Apple’s March event is set — what’s coming?

Coming up, Apple's got an announcement coming up in the first week of March. We'll get into what we think it is. Also, Apple's fast-tracking three wearable AI products, and one of them is already a known bust. There's some big changes in iOS 26.4. We've got a really, truly genius MacBook Air setup, and our hands-on with a great iPhone game controller for the rest of us. So, welcome to the Codcomit Codcast. I'm your host, Leander Caney. Joining me today, D. Griffin-Jones. Hey, Griffin. Good evening, and we're also joined by Lewis from the wonderful lands of Tahoe. Yes, macOS Tahoe. It's frigid and I can't see anything. I thought you were talking about real Tahoe. I thought you were going to be buried in an avalanche. I feel like I am buried in an avalanche of weird UI. All the weird icons? You can't change this crap on me? I don't know. You know, to be honest, not as bad as I feared. Not as bad as I had been led to believe. But, yeah, it takes some getting used to. I got to something yesterday where I'm like, where did the little buttons go? What's going on? What the hell? Why did it? I can't remember what it was. Some app that just, like, did not work as... You don't like change? No, not really. I don't like icons that don't look anything like they used to. I don't like things that used to be in the menu bar and now are not for no apparent reason. yeah i don't know and disappeared didn't it disappear some stuff from your menu bar well yeah it disappeared disappeared the shortcuts thing which i used you know all the time i press a little thing and all these things supposed to happen for the podcast all the setup changes used to work fine used to be right there now i had to like search it out you know which is fine but uh i pressed it and nothing happened i waited and i pressed it again like a monkey you know trying to get a pellet out of icons in the menu bar how do you feel about that like all how every menu bar item as an icon yeah i don't i don't know how different it is i got so much garbage up there it's just sort of maybe that's the problem yeah time for clean i'm sure there's a lot of things i could do to make my situation a little better here all right so we've got some exciting news this week apple finally uh announced its march event which is coming up on march the week of march 4 and this one's going to be different isn't it what's different about this one, Lewis? Yeah, well, it's not an Apple keynote, we're guessing. It's a special Apple experience, in quotes. Apple sent out the invites this week. Just select media members to attend these special Apple events in three cities. Not one of them is in California. Can you believe that? New York, London, and Shanghai. So, yeah. It's interesting. The theory people are talking about online is that this is going to be like that's a wednesday right so the apple is going to like release a press release a day or a batch of press releases a day on monday and tuesday and wednesday and then have this hands-on event for the press to show off whatever products they've uh i just said product just like tim cook whatever products they've uh announced uh yeah lander you were theorizing, you know, talking about how smart this strategy is so that it and I guess they have done this in the past where they released a bunch of things by press releases. Right, yeah, yeah. Because I think the problem was, you know, they'd have a big keynote and they'd release Apple Watches and AirPods and then the iPhone. And right afterwards, all the headlines would just be about the iPhones. And it'd be, oh, by the way, you know, they also released some watches and some AirPods and they really wouldn't get the focus that they probably deserved. This way, I think everyone gets its own news cycle you know for the first day they'll be everyone be talking about whatever they announced on the first day the second day they'll be announced on the the next product and the third you know so on and so on and so forth so each one gets a chance to shine and they did this before right griffin how many times they've done this twice before uh more than twice but two examples that stuck out in my mind was um the november 2024 time when they introduced all of the m4 generation Macs they did you know I think it was the iMac on Monday the Mac Mini on Tuesday the MacBook Pros on Wednesday and they still had like videos for them but it wasn't like an Apple keynote video they just had like John Ternus for like 10 minutes telling you about this new Mac this day another time they did it before was in the spring of 2019 when they had the a flurry of sort of lesser products, kind of like what this event is going to be. They had the iPad mini five, the AirPods two, like the iPad air, like 10 point, whatever inch screen, you know, some, some of the old, older ones. And yeah, they've done, they've done this strategy before. It's always interesting to see what makes an Apple event and what doesn't, what news is worthy. And even at this point, you know, we have the new strategy of like, you know, they might have an Apple event, but it's not, quite a full keynote. So I guess this is, you know, you can read the tea leaves as to how Apple thinks about these products based on how much attention they give them. I mean, you said that in September events, the iPhone overshadows everything else. I mean, this is a lesser iPhone, the 17e. It's not the pro phone. So there might be less of that. Right. Yeah. I mean, this is a good point. I mean, you know, these, but the funny thing is These aren't just chip and chips, are they? There's at least one big brand new product that I think probably deserves its own announcement. This is what we're reckoning. We're thinking the first day is going to be the iPhone 17e. The second day is probably going to be iPads, and that might be an iPad 12 with a newer chip and more RAM to support Apple intelligence, and maybe the M4 iPad Air. And the third day, MacBooks, which is probably going to be a MacBook Pro with the M5 Pro and M5 Max chips and the M5 MacBook Air, which is going to be a killer machine. But then followed by, this is the one that really probably deserves its own keynote, which is the new low-cost MacBooks, which are powered by an iPhone chip rather than an M-series processor. They're going to be made of aluminum, and they're aimed at students and office workers, and they'll reportedly come in a variety of fun colors, which could be light yellow, light green, blue, pink, classic silver, and dark gray. And it's worth noting that the three colors from the Invite are light green, blue, and yellow, which could also be the colors that this new low-cost MacBook could come in. The other possibilities are a new Apple TV, a HomePod Mini 2, and a Studio Display 2, which no one gives a figure about. Actually, that's kind of surprisingly popular look i'm very excited for the new apple tv uh i actually have two tvs in my house now and so one of them like if i ever want to switch to the upstairs tv i just have to unplug the apple tv and bring it upstairs and plug it in i i'm ready for a second apple tv so that both tvs can have one i like roku to be honest like i get a roku stick i think roku is fantastic oh god i see a little skepticism anyway we'll talk about that another time these this new low-cost MacBook is going to kill, I think. Apple's already killing it. The market share has, I think, never been healthy. And the lineup is amazing. The MacBook lineup, there's never been a better lineup of Macs. And this new MacBook Air, I think, going down into the lower cost, I don't think there's anything on the Windows side that competes with this. I saw some ads for some new Dell ones which are made of aluminum. but I don't, you know, I think these are just going to kill. And of course, the new M5 chips too, killer. We're going to see the higher power ones. So that's very exciting. Yeah, so it's going to be an exciting week, isn't it? Even the new iPads, you know, I've got a low-end iPad, the iPad 11, and I don't know if I miss Apple Intelligence. It is actually, it does kind of bug me if I think about it, but this thing being able to support Apple Intelligence, you know like again i think apple's doing a really good job with its low-end products um you know they come that these days are there always used to be compromises than the last few ones that there were no compromises any law um or any serious compromises i was uh you know i actually don't know if i'll have the the bandwidth to review one of the ipads as well because i i want to do the 17e i also definitely want to review the macbook i don't know if i'll have you know the space to review a third iPad, but I'm looking forward to the opportunity to review an iPad, especially after iPadOS 26. Because a year ago, when I reviewed the M3 iPad Air, part of the conceit of the review was like, I'm going to see how much of my work I can do on an iPad. And that's radically changed in the last year. They've brought out a completely new multi-windowing system. They've added a bunch of features to Final Cut and Logic for iPad. They've now added Pixelmator for iPad. I'd like to get my hands on that. So a big change in power of the iPad. So this would, even the cheap iPad 12, I imagine will be a very powerful, powerful device. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That, you know, for light work, if you're not doing anything heavy, perfectly capable and nice and a beautiful thing to work on as well. You know, nice screen, super easy to work with. All right, let's move on. Apple's working with some game-changing AI wearables. This is kind of an interesting story, right, Lewis? Oh, it's so interesting. I think it is, actually. It is. No, no, it sounds interesting. This is like a whole new category, multiple new categories of stuff, right? So they're talking about, the latest news is that they're really accelerating their work on these things. These three products. One is smart glasses with high-definition cameras built into them. This is supposedly going to take on the Ray-Ban Metal lineup, which I guess is surprisingly popular. I still have not yet seen any in the wild, as far as I know. These things sound kind of interesting. They're also talking about working on an AI pin or pendant, and also AirPods with cameras of some sort, which we've discussed in the past. But first up, the smart glasses. This is the part that I found really interesting about this. Supposedly come in several sizes and colors, but Apple's reportedly testing a bunch of different prototypes already. Using high-end materials, giving them a real premium feel. And they're targeting start of production, supposedly, as early as December, so that these might come out next year. The two camera systems, one that'll capture the high-def video and still images. and another that's just for providing input for AI-powered features. And that's a commonality in all these things. Like, the AirPods that come with cameras, those are not going to be for, like, live streaming your day. They're going to be for capturing your surroundings and helping the smarter Siri, whenever that arrives, giving it more input, explaining to it where you're at in a city, for instance, so you can get better navigation. Apple, this is a great quote. Apple reportedly sees the glasses as an all-day AI companion capable of capturing actual information about your surroundings. There was something in there, and I don't remember the detail now, but there was something about the makeup of it. It's like ceramic or something in it. What am I? Am I hallucinating now? Maybe. It says they're testing a bunch of materials. there's a detail in there where Apple was considering having a partner, like, you know, how Meta's partnering with Ray-Ban, but then they ultimately decided, no, we're just going to design them all ourselves. So I'm kind of interested and intrigued to see what they do, like an Apple approach to glasses, like kind of how, you know, they make a bunch of, you know, Apple Watch accessories in now a couple different styles. You know, as long as Apple has one that's like, you know, a brown tortoise color i'm in you know i'll give it a go well the glasses are so everyone's got different glasses haven't they there was there was hundreds and hundreds of different styles and materials you can choose from um i wonder and as long as they have a steve john's heritage edition then john prosser can collect his being right points for it it's a tough problem isn't it i mean they're gonna are they you know if they do if they just do the one men has just got the one Ray-Ban style, isn't it? I don't think it only comes in one, it's like a Ford Model T it only comes in, you know, you can get any color you want as long as it's black. And I think you know, Apple, like you said, has got a history of shipping a bunch of different styles but everyone has a different SKU, everyone's different, you know, it makes the manufacturing much more complicated Yeah, I mean, the thing about glasses is how everybody's face is different, right? And you put different shapes on different faces and it's you know obviously some look better on some faces than others it's very very personal and very uh you know it's a part of your look right i mean my wife has i don't know three or four or five pairs of glasses some of which are you know incredibly like crazy looking prada ones you know and and for her it's almost like a a costume she wears you know whether on stage or even just you know going out you know she has these a bunch of them so i mean what will apple come up with though i mean well i'm guessing they'll be like if you think about the apple watch remember the first time you saw an apple watch you know just kind of like wow that looks very sort of neutral it's i mean the first few years of the apple watch everybody only had like the built-in sport band it seemed so every apple watch you saw looked the same but now that it's like a mature market and there are like dozens of bands you can get for incredibly cheap the people who've had apple watches are probably on like their second or third one like you know i i see much more variety now than i did 10 years ago you know though the band i've got on now is like sort of like a brown leather yeah for the band so i wonder whether you know you can't get away with that with glasses so can you really it's not really analogous is it well the glasses that i have are by a company called pear and they have different uh like magnetic tops that just like snap on in an instant so i have like one that's like sunglasses uh at my old job i made like custom ones where i got like sort of like a white band and then i glued on like safety glass things to the side so they're like snap-on safety glasses that i could wear and if you have like a more neutral color one you can like maybe a white your glasses are white or gray then you can pop on different ones like just add color or you know different colored sunglasses yeah but you couldn't change the shape of the lens so much so the shape of the glass is going to remain the same but you could decorate it with a whole bunch of stuff you know magnetic add-on stuff and make them really crazy dame edna average style um you know or what about those happy new year ones i mean where it has a message across the top well you know what about the glass hole problem because i think that's still an issue isn't it i mean no one likes talking to somebody with a pair of glasses that are recording them staring at you? Well, I mean, Apple's going to make it super obvious that that's what's going on, right? I mean, they're not... That's the one thing that you can always count on Apple doing is like overcorrecting or, you know, being like maybe too obvious. I mean, you could almost imagine like a giant red bar that says on air, you know, it's going to be like that obvious. Maybe it would have that Siri glowing, you know, the new Siri effect so that it glows around the eyepieces to let someone know. Yeah. I mean, when you're recording with the Vision Pro, the whole thing like flashes white on the eyesight display in the front. Yeah, it'll be obvious. So I said ceramic elements. It's acrylic elements. They're saying they're going to have acrylic elements that make it high-end. Does acrylic get associated with high-end? That was kind of what I was wondering. But, you know, I mean, if Apple does privacy right, The other thing that they do right is pick out good materials, right? I mean, I guarantee these aren't going to look and feel cheap. They're probably not going to be cheap either. What about battery life? How are they going to do battery life? Do you think these things are really going to last all day? They probably won't do that much, honestly. AirPods last for quite some time, and they're tiny. They're not running cameras and microphones. Well, and I mean, the other part about all three of these products, and this is not in the show notes, but I remember, they're all tied to the iPhone. So the iPhone does all the heavy lifting, you know, processing and stuff. So not all the heavy but you know what I mean So that would make it easier plus I mean you know if they have large temples that what those are called right temples on the on the glasses I mean there's plenty of room think how tiny an airpod is think how tiny an airpod battery is and I don't really you remember anchor used to make these things these glass like I can't remember what they called them I don't think they call them smart glass I think they called them like audio glasses and they they had different frames that you could buy and and then the temples would attach to them so you could you could have different styles um well those thick temples there are some smart glasses out there that have really thick temples i think there were some shown at ces and i think they were claiming all day use but but i think unlike the this one they were doing all the processing on you know on board like i think video you know catching video especially high def video, it requires a lot of compute and will eat up battery life. Action cams, even though they only have a few hours battery life. But like you said, if it has a fairly simple camera and it's streaming to the iPhone where the video capture is actually done on the iPhone, that would take a lot of the heavy load off of the glasses themselves. So they may not have to have huge fat batteries. What about if it came like the Vision Pro with some kind of battery pack they have to stick in your backpack. No way. That would instantly kill it as a product. Let's talk about this afterwards because there's another issue that I'm a little bit nervous about, which is listening to you all day. That brings us to the next one. Apple's going to get into this AI Pen 2, right, Lewis? Yeah, I think it was described as a pendant in the original story on this. But, you know, this is like – we talked about this before because the information had reported about it, right? Supposedly an AirTag-sized pin or pendant that you can either attach to your clothing or wear, you know, as a necklace so you look like a real hippie. Do you think it'll have a peace sign coming to sleep with a peace sign? Yeah. Supposedly, this is, you know, capture video constantly, feed the data to the iPhone. This report comes from Bloomberg, and they said that some Apple employees are calling it, quote, the eyes and ears of the phone. So, once again, it's not capturing, you know, I think it's not capturing video that is going to be like high-def video. It's more like giving input to the phone so the AI can do stuff. it's not going to have lasers like the old humane failed ai pin no display apple has it supposedly not decided whether to add a speaker to it or not early stage of development you know who knows if it's ever going to see the light of day but uh the time frame is that uh if it does happen it could launch as early as next year i mean that's what's kind of crazy about this this stuff is not like eight years down the pike. It's coming soon. And, you know, they're competing with open AIs, trying to create some sort of device like this, supposedly, you know, with Johnny Ives, amazing talents, putting that together. So, you know, I mean, Apple's got to feel like they're... I mean, I sometimes wonder, does Tim Cook actually, like, think that they're up to speed on AI? Or does he just, like, every day wake up going, oh, my God, how are we going to catch up? surely he's grounded enough to know that they're seriously behind and it sounds like this is like let's get serious about doing these products so they come out you know reasonably close to when these competing competing products come out as opposed to just like waiting around till there's 57 of these things and then oh we'll do it the right way the typical apple thing although i mean there is already like i i've got one of these anchor you know voice recorders right and it's It does kind of stuff like this, but it's more like just recording it and then giving you a transcript, which I'm sure that this kind of thing would be able to do. But, you know, that thing doesn't actually, like, feed into the AI. And I think the really interesting thing about all this stuff is if it gets to the point where you go visit New York City, you come out of a subway, you're wearing this pin or these glasses or AirPods or whatever, the camera sees where you're at, the phone already knows, oh, you're in roughly this location. but then this thing says oh you can imagine something like the stupid workout buddy whispering into your ear oh see that tall building on the left with the green front that is the xyz building you need to go just past that and turn left i mean that's that's what the dream i think of all this stuff is is that it gets all this contextual data about where you're at and what you're doing and then it does something helpful. And we're going to talk about AirPods with ear cams and the AI pin and the glasses. I mean, they kind of sound almost like the same functionality, the same sort of set of sensors, but in a different form factor. So the glasses, you know, have got, you know, like a high def camera for getting video for that first person video, but also, you know, like a low res camera for the AI and ears and mics for the AI. The pendant has a low-definition camera to feed the AI and ears for the AI. And the AirPods with ear cams are the same. It's audio and video input for the AI, but they're all in three different form factors. One, you wear as glasses. The other one you can wear as a pendant or as something you clip to your shirt. And the third one is you put in your ear, like AirPods right now. That's what it sounds like to me. You know, common functionality across these three different devices. You've got three form factors, but they're all doing the same basic thing, which is feeding data to, you know, to the smarter Siri. Right. And so, you know, you can choose. What do you want to wear? I mean, with the glasses, I'm sure, well, I'm not sure, but you would suspect that they will come up with a situation like they do with the Vision Pro where you can use, you know, your own prescription, right? I mean, that's the big problem with all that stuff is like, can you imagine? Oh, well, I mean, it sucks already buying a pair of glasses. They cost a lot, right? And now you're like, oh, I'm going to buy an expensive pair of smart glasses and I'm going to get my prescription so that I can actually see. I mean, that's a pretty big sort of gamble that you're going to like the product. Well, you know, for people who wear glasses, I remember the transition when I had to first start wearing glasses, and I hated it. I kept on, I didn't like them on my face. I didn't like having to take them with me everywhere. I keep on forgetting them. If you don't wear glasses, you're not going to wear glasses, I don't think. If you don't have to wear glasses, no one is going to put it on voluntarily. Sunglasses are the only exception. Like, that's the only time people wear glasses when they put sunglasses on. But I don't think it's the kind of thing that people will voluntarily put on their face unless they have to. I think. I don't think, you know Right? Don't you think that people who don't have to wear glasses I don't think they're going to volunteer themselves to wear glasses Even if they are smart glasses That's interesting. I kind of figured the other way around People would be more likely to try them if they didn't already wear glasses Because they wouldn't be committed, right? They've got two weeks to check it out and see if it's actually awesome If these things look really cool, people might go Oh wow, I mean the classic thing oh, you look smarter with glasses on. Well, so I'll look smarter and I'll actually kind of be smarter because I'll have all this, you know, amazing data being captured at all times. It will help me know which way to turn when I'm walking down the street or whatever. Well, you just made me realize that as usual, I'm talking bollocks because the Apple Watch is a good example, isn't it? I mean, people said the same thing about the Apple Watch. Like people don't wear watches anymore. No one's going to wear a watch. Look at it. Now everyone's got an Apple Watch. Everybody's got an Apple Watch. so you know because the functionality so if it if it's if it does afford you know like crazy functionality then yeah people i guess will wear it i mean at the same time like if if you're looking at uh you know you or me right i mean i wear glasses every day so if these three products come out roughly the same time frame and it's like like we're guessing here that they all sort of essentially enable the same sort of functionality except that the glasses let you you know film your friends at the at the brewery or whatever i mean i'm not exactly a uh you know that kind of social media influencer where i'm going to want to go and and capture first person video of of everything that i do so uh you know i'd probably go with the upgraded airpods or the pin rather than going with the glasses since i have to wear glasses every minute of every day and the uh the airpods um they could be arrive as early as this year that was the probably the first one wasn't it i think uh these are the first yeah we're gonna see and it's the one we've been hearing about forever too right and like there was some some sort of like confusion is it infrared cameras is it actual you know camera cameras what is it is it is it cameras too I think some people thought maybe the AirPods with earcams would be about capturing yourself going down a ski slope or something too. But it sounds like that's not the case at all. This is just gathering data. Yeah, it's very intriguing, isn't it? Because they've been bouncing between infrared cameras or maybe low-resolution cameras and kind of exactly what they do and what kind of data they capture. Still a mystery. I mean in terms of trade-offs, yeah, there's a bunch of people who don't wear glasses. But there's also a bunch of people who have long hair that covers their ears. So the AirPods with ear cams wouldn't be useful at all to them. Yeah, I never thought of that. Not having had long hair that covers my ears for about 40 years. Right, exactly. But not a problem I've had for a long time. All right, let's thank our sponsor. So thanks again, Colton Mack, for sponsoring this week's show. So generous! I know. Where would we be without our gold sponsor? And yeah, Cult of Mac newsletter. Go to newsletters.cultofmac.com. Sign up for our daily news newsletter, which has like – they open right now. Is it crazy? It's up to 80%, 80% every day, which shows that people like this newsletter. They open it. And some of our feedback, I mean, someone wrote me a nice letter saying, you know, it's the one newsletter I actually – the one email I genuinely look forward to every day. But that was Griffin, right? My mom, yeah. it wasn't it was a genuine reader so and all the feedback is it's nice like that and we have polls every day which were super popular always get a ton of comments on them a lot of a lot of submissions uh the steve jobs quotes like this was kind of this was the most um upsetting thing we did we did a poll about some people were saying that the only reason they read the newsletter is for the stage job quads. And they skip past everything else. Oh, God. Thanks very much. Wallpaper of the day, not so popular, but I like it. So it's staying. And tweets, yeah. So we have a selection of great tweets. Actually, this is what we're going to be talking about. Griffin just scrolled by it, but everyone's raving about the new Apple Music app in the latest iOS beta. So we're going to be talking about that in a second. In fact, there we go. Let's transition to that. The next iOS time. Thanks very much, Carlton Mac, for sponsoring this show. The next iOS 26.4 beta just came out, and yeah, people are already raving about it. It's already got some great new features. So unlike iOS 26.3, which was mostly a bunch of bug fixes, the upcoming iOS 26.4 update will pack some pretty big new features and changes. The big one is that it packs full-page artwork for albums and playlists in the Apple Music app. A lot of people are raving about this. normally how it works is, you know, you tap on an album or a playlist and like you see the artwork at the top and the bottom of just like the system color of white or black. But now it's like sort of a full bleed color. So if you have a predominantly, you know, purple album artwork or something like all of Apple's, you know, have bright colors that fill the whole top and top of the screen, the whole thing will be purple and more themed, more immersive in this way. That is a term you don't hear every day, full bleed. Right. Back to the old print days. And, you know, you get some cool animations, don't you? If the album artwork is animated or has some kind of video in it, it plays. So I saw some comparison screenshots. Apples are special and they can be. Yeah, because you don't get that in Spotify, do you? Or YouTube Music. And I saw some comparisons where they're putting up screenshots and like it makes Spotify look awful. Although I don't know how much of people sitting there, you know, while you're playing music watching it, but it does make it nice. it's a much nicer experience you know everybody says that like the the spotify interface is so much better than apple music i've used spotify a few times i could that could not be further from the truth it's so like not information dense like everything is giant like you can't see like more than three things on the screen at once there's like i really like how apple music is like full of menus everywhere like you can tap on any song you get like a full list of context menus and options you can tap and hold on things there's the three dots buttons everywhere like it's apple music feels like a you know this is the one for power users who want options and settings and buttons everywhere spotify is yeah i you know i was um i've been downloading music for offline use and i found that's a lot easier than it used to be and you can now download all you know it's pretty easy to download a whole album a whole playlist um really pretty easily that that functionality is really good i like that lower bar too you know like people hated that didn't they when it first came out but i found it actually quite usable once you get sort of used to it um and the logic of it and the search is not too bad the search has kind of got better maybe sort of you can search for lyrics now so if there's like a one song where you know like the one lyric you can search for that and it'll come up that's great yeah anyway that's not new though in 26.4 that's been there forever um it also adds a new feature called playlist playground uh building on the incredible branding of image playground. Sure to take off. It uses AI to help you create a playlist. You can either enter a prompt describing the kind of songs you want to hear, select from one of the available ones, or directly add songs or albums. So you can type in, it asks you what do you want to hear. You can type something in and it'll suggest playlist items. I haven't messed around with this too much, but I guess there was a post on Mac Stories where apparently this used to be a thing like 10 years ago on Beats Music where it could do this. And so now it's brought back to life by the power of Apple intelligence. This is kind of like radio stations, isn't it? Like a radio station based on an artist. But what's the difference really? I mean, that you can see what's coming up. You can type in something really specific that you want. Like the example in the article we have here is somebody typing in, you know, house and EDM tracks. but you can type in like anything you want, you know, and it'll make one for you. I want songs with bacon in the title. Yeah, you can do that. Is this your meat core, Lewis? Yeah, meat core. It's going to take over the world. Tell us about your meat core idea. I thought this was genius. Yeah, just songs about meat. But wasn't it tied into a whole live experience where there's going to be barbecue with music? Oh, yeah. We used to always have those rock and roll barbecues, man. That was a great event. In fact, we wrote a song called Rock and Roll Barbecue. This was the electric boogie dogs, not those darn accordions. The sadly disbanded electric boogie dogs. My friends and I used to come up with a bunch of silly songs all about bacon. Sounds right up your alley. That's completely true. Yeah. I'm telling you, it could be a hit for someone. It's also possible to add a song to multiple playlists simultaneously. just a nice little ui improvement um and apple music will show upcoming concerts and shows in your area you know if you have a few artists marked as your favorite that's not more than handy that's that's the the feature i'm most looking forward to for sure i have to say the same thing you remember the old i mean like that used to be a uh san francisco used to have a couple of weekly newspapers didn't it that the bay guardian and what was the other one um sf weekly Actually, that was the better one, wasn't it? The SF Weekly. I preferred that. I used to pick that thing up the day it came out, and I would scare for all the concerts coming up. And since then, I don't have a discovery mechanism. I have no idea what's showing. Isn't it weird? Yeah. I feel adrift without it Me too Every now and then I see something on Facebook like Hey this band coming to town and i always like what that interesting uh and i come across some bands that i actually like in that way but uh you know maybe i see something on x or something too but uh yeah the like the whole the whole like how do i know what's coming to town is just broken yeah now that now at least for me now that those newspapers are gone yeah and i same thing i i used to look at uh And oddly enough, I would flip straight to the ads, you know, because the Fillmore would always have a giant ad. Here's who's coming to the Fillmore this week. I used to, you know, as editor-in-chief of a publication in Cincinnati called Everybody's News. And that was a big reason people picked it up was because of those club listings. It was a complete nightmare to pull together. You know, you have to contact all these clubs and get all this information. This is way back when, you know, we actually had to use a telephone. but uh yeah i mean it's i can't tell you how many times lately i've seen like oh yeah i'll see something on x you know coming to town uh you know three days ago it's like crap i you know i really like that band and i missed it i see the pictures of the video like you know big old dynamite played at outside lands and it's like you're joking you're kidding me you know one of my favorite bands ever and i only learn about it after the fact yeah it's crushing it happens to me all the time and i you know i mean i've signed up for mailing lists of people that i really like and you know even then like our our band doesn't send out emails every time we got a gig coming up it's it's like this part of connecting with with fans that is just kind of broken yeah and i don't if apple music could do this and every time that i listen to well i mean black sabbath is a bad example but uh every time somebody listens to a those darn accordions song a little thing pops up and goes, hey, they're playing in Reno this, you know, next week. That would be awesome. Yeah. Absolutely awesome. Get your ticket now. Click here. Well, Apple's resurrected the Apple Music Connect, doesn't it? But it's not for fans anymore. It's just for artists. Did you read that story? I did not because I heard it was just for artists and labels. It's kind of like Podcast Connect, how that's for like uploading, you know, your podcast to Apple Podcasts and like checking analytics and things like it's entirely a backend thing, not Apple Music Connect or Ping is the parallel of a social network. So it's not going to feed into the Apple Music app to service fans? No, not really. I wonder how comprehensive this concert feature will be. I mean, if it is pretty comprehensive for a whole bunch of different bands and venues then it'll be fantastic. I wonder where they'll get that data from. I mean, there are apps out there. What is it? Bands Near Me? Is that the app? I can't even remember. There's several apps like that. which I've checked out a few times. It's intended for people who run bands or labels or something to upload marketing materials as well. You can request to be featured. Presumably concerts on there will be as well. If a band could feed all the data into that thing and if a lot of bands do it, then maybe it would be pretty good. So they're getting it from the bands rather than from the venue. Remember like you were saying you found the venues or the local venues? Right. I don't know. If it came from the band, that's how I find out about it too. I know Nick Cave, I think is, or I heard, who was the band? Oh my God, I forgot now. But anyway, my favorite band of mine was touring. So of course, you go look up the tour dates and you see if they're coming local. That's how I do it these days. But it's very, I miss a lot of stuff. Miss all these my favorite bands. and it requires like searching it out it it's shocking how hard it is to find out a band's touring schedule sometimes you know you you search you look online you know you finally find a page and then you see that like oh look at all these dates and you notice that they're from last year i mean it's i mean you know it's kind of a pain in the ass to update a web page it's definitely something that's broken for sure yeah well fingers crossed apple fixes it that would be awesome should we talk about the other features in the new beta yes uh with ios 26.4 apple will enable end-to-end encryption in the messages app for rcs conversations while iMessage already supports end-to-end encryption cross-platform rcs messaging missed out on this um end-to-end encryption in the messages app only works for iphone to iphone rcs conversations which is weird because surely if you're talking iphone to iphone you're using iMessage. But I guess if you're texting someone who hasn't set up iMessage for some odd reason, you can get RCS instead. RCS is sort of like, you know, that's like the industry new standard thing. So it's kind of hard to enable end-to-end encryption on it. Like Google also has end-to-end encryption on its RCS, but again, only between Google phones. Like it's sort of a proprietary thing built on top of the standard. So they say cross-platform support will arrive later, presumably because they need to you know finalize the the standard for how to make rcs and an encrypted um coming later and it's also only available on select carriers and devices uh according to people on reddit who are sometimes the smartest or sometimes just you know bullshitting it doesn't seem to be available yet in the eu and the uk or presumably other parts of the world but uh you know slow rollout tentative rollout we'll we'll see and encryption could come for green bubble texting but yeah very welcome very welcome um it'll also add video support to apple podcasts uh by you know right now you can have a video podcast but it's uh much in the same way that you know an mp3 file podcast works where you're requesting people to just download a giant video file at once it's not streaming and it's also an entirely separate feed uh this is smarter it works more like Spotify where if you have a supported podcast host, you can give them the video and it'll stream it, you know, like you're streaming over YouTube or Netflix. And there's even a toggle where you can instantly switch between video and audio versions of the show, like at the push of a button, which is super handy. And you can, it still supports downloading videos for offline viewing. It uses HLS technology. If you happen to know what that is, There are a few interesting points to this. Number one being that presumably for this to work, for the instant toggle to switch between video and audio, you would need to have your audio and video versions be exactly the same, which is how we produce our show. but a lot of other shows don't do it that way. They edit the podcast version as a podcast and they might have a separate edit of the video or like the cult cast. We used to live stream it on YouTube and then have the audio version. So those weren't in sync either because the YouTube live stream would have like a whole intro before the actual podcast intro. It wouldn't be edited like the audio version. So you can't just like switch between audio and video at the same timestamp because they wouldn't line up at all. That's something that our show does, but not a lot of other shows do. So I wonder how that's going to work. But the next feature is a really exciting thing. And the ability to dynamically insert ads. That's what I'm looking forward to. Oh, yeah. So with HLS technology, it supports dynamically inserted video ads. That's very exciting. All of the fun of those dynamically inserted audio ads. But now with video. So you'll be forced to watch those as well. Well, as a podcast publisher, that's what I'm looking forward to. I'm super excited about being able to switch between video and audio versions. Because I listen to a lot of podcasts, and sometimes I'm like, wow, I'd like to see the thing they're referencing, or even just know what this person looks like, or the look on their face when they say this. Are they kidding, or are they deadly serious? So being able to just say, oh, I want to watch the video for a second, that would be great. Why did it take Apple so long to get around to doing this stuff? I mean, Marco Ament, who does the Accidental Tech podcast, has said for quite a few years, the best thing that ever happened to podcasts was Apple neglecting it. And the fact that it messed it up, you know, all these other providers, they were doing things like dynamically inserted ads and some of the sort of, you know, possibly listener hostile stuff. and Apple leaving it alone and not mucking around with it was the best thing that ever happened to it. But it wasn't possible before because this goes beyond, you know, an RSS feed with an MP3 attached to it, which is what podcasting has been, you know, since it launched 20 years ago. This is, you know, adding like streaming video, which is much more complicated. Well, our own experience, you know, showed what happened. A lot of people were going to YouTube, weren't they? A lot of podcasters were migrating to YouTube because that was the only place to, you know, the best place to do video. And video is obviously where it's at, which is the reason why we do a video and an audio version of the podcast because, you know, we just don't want to get left behind. So, you know, so Apple is taking on YouTube, isn't it, with this? That's going to be their main competitor. I guess going back to my earlier point about switching between audio and video, One advantage that Apple has is that they build the live transcripts of each podcast, if it's a public podcast. And that even works even if you have a dynamically inserted ad in the middle of the podcast. I think Apple is doing something clever where they make their own transcription of it. But then if your MP3 file is a little bit different, I think they still try and sync it up. So even if you have a dynamically inserted ad, you can still tap on part of the transcript to skip ahead to that part, even if it might not necessarily be the same timestamp on, you know, everybody's different version of it, which is interesting. So they might actually do something kind of like that toggling between an audio and video that are different, where they'll have a transcript of the audio, they'll make a separate transcript of the video, and then try and like line them up. So if you tap on, you know, the line where I say this between and it's a different timestamp on the audio compared to the video, they can still sort of match them up. Maybe they'll do something clever like that. Yeah. That would be a way around it, you know. We'll probably get some smarter Siri to handle it. Yeah, yeah. Apple intelligence will figure it out. Are there any other features worth mentioning in the new beta? A redesigned wallpaper gallery. Woo-hoo! Well, let's skip on that. Finally. Let's talk about the top 10 MacBook Air setups. So we ran a feature this week, a roundup of the best setups involving a roundup of MacBook Air. And this one is probably one of the best setups I've ever seen. I think this thing is crazy. Super interesting. Tons of things to talk about. Lewis, why don't you describe what's going on in this picture? Yeah, what is going on in this picture? I mean, the centerpiece is half of a MacBook Air. He's got the bottom part, the keyboard and the trackpad just sitting there. No screen. And it's powering two different monitors. And off to the side, he's got some kind of MagSafe iPhone stand or charger. I can't actually see that well. It's kind of a dark picture. And then on the right, he's got a Mac SE30. Is that what it is? That's the one that I had when I was in college. And an iMac G3 iMac, both of which are lit up like they're working. But apparently, it's even weirder than that. The SE30 has an Amazon Echo Show inside it. and the iMac G3 is being run by a second M1 MacBook Air. Griffin's horrified by the fact that he completely gutted a beautiful machine like the SE30 and defiled it with an Amazon Echo. So the SE30, it's incredible that you had one in college with us because those were not cheap Macs. The SE30 was the most powerful compact all-in-one Mac of the original all-in-one Macs with nine-inch screens. It had a much more powerful processor than any other one with the 68030. It had an expansion card slot. It had support for up to 128 megabytes of RAM at the time when the Macintosh Classic only supported up to four. And it cost about $8,000 in today's money, right? Yeah, those were incredible machines. And I mean, I will say among the compact Macs, I think it's the ugliest. It has way too many vents, the face of it. isn't balanced really well because that's a floppy drive like really low it's it's kind of a weird looking one the snow white design but i like the idea that he's given it new life with an amazon echo show because those echo shows are fantastic but i was trying to wonder which one it was it must have been would it be the eight inch or the 10 inch one you know how they look it's like a speaker like a home pod speaker with a with a ipad mini graft on the top of it and and usually they they uh follow you around they move so maybe he managed to shove one of those in that box there It's got to be the 8-inch one because the SE30 had a 9-inch screen, so it couldn't go bigger. But, you know, he takes one of these revered greatest Macs of all time and guts it and puts in some Amazon garbage. So minus 30 points. Maybe it didn't work. Minus 68 or 30 points for that. Yeah, exactly. All those capacitors were dying probably. It probably was like, you know, it's either that or the landfill. So I'm glad to see it get a new life. same thing with the the iMac right yeah that's a mystery how's the iMac working because he says it's run by a second m1 macbook air but what's going on so you can tell the se30 has something different replacing its screen because the screen on it is perfectly square in the image it's not curved whereas it looks like the screen of the iMac is curved so it's like the actual iMac CRT in there and there are a number of ways that you can hook up um a crt like imac or you know macintosh screen to something else it's a little bit hacky but it looks like he's gone through the effort of doing that properly so you know i mean he sawed a macbook in half so yeah i was wondering whether it was the screen from the old mac but the headless macbook that he'd use but it's not big enough it looks like it's a different mac uh because they have different wallpapers and it's sort of way off to the side but i think it's funny that one of our we have a list of the top 10 best macbook air setups and the one we've chosen is one that has one and a half macbook airs and it looks like he's using it for gaming he's got a game controller there doesn't he a nintendo game controller so he knows his he knows his gaming stuff but but his you know gaming iMac g3 it has the hideous mouse right that's not the hideous mouse that's the good apology mouse the the good shaped mouse that was the better one yeah it's not the hockey puck not the you know the one that's oh yeah that was the worst but then he looks like he's also got a a proper logitech mouse for the headless iMac though is genius you know i i saw that i think was it hp just recently the last couple of months released um a computer and a keyboard i think was it hp uh and you know like given that the motherboards for the most of the modern computers that you know the size of like an iphone motherboard these days you could easily put a whole computer into a keyboard and it's really interesting in it that you can get the whole machine just like that you know like uh i think it's genius i was like oh my god that's super clever using the keyboard and the trackpad as the you know at the same time as the main input um it's a it's a crazy form factor isn't it you know like uh an alternative to the mac mini i i don't know would you buy something like that if apple offered it hell no i mean the the problem with like getting a macbook air and plugging it into a display and using it like that is that either you can have the screen open and just have like a tiny screen below your regular screen or you keep it closed but then you can't use the keyboard and touch id and the trackpad so this is a nice in-between yeah i've seen people it's a good way to get a you know a cheap um because often you know the screen is not one of I've seen people with broken screens, you know, selling MacBook Pros on eBay. It's a, you know, if you're happy with it, I mean, you can just take the screen off, can't you, if it has a broken screen and use just the CPU and the keyboard and the trackpad alone. I suppose you haven't seen more of these. The person who did it says, referring to getting rid of the broken screen or removing the broken screen, he says, it was easy. You just have to take your time. i wonder how long that took that surgery yeah very cool setup i like it a lot it's a bit crowded maybe but um oh and he got a pixar lamp there too i i think i like that a lot of the setups we talked about that it looks so perfectly arranged like this clearly he just like took a picture of his desk you know it looks very realistic in that way it real one last thing to mention there a camera point on top of the se30 pointing at himself oh like obviously what am i thinking it's just for podcasting i was wondering why is he spying on himself he's oh my god well it looks like a security camera doesn't it it just looks like a cam. I don't know. Yeah. What's the thing to the left underneath the screen there? A speaker, I think. Oh. I thought it looked like some kind of digital projector also pointing at his face. There's another one right in front of the headless MacBook. So there's two, I think, for a stereo pair. You see under the middle screen? Yeah, yeah. And that looks like a remote control that's all lit up, like a TV remote. So that's one of ten. One of ten MacBook Air setups. That's true. You can peruse the other ones in the link in the description. Yeah, yeah. Check out the post. It's a great post, isn't it? There's a lot of nice stuff in there. Always nice to get some inspiration on how to make your own setup better. Right. For sure. For sure. Okay. We have a review. Someone called Hefty Bags, which is a great name, left us a review on Apple Podcasts. And Hefty Bags said, I know you guys are new to podcasting. If only. Not quite true. Nobody tell him. With only a few episodes in so far, you are allowed to swear on the podcast and you don't have to send a curse words if they slip out. It's annoying and childish. Childish? There are two reasons for this. For one, you're allowed to swear on a podcast, but you're not allowed to swear on YouTube. You have to like mark it as, you know, being explicit in that limit so you can show it to. And the other reason I censor them is because, you know, we don't know, you know, where our listeners are listening to this. Maybe they're listening to it in the car and they're subjecting their children to this. Maybe they're just, you know, playing it while they're cooking dinner and they might be around, if not actively listening. You know, it does make it more accessible if you know this is a podcast you can put on and it'll be safe for your kids. So, you know, we don't want to limit our audience. Exactly. If you're putting on a podcast for a general audience, you definitely don't want to be putting stuff like that in. And I mean, this is a lesson I learned in newspapers where they forbid this kind of, you know, salty language, too, because you don't know who's going to be picking it up. you know and if you're going to put out for a general audience you have to make it suitable for for all the members of the audience not just the adults god damn it what's this talking about oh my god i mean the other thing is i actually think it's funnier if you have a swear that's censored if you if you do it the right way i actually leave a much enough of each word in so that you can sort of tell what we're saying if you listen closely but I mean if Lewis were to respond to me and say everything you just said is completely wrong and I just go oh f**k I think it's funnier if it's censored maybe it's just like a personal taste thing but I think it's funnier because you know and like the less is more kind of way like you don't hear me say it it leaves it up to the imagination well if you like swearing we have a great clip which we may put out this week right and you can see how we really talk oh my god I've never heard anybody complain about swears being censored i i mean i understand the the thing i'm i remember back in college you know like running a quote you know if if we were interviewing bands you know guess what they swear and i was always a huge proponent back then of like what did they say print what they said uh podcast seems different you know especially since it's not you know uh it's not like a journalistic thing it's just we're just having fun and i you don't need to subject people to this if they don't want to hear this crap they don't want to hear uh they don't think i think your point about you know kids that's even especially it don't yet it doesn't like a little e shows up by the podcast too right so it probably affects findability right although maybe some people search explicitly for the e well it's like it's like slapping a an r rating on a movie isn't it it instantly limits like you know the audience and who and who's going to go be going to see it so We don't want to kneecap it from the very get-go. Well, thank you for your input. We'll continue to beep our swears. Yeah, yeah, thanks for the input. Please, if you do have a question or a comment, we'd love to get it. We'd love to see it. Let's talk about a review. I hate gaming, and I always get killed instantly. but i'm interested in a fine game controllers you know they seem to be a great way to enhance the game experience and griffin's got his hands on one that is really good it's like half the price of um some of the competing ones and so you know this kind of makes it for the game controller for the rest of us so this is the uh game sir x5s game sir i think is a you know pretty well known name in terms of making game controllers for for iPhones and they also make like third-party controllers for Xboxes if you want to you know get a new Xbox controller but uh you know phone phone controllers is one of their big things and this is one of their not quite their lowest end model but this is like the next to cheapest one they have so it's a it's super affordable it's sort of it's it's stick so if you um if you're not sure if you want to you know get it get a controller for your iphone you know maybe i'll get it but i don't know if i'll carry it around i don't know if i'll use it you know this is a great sort of entry-level model if you just want to like dabble in it a little bit uh so it comes in this little plastic carrying case so that you know toss it in your bag and don't have to worry about oh that's the case uh good lord i thought that was the thing itself i know i was i was going what do you mean little it's gigantic yeah this is the actual thing so here it is compared to a playstation 4 controller you can see it's like a little wider um in terms of the design what i noticed is that the uh the hand grips don't extend out like as far as like a normal controller would so you know if you're holding a ps4 controller the grips sort of you know sit in the middle of your palm whereas because this is a supposed to be a mobile controller they don't want to make it too bulky so the the grips are a little shorter and more cut off does it make any difference um it does it does feel weird you know if you're used to having a full-size controller that you don't it doesn't fill your hand as much but um it doesn't it's it keeps it like weight keeps it kind of portable oh yeah perfectly usable it it just sort of you know sits higher up in my hand than i might be used to you know it's still super curvy super ergonomic super comfortable like it's it's the the back is textured you know curves to your hand so you can wrap your hands around it what about different size phones so you put a phone in the middle there right yes so it actually stretches out and it stretches out really far so you can uh not just put a phone in it but a big ipad in there you can put an ipad mini in here um another advantage is that you can put a nintendo switch in here so the problem with using the nintendo switch handheld for so long is that its joy cons are just completely flat and angular this is much more comfortable you just um slide your phone in you know it's it's stretchy it stretches up to like i think nine or ten inches wide something like that so really any size phone will fit in here um the the buttons feel really good and i'll show a quick game here you know once you have a your phone in a controller then suddenly playing games like super mario 64 good choice you know on an emulator this this game would be completely unplayable otherwise on a touch screen because it just has so many controls sometimes you can get away with playing like an rpg like pokemon on a phone because you're not doing anything like super intense you only have like a few few buttons whereas you know this is a super advanced game with all kinds of buttons and controls that you have to like hit three things or four things at once the one the one game the one game i play is the old arcade game scramble um it's you're a spaceship and it's a scroll it's a sideways scroller and the on-screen controls it used to have a joystick and a couple of buttons on the arcade um and on this the the one you can get now it has on-screen controls and it's completely impossible to play um so yeah even for simple games you don't have to have a complicated game it'll make it usable even for you know ones with very simple controls you know it's super great playing like you know 2d platformers on it because again you have the precision of multiple buttons physical buttons you can rest your finger on a button before you're ready to press it like it's it it makes the whole experience like an order of magnitude nicer for playing other games but um also you know because it's a officially supported apple uh controller um it has this button on it that instantly takes you to the apple games app when you open it which has controller support so you can put your phone in this you know hit that button and then launch a game on apple arcade you know awesome in in just a minute so that that's really handy too a lot of apple arcade games have full controller support as well so i just launched a racing game called asphalt 8 which is one of the only games that i play on my phone if i were to play one and now i've got a much better uh you know way to play it In terms of the button layout, you know, a few controllers vary their button layout a little bit. Out of the box, it comes with sort of an Xbox-style button layout. So you have the A button on the bottom and the B button on the right, which isn't ideal for playing Nintendo games because they have the button layouts reversed the other way. But one thing nice about this controller is that it's super easy to switch them. Here comes the tweezers. a pair of tweezers and swapping them is basically as simple as like pulling them out and you can switch them around yeah that's crazy and you think okay well you know you can change the labels but how do you change the actual button mappings well you can do that too if you launch the game sir app you connect your controller to it one of the options is button settings where you can pick a layout you know the xbox layout or a nintendo layout oh wow you've got your choice right there i actually don't know where the other one went hopefully i can find that later that's all i'm talking about it's like when you drop your airpods and they always go under the fridge or something god uh so that's super handy you know you can have the button layout that you prefer um so long as you don't lose your buttons and send them flying off screen when you're in the middle of a podcast um but that's not further because this accessory has an accessory of its own that you can install uh if you have an older iphone like any iphone made out of titanium the 15 pro the 16 pro or the iphone air you know that your phone gets hot uh especially if you're playing like you know a full 3d game on apple arcade with a lot of graphics and ray tracing so for that uh they produce this thing this um fx5 fan so how it works is uh you know on the on the controller you have sort of like a bar that goes across the back of your phone and you can install this fan onto it so like it has a little metal contact that sticks to your phone and it keeps the heat off and then you attach to that oh my goodness a battery module god it snaps on and then instantly it starts blowing air uh and you have a few different uh fan speeds you can set it to the orange one is the fastest obviously. Where's the air coming from? At the side? It blows out of the fan and up through these vents. Okay. I dare you to try to take that through airport check TSA check. My god you look like you're going to blow up a bridge or something. It's glowing orange and you know what it keeps your phone really cool. I played with it for a while and there was a I mean not necessarily a noticeable difference in graphics like this is for if you want to play a game for like really extended periods of time of like an hour or more your phone might throttle its speed if it gets too hot but uh not with this thing on it that's for sure so you can actually feel it cooling the phone down it has a noticeable effect yeah yeah you can you can actually feel that it your phone does not get as hot um you know i was thinking like a lot of the times when you're setting up a new iphone transferring your old phone to the new phone you know that's another time where your phone gets hot uh maybe the next time i do that i'll attach this to it and then i'm sure it won't so will it heat up your house this has utility beyond gaming that's quite that's quite a and how much is this thing uh griffin i mean as far as game controllers go it's it's super cheap it's only 50 bucks and then the uh the fx5 thermoelectric cooler is 40 bucks so you've got a real pro gaming setup here and it's regularly on sale too on amazon i think sometimes i've seen it for like $30 or $35. So that doesn't come with the controller. That's an add-on accessory. The cooler is a separate product. Yeah. But you can just get the controller for like 50 bucks or maybe even less if you catch it on a sale and then you're all set. As I said, this isn't the most advanced iPhone gaming controller. It has a few niceties like Hall Effect joysticks that won't wear out you know the buttons feel good but it's it's not like a pro system this isn't their nicest controller but you know yeah definitely a really good entry-level one i mean i guess if you have a newer iphone with a vapor cooling chamber you know maybe you don't need that cooler if you if you got an older titanium iphone like mine then you know it's practically essential so have you been glued to that thing then for weeks now instead of working um i don't play a lot of games on my phone um i actually have a big book that i need to read for an upcoming podcast segment in a few weeks so i haven't a lot of time to play games but when i do play games on my phone i mean i i absolutely grab this every time yeah yeah yeah very cool very cool are you interested in that louis are you that the hell of any interest you know you know i uh like the extent of my iphone gaming is like wordle yeah not much yeah well i don't i don't need a reason to spend more time staring at my phone to be quite honest i love games if you if you're any good at them you know like Ratchet and Clank, I mastered that on the PlayStation. We used to have it set up in the basement for some reason. I used to go down there with all the rats and the cockroaches and play for hours sitting on this beanbag. And I got really good at it in the end and was really addicted to it, actually. It's super addictive. You just, you know, one more level, one more boss, one more whatever. It's hard to drag yourself away from it. This is really intriguing to me because I really did enjoy them. But on-screen controls suck. it does make a big difference having the buttons there. And 50 bucks is kind of like I'm not going to spend 100 bucks for something I'm not going to use. But 50 I might. I don't know. Especially if it's on sale. It's a pretty neat controller. Cool. Awesome. Did you crash there already? I did. Yeah, because I'm missing the button that I would need to press. Right. It flew off. Hopefully you'll buy that. Good luck. I do sometimes wonder how much fun would Apple Arcade be if you had something like that. Because, I mean, the few times I've ever opened anything in Apple Arcade, I don't know, the on-screen tapping and this and that, I don't find it all that compelling. No. And if you can use it, you can, putting an iPad in there too would make it better because it's kind of more fun to, it's kind of fun to play with a bigger screen. Apple Arcade's getting really awesome now, isn't it? It's got a whole bunch of great games. I did actually check because I was curious. I was curious, would the folding iPhone fit inside this when I get it? I'm a little scared to try it because I don't want to break it because this is a delicate plastic thing but I checked and yeah it is wide enough so I've got that to look forward to future proof it's going to buckle awesome demo there Griffin I thought that was actually great thanks so much and I guess that's about it that's time to wrap it up that's all we have for you this week please give us a 5 star rating no less than 5 five star rating on Apple Podcasts. And also share the show with anybody who you think might listen to this. Text us or send us a question on iMessage to cultofmacpodcast.icloud.com. That's cultofmacpodcast.icloud.com. You can send us questions for the show, comments, you know, troubleshooting issues, whatever you like. We look forward to getting them. Send us an audio message, send us a video message. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And we'll put on the show, you know. So here's a chance to shine on this fantastic leading Apple Podcast. If you like, you can find Lewis on Twitter. He's at Lewis Wallace. Griffin's on Macedon at D Griffin Jones. And I write the newsletter every day at Newsletter.com. So thank you very much for listening. We'll see you next time. Have a great weekend, everybody. Goodbye. See ya.