iPhone 18 colors + our ‘Apple Experience’ predictions!

Coming up, thanks for the success of Cosmic Orange, new colors are coming to the iPhone 18 Pro, but they're a bit WTF, the super clever way the first touchscreen Macs will work, exciting changes in iOS 26.4, Beta 2, an even weirder keyboard setup than last week's, plus our predictions for next week's Apple's announcements. Welcome to the Cult of Mac Podcast. I'm your host, Leanna Caney. Joining me today, D. Griffin-Jones, coming in from Ohio. Hey, Griffin. Good evening. I didn't prepare anything. How are you? I'm very good, thank you. Lewis from San Francisco. Lewis, what's going on? Hey, hot and humid San Francisco. What is going on? Yeah, it's foggy today. And Casey Liss coming in from Virginia. So welcome to the show, Casey. Thanks very much for joining us. Thank you for having me. It is very rainy over here, so I'm not sure if I'm channeling the UK or San Francisco. It's not foggy, it's rainy, but I'm doing my best to include everyone. All right, yeah, well, thank you. We've got all the weather here. All the weathers. It's in the 50s in Ohio now, isn't it? Nope. It is. 32 degrees where I am. And there's still snow on the lawn. It was in the 50s earlier this week, right? Or late last week? I think, yeah, a week ago it was pretty warm. But no, then we got another continuous 48 hours of snow. So that was fun. Awesome. And then I spend all that work shoveling. And then the next day, it's sunny enough to melt it all off the driveway. So what was the point? I thought you liked shoveling, though. I thought that was one of your favorite workouts. Well, I am proud to say I've never shoveled a driveway in my life. And I hope never to. You're not missing much. I think that enthusiasm was before the winter actually hit when I told you that. I hated shoveling snow. And you're absolutely right. It's like, what if I just put it off for a day? That's the funny thing about Richmond is that we don't get snow often. But when it does happen, typically what will happen is it'll warm up during the day. And some of it will melt, and then it'll get freezing cold at night. And so now you have like this nice sheen of ice on top of everything. It's no fun. It's not delightful. Super treacherous, super treacherous. Well, we almost got some snow here, didn't we, in the Bay Area last week for the first time in 30 years or something. Oh, great. It never did show. It never did show. But anyway, let's talk about the iPhone 18 Pro. And this is a good one. How it's going to double down on bold new colors. Lewis, what's going on there? Yeah, well, I mean, as everybody knows, Cosmic Orange was a hit. Apparently also a giant hit in China. Like, people love it in China. So now Apple is considering a deep red color for its next lineup, according to you-know-who. iPhone 18 Pro is still seven months away. A lot could change by then, blah, blah, blah. Rumored red shade could end up looking similar to Cosmic Orange. What? Yeah, what? What? it's undistinct unclear how distinct the final color options will be also another part of this is all coming from German in his newsletter of course and he's saying that Apple might not discontinue Cosmic Orange this whole thing gets weirder and weirder I don't know if he's like hitting the pipe or what but and then it's like as for rumors about purple and brown iPhone 18 Pro colors. Grimman said, probably just variants of the same red idea, given that the tones are fairly similar. What? This is all completely nonsensical. I was reading that. I was going, man, what happened here? Anyway, I mean, I was wondering if it would be a – maybe they would release like a product red iPhone 17 Pro. Like even next week. I mean it could happen, right? They used to do that mid-cycle. and I don't know why they quit making those iPhone those product red iPhones anyway I mean the people loved them I always thought they looked great I mean I very rarely got one because it's mid-cycle right and you always want to get the latest greatest thing the day it comes out I think the last product red one they did was also not on the mainline iPhone it was on the iPhone SE the iPhone SE 2 came in red and it was cool because you know black and red is like you know the Sith colors if you're a Star Wars fan I think but yeah they used to do the mid-cycle colors on like the iPhone 12 as well which came out late in the purple color and I was like oh I wish I hadn't bought an iPhone months ago because I could have gotten a purple one and it was an excellent shade of purple but yeah they used to do that it was it was always interesting and it always always made me a little bit jealous right because there are always better colors than they had released six months ago anyway so who knows what's actually coming. I mean, I think the good news is that Apple, you know, they finally released a iPhone Pro in a color that was an actual color. And wow, people bought it. And so, you know, Tim Cook loves that money. This is why this story makes no sense at all, because like in China, it was way off the charts in China, wasn't it? And the Cosmic Orange was a massive, massive hit there. And this is like a super cycle because I think, you know, largely because of that color. And so the lesson for Tim cook is to go back to boring weird colors like you know deep red and brown what's going on i i think he might have taken the wrong lesson from it because it's not like people were so infatuated with the color orange that you know oh we should double down on you know the warm hues like you know red and purple like it's just because it was a color at all it's not like people are so tied to orange that you know we're going to keep it for the iphone 18 and then we'll still be selling orange ones along with their other color like whatever other color they make is you know probably going to be better than orange well the funny thing is like you know the pro the pro colors are always so muted like i have a bluish i forget the actual technical term for the color but the bluish you know iphone and iphone pro and it's i i like it but it's also vaguely purpley and it's certainly not as loud as the orange and i have seen so many orange you know iphone 17 pros just an absurd amount of them. My wife has one. One of her alma mater's colors is almost identically orange. So it makes sense that she would be into it. But I've seen so many people with the orange phone and I am not at all surprised that it sold incredibly well because they're so boring. Like this is a very lovely muted bluey purple, but I mean, I would much, I would vastly prefer a much louder blue or a much louder purple if given the choice. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this has been the same thing that people have been saying for years, isn't it? The Apple should do pop colors on the pro lineup, not the muted ones. So what do you think of the orange, Casey? Do you like the orange itself? I do. I do. It's a little, a little too loud for me because even with all this whining I'm doing, I would prefer something slightly downed down from that particular orange, but I would definitely like a louder version of, you know, the, the, the one that I have right now. And I definitely am fully on board with them going hog wild and trying something that one of you just said it a minute ago, something fun, like the orange, whether or not one enjoys that particular orange, it's fun. And the, the, the pro colors, the pro hues that they've always used have almost always been boring. Like there was the forest green from like three or four years ago, which I really, really liked, but it was a very, very dark green. You know, it's like, I can't recall a time that there's ever been a more vibrant color than this orange in the pro line anyway. And every year I look at the non-pro phones and think, man, do I want to give up whatever in order to get a non-pro phone with a better color? And inevitably, when it comes to cameras, I say, no, I do not want to give up, you know, the good camera and get a regular phone. But golly, I wish I could have their colors. Yeah, yeah, right. Yeah, it's this is a strange situation, isn't it? Because, you know, maybe, well, we'll see when the iPhone 18 Pro comes out. But I wonder whether they will go bolder. They've always, are you still, do you still like the orange shirt, Lewis, that you bought yeah i mean it you know uh it is bright and bold but i mean i think even it could have been more bold that's i'm the opposite i like i wanted to have like you know sparkle i wanted to look like a hot rod yeah uh you know but yeah it's all right i mean for me orange is not my favorite color i don't mind orange i was but i i bought it i honestly i bought it just because, hey, here's the first time they've actually made one. I've been griping about this for years. So here's one more pile of money that Apple gets. I think that's the only way you can send a message to Tim Cook. It's just, we sold more of that, so now let's make more of that. So the big folding iPhone that everybody's all hot and they're bothered about coming later this year, guess what? They're going to stay away from fun colors, according to German. I stick to dull, boring, some kind of dark gray or black or some kind of white or silver. Kind of like the original iPhones. Just boring. Boring, predictable, inoffensive. I think inoffensive. Well, this has got to be something to do with inventory management, right? Surely, they're going to see if this thing has any traction before they'll start making it in different colors. And I'm guessing that black and white, they're probably the best-selling colors for all the iPhones. So safe choice for a new product that has no, you know, proven market yet. And then the fun colors will come later. I mean, here's my thing, my thing, though, if they're only going to do like black and silver, why even have black and just just make one that's like both silver and black, like the iPhone 4, you know, you know, that only came in one color, like pure black glass on one side and like the pure unadorned silver on the other side. Like, why even bother having two colors if they're both going to be just like light gray and dark gray? You know? I've got a black and white checkerboard pattern. How would that be? How would you like that, Griffin? Well, I like that two-tone look. You know, that two-tone look looks great, I think, on most products. Then when you open it up, you could use it as a chessboard. You could get little magnetic chess pieces. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's going to be a pretty square device. Yeah, perfect. Cases for that thing are going to be weird, aren't they? They're going to have weird cases because of the fold, isn't they? gonna they're gonna have to you know how they're gonna how they're gonna have a hinge on a case i saw somebody who had a folding phone and the case basically worked kind of like a bumper that went around each half of it and then down the middle it was sort of like the spine on a hard cover book so that when you opened it up it like still protruded a little bit and um it was like sort of wide and flat and then he could like still like kick out a little kickstand from the spine and have it like sitting up you know like a little tablet um i don't know if apple's gonna do something like that uh that'd be interesting i'm curious to see what they'll do and what third party accessories do all right well let's thank let's let's finally thank the sponsor this week which is um thanks very much cult of mike the sponsor of the cult of mike show um we're going to plug our newsletters once again i wanted to read out um a note i got from chris downing in australia who's a regular reader and he said thanks for making the newsletter thumbs up emoji it's a great summary of the apple related news and there's always one or more articles that i go to from the email. It's one of the few emails I get daily that I actually look forward to. So you've obviously got the formula dialed in pretty well and a winking emoji. So thanks very much for that, Chris. That actually really made my day. In fact, it made my year. That was so nice. And actually, most of the feedback we get is, I haven't seen much negative feedback. Every now and again, we get that, you know, like, stop where people reply and they say unsubscribe. So we get surprisingly few, surprisingly few. And most of it, you know, the feedback I've got is very, very positive. So please sign up for the Cult of Mike newsletter. It's at newsletters.cultomite.com, newsletters.cultomite.com. So thank you. Let's talk about this new interface. I thought this was super clever on the touchscreen, Max. This really made sense once you read about it. So, you know, like I was watching this video from 2010 when Steve Jobs, at one of his keynotes flashed up a picture of, I guess it was a MacBook. And he said, we've done loads of user testing. And it showed someone with their finger trying to touch the screen. He said, you know, it just doesn't work. Your arm gets tired. And then it wants to fall off. It's an ergonomic nightmare. So we'll never do it. But you know, here they are, they're going to do something. And according to numerous leaks and rumors, you know, the touchscreen is going to be coming in the fall 2026. And Apple's solution to adding touch is an adaptive interface that responds differently depending on whether you're clicking a cursor or using your finger. So if you tap the screen, macOS 27 will reportedly show a context-aware menu positioned around the touch point with options that are easier to touch with a fingertip. And if the person taps the same item with a menu bar at the top of the screen, sorry, at the top of the screen, The set of controls will large easily to make it more easy to select with your finger. So this thing's going to change depending whether you tap it with your finger or whether you use a mouse. So if you use a cursor on the mouse, none of this will happen. It'll continue to look much like macOS Tahoe does now. So it'll still be a Mac, but it's just a new way to interact with. And I thought this was super, super clever. Yeah, I think this is Apple at its finest, right? Which is, let's take what is the status quo. And, you know, there's been there's been touch enabled PCs for a long time now. And let's ask, you know, a how can we make it better? B, you know, how can we sprinkle our little special sauce on top, if you will? I don't know how you're sprinkling sauce, but go with me on this. And on top of that, you know, let's rethink all of the assumptions that everyone else made. What if we don't make those same assumptions? And this is one of those classic examples of as soon as you hear it reported or you see it in action, you go, oh, of course, that's how it always should have worked. But you don't see me coming up with this of my own volition. So this is one of the examples of what makes Apple Apple, right? And I mean that in a complimentary way. I think this sounds really great. I can't say that I've yearned to touch the screen on my MacBook Pro. But I will say that there are definitely times that I'll go to like scroll from time to time, especially if I've been using my iPad recently. And I'll think to myself, oh, that's interesting. I'm not sure why I did that. But would it hurt if it worked? You know, is it really going to hurt anyone if I could scroll on the screen? I don't know. I mean, obviously, I'll have, you know, my gooey fingers, if you will, all over the screen. But leaving that aside, you know, I don't think there's any harm in that. And I think as long as Apple holds on to what makes macOS great and doesn't completely, you know, sell its soul in order to make macOS touch first, I think this sounds like it really could be the best of both worlds. Yeah, because have you ever used, Griffin, have you ever used a touchscreen PC? at my old job i ran into it was mostly pc based unfortunately so i had a number of pcs and i even had like the uh we even bought as like a company computer for somebody the uh the surface laptop that you can detach uh the screen as a tablet and it was interesting interestingly the person who had that computer didn't know that that happened and so i asked oh have you ever detached the screen and they're like what i like sort of looked at the keyboard for a second i pushed the button I pulled it off and like their mind was blown, which honestly, I think maybe says more about Microsoft's product design than about the technical capabilities of that person, that it wasn't even obvious that that was a thing they could do. um yeah and like i also remember installing windows 8 on a pc that i had when that was new and you know as ed points out in this article um like windows 8 tried to redesign the entire operating system around touch when there were virtually no touch pcs at the time the category hadn't really taken off yet and it sort of ruined both worlds and it also didn't help that they just had filled it with tons of bizarre decisions like yeah let's have everything scroll horizontally in tiny little columns of text as part of metro design like what why would you do that and you know they they tried to go all in on the the ribbon like the ribbon was their idea of let's redesign menu bars as a touch first thing that you know you can just quickly browse through visually um but then they didn't really make it a standard user interface element outside of microsoft office and they didn't put it in the file explorer until kind of recently, like a few years ago in Windows 11. So this is why we say, yeah, Apple doesn't do things first, but they do things better because they actually designed the whole widget from the beginning and they can accommodate it from all parts of the operating system. They also have much greater control over their own APIs. Like Windows, 90% of all Windows applications are still based on the Win32 API from 30 years ago, with Windows NT. So, you know, Apple exerts much more control over these things. And I think that they could actually come up with a competent product. And, you know, the Steve Jobs quote that everybody revisits, he says, oh, you know, after 10 minutes, your arm feels like it wants to fall off. But, you know, that's kind of coming at it from the naive perspective of you don't have to touch the screen. You can still use it as a MacBook and use the trackpad, but the screen is just there if you're showing something to somebody and they just want to scroll really quick instead of reaching over to your trackpad. Yeah, I wonder what kind of interactions that they're anticipating people are going to be using it for, because it is a bit of a, you know, kind of fish nor fowl situation, really. But I think like Casey was saying, I think everyone instinctively these days goes to, you know, goes to touch the screen. There are so, and like, I've got an old bike computer that doesn't have a touchscreen. And every single time I try to use it, I try to touch the screen, and I remember, oh, no, it's the buttons. And I hate the thing because of that. But so, but, But, you know, beyond scrolling, I don't know. I kind of I'm having trouble imagining, you know, sort of workflows or I guess, you know, maybe for sort of not necessarily for work, for getting things done, but for media consumption. Maybe that was when you want to be touching the screen. If you think about it, like just browsing through photos, like in the photos app, I could see how it would be more intuitive to just flick through things by touching the screen. I mean, obviously, that's possible with the trackpad. It's not that this is something that you can't do today. but I can totally see how it would feel more intuitive because this is something that you're kind of sort of touching or you kind of your, your, your inclination is to touch, if you will. And so to just like whiz through it on the display, I could see something like that. And granted, I'm ultimately talking about scrolling again, but I can see that being, you know, a reasonable use case. And similarly, like editing photos, you know, pinching to zoom and, and or pinching to, you know, collapse or whatever, you know what I'm saying that again, something you can do on a trackpad today, this is not reinvented, or I guess it is kind of reinventing the wheel, but this is, This is something that's possible today, but perhaps could be a lot more intuitive when done via direct touch rather than, you know, having that one layer of indirection. Now, granted, this is a layer of indirection that old farts, like most of us anyway, have been used to for 30 years. But, you know, particularly for those who start out touch first, I think that this could be actually a really good way to make moving to a Mac even more intuitive and even more easy. especially because like people just assume every screen is a touch screen now yeah like you know kids kids will touch a tv and to myself i'm thinking what do you think is going to happen when you touch the tv like but they'll do it anyways it won't stop them uh matt birchler the uh he's a um an ios um developer right and he has a blog and he had a really interesting um blog post recently where he was speculating that maybe um that apple should drop ipad os on the iPad Pro and instead put on macOS. And he was saying that way, if he split it up, ordinary people who have an iPad for just, you know, light reading and media consumption, they would still have the sort of, they would run iOS and it would be touch first. Whereas if the Pro users want to use their iPad for something, you know, for work purposes, something like macOS would be more suitable. And of course, like this made total sense to me. I I thought, yeah, yeah, yeah, he's, you know, this is a really interesting idea. And maybe, you know, like this touchscreen Mac OS that Apple is making for the MacBooks, maybe that would run well on an iPad Pro? It probably would. I mean, you can virtualize Mac OS on an iPad using, you know, third part, like open source apps that you build and run yourself, you know, that aren't allowed on the App Store. And, you know, it kind of works, but, you know, people keep saying that and Apple keeps not doing it. And so I think the record is clear here. Apple doesn't want it. Apple wants to keep them separate. Well, except they're not now, are they? You see, like this upcoming Mac OS is going to be one of those weird, you know, it's going to be a hybrid OS. Yeah, I don't know. My bet is that I think in 10 years from now, there will still be Mac OS and there will still be iPad OS. Mac OS will still run on Macs. iPad OS will still run on iPads. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, we'll see. We'll see. Anyway, I thought it was really interesting. Very, very, very, very clever. It sounds like a very clever solution because we'll see what it looks like in real life. Well, a couple more things to talk about these Macs. they will have the Dynamic Island, apparently, at the center of the top of the display. And it's supposed to work like the Dynamic Island on the current iPhone lineup, offering notifications and other status updates. That sounds really cool. People love the Dynamic Island. I mean, this is Apple turning Lemonade to Lemonade, isn't it? And now all the Android phones copy it, even the ones that don't have Face ID sensors. So they have these faux Dynamic Islands. It's been a huge hit. Oh, very much so. Yeah, absolutely. And I think to the point that if they go to like a hole punch camera or whatever, I would expect and hope that they stick with the dynamic island going forward. Because I think having kind of like, I think, what do they call it? A tray and windows, kind of like, you know, the upper right hand corner of the menu bar. What is the menu items on the Mac? Having like a little bit of status available to you, I think is really, really nice and arguably very important. Like being able to look up and see that your Lyft or Uber is three minutes away or, you know, DoorDash is 10 minutes away or whatever the case may be. A great example. Your timer has three minutes left. What the score is of a sports game that you care about. All of these are incredibly useful and I don't think necessarily need much more real estate than a little strip across the top of your screen. And so I really like it. And I'm less I'm not overwhelmed by when they appear in the Mac menu bar as of, I think, the most recent version of Mac OS. You know, it'll, it'll slurp up, say carrot weather. It's raining here today. And so carrot'll, it'll, it'll slurp up the carrot weather live activity and put it in my menu bar on my Mac. And I like that. I wouldn't say I love it, but I like it. Would you love it more if it was in the center instead of aligned to the right with the rest of the menu bar items? Potentially. I mean, I know you're snarking, but yeah, actually kind of, because at least it's a little more consistent that way. And plus like the two edges of my screen are spoken for, you know, I've got, you know, all my menu on the upper left and my menu items on the upper right. And I try to curate those down as much as I can, which is getting ever harder these days. But I think there is something to be said for putting it in the center, leaving aside that a lot of the apps I spend most of my day in, for example, Xcode has about 80 billion menus that it spews across the top of the screen. So then I'm not sure how that would look. But again, this is Apple's job. This is what Apple's good at. So I'm sure they'll come up with a reasonable solution. Would you buy it just for the Dynamic Island, Griffin or Lewis? Buy a laptop specifically because it has a dynamic? No, I don't think that would be the factor that would make me buy it. I think the idea of it being touchscreen is kind of cool. And, you know, Jobs was talking about it being bad ergonomically to have a touchscreen. I think it's the actual the opposite because it gets your hand off of your keyboard and, you know, you let go of the death grip on your mouse or trackpad or whatever. you know you don't have to use it for everything you just use it here and there and you move your arm in a natural way so i mean i think that sounds really cool and dynamic island that'd be awesome to have too i love it on the phone and you know like was there a rumor like oh they're going to get rid of the dynamic island from the phone you know like they're going to upgrade to the like what that that would be a downgrade so yeah i don't know these days you know once they no longer have a cutout out there they could still keep it for you know having you know still having like status things or background tasks up there, even if they don't need to be, you know, I just think they won't be pure black anymore. They might like, you know, tweak the user interface to make it less of a cutout. It really is a great feature though. Like uh you know the United airlines app makes great use of it You know it it just when somebody really takes advantage of that it super cool You look up you see some piece of information that relevant you don have to open an app it just there i love it there a new app that came out it actually for the notch macbooks but it's a teleprompter that appears right below the camera very clever although the uh the like demo that i saw and you know like three seconds of or whatever on on x it's like it was such a tiny type and is moving so fast i'm like who is this for you know it's certainly not for me blind old bastards like me i hopefully can slow it down all right well let's let's talk about the the new bios beta so is 26.4 beta is out um currently we're testing and and like look at i couldn't know our notes it looks like most of the changes are for android users i was 26.4 beta one had uh end-to-end encrypted RCS conversations between two iPhones, which is, I mean, when are two iPhones going to be talking over RCS? Like maybe someone just... By accident. Yeah, doesn't know how to set up iMessage. But Beta 2 now enables it across platforms. This means RCS messages can be sent between iPhone and Android users and be protected with end-to-end encryption. So now you get like a tiny little lock icon at the top of the chat. Seems like a good way to do it. for now it only works between ios 26.4 beta 2 and the latest version of google messages on android across select carriers so you know that's android fragmentation at play right there you know the you might have a bunch of android friends but they might not have google phones they might not have the latest version of google messages but event you know it's on the way do any of you have a lot of rcs conversations yep i sure do uh so my my in-laws basically they're the entire family is on Android phones. My wife and I are the only iPhone people. And I will say, I don't disagree with anything you said, Griffin, about, you know, fragmentation and all that. But it was very cool when iOS 26, I think it was, came out that suddenly these group chats with, say, my brother-in-law and his wife, they immediately went to RCS and we got some of the affordances that, you know, we didn't previously have in a just standard, you know, bog standard green bubble chat. And I've really enjoyed that. I still think, you know, iMessage is superior for a bunch of different reasons that I'm sure, you know, everyone can think about. We don't necessarily need to enumerate, but having at least some modicum of similar ability with my Android friends slash family slash enemies, I don't know, having at least a little bit there is convenient and makes my life a lot easier and a lot better. And certainly having encrypted chats is, I think, in everyone's best interest. So I'm looking forward to this for sure. I noticed, um, I was in a group chat the other day and I actually couldn't tell whether it was a iMessage or RCS because, you know, all the messages were just sending instantly. We could rename the name of the group. We could, you know, add a group photo. And then I noticed that, uh, iOS 26.4 will still let you, uh, set a background image for a group chat, even though that isn't an RCS feature. And so like my friend set a background image for the group chat and it's like, Oh, do you see that? No, I don't because it isn't actually sharing it with everybody. It's bizarre. It feels like a feature flag that they accidentally left on a few liquid glass changes. Uh, context menus on the home screen are a little more transparent than before. So hooray. Uh, there's a new accessibility setting called a reduce highlighting effects that reduces the sort of bright shine on buttons and other liquid glass elements. Uh, but this one is a little concerning to me. Um, the search bar in the games app is no longer integrated into the tab bar as is the case with other ios 26 you know ui designed apps uh there's still like the separate search tab but then the search bar is uh at the top of the screen where it used to be you know ios 18 and before so could it be that they're walking back that sort of integrated search bar design i think i also noticed it on another app maybe it was the app store i think and 26.4 has a separate search bar on the top now, no longer integrated with the bottom navigation, which is annoying because, you know, the whole point was, you know, let's move all the search bars to the bottom where your thumb is. Yep. And right. And I think it works really well. That seems to be like an intuitive place for it. Why would they, why would they blow it up? I mean, I can understand the argument of, oh, you tap on the search tab and then all of the other, you know, tabs for the navigation disappear and you don't know how to get back out of the search tab. I can see that being a little confusing, but, you know, they could have the search bar as like a floating element above the tab bar and still at the bottom of the screen as the best of both worlds. But it could be that they're walking that back, and I would be sad if that's the case. My money, based on no insider information whatsoever, my money is this is an oops of some sort. I mean, it is certainly possible. By no means are you unequivocally incorrect. It is certainly possible you are dead right that they're walking it back. But I don't know. I feel like a lot of what they were telling developers about iOS 26 and liquid glass is, you know, we've, we've have this new tab affordance. We have this new search affordance, as you said, we're moving it down. So it's physically easier to get to, I'd be very, very surprised if they walked it back, especially far enough to get the, to bring the search bar back to the top of the screen. I could understand if maybe they reintegrate that search, like floating action button into the tab bar. That wouldn't surprise me so much, but bringing search back to the top of the screen, I would be very, very surprised. One more change that could be disasters for people who are not fans of iOS 26. If you're enrolled in a developer beta in settings, general software update, beta updates, if you're on a beta track, but don't install a beta for four months, Apple automatically removes you from the program, putting you back on public releases. And this might affect people who are switching to the iOS 18 developer beta to avoid getting the automatic update to iOS 26. It might also be that this change only affects iOS 26.4 onwards. I don't know that for a fact, but I don't know if this is a change that they can retroactively apply to iOS 18 or not, but it could be an end to that trick for those of you who want to stay on 18. So I guess watch out. Do you know anyone except for Charlie Sorrell who's doing that? I do it myself because I have an old iPhone that I want to keep on iOS 18 for historical reasons to just, you know, have that in my repertoire. But I guess I'll have to, I'll check in. I will definitely find out the answer to this question in a few months, apparently. Yeah. All right. Well, that's very dastardly. Tim Cook, so underhand. So, Casey, let's talk about Casey's Call Sheet app. So, Casey, you're going to give us a demo of your app. Sure. Call Sheet. I certainly can. And yeah, so what is CallSheet? So CallSheet, the kind of elevator pitch of CallSheet is what if there was the IMDB app, but it was written by someone who cared? And so I don't know if you've used the IMDB app recently, but like their database is incredible. It really is. But the app is really rough. Their autoplay videos is asking you to log in every three and a half seconds. It's just frustrating. And so a couple of years ago now, I thought to myself, you know, I wonder if I could do this and do it better. And so it turns out that there's a kind of Wikipedia style way in which you are a Wikipedia style website where you can contribute information about cast and crew for movies and TV shows. It's called the movie database. I believe it's the movie DB dot org. And it's pretty darn good. It's not as good as IMDB, but it's pretty darn close. And so the movie database is the back end for call sheet and call sheet is kind of sort of my cut on, you know, here's how you can figure out who's in something. And you're looking at some, this is my, you know, my phone with, which has a bunch of test data on it. So this is a very curious list of pinned items, but don't hold it against me. But the kind of idea behind it is not only can you just look at, you know, TV shows and whatnot in movies and so on. Like one of my favorite movies of all time is On for October, for example. but where I think Call Sheet kind of shines is when you start drilling into TV shows. So as an example, when I was writing Call Sheet, I was really into the TV show Watchmen. And this was in, this came out in late 2019. I didn't get around to watching it until a couple of years later. But when I was looking at the credits on IMDb, some of these characters have dual roles, right? Watchmen is about superheroes. And obviously some of these people have double roles as both both the civilian and the superhero. And I'm not going to spoil which one it was, but one of the people you see on the screen here, when I looked at their credits on IMDb, it said, you know, Joe Smith slash Superman or whatever. And I got spoiled on the secret identity of one of the characters. And I swore that was never going to happen to me again. So one of the great things about Call Sheet that I really enjoy is that you can choose to hide spoilers. And so I'm going to leave them hidden for right now, although I think that the movie database does not spoil it anyway. But for the sake of conversation, you can see here in the preview that Johnny Appleseed has some sort of role in this fake made up show that I invented, but you can't see it. And if I were to turn that off, you can see, oh, he's a botanist and so on and so forth. Similarly, you know, what if, what if, it was the best I could do, right? I was trying to play into the Apple angle. I was trying to play the Apple angle. So it's made sense because, you know, you used to use Johnny Appleseed for all their stuff. But similarly, what if somebody has written off a show? Well, I don't want to know that they're only on two episodes. So maybe I'll hide that spoiler as well. And similarly, what if you're very particular about even something as simple as an episode title or a thumbnail or the summary of the episode? And so you can choose to do to hide all of these things and they're per show. So there is a system level thing where you can default it to always hide, you know, this, that or the other. But generally speaking, it's per show. So if I were to go into, say, 30 Rock, if I were to come back here, you'll notice that none of these things are hidden because I didn't choose that as a default. And so that was kind of one of my favorite features about Call Sheet is being able to not spoil yourself on TV shows. Another nice thing is you can see here at the time of release, how old was this actor? And granted, you can argue that this isn't exactly right because sometimes things get released later and so on and so forth. But it's a good thumb in the wind as to how old these people are. And I don't know about you guys, but when I'm watching a TV show, I'm frequently, I don't know, asking, well, how old is this person anyway? and this is a small computer i can compute that and so that's what call she does as it shows right there you know liz lemon or tina fey was somewhere between 36 and 42 and she's currently 55 that's an exclusive feature to call sheet because i've never seen that before and anything else uh additionally if somebody passes away which i don't thankfully don't see an example of here but if somebody passes away it'll say that you know they passed at such and such year at such and such age. And so it's stuff like that, that I think makes call that let's call sheets stand out a bit. And then additionally, if you're like me and you really want to see trivia or one of many other different things, not all of this, but a lot of this will link out to actually that specific page in IMDB. So for example, the movie database doesn't really do anything about trivia, but IMDB does. So I can tap the trivia button and you can see an ad at the top of the screen and you can see, you know, all this trivia and it's, it's functional, but it's not my favorite, but at least it works and I can see that trivia. And additionally, you know, I can hop right over to Wikipedia and it will go directly to that, you know, page that's appropriate for that, for that particular show. And then if I'm going, if I drill into a particular episode and I want to watch a particular episode and I see, oh, it's a 22 minute runtime. Well, if I start it right now, it'll end at 1.48 PM, you know? And so these popovers also give you little hints as well. Well, when was this released 13 years ago? And so I like to think that there's lots of stuff that you can explore in here. You can pin items, obviously you can have multiple list of pins. Again, this is test data, so it's not very exciting at the moment, but you get the idea. You have your watch history here. You can configure on this screen, which I call the discover screen, what's here and what isn't. So if you don't care about new movies or if you don't care about new episodes, you can pull that off the discover screen. There's a whole bunch of settings in here that you can deep dive into. I have a whole bunch of different icons, for example, that you can choose, some of which done by my friend Jelly, some by my friend Stee. And there's all sorts of stuff you can dive into. I should have actually didn't even occur to me until just now, but I should have had something playing on Plex or channels, in which case above pinned items, you'll see like now playing and it'll show what's actively playing on a nearby channels or Plex app. And that works pretty well. It works really well with channels, works okay with Plex. Plex uses some really old tech to do that. But yeah, I mean, that's kind of the nickel tour of call sheet. If you have questions, I'm happy to answer them. If you're set, I'm set. But basically it's imagine if imdb was done by someone who loves you instead of someone who hates you and that's that's well imdb started out didn't it as a as a community driven database and then it got bought and ruined yep exactly right exactly right uh yeah so call sheet it is 20 searches for free um i didn't really demonstrate searching but uh oh no i did do watchman earlier uh you can do 20 searches for free and then after that um it's uh i believe my pricing is a dollar a month or ten dollars a year You can optionally kind of tithe me more than that if you so desire. You get no perks for giving me more money, but if you choose to, you can. It's kind of like a tip jar sort of situation. But basically, it's $10 a year, and I like to think of that as really darn affordable, given that I'm now paying $3 for a Diet Coke at a fast food spot. So that's Call Sheet. I obviously am extraordinarily biased, but I really like it, and I think it's pretty good. And I'd love it if your listeners and viewers checked it out. I saw that in one of the menus, where to watch. That looks really useful. Oh, yes. Yeah, that's powered by Just Watch. So this will basically go to Just Watch and ask, you know, hey, where can you watch this? Either via subscription or if you buy it, if there were free options available for this particular title, it would show you free options as well. It's all based, obviously, on that particular title. I don't know if Hunt for October, given that it's a little bit older, if it would have more interesting options. Oh, yeah. So there's buy, rent, subscription. it's so on. You can choose which country, you know, I don't know if maybe you had an affiliation or an affinity for a different country, but then perhaps you could see, you know, there's different options there. Additionally, if you're a letterbox person, whoops, I'm sorry. If you're a letterbox person, you know, it'll link over to letterbox. If that's your sort of thing, I'm not personally on letterbox, but you get the idea. And you can also configure instead of trivia to the left of the more button, you can configure a different one of these options. If you're say really into the technical details because you're a photographer or something like that. You can choose your quick action button is what I call it. It's available on iOS, on iPadOS, on the Mac as an iPad app. It's also on Vision Pro. I'm one of the three Vision Pro apps that are native on the platform. So you can check it out there as well if you're interested. But like I said, I think it's pretty decent and I'd love it if your listeners, viewers, readers, et cetera, checked it out. The where to watch button is excellent. That's what I use all the time because I can never remember the name of the service just watch because it's like vague enough that i i can't remember what it's called like i know there's a website but i can also just type it into call sheet the app is super fast especially the search thing you just type it in and you get live results as you're typing them in letter by letter you can often it's only like a few letters then i can find the thing immediately just and then just see where to watch immediately you know it's super fast yep we were just watching scrubs before we recorded because that came back and that was a personal favorite a show of aaron and mine my wife and i uh so yeah i i i really think it's really fast it's It's done with care. It's not perfect, of course, but it's done with care. And certainly if you're listening to this and you have a suggestion, there's a mechanism within settings where you can give me feedback. And I read all of those emails. It's just me around here. So I read them all and I take it into consideration. And I love to do what I can to help my users have the best experience that they possibly can. Yeah. Wow. It's a super nice app case. They look very, very deep as well, like tons and tons of functionality. Yeah. Thank you. It's been a couple of years now that I've been working on it. And so there's a lot there. I have plans for so much more. I'm not going to start into the AI conversation right now, but I've been dabbling with, you know, Cloud Code and trying to figure out where is that appropriate for me to use that in the app. And so far, I haven't used it very much, but I'm starting to get my hands around, you know, where does it make sense and where does it not? And I have a lot of stuff on the to-do list and not enough time to do it, unfortunately. One of the things I love to do after I read something is, I'm sorry, watch something is to read the reviews or read people's takes and stuff like that? Do you have anything like that? Not directly. One of the things on the to-do list is to integrate with Letterboxd more thoroughly. Right now I'm linking out to it where you can see reviews, but no, I'd like to in the future interact with the Letterboxd API and also potentially let you, if you're a Letterboxd user, rate, include your particular rating for that particular title. Definitely on the to-do list. The good and the bad thing about being a single person company is that the things that I'm super interested in happen really fast. And the things that I'm less interested in happen, but just not with the same speed. And for me, like, it's actually very funny that I had a very wide beta test a couple of years ago. And I personally don't care for numerical ratings. I feel like that's very, very frequently. It doesn't match my personal opinion of a movie or TV show. and I got so many people, so many beta testers fussing at me because I didn't include ratings in the app. And I, you know, I've stopped sharing my screen, but suffice to say that ratings are there now because so many people were like, what are you doing? Where's the rating? And so, you know, it's stuff like that. You know, I really try to make sure I'm listening to the, to the, the, the feedback from my, my users. And if there's something that's popular, then clearly I need to make a change. And I can't think of another example off the top of my head where that's happened, but it's happened many times where it's something that maybe left to my own devices, I wouldn't bother with, but enough people have said, no, no, no, no, no, let's fix this, that I've gone and made it happen. Yeah, it sounds like an awesome way to be, you know, to be working on something, you know, getting that feedback from your user base and responding to it and building things for them. Yeah, no, I've been very lucky. It's been very fun. And, you know, I'm glad, you know, I've had a few other apps in the App Store that are mostly unremarkable. And I'm glad to have one that I think has some legs on it and that I can play with for a long time, you know, that there's a lot more to do. I think it's full featured right now, for sure. But there's so many more things that I can come up with, so many more things. I mean, I track my to-do list in GitHub, and I have, I don't even have, like, 50 or 70 or 80 GitHub tickets open with things that I want to do. Some of those are bugs, to be fair, but a lot of them, most of them are things I want to do and things that I'd like to add to the app over time. So I got a very exciting 2026 ahead of me. It's just a matter of just bearing down and getting it done. Yeah, yeah. Very cool. Very cool. All right. Well, thanks very much for that, Casey. That was excellent. Yeah, I enjoyed that. I'm definitely going to download that. I'm a movie nut. In fact, I just bought a projector. Oh, nice. On Amazon, and I'm really excited to set it up. There's unfortunately not one single place in my house where I can project. So if you'll permit me a very brief story that you might appreciate more than most, when Top Gear was airing, like, you know, when it was still in season, if you will, this was in the late aughts, I guess. I was obsessed with it. And I know that particularly Jeremy Clarkson is very divisive, but I always enjoyed the three hosts. And so what we would do is in the summertime, when a new series would start, a new season would start, we have a very, very crummy projector. But what we would do is we would go to the back of the house and drape a king size sheet off the back of the house and have a bunch of our friends over have some drinks and i would project the the debut of the new episode of top gear for that series and we haven't done that obviously in like 15 years but it was a very very fun and like a seminal part of the summer for me uh being able to do that every year and so having a projector handy you'd be surprised if you can't really use it in the house there you will find times that you can use it and you can even get one of those inflatable um screens you know you know i'm saying where they like blow up if you have some some green I go to a park or something. I haven't used one of them, but I'm sure they're not bad. And you can get like, we go to American football games, college football games, and we have a very intense tailgate. And just recently I got a, one of those like portable power station things, you know, one of the ones that's like 15, 20 pounds. And so you could take that with your projector and granted it's a little heavy, but you could set all this up in a park somewhere if you wanted to, and just have your own little movie night in the park. Because why not? because I can. All right. Well, I'm definitely excited about it. Love the movies. Love going to the, you know, but don't go as much as I used to. I used to go to like the movies three times a week, something like that. But yeah, so, and of course it makes a huge difference. I saw Blade Runner actually, you know, the 80s version for the first time since the 80s. And I know that film backwards because it's one of my favorites. And I was, the tears were streaming down my face from the scene where she plays the piano, the android. And it's so much different on a big screen. The impact, like just seeing such a beautiful woman and the music, it really hit different. Like I was so much more moved by that when I saw it on a big screen. So this is why I wanted to get into it. And Kubrick as well, like 2001. I used to think that was so boring. And then I went to see it for the cinema and I was absolutely riveted for the entire take and had never seen, and it was a completely different experience, like a wonderful movie, not boring at all, not slow, completely different when you sit on a big screen. Yep, yep, yep. And when you're not staring at your phone, taking a break every four minutes. Right, true enough. Yeah, exactly, very, very true. Let's talk about this setup. So this is weirder and weirder as you get as you look at it more and more. And this one's really wacky. So an important note here is that podcast listeners, if you're listening, you can check the chapter artwork to see the picture, the photo that we're going to be talking about. So please check that out. What did you think of this, Lewis, when you saw it? It took me a little bit of time to figure out what was going on. Right. Me too. uh, uh, this is part of our, uh, I think the headline should be 16 coolest and weirdest keyboards and Mac setups. Cause we added an extra one. I, you know, the straight behind that is that we, we published this article and then, uh, I was, I was browsing through it to add it to the show notes, figure out the most weird one. And then I realized, Oh, I have a weird and unusual keyboard. I should, you know, message Dave and like get mine added. So, uh, the 15 is now 16. You can scroll through the whole list to see my keyboard somewhere on there. But the one we're looking at today is unusual, to say the least. Not just because of the keyboard. Sounds one better. That's great. So this thing has got a 16-inch MacBook Pro on a stand, kind of sitting open and up. And a 14-inch Lenovo ThinkVision portable monitor on top of the keyboard and trackpad. so you've got these two stacked monitors uh with a quote thin piece of foam to keep the monitor from pressing the macbook pro spacebar uh and then the thing that uh got it in this roundup is this crazy keyboard 15 by 5 straight grid of keys ortho linear keyboard this is the second one of these in two weeks now i i don't think i had ever even heard of an ortho linear keyboard now now the place is lousy with them uh i don't i still don't understand exactly what they're for uh or how they're in any way better than the keyboard that everybody's been using forever i mean there's always been strange is it anything more than aesthetics i assumed i agree with you that i have no idea what the purpose is here but i assumed it was just having like perfectly rectangular aesthetics is is it more than that the one we the one we covered last week had like two halves so you know you could see oh it's ergonomic because you can position each half of the keyboard anywhere anywhere you want but uh this is just like you know to be clear one continuous keyboard it's only one piece uh except the letters are in straight lines and also uh between the letters there's like a group of like punctuation keys and the arrow keys and the space bar is also really tiny and off to the right uh but also separated yeah easy to hit with your thumb But only your right thumb The whole thing is bizarre Only your right thumb yeah Maybe this is where people are just using dictation only Or they're not touch typists in the first place. So they, you know, hunting and pecking, maybe it's easier. I don't know. I read something that said, like, oh, it's just straighters. It's less travel. I was like, what? Really? Okay. To me, it looks like an ergonomic nightmare. I would never even try a keyboard like this. Terrified of it. let's see what else we got here we got some kind of crazy mouse I don't even know what kind of mouse that is geez I can't see nothing can't see nothing it's just a Logitech that's unusual is that a Logitech? yeah it says Logitech on it it's so small on my screen I can't see it and people on the podcast can't see it either because it's audio and let's see we've got a phone sitting floating in the air somehow don't know how uh what what struck me is that there's a uh there's a overall it's a pretty bright white clean room you know there's nice like a cork pads under the keyboard and mouse uh the one thing that's unusual though is that the the cable that's plugging in the iphone i think it's supposed to be white but it's so dirty that it's a darker brown than the cork board it's on so do you think it's dirty or is it maybe just a why would you have a sun weather why would you have just a brown cable though. I don't know. It could happen. Well, you can see as it snakes around the back of the machine, it does turn into a different color. It looks white. It just might be the lighting. Maybe. Well, the stack monitors, I think that's a really good idea, stacking them up vertically like that, rather than having them side by side. It's much more right in front of you. You don't have to move your head anywhere to check it out. And you don't see that too often, do you? It seems like the kind of thing Wall Street traders do. Well, you know, The MacBook is elevated because it's on a stand, but then you have to look like low to look at the other screen because it's, you know, the stand doesn't elevate the MacBook that high. It's not like a full desktop, you know, setup where, you know, you're, as they say ergonomically, like your eye is level at the top of the monitor in front of you. It's level with one of the monitors, but then the other one is like sort of back down below around the keyboard. Maybe it's because it's, you know, he's got to come up with some kind of stand or they've got to come up with some kind of stand to put this portable monitor on. But Ed has been, one of our writers, Ed Hardy, he's been extolling the virtues of portable monitors and says that absolutely game changes if you have a, oh, there you go. So I'm now holding up my portable monitor, which is unfortunately not being made anymore. This is an Azropa, I believe, or Azropa, I'm sorry, A-R-Z-O-P-A. It's a like 13 inch or thereabouts portable monitor. It's USB-C powered. It has the flimsiest case in the world on it. For those who are not viewing, it is like paper thin, but it serves as like a makeshift stand. This is, I think, 2K and 13 inches, but it's enough that it passes muster as retina-ish. Like, I don't think, strictly speaking, it has quite the PPI that retina would demand, but it's a lot better than your average monitor. I love this thing. If I'm not going to be one of those dorks that straps the Vision Pro to his face to get Mac virtual display, then this is the next best thing. And I occasionally will go to like a cafe or a coffee shop, whatever, to do some work just to get a change of scenery. And having a second screen is truly a game changer. And this, when it was new, again, I don't believe it's available anymore. This was like $150, which is not a small amount of money. But given that it's an entire monitor, it's really not bad. And so I hard agree on this. 60 bucks now, I think, you know, for the cheapest ones. And they're perfectly decent. Espresso does some really nice ones. A company out of Australia. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So do you plug it into your MacBook? Yeah, that's right. I have a 13-inch MacBook Pro, single cable that carries both power and data. And it works incredibly well. I mean, it's not as bright. It's not as much real estate. And because I run it in Retina, you know, everything is physically kind of large. You know, I could, if I had better eyes, then I could run it in its native resolution and everything would be microscopic, but at least I would see, you know, I would have more stuff on screen. But honestly, as an accessory monitor while I'm traveling, it's, it's perfect. It is, I would love something bigger, but then it would be much heavier, you know, and there's all those trade-offs and so on and so forth. It would use more power. But no, this, this particular one in our Zopa makes a bunch of them. What did you say a second ago, Leander? What was the name of the Espressive, Espresso, something like that? Espresso, I think. Yeah. Okay, there you go. Those I've heard are very good. I pegged this as a ThinkPad associated thing because I grew up on ThinkPads, but I worked for IBM. And so even in microscopic version of the image, I was like, oh, that's got to be an IBM. Well, I guess not IBM anymore, but you know what I mean. so I'm sure the Lenovo screens are also good I'm not trying to say that that our Zopa as weird as that is is the be-all end-all but I really do think that if you go somewhere that you have the physical space to set a monitor next to your screen your MacBook Pro I can't recommend it enough it's have you plugged your iPhone or your iPad into it too I did plug my iPhone in once just to see that it would work and it was basically useless other than mirroring but it was cool that it did so that was that i had that going for me uh occasionally i plugged in like uh the nintendo switch like if my kids are if we're traveling and for what i don't i've only done it once or twice or in or if we're like at a friend's house and they're trying to like play mario kart against the friend but via the network rather than all being on the same screen you know we've done that a couple times uh the speaker there is a speaker on this thing and it is just as awful as you would expect it to be but um but i mean again in a pinch it serves its purpose and given that it's not extremely expensive if you're a mobile worker i i can't recommend it enough okay griffin we have a super fun game coming up now because it's gonna be a big week next week even tim cook this morning um teased next week's announcement didn't he did you guys see that he put out a tweet saying that um what did it say anyway something about of a big week yeah so he's uh yeah everyone's so we're gonna we're gonna do some predictions about what we think is gonna be shown next week it's still it's still a mystery but there are some clues um griffin so what are we gonna do we're gonna open up uh and there are still some unknowns so for the first time in 2026 and for the first time on our new podcast we're gonna lay down our predictions for apples not an event event uh leander wants to try a format with only 10 questions instead of 20 so to make up for it i've made them all that just just a little bit more devilish uh great so we've agreed on a list of predictions for the event presume i mean my my co-hosts have had the opportunity to look at the list i'm not sure how familiar they are but uh agreed i think it's a bit of a stretch yeah right right for each prediction we will vote yes or no whether we think it will happen votes will be placed in order of who won the previous game so i will go first leander second lewis third and casey as our guest will go last and he has the privilege of seeing how the rest of us vote before he places his vote so that's interesting um uh one point will be awarded for each correct guess any disputes in judgment must be ruled on by ed hardy a responsibility he has not been informed of um much less agreed to listeners can submit their own votes using a Google form that's in the show notes, or you can also type in dgriffinjones.com slash survey, and that'll take you right to it. But you know, also just tap the link in the show notes if you don't want to type that in or you don't know how to spell my name. The highest score submitted before the first announcement will be honored in the next episode. You have the opportunity to plug something in case you win, so that's always fun. So without further ado, we're going to jump into the iphone and ipad section uh again i'll be going firstly under second then lewis then casey iphone 17e with magsafe dynamic island and the same two colors i am going to say uh yeah that sounds about right how about everybody else i'm gonna go out on a limb here and say yeah that sounds about right too okay bold bold choice lewis yeah i mean it sounds lines up with everything we've heard i just thought it was going to be here already and uh casey yeah i i think as the foil of the episode i am somewhat contractually obligated to be contrarian um i think i'm going to say no and the reason i'm going to say no even though the smart money says yes i'm going to say no on account of i wonder if the colors might be different and yes i i am aware that you know the rumors are the rumors but i i'm really hanging my hat on maybe the colors being a little different and if it doesn't end up happening at all i'm going to retroactively claim that i knew it was never going to happen and it had nothing to do with the colors but sitting here today i'm going to say the colors are giving me pause and plus it's fun to be contrarian so i'm going to say no on this one yeah i was thinking the same thing um entry-level ipad with a18 and apple intelligence support so we know that you know there are ipads coming we don't know exactly which ones uh is it going to be the entry-level ipad i'm actually going to say no on this one i think i was uh waffling on this to myself earlier between yes or no but i'm going to go no for arbitrary reasons leander yeah i'm wondering the same thing if i uh i'm gonna say yes just because you said no that's probably the smarter choice lewis can i say maybe since you said yes and you said no uh geez i don't know it's gonna it seems like an awful lot of stuff coming out if this all comes out next week um hmm yeah well the rumors were it was going to be like you know ipads so not necessarily just one ipad but but several ipad models yeah i'm going to say no it's not coming next week bold all right so i am really bad at predicting anything apple does despite it arguably uh nominally being my actual job. But I'm going to say yes for this. And the reason is, is because I can see them painting the story of look at how we're taking care of the every person. And there's all these more affordable options because everyone's pretty much committed to there being the, you know, affordable 18 powered MacBook, which we'll get to, I presume in a second, I don't have the rest of the list in front of me, but I think that paints a really nice story of look at all the entry level stuff that we're bringing to the table, especially as everything and life is getting so much more expensive. So I'm going to go with yes. Good point. Yeah, good point. Yeah. Yeah, it could be in matching colors with the MacBooks. Oh, yeah, that's an interesting point too. Now, can I change my guess? iPad Air with M4 and virtually no other changes. I'm actually going to put myself down as a no for this one as well because I think there will be one other change and that it might have the N1 Wi-Fi and cellular chip. That's just a guess that that hasn't been rumored. But that does add, you know, maybe, maybe it will. So I'm going to say yes. Again, probably the smarter decision. Yeah, I say yes, too. I'm also going to say yes. And I'm going to state for the record that if I am wrong, I'm going to lean so hard on the word virtually. And I'm going to convince you that virtually has done enough work to make me correct. So I'm just predicting it now. well uh you know if it does have the uh the n1 wireless chip in it then i think that does count as like another change but no no that's that's virtually the same thing come on it's the same thing you can't even tell you can't even tell see we're doing it right now we're already preparing well i guess that'll be up to ed to judge then okay fair enough or or more likely i'll just be completely wrong mac and other products macbook comes in eight comes with a18 chip and at least three undeniably bright vibrant colors why why griffin why oh gosh i'm gonna put myself down for yes i think they're gonna do it this time the only quibble i have there is the undeniably bright vibrant colors because i think they it was supposed to be light yellow and light green which kind of i don't know you know is that vibrant undeniably vibrant i'm gonna say if it's if it's like you know light colors in the way that the current ipad air is like so pastel that you almost can't even tell that it isn't silver you know that wouldn't count but if it's like you know cosmic orange level colors or entry-level ipad colors like the current entry-level ipad you know you would say those are undeniably bright and vibrant yeah true and like the old iBooks which i think was the last time they did was that the last time they did really bright vibrant laptops yes i mean rose gold i'm not trying to snark rose gold in certain flavors i think was at least approaching bright i don't know if i'd necessarily go so far as to call it bright but it was in the ballpark at least uh but certainly nothing like you know green or or you know super duper blue or anything like that yeah i don't think they're going to be bright i think they're going to be you know like like they say casey that that you know sort of approaching bright so i'm going to say no okay oh my god lewis i've forgotten what we're talking about uh the mac so listen it's funny i was just looking at the ipad air clothes and those are definitely not undeniably bright yeah but then the regular ipad is so you know that's it's like well they've been making the regular ipad out of aluminum for years so clearly they know how to color aluminum but they just choose not to and apparently they had to invent a new process just to do it on a macbook but like they've been doing it on the ipad for it's perplexing to me so if we were to call if we were to talk about the colors of the current ipad would we call those undeniably bright i don't see why not all right then it's a yes okay one one thing which is just an interesting aside which um uh is maybe jermaine here um we i talked to years ago an apple engineer um and uh who said that the anodizing process it was super hard to get the the lid and the keyboard to match um and there would be tiny differences between you know the silver the anodizing on the keyboard and the lid and and they had a huge that was a huge huge problem getting it to be consistent so maybe that makes it a little harder you know like i don't know if brighter colors are more difficult to match. Maybe that's why, you know, like with laptops where the two halves have to match. You don't have this problem with an iPad, of course, right? Because it's all one piece and it doesn't have a keyboard. Yeah. Yeah, so I don't know. That's just, you know, apparently they did perfect it and they patented the heck out of it too. And it's a surprisingly complex process as well, I think, with all kinds of blasting with beads and all sorts of stuff. But, yeah. You know what's going to happen is it will come in three undeniably bright, vibrant colors, but it'll have an A19. And so we'll all get it wrong. And actually, to that end, I think I'm going to say no to this. And I think it is very clear we are getting some sort of low cost to the degree that Apple believes in low cost MacBook. But I think that this is too specific a question between the undeniably bright and to your point, the A18. I think I think it would become an argument to to figure to claim that a yes answer was correct when we see these muted colors or maybe not undeniably bright colors or perhaps it's an A19 or something like that. I think the spirit of this question is correct. Yes, this spiritually will happen. But literally, I have to say no. Oh, wait, maybe I should change it to A19 Pro. Because I don't have the A19 Pro chip. I don't know. I'll just say right now. if it has an A18 Pro instead of an A18, I'll still count it as correct. An A18 generation chip. Okay. Next, MacBook Air and high-end MacBook Pros with M5 chips and virtually no other changes. I'm going to once again go all in. I don't know. Maybe I'll hedge my bets. Because, you know, these might come with the N1 Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chip as well. You can't even see it, Griffin. How can you say that's a reasonable change? I mean, come on. Okay. I'll put myself down as yes. Virtually no other changes. M5 generation chips, that's it. Leander? Well, that's a good point about those networking chips. Oh, don't bow to him on this one. Come on. Stay strong with me. That doesn't count. I don't know. I think there's a little bit of gray area there, Casey. I think that we could argue that. There is. So I'm going to say yeah. No. Sorry, no. No. You're going to say yeah, no? Yeah, no. you know it is also you know we've seen reports that like the high-end macbook pros are going out of stock and inventory and stores but i don't think we've seen the same thing about the macbook air so it could be that there's a new macbook pro but not a new macbook air and it's just not out yet this whole thing is so weird it's not even an actual event so who knows uh i think that i think that this is a yes and i don't think that it's gonna have modem because i think that would be way too big of a deal the first mac oh i'm not saying with a with a cellular modem i'm saying the n1 wi-fi chip oh the wi-fi chip right yeah virtually no other changes virtually yeah i think this is a yes i think this is very much an apple style to just rev it which that's not a complaint for the record i mean i remember during the dark days of the macbook you know we would kill for a speed bump and little else and so i'm not complaining about the fact that it would just be you know a spec bump and little else but i think that's going to happen and it will also be classic apple to give us a new macbook pro in march and then six months later whatever give us the actually properly new macbook pro with the touchscreen and so on and so forth so yeah i think i think yes next up studio display 2 with thunderbolt 5 and 90 hertz refresh rate i'm gonna this is another specific one, but I'm going to say no, because I don't think the studio display is coming out yet. I thought the, the, the refresh rate was supposed to be higher than that. Uh, well, a, a rumor written into the upgrade podcast said that, uh, from an anonymous source, uh, said that, oh, it'll only be 90 and not 120 for, well, I thought that somebody had discovered some hints in code that that was the case as well. It was both of those things if I remember right. Possibly. Yeah. But what are the other, aren't there some other panels out now already that are similar to this and they're at 120? I think that the assumption, which again, that's the important word here, the assumption was that even though you can get 120 hertz over a Thunderbolt 5 cable, because there's all the other connectivity on the back of a studio display, and that connectivity could also require a whole bunch of bandwidth. The assumption was that Apple would bring down from 120 to 90 in order to leave that headroom for, say, having like an external drive hanging off the back of the studio display, for example. OK, well, because this is a game, I'm going to say no to because of that. Yep. Yeah, sure. Why not? Refresh rate means so little to me. I don't, uh, are you one of the people who's like refresh rate blind and you can't tell when it's promotion or not? Yeah. I mean, I don't know. Uh, I, all I've ever had is a promotion phone. So, I mean, did, I don't know why they would need a promotion screen on a, on a, you know, a desktop monitor though, really. It is. I mean, it makes scrolling buttery smooth, but I mean, other than that, I don't disagree with you. Uh, for me, I think this will happen. I think we are all desperate for a new Apple monitor. I'll leave aside the Pro Display XDR in that lunacy. But we're desperate for a new, like, real Apple monitor. And Apple is 100% silly enough to just randomly decide to do instead of 60, instead of 120. No, we're going to do 90 because we're Apple and we can. 100%, I think this will happen. I'm going to say no, though, because I don't think it's going to happen next week. I think it'll happen maybe in June or maybe even at the end of the year. I think it'll, you know, it, it's a good thing to, to roll out simultaneous with the, with the Mac studio. And that's not rumored at this event. But I mean, it still could come the next pick any other products announced. This includes, you know, Mac studio, a home pod mini too, which some people think is going to happen. The new Apple TV, which is, you know, I hope so every once in a while. so I'm going to put down myself as yes because I'm hoping the new Apple TV comes out and I just want to will it into existence Amen to that brother I was going to say the same thing Apple TV, I think that probably is going to be revealed so I'll say yes to Lewis No, and I just wonder if even all these talking about it are they really going to release this many products in one week without an event I realize they're kind of I mean, it's the Apple TV It's not really event worthy. Yeah, but I mean, part of what they want to do is get a bunch of attention for a bunch of products, right? They don't want to, you know, here's everything but the kitchen sink. I mean, oh, there's also a HomePod. Oh, there's also, you know, I don't think so. Good point, Lewis. I think Lewis is probably the most correct of all of us about this. That being said, I'm going to say yes purely from a wish casting point of view because I desperately want an Apple TV. we as I mentioned earlier we go to tailgates we use actually a three generation old Apple TV to drive the video at the tailgate and that thing is getting very long in the tooth and I really want to get a new one and then trickle down you know from the living room to the bedroom to the tailgate and so on and so forth and so I desperately would love a new Apple TV I'm telling I'm putting on the record that I'm probably wrong in saying yes but I'm wish casting I desperately want it if you get a if you get a new one then you can have have karaoke at your tailgate parties. Yes, because that's what you want to see is us, especially after a little tailgating singing songs. In the miscellaneous section, all new products available starting Friday, March 6th. So sometimes when they have these like little not quite events, I mean, the typical thing for the iPhone is that, you know, the event is on Monday, Tuesday, and then it's like the next week and a half. It releases that following Friday. But sometimes for the lesser products, they're available the same day, as I think was the case with the M5 Vision Pro. It was like available starting the same day. And I didn't even realize that until like a few days later. Sometimes it's available like later that week. I really don't want it to be Friday, March 6th, because I have plans that weekend. And I don't want to blow them all off to write like five different reviews. So I'm going to say no, just because, again, wish casting. It might be the following Friday. you know the new macbook maybe that'll have you know they'll want more time for reviewers to have like right reviews under embargo but uh i don't know i'm gonna say no too i don't think they're gonna i think something's gonna be delayed you know like a week or two if there's gonna be all the raft of products i don't think they're gonna have everything available well keep in mind this says all new products available starting friday march 6 right yeah lewis yeah i would go no just because there's a chance that something's available that day. If they have this many products, I doubt they're all just going to dump on one day. I guess I should also say, from a grading perspective, I think they're rumored to come out with the new watch band colors. I don't consider those a product. Watch bands, accessories, things like that. Literally a new product. One of the main ones Yeah yeah Main products Unambiguously new Yeah All right I going to say yes to this for a couple of reasons one contrarian two uh i do think it makes for a good story like i was saying earlier you know here's all these new products and whatever it is you want you can buy it on friday march 6th and third of all i would say that by the way this is written right now i would say that if the products are available on the fourth and the fifth and the sixth i win because they are all available oh no you said starting never mind starting i take it all back i take it all back all right well i'm still going with yes i'm still going with yes for the first two reasons but i thought i found a loophole i should have read a little more closely all right never mind i think that's how it was written stick with my yes as of yesterday but i i caught that uh this morning darn it okay fair enough all right well i'm still sticking with yes mostly for contrarian and story purposes, but I thought I had you there. Good work. This is another one that I edited. Um, shoehorned in promotion for formula one on Apple TV. So I think that's starting sometime next week, if I'm not mistaken, case the first race is a week from this coming Sunday. I forget what day of the month that is, but, uh, the, not the Sunday coming, but the Sunday after. So that will almost certainly get its own press release. And, you know, obviously, but what I mean here is if they put out a video, if they put out marketing images, they'll just casually mention as well oh and formula one is beginning soon into something else this is the perfect thing to plug with the new apple tv right so yeah oh very good point see now you're getting my hopes up leander don't do that well they updated the maps i saw someone raving about the maps with um some formula one stuff in it so i'm going to put myself down as yes they they will want to remind you that it is coming soon yeah i'll do yes too i would say no every time i think that they're gonna promote something they ever do the only thing that makes me gives me pause is the whole thing about like oh is there's this uh you know thing about the vision pro and formula one and all that you know will they try and make a splash in that way but i think no i'm gonna say yes here. I think it will be very brief. So brief that Lewis will be able to make a legitimate argument that it shouldn't count. But I don't think they're going to do like a whole dog and pony show or anything like that. I think it'll be very quick. I think it'll be mildly cringy, but I don't think they're going to perseverate on it. I think it's just going to be like, oh, and guess what? Formula One's coming and you can watch it on your Apple TV and you can do it for free now if you're an Apple One person, you know, and so on and so forth. And I think it'll you know 30 seconds or something like that and then they'll move right i mean think about wwdc like they had a whole opening joke to the to the keynote about formula one like racing on the ceiling of apple park and they didn't even really have anything to promote then i guess they had the f1 movie that was it yeah the movie but you know this is a bigger splash but also a smaller event so yeah tricky so so if it's just like a you know like let's say they release a macbook pro And there's a screenshot that says Formula One on it. And it says, you could watch this. Would that count for this? I mean, to me, that doesn't seem. I think it would be. It's a shoehorned in promotion. Like one sentence? Yeah. Finally. All right. Well, we'll see. This has happened before. You know, you never know how big or small Apple's going to go in terms of these announcements. John Ternus hosts three short accompanying product videos. sort of mini keynotes as you will i'm gonna put myself down as yes i'm gonna say no because i don't think that he's um you know this the the products are too different i think they'll they'll mix it up you know they'll they'll do what they do with um the longer um product introduction uh videos and mix it up and give you know give some other people a chance to take the spotlight that is true the last time this happened was for the m4 max and you know there were there were three very similar products they're all max you know the imac the macbook pro the mac mini and so it sort of made sense that they all but you know that is true these are all three very different products it's my turn now i'd say no okay no for a variety of reasons might not be all turnus might not be short yeah i think there's too there's too much specificity here. I'm really, really thinking that three is the wrong number. Why? I don't know. But I just feel like three is not right. I think it might be two. It might be four. It might be 12. Not really, but you know what I mean? I think three is what's going to get me the win on this. And I don't think it's going to be exactly three. And when it is exactly three, you can rub it in my face, Griffin. But I think, I think no. Okay. Well, our listeners, you can go to dgriffinjones.com slash survey and fill in your own answers. Click the link in the show notes. If you want to see our table of votes, which is on my website, and, you know, submit your predictions before Monday. I think Apple confirmed that it's going to start on Monday. So, you know, you have a few days. Yeah, just this weekend. Yeah, it's all starting Monday. Yeah, it's going to be a busy week, really busy week next week. Super exciting too, even as if just chip and ship. All right, excellent. I think that's, we ought to wrap it up there. thanks Casey so much for joining us thank you very much this has been a blast I really really appreciate it alright cool yeah super nice to have you so you can find Casey on Mastodon right yeah I'm Mastodon I mean yeah I'm all over it CaseyListMastodon.social I think I'm I don't even remember what my blue sky handle is although I do lurk there at the very least I think I'm Liss I don't remember what's your favorite part on them Mastodon because I'm a dork I get the most time on mastodon and that's where all my dorks are. I love, I love you guys. I'm one of you, but that's, I mean, that's the way it is. Um, but yeah, I mean, you can find all my links at my website, which is Casey list.com. C A S C Y L I S S.com. All right, cool. And you can find a Lewis on Twitter, Lewis Wallace, Griffins on mastodon to at D Griffin Jones. And I write the cult of Mike newsletter every day, uh, which you get at newsletters.cultomac.com. So thanks every much for listening. Thanks for watching. And we'll see you all next time. Have a great weekend, everybody. Goodbye. What a weekend it's going to be. Just waiting for the next week. Did you get your truck fixed? No. They still haven't got the hood open, apparently. You're joking. Oh, no. I'd love to hear this story another time because I know we've got to roll, but I am already very intrigued. Yeah, me too. talk about you know have you got six hours the saga of lewis's truck uh could go on all right what just very briefly what kind of truck is it mazda b4000 2001 oh oh gracious okay fair enough so you know what that is seeing some stuff i'm assuming that's some sort of pickup i'm not familiar with mazdas of the early early off it's the rebadged ford ranger isn't it oh yeah yeah okay Yeah, yeah, yeah. Basically exactly that. But there are some small differences, I mean, aside from just the body. And apparently one of those differences is a sensor, an emission sensor that has cost me hundreds and hundreds of dollars. Of course. I used to have a full head of hair before that thing. So you're a BMW nut, right? Well, how much time you got. So I had a BMW. I bought a lightly used BMW in 2012. It was a 2011 model year, 335. And I loved that car for the 10 minutes it stayed working over the six years that I owned it. I adored it. And coincidentally, so I have a Volkswagen Golf R right now. And I've had it for seven years. And I'm starting to get the itch to get something new. And by pure circumstance, a week ago yesterday, I went and test drove the BMW i4 M50. So this is the electric version of their of their coupe or no, excuse me, it was a grand coupe. So it's their sedan. But it's based on a gasoline car. But then they ripped out the engine, put the electric, the battery and whatnot in it. And I really loved it, which made for a very uncomfortable conversation with my wife when I said, hey, what do you think about bringing another BMW into the family? And she said in so many words, what do you think about getting divorced? Are you mental? I mean, I don't think I'm going to do it because my car works just fine. There's no reason to replace it. I started thinking to myself, what are the vacations you could go on if you don't spend tens of thousands of dollars on a new car? And I quickly convinced myself it's probably not the right answer. But, oh, man, I would love to get one. What makes you ask out of curiosity? Is it this or? I just, you know, I can't remember. I think, wasn't that the, that was the Genesis of the Accidental Tech podcast, wasn't it? That was originally going to be around. It was neutral. Mm-hmm. Yep. We did a car show for a few episodes. Yep. And I like, I love BMWs. Like I say that I've never actually driven one. I just, but you know, of course that, the reputation for the, you know, constantly being in the shop and being expensive to maintain. I have a Land Rover, which just. Yeah, you're in no position to talk. Oh, how very British. Not just any Land Rover, like a 30 year old Land Rover. It is. And it's, it's keeps breaking down, but I keep pouring money into it. You don't say. The more money I pour into it, the less likely I want to give it up. It's like becoming an oval trap now. And, but I'd love to get an electric car, you know, like I really want to go electric, really, really like to go electric. So I'm definitely super interested in getting an electric car. But, you know, also I'm in the same boat as you, you know, tens of thousands of dollars. I don't really have that lying around. And when the Land Rover finally does die, or the Scion IQ, that's my other car, that's my city car. when when they finally go to the great junkyard in the sky i think you know that's when i'm going to be looking at an electric one yeah so my wife has a xc90 with a big volvo suv but it's a plug-in hybrid and we generally speaking don't live the rich leave the richmond area so she only has like 30 miles of range on her car but in the two-ish years i think we've had it for about two years i think we've put like five tanks of gas in it because 90 of the time she's on electricity and um i personally think for me i would like to go full battery because my car isn't the family car if we take a trip it isn't in my car hell i don't think my car has been more than an hour away from this house possibly maybe twice in the eight years i've had it seven years i've had it so i am like the poster child for like the little baby like chevy vault which is actually nice but because i like cars too much yeah my parents have one and they're actually astonishingly nice but because i'm a who likes going fast and being an idiot um that's not really my cup of tea but that's what i should be driving if i was smart is getting like a little baby you know like a city car that's full electric um but no i i think it is i think it's time for people like yourself people like me to go full electric if we're upgrading and getting a new car anyway um but it's certainly it's not cheap especially if you're buying new i was going to buy this used if i were to do it um but the the good news is the depreciation of an electric car is hilarious you know i was cross shopping porsches and the porsche tycan is like 120 000 new and you can get them easily for like under 50 grand which is astonishing and ridiculous um so it's it's it's i think it's time in general i'm again i don't think i'm going to be buying a new car right now um and and allegedly actually for the record, I'm told that the BMW electric cars are actually astonishingly reliable, but you're still rolling the dice if you get an ice car, you know, a gasoline car. And certainly for me, every time I went to Richmond BMW, I would walk in the door and they would basically hold their hands out and I would put a thousand dollars in their hand. And then they say, come back tomorrow and we'll ask for the rest of the money. I mean, that's obviously not literally what happened, but pretty much every time I brought my, my three series to BMW, which was every other month, it was a thousand bucks. And after, after like a year of this, I was like, I'm done. I can't, I can't do it anymore. And this is why my wife is right to say you're an idiot to try to go back to that. Well, but I tell you what though, as soon as I sat in that car, as soon as I sat in that I four, I was like, Ooh, this feels like home, you know? So Lewis, I, I am very sad to hear about your Mazda pickup. My, my wife earlier in, in her life had a Mazda six, a 2007 Mazda six and hand to God, that is probably the best car we've ever owned. We put no money into it. It ran for like 100,000 miles. It was incredible. And to a degree, I still miss that car. So I feel for you with your pickup. I'm very sad for you and I'm very sorry. Yeah, it's weird. I don't know what's going to happen. Do you want to give a quick recap of what happened? Is there a quick recap? I mean, a couple of years ago, I had to get a fuel pump replaced. And I'm pretty damn sure that what happened is when they changed that out, they used a ford fuel pump instead of a mazda fuel pump or some kind of and i think that there's like a sensor built into that fuel pump that is part of the you know emission system emission system yeah and and and that and after that it you know it failed the smog test it had never had a problem ever ever ever uh and i had to go to i went to like multiple places get it smogged and Like, oh, well, you know, you had the battery unhooked to get the thing done. So you need to ride it around for another couple hundred miles, which took me weeks or even months. Right. So I drove around that time like for a year and a half with expired tabs on my registration. And to be honest, like, OK, San Francisco, they don't pay that much attention. They don't stop people from running through stop signs. So where are they going to care if my car is registered? So this last, and I swore then, like, I'm going to, I got to get rid of this thing before this happens again. I can't go through this, like, bureaucracy of the, what's it called, bar, Bay Area, resource, I can't even remember what it's called. And, of course, I didn't, because I don't have, you know, just $20,000 lying around to buy a different car. I can't decide, you know, the wife isn't interested in cars, but she doesn't drive. But she doesn't mind getting dropped off places. So anyway, I just kind of like didn't get around to getting it smogged. And the other day, I was going to go play darts down in South, like down around San Jose or something, Santa Clara. And my friend's like, oh, well, you know, I could pick you up. I'm like, oh, I'll just meet you at the BART station. I'll just leave my car there and you can drive. You know, that way you kind of carpool. You don't have to go all this way. and so she goes she drops me off at the bard station and huh my car's not there like oh god and so it we i found out then like you're really not supposed to park at the bard station like that anyway and they go around and they look and since they saw that my head expired registration they towed it so you know i ended up spending half a day that next day you know had to go to the DMV, sit there for an hour and a half, two hours. I had to go to the cop shop, pay them $250 to sign a slip of paper. I had to go to finally, and oddly enough, the thing had been towed to within a half mile of my house. Like completely not where it was. So that was convenient. And so I had to pay them $320 to get the car out. So now I got a $600 extra on this car that I didn't want to spend a penny on. and uh i took it i took it to the smog shop where i took it the last time where they sorted it all out and got helped me get the exemption because the part the part i left out before the part in that uh fuel pump they don't make it anymore so you can't get it cool yeah you can't get so there is a mechanism for like if you spend a certain amount of money a certain amount of time you exhaust all your things they you can get an exemption for two years and so i'm trying to get that again and but i took i took it to the shop on tuesday morning first thing and i called they're like oh yeah we should have this be you know within an hour till we'll get back to you i call them like at the end of the day i'm like well should i come pick it up or what like oh we haven't been able to get the the hood open and i said what what that's exactly what i said i laughed i said you're kidding me i and i've had this happen before i said you know you just have to like get in there and just really like crank on that thing down there and and in fact you just take vice grips and it's just a wire you can just pull it and the guys like well you know i think it was a smog technician a female smog technician who was looking into it so maybe i can get one of the mechanic guys to do it and i'm like okay great so i call it yesterday end of the day you know once again i said what's up what's up with the car just checking you should i come and get it like oh i think they still have to be able to get the hood open how okay well i i mean if they how do you run a shop and you can't open a hood they should get a right tin can opener to oh my god i just i just don't get it you know so um who knows i'm not sure how much it's gonna say the car is at the i mean it's only got 120 000 miles it's 25 years old runs fine but things are you know like sometimes i can't roll the window down because the actuators like shot or something's shot somewhere doesn't the air condition doesn't work yeah it's just always something you know and it's like i just really would like to become an adult and have a car that works that's kind of my situation as well since i guess we're sort of going around the horn here um i'm a car enthusiast although i drive a prius that's an oxymoron i know i know i i i don't like it it's miserable it disappoints me every time i push down the accelerator but the the thing that that keeps me on and the worst part about it is that it won't break down the one piece of maintenance that it needs at 180,000 miles. And then once I get that fixed, it's cursed to live for another 180,000 miles. But I keep it because I bought it in the fall of 2019 for $2,000. And I know it's the, and it refuses to die. You're cursed. What a curse, Griffin. What a curse. I am, I am super interested in one of those plugin hybrids because I have the same situation. Like I I can't, I probably drive once a month farther than 30, 40 miles. Yeah. All my trips are within town. And to be clear, you know, there are plug-in hybrids that are not as big as a house and they get a lot better range than the 30 miles that Aaron's car gets. So you should definitely consider it because it's really great, especially if it's an only car. It's the best of both worlds because, you know, as soon as it runs out of electricity, the engine is already running. You know, at that point it realizes what's about to happen. And the engine's already running. And then you just carry on like it's a regular car. So, yeah, I can't say enough good things. If you didn't want to go full battery, I really, really have enjoyed having the plug-in hybrid. It's really worked out well for her. Yeah, I had one of the guys on the Darts team. He had one of the Prius plug-in hybrids. This was before. I mean, I think the first version of that only got like 24 miles or something on electric. But he said he literally, like every six months, he would have to like intentionally drive somewhere to burn some gas so that he could actually keep the gas new. Because it's just so convenient to just keep it plugged in and be barely, you know, most of your trips are not that long. I think it was around like 150,000 miles. You know, I needed to replace the brakes. And it should be a simple operation. You just pull the brake pads off. but for whatever reason the person who was doing that it for me like couldn't pull them off and he realized these are probably the original brake pads that shipped with this car in 2010 because it uses regenerative braking to slow down automatically and so right it was the first that's incredible i never had to replace the brakes before that's fantastic a spreadsheet of yes because consumption yes because i'm that kind of dork but the the tanks miles per gallon for this particular tank in June of last year, effective miles a gallon of 470 because it was on battery for one tank. Again, that's, this is unfair because what's really happening is we drove, where's the mileage? We drove, um, 1300 miles on that tank of gas, but presumably a thousand, literally a thousand of them were electricity. So this is kind of bullshit, but the effective miles per gallon was 470 miles per gallon on that tank of gas. I mean, the average miles per gallon for the entire life of the car since we got it in july of 2024 is 91 miles per gallon and that's after having gone these are these are trips basically so are you plugging it in also yeah so every night basically every time it's in the garage it's getting so have you got a spreadsheet of um you know the electrical costs so okay i gotta go guys see you later i don't that's a fair i'll snark aside that's a fair question but you get my point is that if you're not driving far, you know, if you're not doing more than 30, 40 miles in a day, then it really can be an astonishingly long amount of time. Like you were saying about your friend at darts, it can be an astonishing amount of time before you fill the car. And for her, we drive it far enough, often enough that it'll be, you know, every couple of months or maybe every month. Uh, but it's certainly a lot better than the same. She had the same car, but full, full gasoline, um, before it had a catastrophic failure that wasn't the car's fault well anyways um that car we would fill once every three to four weeks and this car we maybe maybe fill every month you know and the old one was like every couple of weeks maybe three on a good tank so i recommend it one of the major car manufacturers i think just they they had the results last week and i think the electrical cars the plug the plug the full plug in the full electric cars the sales were terrible but the hybrids were off the charts i forget which manufacturer it was i think you're thinking of ford that's not surprising ford has decided to cut back on their all electric models and go back to like plug-in hybrids and that's actually coming back to lewis and your car search that you don't want to go on a local friend has an f-150 lightning and that i mean i'm not a pickup person so for me it doesn't really do much for me but i can tell you that it's a very nice truck and you can get them very cheap well cheap given you know as compared to the msrp right like it's still a 10 20 30 000 but given that these things were supposed to be like 60 70 80 90 or whatever it was you can get an f-150 lightning astonishingly cheap and his goes something like 250 miles on a on a batter on a charge so i'm not saying that a ph ev is the wrong choice for you in fact the way you describe it it sounds like it's the right choice but if you wanted to stick with a pickup in something that's ford or ford ish you should at least glance at an f-150 lightning they're very nice i really don't need a truck anymore i mean i I bought that thing because it was, you know, we were doing work on our house and I had to move musical equipment all the time. Most people who buy an F-150 don't need a truck either. That doesn't stop them. Yeah, well. I didn't say that, but you are 100%. You are 100% correct. I was kind of shocked, like, when I started looking at this. I mean, this is another reason why it's like, why I haven't made a decision. It's like, oh, my God, there's so many different kinds of plug-in hybrids. I had no idea. Like, there's a Ford Escape. And I was just looking yesterday on a website. Ford Escape plug-in hybrid. A 2024 model. Brand new. So, apparently, they still haven't. And it's like half price. Like, $24,000 at a dealer. You know, because they haven't got rid of the 2024 model. Crazy. It's like, God dang, really? I just, I don't know how. I would like to get one that actually got good mileage on the gas part of it. and that's what I'm kind of, I mean, I've been looking at like the Prius and things like that, but I've still never gone and ridden in one. And I, the idea of having a- If you drive one, you won't want to buy it anymore. I'll tell you that. If you want to drive a marshmallow, you're fine. That's all you need. Supposedly the new ones are kind of peppy, but I mean, that's compared to an old one. The styling of the new ones is fantastic. They look great. Actually, I would agree with that too. Yeah, yeah. I better go because I got to get on with the newsletter. Oh God, yeah. It's funny how it very fitting how he made an accidental car podcast. That's true. See, we did it. Success. All right. Well, thank you very much, gentlemen. I really appreciate it. And hopefully I'll talk to all of you soon. All right. Take care, guys. Take care. Bye.