Apple event confirmed, iOS 26.4 features, Apple AI devices

Mayor, I got quite the surprise in my inbox on Monday morning. I was expecting a slower day because it was President's Day here in the United States, but that was not the case. An Apple special experience, not a special event, a special experience for March 4th this year at 9 a.m. Eastern time. I was invited to this in New York City. And then it also turns out Apple is holding separate experiences in London and Shanghai on that same day. there is no like tagline to this event invite experience invite it is simply says you're invited with a colorful apple logo kind of made from glass kind of like a layered glass design very liquid glass like yeah the marketing copy people took a week off they didn't do a slang punt but i think the biggest question we had after we got saw these invites go out was the exact format of this event like why are they calling it an experience instead of an event based on comments from John Gruber and Mark Gurman. It sounds like what we can expect is product announcements via press releases on the Monday, the Tuesday, and the Wednesday. And then that same Wednesday is when members of the press and creators will get the chance to go hands-on with these products and probably have like private briefings with Apple representatives ahead of a review embargo at some point. So the actual products will be press releases. So there won't be any sort of like proper live stream event style festivity on wednesday they could do videos um they could do short videos yeah like for each of the products like the october week where they did the new mac mini and stuff that was they had announcements on the monday the tuesday and the wednesday but i think in that case the press briefings were on the monday and it was under embargo i think from memory i believe that is correct yes yeah so maybe someone leaked or something when the time was reformulated slightly where they're going to do monday tuesday wednesday and have briefings on the wednesday just to keep it more more under wraps but in that in the october max situation they had like john turnus in the observatory he did a little video about the imac he did a little video about macbook pros and he did a little video about the mac ninny and then they'd do a press release and that'd be it right and then i guess there was a hands-on thing um in private but the the hands-on was slightly different in the sense that it wasn't really um that was more like a private briefing right rather than this which is like a they sent out an invite you know like it's a bit more they at least slapped the logo on it right and gave it a bit more of things so it's kind of a mixture of the october event not this wasn't an event the october announcements and like the ipad pro m4 event where they held uh like they had like john turner's in the uh london office battersea because it just newly come out this was like may 2024 and so they did like a video stream for that but then they had press in you know three different locations including the US. So I'm imagining this will either be, there'll be a video on the Wednesday that everyone will watch and then they'll do press briefings or it will be press releases Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. I think the weird part about this is, or at least again, based on what Gurman has said, it sounds like the weird part about this is there won't be a live stream necessarily. Like we all won't go to events.apple.com and hit play on something at 9 a.m. Which is what happened in the October Mac stuff, right? The videos went up alongside the press releases, but it wasn't as streamed. Because this isn't even listed on the Apple events website. This was only sent in email to members of the press. And my instinct on Monday, I questioned whether I could talk about this publicly. I was like, am I under embargo about the existence of this invite to New York City? So I had to check with my Apple person to see if I could talk about it publicly. And I know on Upgrade this week, Jason Snell had the same response. He was like, is this public? What is this? Can I tell people about this? And it turns out we can. So at least I presume that means we will be able to provide coverage of some sort on that Wednesday, probably just basic hands on. And then presumably there'll be a review embargo at some point down the line. Yeah, they'll set up the influencer tables, right? So you can get some nice product shots. The fancy lights and all that. Yeah, get the sets. You know, take some pictures, maybe have a quick test or like hands on. And then obviously review embargo will come later in the month. So as for actual products that we're expecting, there's the low cost MacBook. that's the A18 Pro MacBook, the M5 MacBook Air, the M5 Pro and M5 Max MacBook Pro models, the iPhone 17e, a base model iPad with the A18 chip, an M4 iPad Air, and then hopefully, maybe, possibly, if you're feeling optimistic, a new studio display. I don't know if all of those products will be announced in those three days in March, because that's a lot of products, But I think the surefire bets are the low-cost MacBook, the 17e, and the MacBook Pros. Yeah, I don't think they'd want to really do the MacBook Air and the low-cost MacBook at the same time. Yeah, yeah, good point. Feels a bit confused. And the M4 MacBook Air isn't that old? It was March 2020. Was it March, really? Yeah, it was March 2025. So, okay, I guess it's coming up around then. Yeah, I mean, it depends if they're going to frame the low-cost MacBook as a MacBook Air or as a separate product, right? yeah like is it going to be a 799 macbook air or is it going to be like a macbook you know full stop or something they're going to give it some kind of other macbook se you know macbook e you know give it some other names instinctively doesn't feel like the macbook air refresh is due that could more be like a late spring summer you know like june kind of thing and mark german has said the m6 chip is closer than we think so i mean it's not out of the question maybe that they just skip the m5 for some of these products like the macbook air for the m6 thing though isn't that he's just like escape get out clause for the fact there's going to be two MacBook Pro refreshes in the same year maybe I don't know like there's going to be MacBook Pro refresh now and then they'll do the yeah October November one which is what the one actually want you know with the touchscreen yeah and everything and I guess if you really want to go crazy they could do the M6 MacBook Air and skip an M5 MacBook Air but yeah I like I the instinct for me is it's going to be 17e MacBook Pro and low-cost MacBook is what it's going to be and that's three days and there's monday tuesday wednesday you know i i my family wants to buy new base ipads and stuff so i'd welcome that uh but maybe that's coming they've got they've got plenty of time doing now and the end of the year right so these kind of things can be spread across i would obviously personally love them to announce new studio displays i'm feeling good i'm feeling optimistic i i'm putting my stake in the ground that i think we will see a new studio display as part of this so the original studio display came with the mac studio yes in 21 22 the mac studio is technically due for an update yeah it's meant to be getting the m5 ultra right yeah um it's yeah because it skipped it skipped the m4 ultra the rumor is there's going to be m5 ultra and there was code findings or code references to an m5 ultra chip in the 0.3 macOS 26.3 which generally they're not going to put it in the 0.3 unless it's more imminent right so maybe the mac studio is going to get refreshed as well and they could do a studio and studio display update at the same time basically it i think going into this week the vast majority of apple products could see updates or they could not there's a lot in the wing specifically for the mac and it's anyone's guess again other than those macbook pro m5 pro chips and m5 max chips and the cheap macbook those are the two surefires i'm not even sure the cheap ones surefire it could be like june yeah anything's possible i think every i mean the cheap one's been rumored for a long time right it was like as an early 2026 thing but it could roll over a little bit further the the only thing to me that is like 100 is the map pro update yeah because they need to get this one out so they can do the m6 one and they already did the cheaper map pro m5 right m5 base and we saw the code references in 26.3 so i think the map pro refresh is like guaranteed everything else is more up in the air but oh and the iphone 17e that's pretty pretty locked the other mac stuff is more flexible but if you're just going off the the dating you've got monday tuesday wednesday so you think they're going to have three flagships so if you can do one is the iphone one is the macbook pros feels like the third slot is going to be the low-cost macbook in my opinion but obviously they can enhance more than one thing on the same day but that's just the general structure in terms of the individual products a lot of them are just spec bumps right so you can understand why it's more understated than a full-on big event you know the ipad's going to get a chip refresh the fn 17e is essentially just a chip refresh and they're going to put magnets in it which they should have put in first time around uh but like nothing else is changing about that phone right it's it's only significant because it's an iphone otherwise it's a chip refresh uh m4 ipad air again chip refresh mac studio be chip refresh the display would be pretty significant if they're going to do that new max studio display hopefully with 120 although there was that rumor we spoke about on the show 90 a couple weeks ago it was gonna be 90 hertz that'd suck um yeah so the big things that are like flashy is the low-cost macbook right because it's going to be some kind of new design in even in the smallest sense of the form factor slightly different because the screen's slightly smaller and it's going to come in some other colors is the latest rumor right that have some more a wider color palette than shades of gray um and obviously it's going to hit a newer lower price point it's it's run by a different chip architecture than the rest of the mac lineup so they'll want to they'll want to weave a story about that how even though it's an iphone chip it's still more than powerful enough to do everything you need to do which i completely believe it is because the the base macbook air is overpowered for what a lot of people use the base macbook air for so they can definitely slip an iphone a18 or even a19 or whatever it's in there as well and be just as adequate i this is kind of a tangent but a couple of years ago i I sold my M2 MacBook Air to my sister. Like on the cheap, she needed a laptop. She was going through school. And I said, I have an M2 MacBook Air. I'm not using. There's a new one coming soon. I'll sell it to you on the cheap. Sold it to her. And she was replacing or upgrading from a 13-inch Intel MacBook Air, like the pre-retina, like the silver bezels, you know, like the classic wedge MacBook Air design. Intel powered. I found out this week that shortly after I sold her the M2 MacBook Air, she sold it on Facebook Marketplace. She said she couldn't notice a difference between that and her original MacBook Air. Wow. And she'd rather have the money. And I said, all right, well, that's fine. But I think that proves exactly to your point that the MacBook Air is overpowered for what most people need. Because she said all she uses is Google Chrome and she plays Minecraft. And she can do that just fine. I think it's a 2013 MacBook era, I want to say. Somewhere around that era. More power to her, I guess. I mean, you could definitely play Minecraft on an 2018. And if it maybe comes in a prettier color, she might be more inclined in keeping it. The other thing we should point out is the event, not event, not event image, is that Apple logo of glass in shades of what, like yellowy, greeny blues. Yeah. And German said that Apple has been testing the cheap MacBook in colors, including light yellow, light green, blue, pink, silver, and dark gray. So there's at least some alignment there on the color scheme. And he also reaffirmed that it's going to be aluminum, not plastic. He said Apple Cree did like a new aluminum shell manufacturing process altogether that will help it increase the yields and keep the cost down during the manufacturing process without having to go to plastic. So this is not a return of the plastic MacBook design. Overall, though, I'm feeling relatively excited about this. It's not going to be like an iPhone event or WWDC or anything, but I think this low cost macbook is potentially the most important product apple released this year with the maybe exception being the iphone fold yeah the folds the iphone's just too big like the iphone fold's got to be bigger than going to be bigger than cheap macbook but the cheap macbook is going to probably be second they'll probably sell more cheap macbooks than they will iphone fold though oh i don't know about that really the iphone is so ginormous like the scale of the iphone is is obscene compared to everything else like even though the folding iphone is going to be two grand and up it was still outsell the cheap macbook yeah 100 i wish we could put some money on that but we'll never know the answer i mean apple wouldn't tell us unfortunately but i it's just like everyone makes you know how everyone makes hay about the iphone air being a flop i guarantee you it still sells more units than like anything but iphones of apple's yeah you're probably right maybe not airpods or something but you know i mean like yeah compared to max and ipads the iphone it just runs rings around them and again i'm putting my stake in the ground that we will see a studio display. It's been four years almost to the day and Apple needs to commit or get out of that category altogether. And now is their chance to prove their commitment. What about the Pro Display XDR? That thing's dead, I think. I don't know. What about the M5 Ultra Mac Pro? Yeah. Lots of things that should be removed from the online store or updated altogether. That's what the experience would be. It would just be a funeral for the Mac Pro. 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Framer.com slash happy hour. rules and restrictions may apply thanks to framer for sponsoring the show so apple last week published their annual first release of adoption numbers for new ios updates so this year that was ios 26 and more so than any year i think there was a lot of consternation about what these numbers would show are people actively avoiding ios 26 because it sucks and it's a disaster and liquid glass is terrible or are people just updating it and taking it in stride and i think apple's numbers prove that it's the latter? So the headline numbers here are that after 150 days of availability, iOS 26 is installed on 74% of iPhones introduced in the last four years. Compare that to iOS 18, which Apple released the numbers after 127 days of availability, it was installed on 76% of iPhones released in the last four years. So yes, Apple took 20, what, 23 additional days to release these numbers. And yes, iOS 26 is technically 2% lower than iOS 18. But I don't think that says anything at all about people response to iOS 26 And another factor in this too is that iOS 18 was supported by all of the same iPhones as iOS 17 iOS 26 dropped the iPhone XS XS Max and XR And when you do that it does play a role in adoption numbers So to me, this proves that people are just updating to iOS 6. They're not actively avoiding it. And for an update as big and dramatic and liquid glass and everything in this update, to be basically lockstep with iOS 18 says a lot, I think, about the update. so the biggest factor in terms of iOS 26 adoption percentages is not whether the user base actually likes it or not it's when Apple presses the switch on forcing automatic updates to go on and it's how many devices are out there and how many of them are older right so the 10s and stuff getting cut off does play a factor but the number one reason is just Apple didn't flick the switch on forcing updates until a bit later in the year right it was very clearly it was more like October and september and the automatic update schedule is how 95 of the iphone user base receives updates so the entire you know 74 of people have been automatically updated to ios 26 they might hate it but they're still going to appear on the update charts having 74 of the market because you can't go backwards like you can't vote with your feet like you you have an automatic update given to you and oh i hate ios 26 oh what should i do about it well like you're not allowed to downgrade because they stopped signing the old releases so you're even if you didn't like it you're still showing in the positive number there right so you can't really draw reception from that too much like you would need a crazy scandal that would encourage the user base to turn off automatic updates in their settings and stuff as if it was that bad and i just don't think that kind of upswell exists anywhere so i'm not trying to say that i'm not on the side of the fence that saying i was 26 is bad or that people hate it but you can't really look at these numbers as like a endorsement or rejection of of the 26 design really because the number one factor is just the automatic update process forces people to update and then they're like oh this looks a bit different and then they get on with their day the other part of that though and we've talked about this some is that we hadn't seen any sort of like massive blowback to liquid glass in general yes and and the counter argument to that as we talked about it over the fall was that okay but what if people just aren't updating yet what if people what if there's a significantly lower percentage of people running iOS 26 at that point in that release cycle than there was in iOS 18. And now we know that that's not the case. Like the same number, almost the same number of people have updated, and we still haven't seen that sort of massive blowback protest of iOS 26. Yeah, my parents text me about the new update in like January. So yeah, the automatic update thing finally got around to them around the start of the new year. And though there was a couple of questions about where's this button moved to? This looks a bit more transparent, but they just use their phones like normal right most of the time um and for an update as dramatic as 26 i think that was a decent success yes we will have our individual design quibbles about certain certain things and certain parts of it but overall i think if you poll the average iphone user they're either going to tell you they don't care or they like that it looks a bit different and so you've got to take that as a win some people just don't notice the difference which to people like us who analyze this stuff and spend hours over the summer debating little tiny changes to transparency is crazy but people just use their phone how they use it they use their apps most people are using third-party apps they don't have liquid glass like the facebook app does not have actual liquid glass it has some weird version instagram does not have actual liquid glass like the most popular iphone apps have their own design language and for better or for worse that creates an inherent level of familiarity for iphone users regardless yeah some of the biggest complaints i've seen on like social media and reaction 26 is about like safari because everybody uses safari yes right and and what did they changed this year at safari where they they did that new compact toolbar layout which hides more of the buttons away and so one of the constant refrains i do see about 26 is they made things like that were one tap like three taps right and if you actually dig into it most people just mean i win safari now to get to all my tabs i have to press the dot dot menu then press all tabs there isn't just a tabs button directly visible because if you actually explore the operating system overall there aren't that many places where they've done that where they've hidden away more buttons and more controls behind extra taps safari is a prominent example and it's an app that everybody uses and so that becomes the meme right and even in the safari case you can go in the settings and change your layout which people don't know about but you can do it i was i guess my biggest takeaway from the 26 in hindsight now is that i was surprised the camera app changes didn't get more publicity yeah either positively or negatively right they just kind of came and went and people kind of get along with it because the camera was you know you're saying about most people use stock third-party apps the stock apps people use are like safari messages and camera and so camera's really up there in terms of popularity and it got a pretty big design change with 26 and it was mostly accepted with a shrug right people don't seem to be too outraged about it um so you can take that as a win for sure then continuing on with the ios 26 cycle apple released ios 26.4 beta 1 this week and it includes the new more personalized siri let's go it does not There is one Apple intelligence feature in this that we'll talk about. But otherwise... And Apple intelligence might have gone there by mistake. Yeah. Yes, I think so. A big update, though. A pretty big update for a .4. I was worried that we've been hyping this up all along. 26.4 would be a big update, and then it would be nothing. And it is nothing in regards to the Siri features. But like you said, there is a nice collection of other seemingly kind of random things, but interesting things nonetheless. It's another great example of stuff they might have mentioned at WWDC. but they refrained on in the blowback to the PR nonsense about not announcing stuff too early. And so now it's finally coming around. They're like, okay, guys, we've got this out before we start the 27 cycle. It's 26.4. Let's do it. And then they get out all the stuff they've been working on for six months. So there's support for testing end-to-end encryption with RCS messages. So the background here is that Apple added its initial support for RCS with iOS 18.1. Then last March, they announced their plans to support end-to-end encryption for RCS. What we have in 26.4 beta one is like a very basic and a very early way to test how encrypted RCS messaging will work. So right now, this sounds weird, but it is how it is right now. Encrypted RCS is only supported for iPhone to iPhone messaging. So that's basically iPhone users who have iMessage turned off. There is no support right now for end-to-end encryption for RCS from iPhone to Android. Apple says that will come at some point for testing, but it's not there now. And they even go as far as to say actual encrypted RCS messaging will not even ship as part of 26.4. It'll come in a future update to iOS 26. So this is just like a very basic, but very important step in adding encryption for cross-platform messaging. It's an early preview kind of thing. Yes, yeah. Which is what I suggest in a lot of these episodes they should have done for the Siri stuff, right? Bring in the baiters, but don't promise you're going to ship it until it's ready. um but yeah this is nice obviously they they committed to supporting encrypted rcs last year um they didn't really give a time frame and so this is them continuing with that promise also by the way now if you do an iMessage conversation with someone it makes it very clear that you're having an encrypted chat because if you start a new conversation the top you know it has like the the timestamp thing in the middle yeah the first timestamp says encrypted with a little padlock which designates encrypted rcs communication and it now also designates i messages as well because they don't want to see like it would be weird if they didn't put the encrypted label on the i message chats and only on the encrypted rcs chats because then people would be like well these are not encrypted as well well they're all encrypted but you do see this um i don't know if it's such a big phenomenon in america where whatsapp is less popular but whatsapp make a big deal about like your one-to-one chats being encrypted and not available to them Like you start conversation stuff in the app and it like says a little banner. And unless you were intimate with Apple's marketing, it's not very obvious that iMessage is in turn encrypted as well, right? Like there's nothing in the messages app that actually tells you that. We know it's the case. And I guess there's some sort of like undercurrent of people who associate Apple with privacy. But this is like the first time they've actually spelled it out with a big button, with a big thing that just says, this is encrypted, you know? I think the inherent thing that Apple hopes is that they just think blue bubbles means people know it's encrypted but rcs isn't blue rcs is green so they had to add the padlock somewhere so they did it and they did it for green and blue which makes sense in apple podcasts apple is adding a new sort of implementation of support for video podcasts so i've seen this be misreported quite a bit or at least headlines be a bit inaccurate apple podcast has supported video podcasts since basically day one i think yeah back to the days when you used to sync the video to your ipod yes uh-huh and it would take up a bunch of your storage so you'd have to delete them after i used to i remember i used to watch a load of um like uh this week in tech yeah the twitch shows yeah the twitch shows i would they would subscribe to them through the itunes app i think on this would have been before i even had a mac so this would have been like a windows computer using the itunes app on windows and it would download the videos every week yep i did that too and obviously back then broadband wasn't even as fast right so you'd be You take like two hours to download a 300 meg video. But yeah, I used to watch them through iTunes all the way back in the day. So in iOS 26.4, this is more of like a modernized way of video podcasts. And it comes, of course, to compete with Spotify and YouTube. And I guess Netflix does podcasts now. It's built on Apple's HTTP live streaming technology or HLS. And this allows Apple to offer video playback without compromising the audio podcast listening experience. And that's because HLS can automatically adjust quality based on network conditions. So this integration with the audio component means that you can seamlessly switch between watching a podcast and listening to a podcast, depending on what you're doing. So you start watching a podcast while you're sitting and eating lunch or whatever. Then you got to get up and move on with your day, but you want to keep listening to the show. in iOS 26.4, there's that integration between both versions of a podcast in Apple Podcasts, which is a very well done, clever idea, I think. Yeah, you can start watching the video. And if you want to carry on with audio only, there's a little button that just turns the video off. Right now, creators can distribute video podcasts only through a selection of partners that Apple is working with for this new version of video podcasts in Apple Podcasts. So that's like Acast, iHeartMedia, Amazon's Art19. there is no way to like do it natively or roll it roll a solution yourself so it's going to be kind of limited and it's going to require the shows to use one of those platforms so it's not going to be like an overnight thing where anybody with a video podcast can just start rolling it out on itunes with this new feature yeah you don't upload your video to apple correct or you can't host a video on your own server unless you do the older way the older method the streaming hls you have to use a polymer. Then for the first time, also as part of this, podcasters can dynamically insert video ads into their video podcasts. Dynamic ad insertion has been a thing in audio podcasts for a long time at this point. And most shows that you listen to are probably using DAI in some form. Not us, but lots of those big shows that you listen to. So with iOS 26.4, you can do dynamic video ad insertion. And of course, Apple says that they are going to take a cut of this. Apple says they will charge participating ad networks a standard impression based fee for the delivery of dynamic ads and HLS video on Apple podcasts starting later this year. One of the rare instances of Apple trying to make some money from the Apple podcast app, I think. The other primary example being people who use Apple podcast subscriptions like we do, and they take 30% of that. At least in the Apple podcast subscription case, they are hosting the audio correct yes you upload subscriber order to them and it comes from their servers and there's like in the ui it like promotes the subscription you know they have to kind of do some work and editorial around it i presume the fee for the integrated video ads will not be 30 because apple is doing far less in that transaction they're not hosting the files you know they're not putting ui in the in in the layouts for like his press the subscribe button use apple you use Apple Pay to finish your purchase, right? They're literally, they're just a facilitator of the stream that's being served and generated by these third pay platforms. So obviously it's a business arrangement where they'll get a cut, but I doubt it's going to be 30%. But all of this I think is good. I think anytime, I think lately, especially we've been seeing Apple sort of put some renewed focus on Apple podcasts with the automatic chapters and the incredibly useful transcription stuff. I'd say they're a little bit late to formally adopting support for video podcasts, but yeah i mean video podcasts have exploded on youtube yeah and to a lesser extent spotify and spotify does a thing where you do upload like the video directly to them so that's meant some more of the like you don't need as much infrastructure right if you can just upload directly to spotify there's less arrangements involved for a smaller show to be able to and that's why youtube popped off right because literally anybody in the world can make a video and upload it to youtube and kind of put it in some sort of podcast format but it's you know an informal podcast in most cases and get distribution for free the the apple situation is slightly more intricate because you're gonna have to work with a third-party partner you can't upload the video direct to apple it's not like you've had an enthusiast out there with an iphone they can just start making an iphone in final cut on their ipad and then upload it straight to the apple podcast app it's you know there's a few more steps in between so i don't know how much it will like it's not going to compete with youtube right like yeah and youtube podcasts are what been eating people's lunches recently in terms of engagement so i don't know if it really makes a difference there but it is a good feature to have it brings them more in line with the spotify offering and i bet it'll be pretty popular especially for the bigger shows that are already producing videos it'll be like well now we've got a good way to stream through apple podcasts uh whereas before they didn't really want to do like you host it and you download an entire file right before you can watch it that's like a big size instead you can do h layers which has you know on the go streaming if you go into an area of weak signal service it can down you know move you down dynamically to a lower quality stream and back up again like hls is how all of like the original content in the tv app streams right and it can go all the way up to 4k and go all the way down to something quite blurry like if your internet starts cutting out it you know gracefully goes downwards and it goes back up as the internet recovers so it's a good technology and uh they are a little late to the party here but you know late's better than never i think better late than never is the proper phrase there but you got there apple music i think ios 26.4 is kind of the Apple Music update, there are a lot of really good changes to Apple Music. There are several design updates right off the bat. So in albums and playlists, there is now this just beautiful full screen design where like the background of the album and the playlist, like the tracks, it morphs to match one of the colors from the album art or the playlist art. So for example, if an album has like a prominent blue color in its artwork, you'll see a similar shade of blue fill what used to be white in the album view in apple music and it looks gorgeous yeah it looks really good i think it's the only way to say it yeah because before albums and plays would have um like the same they basically retain the accent color of the overall apple music app which is like that kind of red color right so yeah it'd be like you know white and red and black in light mode or like you know black or white on black and red in dark mode um and now they're just they're basically doing what they do when you're in the now playing view where they take the colors out and extract it over the whole screen but they're doing it like the album and playlist view um and i think it's you know things things where ui adapts to color elements it's very easy to do that in a way that kind of looks a bit gimmicky and cheap you know but i feel that way they've done it here is very elegant and they only change the background color so the foreground text color is only ever white or black they don't try and do something like super fancy where they take multiple colors out of the artwork which apple music did way back in the day like the first version of apple music would take like the three dominant colors out of the album art and use that in the ui and because that that was something that itunes 10 started on the desktop and they kind of poured that over when they did apple music first time around but after like two years i think i was 2010 they dropped it and they just went to standard black white and red and if you go back and look at the screenshots of the color matched album pages compared to what they have in 26.4 you can kind of tell like it just wasn't done as well this is much more tasteful looks much nicer it's cool to look at but also doesn't remove any functionality and i think they actually made the design better in terms of functionality because the like the download or add button used to be in like that top toolbar at the right with this design it now like dead center yeah next to the play controls so it much more prominent and what replaced in the top toolbar is the share button which you use far less often so as well as it looking better it also a bit more functional and it kind of aligns it more with like the tv app like the and the podcast app really like they all now have that kind of like central button with like an add or follow on the right hand side of it so there's it's harmonious with apple's other content apps and it also just looks really nice. I assume that there's a reason that they're doing this. But one thing I've noticed is that if an album has even a little bit of black in it, like the album art, Apple Music tends to want to make the background black as well. Even if it's not necessarily the primary color, for some reason, it likes to more to heavily favor the black in the album art versus another color, which is just something odd I've noticed. And I've seen people call it out on social media, where it's an album that maybe you think should be a different color. But for whatever reason, Apple Music has latched onto the black and the album art. Yeah, I don't know what the exact algorithm or exact parameters they're using. I do think there's a slight bias to the color around the border of the image. So if an album has a vignette or a black border, the Apple Music would take black as the dominant color because it seems to prefer... They kind of want to do the illusion where the background color just continues from the edge of the artwork. So basically, the biggest color from around the edge seems to be preferred. but there are some cases where you have like a vignette effect on the artwork to the user you don't perceive that as black being the dominant color of the artwork it's like a color more in the center but the algorithm just sees the the corner color so maybe they can tweak that a bit more in some cases right now i think there's no control for like artists or album publishers to choose like you just get the automatic color and that's it in the fullness of time if this is a bigger problem they can add like a you know an override so they can change it for certain albums or popular songs or artists and things. But as it is, the default automatic thing does work the vast majority of the time. And even in the cases where it takes the black when you don't think it should, it still looks good. It just makes you think twice about why they've chosen that color. It definitely works best on albums that do have a lot of color in their album art. So like I've seen Taylor Swift is a good example, like Brat by Charli XCX. That's a very distinct color that bleeds really well into the overall interface. Coldplay, Sgt. Pepper's by The Beatles. All of those are ones that I've noticed where having such colorful album artwork, it just looks so good in this new interface in 26.4. Other things in the music app, there's now support for finding concerts and tour dates near you for artists. So if you go to an artist profile page in Apple Music, you'll see like a new concert tour dates button at the top. Then you can scroll down to actually look at upcoming dates near you and buy tickets, which I could have sworn Apple Music already had this or had it at some point. They had some like Shazam integration. That's very similar. I think it was Shazam. Yeah. So it was definitely in the Shazam app. And then maybe in Apple Music, there was like a link to it in Shazam kind of deal. But this is definitely much more integrated because it's not just on the artist page. If you're on the home tab and you scroll all the way down, there's a concerts for you section, which shows any nearby concert, basically, based on your location. So then you can kind of browse through the artists and the dates and things. Like a lot of these features, why do you have to scroll all the way to the bottom to the tab to find it you know like why can't there be like a next to my icon in the top right a little like dot dot menu and there you have shortcuts to like concerts and replay and all that like they they they tread too much on let's just shove everything on the home tab and just keep making it longer and longer and longer when you need a bit more like secondary navigation to make some of these stuff quicker and have shortcuts for things but if you know where to find it it's quite useful little addition and it takes you i think it takes you to the primary platform that the artist is using to sell tickets. So for 98.9% of those, it's going to be Ticketmaster. So it just takes you right to the Ticketmaster app. Then it also integrates with the Apple Music concert set list feature. So if the artist has a set list as a playlist in Apple Music on that concert page, you can jump right to it and view the set list too, which is a nice integration of multiple different Apple Music features. The Apple intelligence feature that we referenced at the start is something called playlist playground. This is in Apple music and you, you find it by clicking the new or tapping the new. There's like a dedicated playlist button in the upper navigation bar. Now on the homepage or rather the library page of Apple music, you tap it. It brings up this interface where you can type in a text prompt and Apple music will generate a playlist for you based on that prompt. You type it in, you hit the generate button. It takes probably like at least 15, 30 seconds to generate something. Then once you have the initial version of the playlist, you can manually kind of iterate on that prompt just by giving it more text ideas and further refining what you want that playlist to feature. There are some built-in prompts. So one of them's like morning coffee music, hip hop party songs, disco songs that defined the 1970s. Then you can also manually add songs to these playlists too. Then once you get to that final point, you have the playlist crafted however you want it, you can add it to your library just like a normal playlist in its current form and to apple's credit it's labeled as a beta it says playlist playground might create unexpected results and in its current form it is pretty buggy i think i haven't got to try this it doesn't show up for me i think it's us only oh really yeah i didn't know that that's yeah i think it's us only based on me not having it and i looked on ready and other people were saying the same thing and the bigger point is it wasn't included there was for the apple music app on 26.4 there's a what's new screen the first time you launch it and it mentions the new design for albums and playlists and it mentions concerts for you it doesn't mention this playlist playground i think it probably wasn't meant to be in the beta or yeah it's not coming out any times like it just feels like one of those things that they were definitely working on and they want to do and it it basically is what you can do in chat gpt for apple music right we talked about a couple months ago and i was like why is this not just built into Apple Music. This is clearly that. But it seems to be running on like Apple's current private cloud computing infrastructure rather than like Gemini. Like it feels like a feature that was built pre-Gemini deal. Yes. And then it'll probably come to market backed by Gemini. That's my guess. And maybe it wasn't meant to be in 2016 before or it just like, it doesn't really seem intended to ship immediately, you know? So if it's buggy, slow, the results aren't perfect. I think there's some pretty clear obvious direction for them to improve it and it probably isn't meant to be like I don't know if it was like because it's not mentioned anywhere right? Yeah. It wasn't even like oh we're including it here as a preview it's just kind of someone pressed on the playlist button and then it opened to that. So I feel like it's probably come to the betas too soon and maybe in beta 2 they might take it away you know and we'll see. It doesn't feel like a feature that's going to ship in 26.4 final. I've done some like head-to-head comparisons between the chat GPT version of this feature that you mentioned and Apple's version. In terms of accuracy, Chad GPT blows it out of the water. I think like one of the examples I tried was create a playlist of songs that have been performed in recent Super Bowl halftime shows. So I'm thinking like recent, meaning last 15 years or so, a few songs that each artist that has performed at the halftime show played during their set. Chad GPT was pretty good, got most of it. It maybe added a couple of things that I knew that that artist didn't perform. Apple Music, for the life of me, I could not get it to understand that I did not want songs from artists that performed at the halftime show. I wanted specific songs that were performed at the halftime show. And I could not get that through Playlist Playground's head to do that properly. Personal context, world knowledge. Yep. Like if that was bought by Gemini, it'd be way more accurate. Yes, absolutely. But from a visual perspective, like with most of the Apple intelligence features, the animations, the design to Playlist Playground, very nice, very elegant, very well done. just a little buggy, a little janky in terms of the actual process and the actual results. Let's see, what else is in 26.4? They brought the tabs back on iPad and Mac, the compact tabs. The compact tabs, yes. You're not a fan of the compact tabs though, are you? Oh no, I didn't like compact tabs. So I didn't miss them going. Some people very much did. You used compact tabs, right? I did, but I've kind of settled into what is in Tahoe and I've grown to prefer it, I think. It's so funny they brought that back. The iPad multitasking stuff, there was like a very discernible outcry for you know when they got rid of um split view and slide over in a traditional fashion and they came back in 26.1 and 26.2 people obviously noticed that the compact hub option had gone on mac and ipad which is funny because in the same year they added a compact option to iphone safari yeah but they took it away from mac and ipad and i just assumed oh well this is the liquid glass direction they've just decided it doesn't look good enough and I'm going to do that. There wasn't that much blowback from it being removed that I saw, but no, it's back in 26.4. I guess it just took them a little bit more time in the oven to get it baked. In the App Store, they've made a very weird change in the bottom navigation bar. So previously, the search button was floating off to the right and it was separate from the rest of the navigation tab bars in the App Store app. In iOS 26.4, it is now one singular cohesive, all attached, all the buttons are attached navigation bar, sort of like we'd had pre-iOS 26. And then the search bar is also now back at the top. It was at the bottom, like most of the iOS 26 apps, but in iOS 26.4 in the app store, the search bar is back at the top. No explanation for this change. It could be a bug, but my cynical take on it is that having the search bar at the bottom was somehow hurting the performance or the click-through rates or whatever of that ad that appears on the search tab. And that's why they've made this change. I don't know, but I'm willing to bet that that's why they've made, why they've done this. But I also might just be jaded and cynical about ads in the App Store. Yeah, because I like the separate, I like the separate search. I like it, yeah. Layout. Because it also means that the search bar is at the bottom, right? Rather than being at the top of the screen. So I don't really know why they've done this on the App Store. They haven't done it on any of the other apps. And it doesn't really, I didn't feel like there's usability issues. So maybe this will be something that we fix in beta too. I'll be interested if this ships in this format. because if you're going to do it here, you should kind of do it everywhere. Well, that's why I think it's because of the ad. That's why I think that this is... But the ad's like not really... The ad's like... You mean like the suggested ad? Yeah. It doesn't really... It's still visible in both... It was visible. Like, I don't really think the click-through would be any different. I don't know. Advertising's weird. The only thing you get is like... They've added a few more options to the browse menu, I guess. So like, as you scroll down, you can still see the search bar at the top. And then if you're like browsing, you can click on you can quickly switch back to like today games or apps then go straight back to search and it'll keep your context whereas you'd have to like you know minimize the tab bar to go back to the menu so it is a different axiom of like search experience compared to the other things but i don't really think it adds enough to break from the general pattern of 26 they do let apps break from that pattern like there's developer apis that you choose where you want the search bar to be placed whether it wants to be in line or whether it wants to be standalone but here i don't really see the justification like in the shortcuts app they they since 26.0 they haven't done the search bar in the in the in the tab bar design but it's kind of you can understand it there because the search is specific to like the items in shortcuts it's not like a tab on its own it's like it's more like a filter for what's current on the screen but you can like navigate away from it and it wouldn't make sense for there to be a permanent search item in the tab bar but that argument doesn't reapply to the app store because you can get to search from anywhere so we'll see what happens with this on beta 2 a couple of changes to carplay so we talked was it last week i think about bloomberg's report that apple was preparing to allow conversational ai apps in carplay for the first time ios 26.4 adds that support so now if they want to open ai or google could make dedicated carplay apps for interacting with the voice modes of chat gpt and gemini and apple has some guidelines like voice-based conversational apps must have a primary modality of voice upon launch. They should optimize for voice interaction in the driving environment and not show things like text and imagery in their query responses. Then iOS 26.4 also adds more under the hood work on bringing video support to CarPlay. So the ability to watch videos while parked via the CarPlay screen in your car. This was mentioned as part of iOS 26 at WWDC, but Apple was very quick to also say that it wasn't coming anytime soon because they needed support from app makers and from automakers. the one part about what's in 26.4 that's interesting is that a developer named thomas die he was able to simulate carplay in a development environment and then unlock some of the user interface aspects of what it will look like to watch videos via carplay so that includes the apple tv app itself apparently being in carplay yeah and like from the screenshot it has the home screen you can browse the whole catalog you can choose episodes like it's like a pretty fully featured tv app experience on the car dash yeah and then also the ability to move a video from watching on your iphone to your connected carplay screen it's kind of like airplay i think i don't necessarily know if it's the same exact protocol as airplay but the interface looks very airplay yeah like the ui looks the same which is good because that means you don't like when this feature does roll out in a compatible car you don't then also have to wait for like your app of choice to make a carplay app yeah you can just pick the video on your iphone then airplay it to screen, which this is a feature that CarPlay desperately needs, I think, particularly for electric cars, because you have to sit and you have to charge like on a road trip. On Teslas, you can watch, they have like a Tesla theater with a handful of built-in streaming apps. I think Rivian kind of does it best because they have Google Cast support. So similar to AirPlay, you can just cast content from an app on your phone to the screen in your Rivian. I think that's really well done but it's one of the areas where carplay kind of lags behind those native solutions so but just because apple is kind of finalizing support in ios 26.4 we still need an actual automaker to say yes we're supporting this and we still don't really know what the automaker has to do to support it like if it's as basic as just saying like checking a box and saying yes our implementation of carplay can do this then it might happen pretty quickly but if they have to do any underlying work themselves like this is going to take a long time to actually meaningfully roll out to people yeah like does it change the way the video codec process works to make it display and have like a decent frame rate and stuff um i saw some people like well the car just needs to tell the phone that whether it's parked or not but carplay already knows that like yeah if you're in the maps app if you're driving the search button will only let you speak to it but if you stop moving the search button of a keyboard which i hate that i i know why they do that but like it frustrates me and it frustrates like emily if she's the passenger and she wants to type in it yeah exactly it's passenger hostile yeah but it complies with the law right so i kind of get why they do it but yeah so that doesn't really seem to be the hold up i assume there's some sort of like video codec thing that not all cars will work with and they have to do some work so i'm imagining this will be like most carplay features where it gets released in ios 26 and then people actually are able to start using it in decent quantity by like ios 30 you know like it just takes a long time for this stuff to roll out but you got to have it there to get it to roll out mac os 26.4 they've added a pop-up that lets you know when you open an app that is being translated using rosetta 2 that that app won't work in a future version of mac os they announced the wwdc that rosetta which is the translation layer that lets you run intel apps on an apple silicon mac they announced that that would be supported through mac os 27 but would then be dropped so that's basically means it'll be dropped as part of mac os 28 which will be fall of 2027 presumably and this new pop-up in 26.4 is basically a way for apple to give users an early heads up that either a the app that they're using has been abandoned by the developer and it's not been updated to apple silicon or that they need to go and seek out an updated apple silicon version i mean apple's done this strategy many times over like with the 32-bit to the 64-bit transition they ahead of time make the os put little shame alerts out saying this app hasn't been updated yet you know it will stop working and it informs users about the state of the software on their mac but it also uh pressures the developers to make an update available yeah like because then although you know some suction of all those users who get that pop-up will then go email the customer support of each app and be like my computer says you won't support me anymore fix it please and then that the best way for them to yeah uh force developers to like get in gear and ship a native silicon version uh without just pulling the rug under them in one go Like it a migratory path and they done this tactic many times over and it generally works So they doing it again My only complaint is that the pop-up is kind of vague and it doesn't actually tell the user when that app will stop working. So I can imagine someone opening an app and seeing that pop-up and not realizing that they technically have 18 months to find a solution or figure it out. Might be on purpose. Yeah, which might be on purpose. Because if you say this app will stop working in 2028, people will kind of just like forget about it if it says this apple stop working soon they'll be emailing the customer spotlight real fast it is probably intentional anything else in 26.4 that you want to call out one more thing i want to call out the password screen so on the iphone this is you go to settings face eddie and passcode right that that page and it brings up a full screen sheet where you have to enter your pin code for who knows what reason on earlier versions of 26 they were like you know this left aligning we like doing everywhere we're gonna do it on this screen as well we're just going to make all these elements left aligned so you're going to have the lock icon left aligned you're going to have the pin dots left aligned you're going to have the text left aligned it looks stupid i said it looks stupid from the beginning in 26.1 and 26.2 they centered the icon but they left the pin code and the text left aligned and 26.4 all of the elements are centered again so it just looks better this is one of the criticism you can levy against liquid glass change is that they they had some like key points of this is what the design is going to be and they almost too strictly adhere to them so there was no room for exceptions or like get out clauses so one thing i think that comes up a lot is the concentricity push it's like everything's gonna have random corners that are concentric with the container and that comes up on the mac most noticeably with the corner radius of windows right and you must have seen those things where people stack all the different windows on top and all the ranges are different but it the os is intentionally making it concentric with the the controls inside the toolbar of the window so that's why the corner radius changes but it's like yeah i know you want everything to be concentric and it works well on the iphone but you probably want to relax that design rule on the mac here because it doesn't work right another one they've gone for all across the system is left alignment and in many places i think it looks all right and looks decent you know they did it in the the full screen model alerts the little descriptions at the top of each settings page they left aligned all of them you know etc etc a lot of left alignment but in some places it's like now this doesn't need to be left aligned and here's a case where it definitely didn't need to be left aligned it looks stupid it almost looked broken i thought um but it was intentional and somewhere in the design mind of apple incorporated they've come to their sense and like not literally every single screen has to be left aligned by force where design is great when you know a good design has rules but it also knows when to break the rules and this is a good example where breaking the rules makes more sense. Happy Hour This Week is sponsored by Shopify. Check them out at shopify.com slash happy hour. Starting a new business can be an intimidating and lonely affair. I know whenever I'm building a new app, there's so much anxiety during development and even more as you get close to launch. Questions come up. Are people going to like it? Do I have all the press kit and website materials ready? There's just so much stuff up in the air all at the same time. But that's why you need a partner like Shopify to help you get your new business off the ground. Shopify helps millions of businesses around the world and powers 10% of all e-commerce in the United States, including big names like Gymshark and Mattel. But they're also great for helping new brands like yours that are just getting started. Shopify is your commerce expert helping with managing inventory, shipping out products, processing returns, and more. They can accelerate your efficiency with AI tools to help you write product descriptions and enhance your site's photography. And Shopify lets you easily create email and social media marketing campaigns to meet your customers wherever they are. When we sold wallpapers through 9to5Mac, even though we obviously already had a website, offering a store and checkout system was another ordeal altogether. Doing everything on our own was a non-starter. Instead, we used Shopify and it made everything so easy. Start your business today with the industry's best business partner, Shopify, and start hearing. Sign up for your $1 a month trial today at shopify.com slash happy hour. Go to shopify.com slash happy hour. That's shopify.com slash happy hour. Thanks to Shopify for sponsoring the show. Mark Gurman has a report in Bloomberg this week saying that Apple has accelerated its work on three new AI wearables. So that's a pair of smart glasses, an AI pin and camera equipped AirPods. The smart glasses are very much a direct competitor to meta ray bands. So these aren't AR glasses with like a screen built in. These are just glasses with a camera and speakers and a microphone. Mark says the prototypes have two lenses. There's one for high resolution images and videos and another for what he calls computer vision that will give the glasses environmental context. He has a couple of examples of what that quote unquote environmental context could accomplish. So for example, if you're using Apple Maps for navigation on your phone and you're wearing wearing these glasses theoretically siri in your ears for example would be able to say up ahead you'll see this building turn left or whatever like more precise personalized directions i guess compared like rather than saying road names and traffic lights you could say yeah go past that statue and turn left yeah he also has an example that i think is a little bit weird where it could be like context aware and reminders and it could prompt you to grab an item when you're looking at the right shelf in the grocery store i feel like if you're already at the shelf then you already know what item to grab and unless it has the ability to say like the item that you're looking for is on the bottom right of the of the shelving like that's kind of useful but some of this feels like a looking a solution in search of a problem yeah i mean the vision intelligence stuff is definitely in that domain where yeah there's some utility but also there's some like well technically we can do this so i guess we should do it but we're convinced that people do this on a daily basis but though like it comes in handy when you want to do it you know it's just not it's just it's like a it's a whole bunch of niche cases where occasionally you might want to do this thing and if you can rely on a device that can do it then you'll do it but right now you can't trust that like the vision and center feature on the iphone will be able to do what you want to do because it only does a very small subset of things so you kind of need to do everything for that one time where you're looking at a shelf and like where's the brand x right i can't see it and then it can be like it's on the bottom right right but like you know most of the time you're gonna walk in the shop and just pick it up but on the vague occasions where you can't see it because you're just having a moment of blindness you can ask your assistant and get help similarly with the the uh vision demo that they love is you know hold up your phone to a poster of a concert and it can automatically add it as a calendar event yeah that there's a you know yeah a lot of the time do you need to do that no because you know you'll read the poster you might just remember when it's going to be you might remember to look it up later you might just get your iphone out your pocket and make a note and just type you know like but if you're in if you're you know busy you're in a rush you're commuting you just see a poster oh i like that if you can in a snap go remember this for me and then carry on walking it's kind of useful but right but it's not going to be something you can do every single day in and out it's like those things where it's there in the background and you might need it occasionally yeah but you're never gonna you're never gonna develop a muscle memory habit to ask your you know whether it's the pin or whether it's glasses to do that thing if it can't do a lot of things so it kind of has to do everything so that you'll actually use it for the one thing you need it to do every month or whatever i think the primary reason the vast majority of people will want this product is just for the camera and the video capabilities i think that's the primary reason people wear the meta ray bands so I just hope Apple doesn't overthink this product too much. Yeah, and ignore the visual intelligence stuff. You can just make it an interface to your voice assistant that doesn't require you having your AirPods in your ear at that exact moment, getting your phone out of your pocket, you know, tilting your watch to your face, right? Like, all these things have uses, and I do them, and I use Watch on Siri fairly regularly, but it's not like every day, you know? It's the same thing with these glasses. If you're wearing them around, maybe you want to just take some pictures and videos of the world, but occasionally you're like, oh, what does that mean? Or look this up for me. It's good that you can do it. Then he says Apple is accelerating their work on an AI pendant. This is similar to the information report that we talked about earlier this month, where the information described it as an AirTag size wearable pin, thin, flat, circular disc with an aluminum and glass shell with two cameras, a speaker, and three microphones. Bloomberg builds on that and they say it's reminiscent of the failed humane AI pin, which I don't necessarily know is a great description because there are two pretty big differences. So the first being that Apple's pin won't have a display or that kind of awkward like hand projection system that the humane pin had. And whereas the humane pin tried to be a fully standalone product and antithesis to smartphones, Apple's AI pin will rely heavily on the iPhone for processing. So Bloomberg says that some Apple employees are calling it the eyes and the ears of the phone. Then Apple envisions that people would wear with a clip attached to their clothing or as a necklace again serving as the eyes and the ears rather than doing too much itself as like a standalone product yeah it's the definition of accessory right it's not a standalone device which is a huge reason why the humane pin completely flopped as an accessory product obviously that means you're going to be nisha right because you're not trying to be like this let's be your one-end-all device but you're obviously be more practically successful in the tasks that you assign it to do and again if you can build up your visual intelligence suite of stuff to do lots of things people are going to want cameras that are readily available to them at chest eye level kind of range um would you wear glasses and a pin i guess not right yeah i don't really there's too much overlap there but there's going to be people out in the world who don't want to wear glasses and they want a pin just like there's people out there in the world who don't want to wear a watch they prefer glasses there's people out there who don't want to wear glasses and they don't want to wear a watch oh but they want to do this and that no here's a pin for you like you have to get away from the idea that every new apple product is going to be like the next big thing and like it defines an entire universe i think a lot of the ai devices and the smart home stuff it's just little bits here and there that you know one person isn't going to buy everything or find utility and everything but it's like personal preference you know wearables are personal preference so much of it is and some people are just like the same reason some people just want fitness bands rather than apple watch you might sometimes be wants a little clip to take some video of the world you know maybe they're doing some action shooting but also it doubles up as your little you know extension of your hopefully good voice assistant i think that's why in general i'm more bullish on apple apple's products in this category because they aren't for obviously very selfish reasons but they aren't trying to kill the smartphone like humane was or like presumably this open ai product will they're It's not a rebuke of the smartphone form factor. Because again, I think inherently people love their smartphones. They're not going to get rid of them. People love having a product with a screen. So what Apple is able to do with these three products, the glasses, the pen, and the AirPods with cameras, is just give people additional ways to interact with their phone and to give information from the real world to their phone. And then their phone can do X, Y, and Z with that information. It's like the Apple Pencil for the iPad. Yeah. Right. Like not everybody needs an Apple pencil. Not everyone finds value in Apple pencil. Some people like using it for drawing. Some people like using it for note taking. So therefore some people buy it. And would you ever argue that Apple should stop making the Apple pencil? No, because it serves a purpose. It serves a role in the ecosystem, but it doesn't have to be like mission critical necessity. That's one of Apple's biggest pitfalls, I think, of the last 10 years. They went really, really big on like, let's do the watch. okay now let's do a car because we have to do something really big that can like rival the phone relevancy and then obviously the car project falls apart and then the vision bro headset is kind of another try at that but it's a bit more niche it's a bit it's kind of a junked but different but still the same kind of thing it's like you don't need to build up these products to be like they had a run where they did you know mac ipod iphone ipad but it's a different era of the world like the maturity is here the iphone's dominant make accessories for the iphone that people like and you can have you can extend the longevity of the over a week assistant by a lot more i think one day ar glasses that are independent of phones will be a thing but the timeline that is still just super far out at least from what we can see right now so in the meantime you're gonna have these little accessories that you choose one or two of and put them on your body is there one of these three form factors that you would be more interested in than the others i mean i wear glasses already so if you can give me prescription glasses that do more features and aren't super heavy on my nose and heavy on my face and relatively discreet i guess i'd be interested i'm not like begging for one do you know what i mean yeah i think it's interesting the pendant thing all of these products rely on less on the hardware more on the software i.e the assistant like you've got to make the better siri first that has better understanding of the world and then the product be more important but they're definitely if you just take those three categories as a whole they're definitely lower on my list than my demand for like an apple home smart display because i have an immediate need for that in the kitchen you know this other stuff is more nice to haves at least right now i mean maybe they'll find one use case for it that everybody wants and it's like the killer the killer reason to get one but for now it's like well you know especially if especially if you've had like um if you had kids and young kids, like the glasses, you know, you can play about in the garden, take some footage of your family at the same time. Like I see the appeal, but it's not going to be for everyone. And right now it's not really for me. I think the glasses are the most compelling form factor here. Again, just because I think it's such a cool way to take the first person POV photos and videos. I have toyed with the idea and come very close to buying the Meta Ray-Bans for that exact reason. But so far I've held off just because I don't think there's enough else that that product can do with integration with my iPhone that I'd want to wear them in the vast majority of situations. But an Apple version with proper iPhone integration that can control my Apple music and interact with Siri to the degree that I want it to interact with a voice assistant. The AI pin, I'm still not convinced that's a viable form factor for really anything. The pin butts up against the watch too much, in my opinion. The only thing the pin really gets you is front-facing cameras that are harder to see how they would do it. because even if they put a camera on the watch you then have to like hold your hand up at like a weird angle for it to like see at the same point um but the other stuff the pin can do the watch can do way better so that kind of puts it down the list then airpods with cameras that's the type of thing where it just depends on the compromises like i wear airpods multiple hours every day if i can get a pair that has cameras and can do a couple things that are interesting without hurting the overall experience then sure i'll probably wear them yeah because that's not like a new thing i'm attaching to my body every morning. But overall, I think you're right that so much of this hinges on the software experience. And I think, I mean, I just, I don't feel confident that the software experience will be ready in time for the hardware. I mean, that Home Hub product with the display, that hardware has been ready for a year at this point. And it's just sitting and waiting for proper next generation voice assistant. Yeah. But at least in theory, Gemini gives them the path to do it. Yeah. I mean, I guess it's this reporting coming at the same time as reporting that they aren't shipping the features that we thought they were shipping with gemini in 26.4 i think that doesn't bode confidence for me at least oh i mean obviously it's not a good sign yeah if you had if you had this hardware roadmap without the gemini deal it feels almost flights of fancy yeah the gem ideal existing it's like okay i can actually see a roadmap to do this because you know gemini vision is pretty good and so i presume the gemini deal includes all the vision stuff and that would help them feed it into a newer version of visual intelligence i mean half the vision stuff visual intelligence stuff now just sends the picture to google like yeah that's not that's not a big leap in logic right there all right i think that does it for this week you can find us on apple podcasts where you can leave a rating and a review find an ad free version of the show with bonus content each and every week at nine to five mac.com slash join this week we are talking about mayo's upcoming trip to Japan and kind of the tech packing process for that. Send us feedback, happyhour at 9to5mac.com. I'm on threads and elsewhere at Chance H. Miller. And Mayo, what about you? At BZMA. All right. Thanks, Mayo. Bye-bye.