AI-powered Xcode will change the world

Coming up, Xcode's AI agents can build an app from scratch in a day. Major new details on the folding iPhone and the other folding iPhone. Does Apple plan obsolescence and a trick that will wrangle notifications on your iPhone? 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. Today's episode of the podcast almost didn't happen because I've spent the last two days basically setting up my Mac from scratch. So unfortunately, I fixed it and now you have to endure this. Unfortunately? Yeah, I know. I'm regretting it. Lewis, how are you doing? Fantastic. My Mac seems to be working okay. Just occasional problems. Can't update pages for some reason. It keeps nagging me to do it, but what are you going to do? Update pages, I guess. I got those nags too. They won't work. i i go to the app store there's no button to install it just says the only button is there is cancel yeah isn't that awesome i'm sure it's a user error of some sort i'm sure it's an app error because it was built on the infrastructure of the itunes music store from 2003 and now that they're rolling out the apple creator studio version they have to have two different listings of pages on the app store and if you have the old one you have to update it you have to update to basically the same one that isn't the creator studio it's a mess i wouldn't blame yourself it's it's confusing i just hit cancel i'll do it later when uh all right let's look at let's thank our sponsor so thanks again to cult of mac for sponsoring the cult of mac show wow this is a really incredible get i know it is isn't it that's a huge huge win for us i want to talk about our newsletter our daily newsletter and our weekend newsletter the weekend uh you can get our newsletter at newsletters.cultonmike.com. And, you know, this is a great newsletter. I've got to say it myself. I don't want to toot my own horn, but people love it. It's got a 75% open rate, which is insane for a daily newsletter. People up on the weekend are too a lot. It's a great digest of everything we publish during the week. It's full of tips, how-tos, reviews, all the news stories that are important. It's a great way to catch up. Really good weekend read. I really encourage you to sign up for the Cult of Mike newsletters we do daily polls people love the polls it's a super lot of fun get a lot of comments it's a great way to get Cult of Mike content so it's newsletters.cultomike.com thanks again for Cult of Mike for sponsoring the Cult of Mike show that's our first story this is a funny one OpenClaw comes to Xcode there's a big exciting change coming to Apple's Xcode programming environment and Lewis is going to tell us all about it Just to clarify, it's clawed, not open clawed. Don't be a pedant. Don't be a pedantic. It's a joke. Say that. It's a joke. Okay. Yeah, so an update to Xcode enables AI agents to operate with greater autonomy throughout the entire app development cycle. Xcode, of course, is Apple's comprehensive, free, integrated development environment for programming apps on all of its platforms. And now, instead of simply suggesting code completions like, you know, pathetic sort of Apple intelligence stuff, I'm guessing, these agents can break down complex tasks, make artificial architectural decisions, and use Xcode's built-in tools independently. Apple just – I think they released this in beta or something this week, right? Yeah. And release candidate in Xcode. Oh, release candidate. Correct. Yeah. It supposedly makes Xcode capable of building apps by itself. completely by itself, which isn't scary at all. It should make these easier for beginning coders, though. In fact, when I heard this, I was like, oh, this is exactly what Graham, our colleague Graham Bauer, used for updating his weightlifting set app, Reps and Sets, which I've still yet to fully take advantage of as I sit here with my gangly arms. Anyway, but people on the Internet, developers, like Stephen Trottonsmith, isn't it? He was talking about how great it is. He says, Xcode just builds entire apps without you now. You could write a full shippable app every evening with Xcode's agentic coding features. Two apps a day, even, he wrote on Mastodon, which maybe you've heard of. Woo! Mastodon. Wait, that was a horse, not a... I don't know what a... Does anybody know what a Mastodon sounds like? Well, that's supposed to be a Mastodon. That's a Mustang, not a Mastodon. That's a miss. so uh he he had a long thread on masses on talking about this he said i had xcode's new agent feature throw together a little ui kit timeline app without me writing anything myself all using codex i apparently i mean the the name dropped ones are clod agent and open ai codex a couple of coding tools but it looks like you can use basically anyone right i mean they have some kind of API so you can pull in whatever kind of coding AI you want into Xcode and, you know, streamline stuff. You can have it do some of the drudge work of this stuff and check things out. It supports MCP, which is basically the open source equivalent to what Apple's trying to do with like App Intents to part of the new Siri, where it's an open protocol that a lot of other companies are implementing that basically lets you know ai things control parts of computers and so xcode incorporates mcp support so you can just plug in your api tokens and use a different model if you want to use that one instead yeah uh yeah i know that luther said a word of that could you could you hear my eyes glazing over it sounds very cool doesn't it sounds super super cool of course i think the part that everyone glosses over is you've kind of got to know what you're doing in the first place i think like you know when graham was talking about his vibe coding experience what came through clearly really was you know he knew a lot about what he wanted um what the different platforms and apis were capable of. So when he was vibe coding, he's coming from a lot of knowledge. I think if you read the press release, you kind of come across the idea, oh, this is like, I can just vibe code and bullshit my way into making a full app. And I don't think that's probably going to be true at all. You've still got to bring a lot of knowledge about what the different APIs and platforms can do for you and what your app's going to look like, what you wanted to do. You know, it's not going to take all the work out of it. There's much deeper integration than they had before, where it's not just like editing a single document, it's building and it can analyze your entire project at once. And it can even double check the work that it's done by like taking a, you know, capturing the screen of the preview that Xcode has built in or the simulator and verifying that it's actually done what it's trying to do so it can double check itself as well it can clear warnings for you this is a this is a great thing for them to do at this time you know before wwdc in a few months you know to make developers happy before their big developer event well my joke about open claw you know obviously like for people who may not know what i'm talking about open claw is the rename of claw bot it's an agentic ai that a lot of people are installing on mac minis and And they're giving it access to entire digital life. And it's supposed to be like they call it AI with hands. So it can actually really do stuff, go out and order things for you or, you know, all kinds of things. Check your response to thousands of emails, make the inbox go to zero. And it's a huge security nightmare. People are setting it up and giving it access to their full digital life. And these security researchers have found that they're easily taken over. But even with prompt attacks, you communicate it with it via messaging apps like WhatsApp or messages. And people have been able to send malicious instructions to these OpenClaw installations. Anyway, that was a joke about OpenClaw coming to Xcode. Funnily enough, Federico Vitticci, who wrote one of the big articles about how to get started setting it up on a Mac, after he published that article and it started getting a lot of attention, he had to disable OpenClaw reading his email because he was worried about, you know, he has a public email address. People could send him an email as prompt injection into his computer. So it's a bit of a security nightmare in that regard. If you want it to be useful at all, it needs to be, you know, plugging into your actual computer. But if it's plugged into your computer everywhere, then you're opening yourself to like a massive attack vector. Right. Nothing else is thought like that. It's super, super security risk, massive, massive risk. But one of the interesting things about OpenClaw they were talking about was you can tell it to do new things. And it'll go out and it'll figure out how to install the various packages and the various software it needs in order to achieve that. And what that gives you is an insight into our future computers. So, you know, what a future iPhone might look like is something like an OpenClaw implementation where it's a super smart assistant. And what it means is the death of apps. I mean, you'll no longer need an app to go do something. You'll just tell your agent to go figure it out. And it'll figure out how to do something on your behalf and go do it. So some people are arguing that this is the beginning of the end of apps, that standalone software will no longer be needed. Now, I don't believe that for a second. It's funny. You said it pretty convincingly. I thought you were already carving up the headstone for apps. Yeah. I think there's an argument to be made for a lot of things that is going to be true. But I think for some things it won't be. Like you'll want to have control over, you'll want to go see for yourself or do for yourself certain things. Maybe photo editing. I don't know if that's a good example. You know, like some tasks you'll want to keep hands on. There are a lot of tasks, there are a lot of apps that will, I think, disappear or at least tasks that apps. I can help you out here. I don't think this will be the end of apps because photo editing is a good example. photoshop is a human is an incredibly massive incredibly complicated app that has like you know 30 year old legacy ai can't replace that and if you if it tried to generate photoshop every time you wanted to edit a picture it would be a massive energy waste it would be incredibly slow it's a waste of time like there is still a room for an app like photoshop final cut pro things like those to exist right where you're doing something even in a super powerful post ai future but And also like online services like Instagram, Facebook, you know, those require server infrastructure software like iMessage, you know, basic platform level stuff. But I think – I don't know. You know, a messaging app could definitely disappear because you could say, text my mom this, text my brother that. I don't want to go open up the app and type it out. If I could have an agent that would do that reliably for me, there's no way I am going to go to an app to do it any longer. That tax has completely disappeared. And I think it's true for shopping too, right, or booking trips. if you have an agent that you can trust you can say okay go buy me some toilet paper and get it the cheapest possible price why and it could do that reliably and the toilet paper shows up you know the next day from amazon in a box why would you all open amazon ever again i would if it can do it reliably is a very if is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence right i i agree but i agree but if it and also like yeah agentic things won't make you know the the existence of apps obsolete because there still needs to be the iMessage and service in place for the agent to be able to do those things. Right. Some apps, some apps, but from the consumer point of view, you know, from my point of view as a consumer, as a user, some apps are definitely going to disappear. I don't know. A good example is encoding chapters into an MP3 file for a podcast. That app exists, but if you don't want to use those in a post, you know, imaginary 10-year feature from now where ai can generate apps like you know willy-nilly like that you know a person who doesn't have you know forecast which is an app that does that already can just type it into a you know an agent and have it generate one that'll do it for them you know tiny little utilities technical problems like that i think those are those are ripe to be reinvented by these things well coding coding's a good example though like that early in the week um one of the top programmers at Facebook. I can't remember the guy's name. He has since moved on somewhere else. I can't remember the guy's name. This tweet anyway, someone was commenting on a tweet that he made where he said that 100% of his coding is now handled by Claude or some AI agent, right? 100%. And he works at Facebook, that lines up. And he said, yeah, right, good point. But he said, you know, he had very, very mixed feelings about it because on the one hand this is he said this is an astonishing change this is this is like you know programming has never been like this before it now completely different programming has completely changed There is no point for anybody who learning computer science to learn programming any longer I'm sure you could argue that that's not true. But anyway, he's saying 100%. I actually wrote up a few notes about this because I also have a computer science degree, and I have some thoughts. Now, I've been painted on this podcast as like the anti-AI person because I don't like AI-generated images. I don't like AI-generated videos. Accurately depicted, I think you mean. I think my point of view has been taken to a bit of a more extreme than what it actually is because I actually have less of a problem with this than other AI services because the code itself is not the product that you're making here. the code isn't the poetry the code is not the art the code is what it generates to make the actual product which is the software and the app now AI is always going to generate the most bland predictable statistically average outcome and that's just fundamental to how it works that's what it does although I have a computer science degree these coding tools have a better understanding of Swift and Python syntax than what I can write. I understand the broad concepts, but I'm not as familiar with the actual languages to produce the code as accurately as these things can. I actually can foresee myself using a tool like this to help finish the two dinky apps that I've been working on as a hobby on and off for the last three years because I've reached my skill level and it's still not to the level that I would want to ship them. Because, and this is critical, These are two dinky little hobby projects that run locally, don't deal with any essential user data or information, and can't cause harm to anybody if the AI generates code that has a horrible race condition or deletes data. Oh, no, it lost basically nothing because, again, the apps that I'm working on are very small scale. For better and worse, these are going to significantly increase the global output of software in the world. Right, for sure. And that's not something that can be undone. I don't think that that's going to be necessarily beneficial to the world because there's already way too much mediocre software that manages and runs our entire lives. It's so much harder doing things like just getting a parking spot. Now you have to download an app. Now you have to do this. naive to doubt you need to sign up for an online service, a thing that breaks, a thing that doesn't account for any edge cases. And now we're going to be trusting these AI services to create them for us. And by companies who are only trying to minimize their operational costs to the highest degree, we're opening ourselves up to a world where we are putting way more trust in these things to run so many little parts of our lives in every meaningful way. And I think we need to prepare for that. It's taking a lot of the grunt work out of coding. And I think it's, there's a jobs report today, wasn't there, that just came out. There's been, this is the, there've been more layoffs in the month of, was it for December? I think there were more layoffs in December than any time in the last 15 years. And it looks like a lot of entry-level jobs are being wiped out. Maybe, maybe not. But, you know, for the, in the coding example, the grunt work is being done. And what people like Steve Trout and Swift say is that it allows a competent, you know, his example, a competent developer to be much more productive. Now he can do two apps a day now in Xcode when it might have taken him weeks before. And I think it's true that, you know, they're not laying off the senior developers. They're not laying off the senior programmers, the people who really know what they're doing. And, you know, will future people have to learn coding? Probably, because you kind of have to know what the machine's doing on your behalf. So I don't think it's entirely going to wipe that out. But it does make you more productive. And I think on the consumer level, the same is true, that a lot of the kind of grunt tasks that you don't want to do will be taken over by AI agents. And I don't think there's anything wrong with that. If you can trust them. Okay, that's a big if. And right now, you definitely can. But this is what Apple's working on with the smart Asuri, isn't it? Trustworthy, private, secure AI agents that will take out the grunt work that right now some apps do for you. It's also going to have rippling effects on the economy and the way that the existence of these tools, it's shifting power away from entry-level people who just learn a little bit of coding, go to a coding bootcamp or have, maybe they have a CS degree, but they don't have any job experience. All of those jobs are going to be gone. And that is going to be an absolute net negative on the world because it's shifting the existence of these jobs only to the senior level positions. And it's transferring the ability to make money on code. When code is devalued, it's shifting the ability to make money with the skill of programming only to the fortune 500 companies well i maybe maybe not and software has gotten more and more abstract hasn't it as time has gone on i mean at the beginning you have to learn how to you have to learn no machine code and then it got abstracted up to another level with fortran and you know whatever those other early programming languages and now modern programming languages are even more abstract aren't they? And now it's got to the level of abstraction where it works with plain English, which I think is an astonishing and absolutely fantastic breakthrough. It's amazing. It's amazing that the machine can translate those ideas now and just implement it. And you don't have to know machine code. How many programmers these days know machine code? I mean, they probably know exist. They may have some ideas about how it works, but they definitely don't learn it. And I think this is, you know, now we've gone up to another layer of abstraction where I think you have to know some of the, you know, you have to know, you will definitely have to have the basics of what you want the code to do. You'll have to know that because it's not a good idea, you know, someone who doesn't know what they're doing in charge of something that might be critical. This is getting a bit abstract now, but I think it's amazing breakthrough. I think it's astonishing. And I think there's definitely going to be a huge shakeout. And I think there's definitely going to come a time when there's going to be a huge backlash, too, when we find out there are huge downsides to this, to allowing agents to do it. And we already know what they are. The data centers are massive and require huge amounts of power. It's less efficient. It's less energy efficient. Again, we're going to see the massive economical impact of this, and I don't think we're remotely prepared for that. Honestly, if you're considering getting into a white-collar job in programming, I'd say go to a trade school. Learn how to become a plumber or an electrician. Well, that's funny. That's funny because a good friend of my – my 24-year-old son, his group of friends – I mean, a couple of them have gone into the trades. One of them went to Berkeley, and now he's working as a – he's learning how to be a carpenter. And he's thinking very clearly, very explicitly that – he's having trouble finding a job. He couldn't find a job. That was probably, this is, you know, what, what, uh, in San Francisco, this is, um, uh, what spurred it, but he's also thinking ahead, you know, and he doesn't think those skills are going to be disrupted. And almost every single white colored job is in the cross sites of AI. And thinking about his future, he wants a blue colored, he wants a blue colored trade. And it's smart. He's smart. He's smart to do that. It's a good idea. Yeah. I have a friend who works in HVAC and I have much more confidence in his career than i do mine that's great isn't it wonderful all right let's talk about our next story i think we've uh killed that to death and in fact i've lost my kill it to death wow we've gone on about it too long let's talk about something a little more fun the folding iphone uh this is uh yeah we got you know some more details of late and the devil is in the details i think this is what is interesting because it's it's telling us a little more about what the what the device might be like and there's some there's some good news about the guts too some very good news lutheran why don't you tell us about it yeah a few weeks ago when we when i actually have it right here the the folding iphone mock-up i still pick it up and handle it every once in a while but you know we know we think we know roughly what the screen size and specs are going to be but you know there's still a lot of unanswered questions and so this the information is starting to trickle in to on all these details so the latest leak comes from instant digital who's a pretty reliable leaker in china who revealed on weibo more information similar to current iphones the right side of the device will feature the touch id integrated power button and camera control i think it came out a while ago that it's probably going to have touch id and not face id i'm not entirely sure how you feel about that i think that my at least my theory right now is that it will have Face ID, but only on the front outer display. And then when you unfold it and you're looking at the big screen, it's not going to have a second Face ID sensor there. So it'll have Touch ID and the power button, kind of like an iPad. But I don't know. Some people are saying it definitely won't have Face ID, but I'm kind of hoping, I guess, wish casting. So yeah, Touch ID and camera control on the right side of the device. But then it leads to the question of where the volume button is going to go. you can't have it on the left side because the left side is a hinge and the sort of other edge you have when it's folded up it would put all the buttons like right next to each other uh so they're saying uh apple plans to put the volume rocker on the top right edge as seen on the ipad mini so it's sort of on the top um this is apparently due to the company internally positioning the motherboard on the right so they won't have to route cables across to the other half of the device, which certainly makes sense. This has purportedly also enabled Apple to dedicate the entire space on the left to the screen structure and battery. As a result, the folding iPhone could feature the largest battery capacity of any iPhone to date. I did the math, and it has 75% more surface area than the iPhone Air, so that's, you know, almost the double. You did the math. I did, yeah. so what does that mean in terms of battery life how much more battery life will it be uh a lot more percent more battery life okay so you didn't i did not do all the math there not all the math no but that that makes sense for like a device that's going to be used like like an ipad for half the time right uh it's going to have to have like ipad like battery life i mean if you think about it it has basically like three displays so it needs a much bigger battery yeah um additionally the leaker says the front of the foldable iphone will sport a single punch hole for the selfie camera apple appears oh okay this actually explicitly says apple will ditch face id and stick to touch id on the device due to space constraints and technological your dreams dashed in like just a two minutes yeah yeah um but it means it'll have a smaller dynamic island so you know that'll be fun on the front at least at the rear the dual cameras will sit horizontally within an iPhone Air-like camera plateau. Apparently Apple will only offer the iPhone Fold in two colors, one of them being white. However, the company will purportedly finish the rear camera module in black for a two-tone look. The other color hasn't been confirmed yet, but will likely be black. I think it also said in his report that they might only have one color at launch and come out with a second color later. Or maybe I misread that. It was kind of interesting, but I didn't expect them to make this in a wide range of colors. I mean, it's going to be such a high-end expensive niche device um well right and it's uh each each color is a huge um you know supply chain nightmare um and it's so much harder to keep all these screws uh juggled in the air like it doesn't make any sense to have all these different variations for a brand new device so they have no idea if it's going to take off or not yeah so it's a lot of ipad cues a lot of ipad design uh touches i like the idea of the la broca as well i remember that the device that um it Well, I don't know if that's true either, but a device that it was famous for was like one of the iPad Nanos had this beautiful button that was a home button as well as a volume rocker. So if you press it up at the top edge, it put the volume up, volume down at the bottom, and then press it in the middle, it acted like a home button. So it was a three-in-one button. Someone wrote an appreciation, like almost a, you know, this is one of Apple's best designs ever. There was some blog post that was going on and on about how great a design this volume was, and they wanted to bring it back for modern iPhones. I've never heard of the iPad Nano. You know, iPod Nano. Don't be pedantic, Nate Lewis. I'm sure AI can clean that up. Yeah. I'm still trying to imagine what timeline I'm going to be spending $2,000 plus on an iPhone. Because I still even though I pay a monthly a month or whatever for the Pro it just like oh my god every month another can you imagine doubling it yeah iPhone upgrade program yeah and I just I still you know I'm sure this is gonna be you know Apple doesn't make garbage so I'm sure it's gonna be an interesting device and it'll be like oh look how cool that is but I still like in my day-to-day life I I I don't have a need for a phone that flips out into an iPad. You say now. Only time I can really imagine it is going on an airplane flight or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I suppose that's great, but is it really worth spending all that extra money and, frankly, lugging around a device that's bigger, bulkier, and more fragile? you know the other whatever it is the other uh you know 363 days of the year that i'm not on an airplane i'm not looking forward to how fragile it's going to be like the other day i was you know i i'm borrowing somebody else's uh truck right now because my car is uh getting some repairs i know it's kind of dirty in there and i like sort of you know chuck my phone on the end of the cup holder and i'm like if i had a folding iphone i wouldn't just be able to do that i would like very delicately like place it somewhere or you know i was out with my dogs and you know run it running down the driveway and i was holding my phone in my hand and i was thinking i don't know if i would be as comfortable doing this with the folding iphone because if it falls on the concrete it's absolutely broken and that's you know three times as much money that i've you know wasted so i plan on getting apple care for it but i'm not looking forward to how how much more careful i'm going to have to be with it apple care is definitely going to be a must-have this This reminds me of before the iPhone came out. You remember people were carrying mobile phones, clamshell phones, and an iPod, and they had two devices. And, you know, maybe this is kind of like the modern version of that, where you have an iPhone and an iPad, and you don't need to use devices. You know, AI Steve Jobs will be up on phone. It's an iPad. It's an iPhone. Are you getting it? It's a wallet drainer. Yeah. Yeah, honestly, if they don't get Face ID in there, that's going to seem like a big step back to me. Face ID is pretty awesome. I mean, I wish it was faster, but the idea of having to always maneuver your hand up to a Touch ID button. It never works. It never works for me, ever, ever, ever. And I have to keep constantly reprogramming it. Especially if the button is on the far right side. It's going to be hard for me to reach that with my finger. Doesn't it seem like a weird omission? Here's our most expensive iPhone. most it's the most amazing iphone ever we can't wait to see how you use it with touch id which we introduced what a decade years ago yeah in 2013 with the iphone 5s thank you mr memory more on that later how the hell you remember all this stuff yeah so it's not just one foldable iphone apple is apparently pounding another one As Mark Gurman, who's he again? He reveals in his Power On newsletter, the foldable iPad project, which I'd completely forgotten about, has hit a snag. So Apple Labs team is considering another model, a square clamshell-style foldable phone, so something like the old Motorola Razr. And it may or may not hit the market, apparently. Everything will depend on consumer response to the first iPhone. So if that's a hit, then they might come out with this. It's also going to hinge on whether the device can generate real demand for the category. Analysts believe Apple's entry into the foldable space could give the segment a much-needed boost in demand and expand its reach. While Samsung and others have been shipping foldables for years, Apple's arrival is expected to move the needle. Even with a rumored $2,000 plus price tag limiting mass appeal, a foldable iPhone will go a long way to grab attention and make people sit up and take notice. so yeah the clamshell one i don't know do you want a clamshell no i don't i don't see the point at all i've never looked at my phone and thought man i wish it was shorter and square and twice as thick well the advantage is that you can uh it's much more foldable it's much much smaller you could you could definitely stick it in your front pocket of your jeans of your skinny jeans of your tight skinny jeans that was the advantage of the razor i used to love the razor i used to have them i had a whole bunch of motorbroad razors a bunch i had about three maybe or four um they were wonderful little devices they were fantastic little phones and the whole thing you flip them open they flipped open really beautifully and it was like a great form factor i i love those things i can imagine doing that you know like it'd be like a little it'd be like a regular iphone that folds down into half its size or even you know yeah but i with the existing fold rumors of a foldable iphone And I have a fully functional iPhone that unfolds into something twice as big. But the clamshell foldables, you have to unfold your phone every time to use them. And that just sounds completely annoying to me. I mean, I guess you don't have to fold it up. That's just what I was going to say. You could just leave it unfolded. But then what's the point? What's the point at that rate? Think about how many times you look at your phone during the day. And there's not going to be a crease after opening it 150 times a day. I mean... They've solved the crease issue. Really? I mean... Apparently. I'll believe that when I see it, especially for something like this, you know, where it's like always you have to open it to even use it. I mean, I don't know. That sounds pretty crazy. So even more skepticism for the clamshell than the regular old folding iPhone. It just sounds implausible. I mean, I guess it's years down the road if it ever arrives, but I don't see the basic problem with the iPhone as it is. I don't see any compelling reason to have a phone that, to me, sounds harder and more annoying to use and costs two, three times what an iPhone does. And probably won't have Face ID either. God, man. Yeah, okay. And costs $3,000. And again, you go to the store, you look at an iPhone Air, you pick it up, you go, wow, this is an amazing piece of technology. I'm sure the same thing is going to happen. If they do fix that crease problem and there's been all this talk about the time and effort they're put into engineering the perfect hinge, right? I'm sure it's going to be an amazing device. I'm just not sure that there's going to be $2,000 worth of utility for me. I can understand the argument that Apple will make. I can see it coming. You're buying both an iPhone and a mini iPad. Sure, that could be $2,000 of value. But a clamshell phone, what's the extra value? What's the extra utility there? It doesn't have the same argument. It has to be much cheaper than that to be a product. Yeah. Think how many times you'll get to open this every day. It'll be completely annoying. Not only that, but where's the MagSafe? You know, they'll probably take MagSafe out of it. I don't know. Yeah, or it'll only be on the bottom half, and then your phone is sitting on a MagSafe thing, like, off-centered and sideways. I don't know. Could they split it up half and half? I don't know. MagSafe? I suppose they could. Like I said, why not? I mean, just magnets. Yeah, of course, I didn't even think of that. But I just assumed they'd leave it out like they did with the, what is this, 17E? 16E. 17E? 16E. Come on, Louis. Don't you know the specs of every iPhone? I thought they were going to straighten this all out. I thought they were going to straighten all this number stuff out. I'm almost more confused than ever. The last part of 2005, or 2005, oh, my God. 2025, I was convinced it was already 2026 just because they changed the names of all the operating systems. I can't wait until they come out with the iPhone 18 in 2027. Nope, that's this year. The iPhone 18 is coming out this year because the iPhone 17 is what they're doing. 18 Pro is coming out this year. 18 is next year. Oh, yeah. It's good. If you thought you were confused before. Yeah, right. Look how clearly they clarified everything by changing all the numbers. It's so much simpler, so much easier to follow. Let's talk about the myth of planned obsolescence, which Apple has long been accused of. People have forever been accusing Apple of using software updates to reduce performance of older iPhones to force people to buy new ones. This is BatteryGate. Remember from, was it 2015? Of course, this is grade A certified bullpup, and we can prove it. And this is, you know, proven by Apple's latest software release, which updates every iPhone introduced since 2013. So last week, they put out bug fixes to iOS 12, iOS 15, iOS 16, and iOS 18. So these update the iPhone 5S, which Griffin has. That's right there. Look at that thing. Did you update it, Griffin? I did. I did. Just yesterday, I got a software update for my 13-year-old phone. Great. 13 years. And of course, you know, like in tech years, that's like a century. How long does the battery last on that thing at this point? It's pretty good, actually. I took a screenshot of the software update screen just to commemorate it. iOS 12.5.8. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's the oldest one, I think, the 5S, but it also updates the iPhone 6, the iPhone 6 Plus, iPhone 6S, all models, iPhone 7, iPhone SE, the first generation, iPhone 8, iPhone 8 Plus, iPhone X, iPhone X, iPhone XS, the XS Max, and the iPhone XR. So Apple says, quote, This update extends the certificate required by features such as iMessage, FaceTime, and device activation to continue working after January 2027. Without that certificate, all these older iPhones still in use would have become almost useless. And Apple could have let that happen, but it didn't. So legacy iPhones contribute to Apple's services revenue, and this is why Apple wants to keep them running, hence all the recent iOS upgrades for them. I don't know who wrote that. I don't think that's true. I think, you know, this is Apple keeping its devices alive. But they used to make this argument that back when Johnny Ive was still there, I remember him and Lisa Jackson came out and they were talking about the environmental green initiatives that Apple does. And one of the arguments they made is that Apple, by making devices that last a lot longer, that's a green thing to do. That's an environmentally thing to do. And Tim Cook also said, I think, during one of the earnings calls, he answered a question like this, and he said, why would we intentionally make iPhones worse? Because that won't make people want to buy another iPhone. People will fall in love with their iPhones, and they'll continue buying Apple products if they're great products. Why would we intentionally slow them down? If your iPhone slows down after just a few years after software updates, you're not going to want to buy an iPhone. Yeah, yeah, true enough. Like the logic just doesn't hold up. Well, planned obsolescence, you know, is like goes back to the 1920s. I think when a bunch of light bulb manufacturers, they formed a cartel to agree that light bulbs should be limited to a thousand hours, which forced people to keep replacing them. And, of course, like, you know, since then, a lot of companies have engaged in this practice. And like cars, you know, my car's in the shop right now. and my son wanted to buy a car. We were discussing about mileage. He wanted to get a car that was, I think, close to 200,000 miles. And I was saying, that's not a good idea because all these components, they're only designed for a certain lifespan. There's always a trade-off, isn't there? Detroit could make a car that would last forever, but it would be heavy, it would be over-engineered, there would be all sorts of other trade-offs. any product, no product designed to last forever. There is one car that was designed to last forever, and that was the original Toyota Land Cruiser. And you know what? It's an $80,000 SUV that, for all intents and purposes, is basically just an over-engineered forerunner. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway, so Apple's been long accused of it. Battery was a great example, wasn't it? When they slowed down iOS to make sure that older iPhones that had aging batteries, sometimes they were prone to shutting down unexpectedly. So to stop that, they throttled them. And the mistake they made, and I think that's quite reasonable. But, of course, they only explained this after the fact, after there was a whole bunch of lawsuits. They weren't up front about this, which I think was the big mistake. And they paid out $500 million, half a billion dollars to settle these class action lawsuits. and of course the worst thing I think is the stink, you know, the brand damage to their reputation, you know, people's thing the other great example is all the built-in batteries, I mean like, you know, since the were there devices before the iPod that had built-in batteries? I think that was one of the first devices in the consumer market anyway where you couldn change the batteries and I remember there was such an outcry about that people wanted to be able to change the batteries on iPods They wanted to be able to use regular AA batteries But I talked to one of the designers on the design team, and he said, well, they made a conscious choice. Two reasons. One is less space. To build in a compartment that's accessible to the consumer takes up a lot of space. It actually makes the device a lot fatter, a lot bigger than it needs to be. You can save a lot of space by putting in a built-in battery. And two is, like, it increases the water proofing, the water resistance and dust resistance of the device. It makes it much easier to seal a device if you don't have to have a compartment that's accessible to change the batteries out. And then the third thing, I think Phil Schiller talked about this. He said that people don't change batteries. They think they want to. They think they want a device where they can swap the battery out easily. But in practice, I think it's like 4% of people who buy an iPod or an iPhone or whatever ever, you know, got to the point where they wanted to get a new battery for it. Most people are quite happy to hand it down and buy a new one that's got newer features, better features, that's thinner or whatever, you know, got a better screen. The whole upgrade cycle thing. um and of course that that's been apple that's been the big knock against apple that it builds in these consumables a battery battery it's not going to last forever at some point you're going to have to replace it and the fact that you can't do it easily yourself is planned obsolescence par excellence and also another piece of irony there is that in retrospect the ipod is far more repairable than the iphones that came after like there's a huge modding scene on ipods where people do replace the batteries and even like replace the cases with cool transparent cases and different colors flash different operating systems on them like uh from a modern perspective the ipods are like incredibly simple little computers that you can actually do a lot of uh you know retro modding too yeah right right right i guess apple with the latest iphones as well has made it a lot easier to replace the batteries even though you have to like undo the glue or you know you have to heat them up and get some kind of sucker to pull the thing apart. And you probably wouldn't want to do it anyway because you're probably going to ruin it with your big sausage fingers. But yeah, I don't believe that Apple planned obsolescence for its devices. I think almost all of them have been designed to last a long time. And iPhones have like three or four lives, don't they, often? Yeah, I've operated on a lot of iPhones and I've successfully fixed some of them. I've ruined a couple myself. Oh, my God. Yeah, fix the guides. Yeah, heartbreaking. Nothing worse than that, especially after you bought the battery and everything like that, and you have all these parts that you spent money on, and then you wreck it somehow. I can't even imagine thinking about doing that. And, of course, you can do it yourself. You can order the tools from them now and follow their – they have the whole DIY service program. The 48-pound repair kit. Yeah. They ship like six boxes to you, don't they? And then you have to send it back. Including sand, right? does it include sand i wonder i think so like there was some kind of thing like sand for you know safety with dealing with the battery or something like that you know like in case there is a thermal event as they say yeah i i would we should actually do that sometime just to see exactly how crazy the setup is that they send what it takes you might need a new new room of your house that'd make for a good video and i bet somebody else has already done it unfortunately yeah for sure for sure all right i think uh we should talk about notifications so notifications like this is actually one of the ways that the only ways i keep on supper stuff like uh you know seeing the notification go whizzing by but of course there's so many that it's easy to miss stuff but there's a there's a good trick that griffin's going to show to actually keep the important, a trick to make sure that you don't miss the important notifications. So you can set up persistent notifications from specific apps. So they stick to the top of your iPhone screen. So when your iPhone is locked and unlocked and an important alert comes in, the notification will like stay on the top of the screen until you act on it. And it's super helpful for things like medication reminders. It works wonders if you're the sort of person who ignores notifications once they disappear from your phone screen. It's like, poof, they're just gone forever. So it's super simple to set up. You just go to Settings, tap on Notifications, and you can scroll down for specific apps. I'll just pick one off the top here, like 2048, the game. I normally turn off notifications for games, but say, substitute this for any app that you might want notifications to stay on for. There's a setting here that says Banner Style, you can tap on that and the default is temporary but you say persistent and then whenever those notifications come in they will you know stay there in your line of sight until you dismiss them it feels like your entire life just filters through your phone through notifications and they're all given like equal weight but uh this can this can balance that off it's good for like calendar reminders you know meetings phone calls stuff like that you don't want to miss Medication reminders. It's absolutely perfect. I mean, I recently started taking a medication. I was taking it after dinner, right? I can't tell you how many times I forget that. And yet, there it is. Once I set this up, now it's always there. And even if you forget to do it, like let's say you go out to dinner or something. You don't happen to have the medication with you. You get home. An hour later, you look at your phone. Oh, crap. I forgot to take that. But I mean, I don't want to use the term life-saving, but super amazing way to not forget to take some crucial medication. I think I have reminders set to have persistent notifications as well. So when I get a timed alert and reminders like take the trash out and I'm like, oh, I'll do that in a little bit. I'm in the middle of something. Well, it stays on my screen until I manually act on it, and that's also super important. And, you know, while you're here in the notification settings, this is also a good time to clean up what notifications your phone receives because, you know, part of the reason you're trained to ignore notifications is because you receive so many that are complete junk or spam. So, you know, that's why whenever I install a new game, I don't let it send me notifications at all because they almost like what's a game going to notify you about that's so important. I turn those off. Shopping apps, I turn those off wherever I can. I'm very strict about what apps are allowed to send me notifications. That sort of alleviates the problem to some minor extent. Messages are a good one to have permanent notifications for, isn't it? Getting important messages. Can you drill down and do that for certain people? You can, yeah. You can tap on you can tap on a specific contact and I think turn off their notifications or hide alerts is the setting for that. But if you, if you go into an app I also recommend, you know, maybe you want to see a few notifications as they come in, but you don't want them to build up in notification center over time because then you scroll down to notification center and then it's like a big junk drawer of stuff. You can turn those off. You can also turn off the badges, but leave the the notification banners turned on so that, you know, you'll see them as they come in on your lock screen or as you're using your phone. But, you know, the, the red alert badges, if those bother you on your home screen, you can disable those. That's another tip that I, another thing I recommend for a lot of the less important apps in your life. Yeah. I never use the badges. In fact, my, um, what my, my, my mail app was showing like 150,000 unread messages. It's supposed to be crazy. But I know that some people like it. That really does bother people, like seeing the little red dot above the icon, and they're obsessed about closing them and making sure that there isn't one. You sound like one of those people, Griffin. I am absolutely one of those people. I hate red badges. I just ignore them. 139 on Facebook, 6 on Instagram. I think at that rate the badges aren't telling you anything, and maybe you can turn them off. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think, like you said, they aren't telling me anything. What I should do is I should make sure that I'm only getting them for the important ones. And I should actually spend some time and go through this stuff. Leander don't need no stinking badges. That's right. There you go. Yeah, honestly, I did that immediately with this medication thing, and it really is helpful. It's astonishing. So thanks, Griffin. Life-saving. You saved his life, Griffin. Literally. That's why you pay me the big money. All right. We're going to list a question. And this comes from – you're going to have to bleak this out. Turd 2402, 2402, Turd. It was spelled T-E-R-D. And this came on YouTube. Lewis, what did he say? Yeah. So this comment says, I always see reviewers talk about phone wobble when the device is laying flat on a table. Do a lot of people really care about that? I feel like it's such a non-issue. Well, I've got to say, it bugged me when I had the previous version of the iPhone Pro, the 16. Now I've got the 17. It's way less wobbly. Now it's like a wedge equally supported across the back by that, what is it called, the awesome plateau? or the groovy plateau. What are they called? There's the iconic plateau, which is on the iPhone Air, and the forged plateau, which is what you have. Right, the forged plateau. Wow, that sounds very Nordic or something. I don't know. But anyway, do a lot of people care about it? I mean, I don't know. I actually did. I found it annoying to set my phone down. In fact, what I would often do is just lay it face down because I couldn't bear that wobble. Now it's... Weebles wobble, but they don't fall down. Griffin, what was the first... You'll remember this. Which was the first iPhone that had a bump? And people lost their minds. The iPhone 6, but the camera bump on the iPhone 6 was so tiny that the wobble was barely noticeable. But yeah, it didn't choose a wobble for the first time, though. That's why they lost their minds, wasn't it? Very slightly, yeah. But yeah, I think you had to tap in the upper corner for that. But the thing is, as the camera plateau has, as the camera bump has grown and shifted downwards and also gotten significantly thicker, you know, it's just a matter of physics. Like it's, it protrudes more. And so you get more of a wobble. When I set my iPhone 16 Pro down on a table, I don't use a case. It absolutely wobbles a lot. And that's really annoying when I'm trying to type on it. Do you set your phone, you set your phone down to type on it on a table? I mean, if I'm trying to show somebody something like, oh, let's add stuff to the shopping list. I sort of set it on a table so we can both see it. And then I'm typing things in to add it to my shopping list. It wobbles. Like if I'm hit the Q key or the W key. Yeah. And it's a big problem if you don't have your phone in a case. And this used to affect people who used cases as well because the plateau is only in that one half of the phone. But now that it spans across the whole width, I mean, I guess if wobble bothers you, then buy an iPhone 17 Pro and put it in a case. Apple fix wobble gate. Now it's just sort of a ramp. I set my phone down beside me when I'm eating or something. It's like you just tap on the screen to do something, right, because you get an alert. I can believe somebody like you in Slack, you get a work message while you're having lunch and you got to reply to it. So you're tapping on it. In the old days, wobble all over the place. Yeah, it's way better. Way better. Yeah. All right. Well, thanks for that question, Turd2402. I'd love to hear what you think. We've got to figure out a way to get listeners to send us messages. and we're going to try and set up a number or an email address where you can FaceTime us, a video response. In fact, we're going to do that. Let's make a commitment. We are going to do that by next week. Whoa. So we're going to set that up, and you can send us a FaceTime message, a little recorded message, and we will play it on the show. And, in fact, if you have a question or any kind of comment, send it to info at cultomac.com. Why not? Info at cultomac.com. Email us some kind of video message, and we'll play the good ones on the show. Won't we, Griffin? Yes, I guess. Apparently we will. Yeah, we will. We're looking forward to it. All right, that's enough of this rubbish. That's a wrap. So please give us a 5, 6, 7, 8 star rating on Apple Podcasts and share it with anybody who you think can put up with this stuff. Leave a comment on YouTube. Ask us a comment for the show. Ask us questions, you know, if you have tech problems. We will try to solve them. You can find Lewis on Twitter at Lewis Wallace. Griffin's on Macedon at D Griffin Jones. And like I said earlier, I write the Cult of Mike Today newsletter every day, which you can find at newsletters.cultomike.com. Thanks, everyone, for listening, for watching, and we'll see you all next time. Have a great weekend, everybody. Bye. Goodbye. See you.