Apple Intelligence in iOS 18.2, new Apple Music stations, on the AppleInsider Podcast
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Hello and welcome to the Apple Insider Podcast. I'm your host, Wesley Hilliard, and I'd like to thank our sponsor for the week, Masterclass. And of course, I'm joined by William Gallagher, as always. William, are you doing okay over there? I think I hear some whistle in that nostril. I am actually full of cold, so I've decided, last minute decision really, but I'm mostly going to answer yes and no throughout the podcast. Actually, this will be yes.

And this will be no. Okay? Just, right, so we're clear. Okay? Did you follow that? William has been sacked and replaced with a piano. So today, we also have an Apple Insider Plus segment for paid subscribers. If you are a paid subscriber, you get an ad-free show. And the after show, which today will be about our hobbies. What we use Apple Gear for outside of work.

And William, you said this is your topic. Are you having anything in particular in mind? Oh, I do. In fact, oh, hang on. Yeah, actually, the piano is part of it. I promise to not keep doing that, but it's very tempting. I'll explain that later. It's just actually last night, I'd done something like 15 hours at the Mac at the keyboard writing on various things, and I was done, put everything away, and the first thing I did was get out my MacBook Pro and watch a film on it. And I'm thinking...

What do we do when we step away that we still use Apple gear for? And hopefully in my case. Yeah, exactly. And why should there be? Apple, I think is very much 24 hours of my life. And I don't know if that's a sad thing or not. I mean, I don't sleep in an Apple bed, but I do wear an Apple watch to bed. So I think that counts. Yeah. There isn't a moment. There isn't some, some kind of Apple gear or adjacent thing going on, which is kind of odd to say out loud.

But the thing is, you should go get married. You are getting married. Yeah, I was going to take a lesson. I love it so much. You should get married to it. No, we have this fun story that you wrote here. If you can manage to breathe through the whole thing. Can you tell us about it?

We don't know who this is, OK, but there is a couple, or at least it looks like the bride of the couple. I don't know if it's a same-sex marriage or not, but one of the people, a woman who's apparently got a background in fashion, has sent out wedding invitations that explicitly say no Apple Watches.

And this has kicked off an amazing number of things. I mean, there must be somebody who thinks, what about Android watches? But probably not. There are also, it turns out, a lot of people who think, yes, there should be no watches of any kind at a wedding. Now, I am married. It's been a while. You're getting married. Did you know that this is a breach of etiquette for the bride, the groom or the guests to be so terrible as to wear a watch?

This is, I've heard of this before. I think it's meant to keep people from looking at their watches or appearing bored, especially in photos. Kind of this, it's an old school trick. Like this isn't a recent idea, but to specifically call it Apple watches, I believe this fashionista type is looking more at

They don't like what it looks like. They don't like the Apple Watch and its style. So they don't want it in their photos, I guess. They don't want this techie thing showing up. But I don't know. It's kind of funny to me that that would be called out specifically. I don't know if I could go to this wedding. It depends on who it was, I guess.

No, it's amazing how three words kind of conjure a picture of somebody entirely. Or maybe actually they resent the fact that Apple no longer does those incredibly expensive, was it $10,000 gold versions of the watch? Perhaps that would have been allowed. Perhaps it's a blow against the whole of Apple. That's what she's really doing.

I mean, Apple Watch did end up on a runway. So, you know, you should ask the bride if her dress was on the runway maybe before banning Apple Watches. No, it's just a fun thing. Like social norms, like it would be like banning specific...

or something. I don't know. I guess some weddings are more picky than others. I've been to a few that are very casual. I've only been to one that's even close to dress up, and even that one was just collared shirts. I've never been to a suit and tie wedding before. So yeah, I guess to each their own. Good on them for, I guess, having an opinion. True.

sharing it, but I think this one might be a little silly, especially if the wedding is long-sleeve attire. You wouldn't even see the watches, would you? You're right, though. It is their day, so up to them. I just...

I looked into etiquette guidebooks to see whether it was there, and there's a version of Debrets, a famous UK guidebook from the 2001 edition onwards, talks about making sure you don't have watch alarms on, and explicitly for that moment when the...

efficient, the celebrant, the vicar, all of those, asks if anyone has any reason to object. Because, isn't it, it's declare it now. And you could hear Siri taking that as an instruction and coming out with, you know, here's a few things I found on the web. That could have been, actually, that could be great, couldn't it?

I wonder, you know, maybe by October of next year, if Apple's artificial intelligence is good enough, Siri can just be the officiant for my wedding. There we go. Yeah, I'm thinking there's one other person who might have an opinion on that. I don't know who that could be. Maybe.

So, Apple did a quick, quiet release this week. New Apple Music Radio stations. Just three new stations out of the blue. Latin music channel, like Spanish-speaking music channel. A chill channel, I suppose, that will put you to sleep. Or maybe annoy you. Not sure which. And then there's the third one that escapes me. Club music. Because, yes, the 90s are not dead. So...

I'm joking. I understand Club is a very popular brand over there in the UK. Well, in my house especially. I'm sure. The Chill Station, I mean, because I haven't listened to it yet, isn't that just...

like a wider ranging version of the chill mix that it does for me every week. Low tempo specific instruments. It's not always going to be, you know, waterfall sounds and rainbows. Like it's going to be like, I think Beck debuted his new song on this channel. That was kind of the promotion going around for it. And I still have yet to meet another human being in real life, not on the internet, but,

That listens to any Apple Music Live radio station. I do. I listen to Apple Music One and Apple Music Hits. I don't care for country. And these other three are probably just going to fall off the end for me. I don't really... I'm not going to go to either of these. I do hope that the existence of the Spanish channel and the...

Club channel will mean less of that on hits and Apple music one, not, not because I don't like it, but it, they do seem to take over a certain hours of the day and,

and sometimes that's when I'm awake and I would like to hear something else. And I tune in to, you know, because I like the main shows. I like tuning into the main shows that introduce new music or maybe the hit station's playing some oldies and goodies, and I can go hit that star and get that added to my album or to my library. So, yeah, having a little bit more broad choice is,

letting users choose what they feel like in the moment. It's cool that they have all these live stations and, you know, real human beings and artists running them. Normally, I think... Well, hang on, back up a bit. I was going to say, I would really like a version of Apple Music Country that only has women singers in it. Normally, you know, actors, actresses, I think, what's the difference? Should all be one. But every time I hear a male country singer...

they're wearing one of those hats and they just, I mean, I think Junior Brown pulls it off, but everybody else has a 10 gallon hat. And you know, they've been nowhere near a farm, whereas women at least wear whatever they wear. And it's not just, you're not as distracted by this as I am. Well, I mean, I'm more of a Reba McEntire, Dolly Parton, country music listener myself. Country died about 30 years ago and was replaced by some weird pop band

version of rock music. I like that. New country. I can't hear it. Here in the UK, there was a, well, I think you still have it in the set, CMT, Country Music Television. It was shown over here until somewhere in the mid-90s, I think about 96, 97. About six months after I found it, it was taken off air forever. But in that time, yeah, I mean, Shania Twain was big at the time, like I got into her stuff. But also, you know what you said about different hours a day? There would be a rebel country strand of

where they would desperately play any pop music just to get anybody to listen. And that's how I found the kind of folk country pop crossover stuff like Dar Williams, I learned. They got Bruce Springsteen on once. You know, expand your horizons. Yeah, I will blast Man, I Feel Like a Woman any day. That's such a good song. But no, it's just modern country music has fallen apart, I think, in a lot of ways. It's too...

dumbed down I think is the word I would use for it you know the the old jokes are now were funny back then but because they were tangentially true now it's just on the nose and that hurts a little bit of you know my dog died the truck broke down my wife left me and that's every single song and it's it's more true today than it ever has been but moving on to more fun things iOS 18.2 has finally released to the public

Yes, but I'm confused. 18.2 is out here in the UK as well, but is 18.2 in the UK full of all the same app intelligence stuff that is in the US, or am I only getting it because I'm still on the beta system? I can't tell you how confused I have been over all of this. The EU is the one that's not getting stuff. UK is bundled in with the usual English-speaking initial release people. Oh, right, great.

cool yeah so you should have everything uh as long as you're running the proper devices right so genmoji image playgrounds have you messed with any of this at all beta or not

Every now and again, I mean, like every few days even, not quite once a week, but close, I will try very hard to get Image Playground to create an image of me that's, well, at first I thought acceptable. I've reduced it down to just recognisable for it, and it's entirely failed. It's done my wife, my mother, it's done...

Shed at the bottom of the garden. It's on all of these brilliantly, but I appear to be eluding it or I'm fussier than any of the above mentioned people. I haven't tried. No, I did try Genmoji. I sent an emoji of a sausage with a watch on it. I mean, you had to be there. It made sense. It's the future. That worked. Yeah. But, you know. This is technology. This is what we use it for.

Apparently so. Yeah, I'm rushing back to that one. But how many times will I write something that has a sausage with a watch in it? I mean, yeah, and now I'm ready. Just one button and it'll be there. I believe, though, that you are far more interested than I am because you have spotted that Apple isn't using Genmoji where it implies it is. It's so clear. Like this ad came out as we recorded yesterday saying,

And it's cute. It just shows a bunch of little objects dancing around, and it's a sing-song song of all the emoji names that they printed off of Genmoji, I guess. You can't make almost any of them in Genmoji. And the ones you can are terrible representations of what's actually on the screen. The cute little garden gnome that they showed is nowhere to be found. You cannot make it. You get kind of a generic...

weird looking gnome. You can't make a clock with a face. You can't make a chair that walks. You can't

do any of these things really a chrome skeleton gets you a skull head but no body um so it just makes me wonder if the ad department was just told hey you can make whatever emoji you want uh run with that and they designed this entire ad without actually using the software or understanding what it does like the pig flying pig one the the wings are flesh colored in some of them it's

Yeah, somewhat disturbing in some ways and doesn't work out the way you want it to. I mean, it is generative AI. It is trying to combine existing emojis into cute little things. And more often than not, it tries, it forces you to pick a human to base it off of, which is very annoying because a lot of times I just want it to be

And yes, you can choose an emoji person, but it ruins the effect, right? If you're trying to do the tomato spy, which is one of the ones, if you say it's a tomato with sunglasses and a trench coat, it'll make it. But if you try to add a hat, it tries to turn it into a person. So it's just an odd thing.

thing to put out this ad that is completely unrepresentative of their tool and clearly human made models for the entire ad nothing generated with ai so i don't know if that's just an odd misstep another one in apple's ai advertising branch

I mean, it is a fun ad. I only watched it when I read what you'd said about it, because otherwise, you know, I rush to emoji. But, yeah. So, is passing off misrepresentation? I mean... No one's going to care. I mean, this isn't... It's not a big deal. It's not the end of the world. I just... I wanted to make note that this is, again, just an odd way to present this thing. Like...

Okay, I get it. It was a fun little song. But you know, it took me back to Animoji Karaoke. And you know what they did with that ad? They used Animoji. I don't remember this at all. Animoji Karaoke. It sounds like a character name from a cartoon film noir. I can barely say it. What did they do?

All right. So when iPhone 10 first came out with face ID and everyone was scared because the government was stealing your face, uh, Apple was trying to convince everyone that face ID was cool. And the 3d dot projector could capture a wide range of emotions from your face. And they created an emoji to promote it. It was the little animals you could do in FaceTime, which eventually became me emoji. Um,

And so as a part of that promotion, they got Migos, rest in peace, and a couple of other artists to make a karaoke style sing along video of them with the various animals that

And I think the best ones were definitely the ones by Migos. They were really funny, clever ads. And yeah, a lot of it was computer generated. You couldn't make these videos on your iPhone. But every meme or animoji you saw on the screen...

animated and reflected the real animoji on your phone there it was a computer graphic to create an ad but it was representative of the final product that you could go and use right now whereas this ad is not representative at all in any way and it's just an interesting change of thought technology i guess for apple where they're usually very deliberate in the way that they present their stuff

Every single pixel of that ad campaign totally missed me, totally went by me. Am I really blinkered against emoji then? I think apparently I am. If you watch the ad, it would instantly come back, I think. They're very specific ads. Okay. But it's just a combination of you not caring about Animoji and the music that was involved, I think. Okay. Okay.

Right. I feel like I'm failing in some way. I'm not expanding my horizons into little images of people doing karaoke. This release though, I think is actually really good. This is, this is going to be the usual annual emoji release where everyone updates because everyone's going to see these custom emojis floating around this ad and everyone's going to update or people who don't have access to it are going to think about updating their phone to get it. It's,

It's that big a deal. Even image playground as weird as it is. And it has gotten better. I think I've noticed the models improving slowly. Uh, the eyes and teeth are still weird, but I think general details and things are getting better. But, um,

I have a group chat with friends and I started sharing different representations of them from image playground in there. And they were like, Oh, do me next. Do me next. Now try this. Try it. Like they were interested in it as a toy, of course. And I think that's the point. Apple wants it to be a proof of concept for image generation. It is nowhere near like a primetime thing you're going to like use to design something, but it's a fun toy. And I think people like playing with toys, you know? So, um,

so image playground is bad compared to everyone else, but this one's on your phone. And I was generating a lot of fun images of friends and they come in the, these likeness of the, of them is what took them. They were like, you can't do this with anything else. You know, chat GPT can make an image, but it can't make it look like you. It can't learn from a human photo. So that's where Apple, I think is doing great. And, and,

Um, Jen Moji, of course is the winner. I mean, I may, I immediately made a pot leaf, uh, to send to people cause I, and it made it and that's funny. So there's a pot leaf emoji. Um, I made different emojis of just different random things. I could, that popped off the top of my head. Um,

uh like a rabbit sticking its tongue out right just things you can't do right now normally but um so genmoji no not much needs to be said about that because it's very clearly the winner people are going to be using that regularly and if even if you don't have apple intelligence if someone sends you a genmoji it'll pop up in your emoji picker so that's cool i do think that's very impressive that they would do that yeah but i i wanted to wrap up and say for apple's

Image Playground, it's a good sign of what's to come. I am actually excited about the potential, hopefully near future. If we don't see a marked improvement in image quality and generation by the end of iOS 18...

It's going to be a sad day. I understand that's probably realistically what's going to happen. There's going to be no change between now and I was 19 and that's terrible, but hopefully then I was 19. They blow our socks off with some more Pixar level generation because it's

Well, what I did was I took my image and I told Siri to send it to ChatGPT and make it into an animated character with exaggerated features to try and avoid saying Pixar because it would ignore that. And it created this Pixar-like animation that looked nothing like me because, again, even if it has a base image to start with, it's going to hallucinate itself to death. But it was still a very nice-looking Pixar image.

character. And it's like, if Apple could perform that level of detail and animation, this would be an incredible thing.

like runaway feature and i hope that they're aiming for that as quickly as possible i really didn't realize that chat gbd couldn't do that with i mean because i've obviously never tried i use text-based stuff but it never occurred to me that uh app intelligence would be better at something like that if you give it if you give it a human photo it says i can't do anything with this because it's trying to avoid you know deep fakes and stuff which we'll get into in a moment hmm

That doesn't seem fair enough, really, but okay. Yeah, Apple's approach is privacy, right? It's all on device. Apple isn't learning from your photos. This is something I've seen float around social media. Some person who thinks they understand the technology telling everyone, go to settings and go to Siri and Apple Intelligence and turn off all the toggles because Apple's learning off of your data. None of that's true. It's very silly. You're...

intentionally breaking your phone and its functionality by doing that and if you want to do that go for it but it's dumb it's cutting off your nose by your face like nothing about apple intelligence is learning from your using it that is not how apple intelligence works the model is built it's on your device it's not learning from you it's using your data to generate outputs but it is not training the model that's going on everyone else's phones that's not how that works

And me, I hate these things with a passion in some ways because they were poorly executed. The name is terrible and it required stealing everyone's data to get there. But because now Apple has introduced this more private option and given me the ability to use something like ChatGPT without providing any data to it for its training, it's

it changes the game a little bit. I'm still not happy with how ChatGPT came into existence or what OpenAI is doing as a company, but at least I know, just like with Google Search and Siri, I can use it with a little bit more of a clear conscious and say, okay, I can send an image of a screenshot and ask for a bulleted list in HTML and get it back. That's a useful tool. That's a useful output from ChatGPT. I can...

Make these fun little images. I took the time to take my image playground output, pass it to chat GPT and tell it to turn it into a pixelated avatar and describing around what would be a Pokemon game from the 90s and creating a pixelated avatar.

creation with clear Pokemon like a Pikachu was in that photo because ChatGPT is really easy to fool that way. One image I generated had the trademarked Pokemon logo in it. So you just can't say make me a Pokemon because then it'll say no, but you can get around it very quickly. That's the kind of stuff that like

you can do now privately without sending any information that's going to be kept by ChatGPT. And I like that. I think Apple's doing a lot of interesting stuff here. I like the sound of it. I like the way Apple is doing it. I'm just, I don't seem to be as into it this year. I don't seem to be finding as much use for it. But I do find if I move away from a Mac or iOS device that's been having the beats onto one that hasn't, that there are certain things I miss. Like I keep saying the summarizing stuff, the text-based stuff.

Although, OK, actually, late last night, I was replying to a friend who was worried about something. And I leant on a button somewhere. And Apple Mail opened up. I don't mean to say mail. I was replying to it. But it opened up a new copy of it, started to reply, and inserted an Apple Intelligence prompt there.

about it and I clicked that and it was giving him advice about seeing a counsellor and therapies and things. I mean, I don't know what button I pressed to accidentally get another copy of the email. I hadn't had that prompt about app intelligence when I first went in so did I lean on two buttons? I actually, I showed him that thing and I think he might be considering it but so maybe it was actually very useful but it was very disturbing in the middle of the night. Yeah.

Yeah, it's definitely hit and miss. I keep coming back to this because I just believe it's a good metaphor. It's just, it's a good tool. It's a good hammer. Use it for what it's good at and you'll be fine. Like,

Even when I – so yesterday I passed an image to – this happens quite frequently in our line of work. You're handed a PDF, and it has information in it you want out of it, and they somehow disabled the ability to select text, so you have to screenshot it. So I sent it to ChatGPT to make it into a bulleted list, and it sent back –

some hallucinations in that text. I had to review it. Now it did remove, it did remove a lot of steps and had most of it correct. But if I hadn't had, I not read it, I would have submitted incorrect work. So like you have to know that you can't trust these things to get it right, but you can at least trust that it might speed up a few workflows. I mean, I'm never going to use image playground to create artwork for our job, unless it's for, uh, an article writing like the Jen Moji article. Uh,

I went through the video and made every emoji that it said, or at least tried to, and included some of the outputs as an image for the piece. And that was, you know, a use case for it. I've written in the past about how Apple's making a robot, and I used Microsoft Copilot to create an Apple robot, like, just as a gag, almost, because I don't really like these things. I personally, like...

I'm never going to use those Pokemon things. I just wanted to see if I could break chat GPT and, uh, using text, uh, Siri, uh, text to Siri. And I did, but you know, test successful. I posted them on blue sky and I checked my clear sky, which is a way to look at your analytics. Um,

I checked it the next day and people blocked me after posting those pixel arts because they were pixel artists and they hate AI slop. And I'm like, wait, no, I'm with you. I hate AI slop as well. This is just an example. But it's okay. I don't care. No loss on my part. But it's just, it's funny to me.

How the internet works anyway. But yeah, like I would personally love to hire a pixel artist to make artwork for me like that. That's a cute idea. That's a lot of fun. Like I don't like...

The idea... I wouldn't have changed my avatar in blue sky to this pixelated artwork. Now, if Apple Image Playgrounds comes out with a pixel art setting and I could give it a photo of my cat or a photo of myself, I'd be interested in seeing what the output was, if it was usable as like a profile picture, but...

I'm still always going to support artists. I love going to conventions and going to artist alleys and buying their art or commissioning them to do things for me. So that doesn't change that for me, but I think it does for a lot of people. And that's, what's scary about this stuff.

One vital thing to tell you is there's another way to do that locked PDF thing, by the way. CleanShot X. You can just drag over an area and it will OCR the whole thing, put it into your clipboard and you can paste it wherever you go. I have to look through various patent legal documents and I do that in case I get the wording wrong. Well, the trick is I can get the text out. I mean, Apple will let me take the screenshot and OCR it as well using its just built-in screenshot tool. But...

transforming it into an HTML list that has to be done with that just because it's a repetitive task U-L-L-I-L-I close bracket open bracket close bracket open bracket I can just make a little AI thingy do it for me in five seconds and then I'm done right and as long as it does it correctly and doesn't hallucinate any new text in there good to go but

Interesting that after Apple released 18.2, ChatGPT went down for about eight hours yesterday. Clearly people want this feature and are upgrading for it. Has ChatGPT gone down before? I mean, would we even have noticed before? I certainly hadn't heard of it. Everything goes down sometimes. It's fine. Yeah.

It's not a big deal that it went down. I don't know why they released Sora, their video engine, a day before 18.2 went out. There's just too much going on. But yeah, clearly they overloaded their servers, but it's fine. It's not like it... And it never went down for me. It was only a partial outage. I was able to use it yesterday. So...

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But moving on, because we have a lot I would like to talk about. We are about halfway through the show. So speaking of AI and all this stuff, Apple's in a little bit of hot water over artificial intelligence, but not Apple intelligence. This is to do with the App Store. Have you heard of this situation? No, I've missed this completely. What have they done now?

It's what they haven't done, and it's the usual problem. So Apple is the single sole arbiter of the App Store, and they decide what goes in and what doesn't, and they got in trouble a few months back. A report from 404 Media, an excellent independent firm, they spotted an ad on Reddit for basically the ad wasn't trying to be coy. It was just...

use this app to make deep fake pornography is more or less what it was saying. Uh, and maybe not so many words, but, um, yes, it was basically saying we're a face swap app and we can, we link to Pornhub. So give us a face and we'll add it to your favorite thing. Right. Um,

Really just disgusting, awful thing. And a few of these were in the App Store that 404 found. So they reported it to Apple. They wrote a report on it. Those apps got taken down. But it kind of brought up the question of how did these get through? And I wrote a story about something called dual-use apps. It's an app that seems innocent enough on the surface, but has a dual purpose that can be used for nefarious things. It's not...

uh, there's, there's a new term for it because not all, um, not all of these things being made as quote unquote pornography. It's called non-consensual intimate imagery, uh, or video. Right. So NCII is the word we're using for it now. And fine. It, it just, it's a wider encompassment. Just like CSAM is better than, you know, child pornography. We'll get into that too here in a moment because Apple, but, um,

This whole thing is just, it's a crazy story. So these apps got taken down from the App Store because of this report from 404. But then Congress caught wind.

And now the U.S. Congress has written letters to several companies, not just Apple. So has Apple, Microsoft, Snapchat, TikTok, Meta. Even X got a letter saying, hey, what are you doing about this deepfake problem? And they mentioned there's this Take It Down Act, which I assume is an act meant to stop these kinds of deepfake things. This happened with Taylor Swift, if you remember, on X.

There's this big deal where her face is being swapped in on these images. All bad juju. And so basically Congress has sent out these letters asking, what's your game plan? What are you going to do? And specifically in Apple's letter, they said, how did it get through in the first place? If you are watching the App Store, how did these apps get through in the first place? And what are your plans in the future to not let this happen again?

And so that I just found that to be an interesting story. And I wonder if it'll turn into a wider lawsuit from the United States government. I did hear this week of some app. I don't know what it pretends to be, but if you, I don't know, throw salt over your shoulder and press two keys and,

recite something backwards so that it turns into an emulator of an old-style iPod. And I quite fancy the upper, but do I fancy it enough to buy whatever the other app pretends to be? It feels somehow illicit, and that's not exactly a porn-level illicitness. No. Yeah. But...

The emulator for the iPod, I believe, is already gone because the person who mentioned it on Blue Sky was prominent enough that Apple probably saw it and took it down immediately. But cool. I wish Apple allowed real emulation of the iPod software because even this wasn't an actual emulator. It was just a skin over top of a music player that it could let you listen to your Apple Music album. But because it looked like an iPod, it couldn't exist, of course.

But the Apple's app store has been running into more and more of these stories. Uh, I, I keep going back to this child's game that turns into a casino, right? Ooh,

I don't know how you get that through app review and the code base, I guess because they're not looking at the code base. They're just looking at how the app operates. And as long as you don't hit the right secret combination, it doesn't become a casino. Or maybe they've triggered a filter that turns on only for app review that turns back off later. Right. There's ways to do it, obviously, but it's just come on. Can you not detect this, Apple? Is there not a way to detect the secret button code in app review? I don't know.

Aren't there supposed to be some apps that get a lot of data from a website? So in a way, a browser would reach out to get things. They are an app that does certain things, but some of the furniture is brought in live. And what these developers do is wait until Apple's tested it and then change what gets sent online.

Yeah, but again, would that code not be... I'm not a coder or anything, so I wouldn't know, but it just seems like would the structure that allows that to exist not be findable? Could you not have a detection system for... I mean, unless it's just so well hidden and somehow... I just don't understand it enough to make my case, but I'm just saying it feels like there should be some way to stop this. But even if there isn't, at least...

have a reporting system in place, which Apple does. That's what Congress is asking is if people find non-consensual imagery that has been made, uh,

using these apps is there a way to report it to apple get this stuff taken down but this this drives into a whole different issue once it's made it's pretty much impossible to get something off of the internet and it it creates a lot of problems for these people because you know just having this any kind of imagery real or not it can be very destructive to your life to your personal image to just your relationships everything it's a it's it's rough

And so Congress is trying to find ways to combat it. And the usual Congress way, they don't really understand how the technology works or what to do about it. But I honestly, as long as this stuff exists, I don't really think there's a way to stop it. Cause even if you stop Apple from distributing the apps, they're still available on the web. You can still go buy an Android phone and bypass everything. And if the EU and other countries get their way, you'll be able to bypass everything on iPhone and install a third party app store full of porn apps. Like I honestly,

It always seems like they're very well-meaning in their approaches, but there's always some other bill on the other side of the government that's contradicting exactly what they're asking for here. Yeah.

But at least the bill that gets through has an acronym that is in some way really good and powerful and not in any way contorted. Yeah. Yeah. No, of course. I know the acronym you're talking about and I've forgotten it, though. And so it just seemed every time I read a U.S. story of a proposal for something to do with the Internet, it would be some incredibly complicated way of saying, I don't know, be nice online. And that would be the B.E. I can't I can't even.

No, there's this – I forget it, but it's the one going through right now that is really bad. That's Child Safety Online something. It spells a word, and I forget what it is. But it's a really terrible thing that I really hope doesn't go through because it's just exploitive specifically of, like, trans people and trans children, which seems to be –

a lovely topic in u.s politics these days but uh speaking of children uh there's another issue going on with apple so if you recall two years ago i believe uh there was a c-san protection feature coming out that would privately completely okay on device or on cloud network it was it was

I wrote about this ad nauseum and people just could not grasp it, but this was going to be a secure system. Apple was not scanning your photos. It was creating this kind of hashing tool that would allow it to see what images were being uploaded to iCloud without seeing them, right? It was, it would compare a hash and if it matched an existing hash of, you know, child exploitation material, well, okay.

it would flag it. And once it reached so many flags, you would get reported and then they would evaluate your iCloud and send it to, you know, the center for missing and exploited children, all that stuff. Did not ever make it to the light of day because privacy advocates were like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. What is this about scanning people's photos? That is a privacy violation. Bad on you, Apple. Don't do that. And eventually the privacy advocates won. And I'm,

generally a privacy advocate. I just believe that they were in the wrong on this one. I think Apple's system, maybe it needed to be tweaked or perfected, but they had the right idea. Do this without looking at the images and the end result is the same. You can actually find it and report on it. But now, you know, we fully went back to, uh,

Not being able to detect it. And everyone just seemed to kind of say, okay, whatever. It's fully encrypted. The police need to handle it on their end. Leave Apple out of this. They're just a technology producer. If someone decides to store something on iCloud, that is that person's fault, not Apple's. And that seemed to be the consensus until we started seeing lawsuits. So there were enough people who were pro this feature.

um that existed that it led to uh victims of c-sam abuse and spreading their imagery online coming together and creating kind of a class action lawsuit against apple for abandoning this project saying hey you need to find a way to do this it doesn't matter how maybe you need to implement this specific feature or a feature like it but get it done and so a court took up the case and that is underway

Well, so Apple's damned if it does and damned if it doesn't. I just... I can't... You said you wrote about this ad nauseum. So did I at the time. It was... That covered that widely. I'd forgotten it was two whole years ago. But I'd also forgotten... I feel I was more on the side of the...

anti-surveillance people than you were. I remember thinking Apple things was clever, but I could easily see, I think I could easily see how it would be subverted. So I wasn't as against it. I understand the slippery slope argument, right? And go back and read what I wrote, everyone listening. We don't need to dive into it here. It's a done deal. But yeah, the idea was...

at first they could hash against these images, but then what if a government like, I don't know, China said, uh, hash against these images. If there's anything anti-China in their iCloud, we want to arrest them. Right. And then that could be exploited, uh,

And I get it. Like that was a serious concern. And I figured I was on the side of let's cross that bridge when we get there. But of course, yes, authoritarian regimes, especially ones with as much power over Apple as China might exploit such a system. So,

I ended up on the side of let's walk away from it for now and hopefully a better situation, a better idea will come up later. But instead, I think Apple just completely threw it away and said, we're just not even going to bother anymore because there's just no way to do this without someone trying to exploit it.

or what have you so it's just i don't think anything's going to come from this case it's just bringing light to the fact that this existed in the first place um it might climb up the higher courts i don't know but it's it's hard apple fully encrypts everything and now there's a button you can toggle in settings that like adds in another layer of encryption that this nuclear mode of if you forget your password you lose everything forever even apple can't get to it so um

I don't know what you do in this case because I would fall on the side of consumer privacy and security. But this is such an important thing that something could be done. But also, this is why it's so complicated. People use but the children every time they want to get something done and slip in their nefarious little deals on the other side. So it's an impossible line to walk. And Apple's in a tough place.

Chudden is too powerful at points. It's used...

In good ways and bad ways, and I think that's just the sheer volume of it, the scale of it. Whenever somebody does that line of, but the children, I'm instantly alert and against them because it's like a trigger phrase rather than a reasoned response. It's, I'm throwing this at you. I'm getting political cynical here, and this maybe isn't a time to do that. At the end of the day, I think...

There's probably a way to do something, but the initial concerns I think are valid. And maybe Apple could find another way to do it without...

leaving any options open for for abuse and i i know that's an impossible ask but you know we're i don't think there's a timeline here if maybe if there was a deadline there'd be a little bit more danger of something bad happening in this but this is just you know your simple usual lawsuit a group of 2600 eligible victims coming together to complain about um apple yeah i i

I'm also on the side of, you know, good old fashioned police work does its job. Right. You don't you don't usually hear about these kinds of cases coming from. Well, we found it in Google's cloud and then they were arrested. It's well, they got caught doing something and then they found the cloud storage full of stuff. Right. Like, yeah. So so I I can see why people would say, hey, just let the police do their work.

And this gets back to the deepfake problem, which people make deepfakes of children too, which is terrible. But this is such a wide issue on both sides of Apple's tech here, the App Store allowing these apps in, storing these items, iMessage being encrypted. It's all so complex. But again, Apple's just stuck between a rock and a hard place. What do you do? And at the end of the day, really, I think it's...

police have to do the police work and not wait for a detection system to set off an alarm and iCloud for them to go arrest somebody. Kudos how this one will pan out, but the lawsuit itself you can guarantee will take a long time even if it goes nowhere. I have a feeling this is going to go nowhere. I mean, I think it's important to have the awareness, but I believe this particular method of detection is long dead and gone.

And maybe in a couple of years, because Apple even said when they dismissed it, we're going to revisit it in the future. And when that future is, who knows? Do you know, I'd forgotten that. I remember reading that thinking, oh, yeah, yeah, sure you are. But actually, they could mean it. You're right. So maybe there'll be another day when this is better. Okay. That's more optimistic. I like that bit. On to better things. Pat Gelsinger is no longer at Intel. Yeah.

Right. I can't say this really kind of shook my news radar this week, except I did read that he might be replaced by... Why does this happen to me? Johnny and I'm really sorry, I can't pronounce his surname. Thank you. Yeah, that's exactly what I was going to say. Who will, of course, leave Apple immediately and take over Intel and sort everything out. Is that looking likely? No, Sturridge is not going to Intel, but...

I do find the whole story very interesting. If you don't know the story of what happened with Intel, go look it up. We don't have time to delve into it here. But basically, Intel thought they were the king of the mountain. x86 is the future. They didn't bother with smartphones. They didn't bother with crypto. They didn't bother with AI. They just kept marching forward. x86. They even tried to make an x86-based GPU. And it's just this whole hilarious...

terrible thing and uh i think sadly like there was a lot more than just pat gelsinger at the center of these decisions but i you know obviously didn't help as the ceo but he definitely played scapegoat to the shareholders and was given a very short timeline to turn things around the plan hadn't even fully gone into effect when they said nope you know what just get out and they they voted him out of the company so we'll see what they decide to do here uh

Intel's in a lot of weird places right now with government contracts and trying to get things made in the United States versus TSMC. Ugh, man. This was one of those, it'll be in the history books of tech, but it was such a blip on the radar this week with everything else going on.

I didn't know about the x86 GPU, but I did remember that Intel not just didn't bother going into phones, it actively turned down the iPhone. The only thing is, as stupid as that seems now, at the time, you can kind of see their logic for it. So I feel sorrier for them, although I think it's worked out better for us in general as users than...

basically a Windows phone with an Apple logo on it. So I wasn't unhappy, just sympathetic. Speaking of CEOs on the chopping block, no, no, Luigi has been arrested, not that. I'm talking about Apple delaying iOS 19 features. Terrible. Okay. So Tim Cook should be fired, right? Am I the only one saying this? It's just such an utter upset. Yes.

I don't know how he can sleep at night, said William, while thinking, what? We're only on iOS 18.2. I love these stories. This is the usual annual cycle of, it's a slow news cycle, so I should say something's delayed that hasn't been announced yet kind of story. At least it feels that way. Nothing against the people who released the story. I just find them very funny every time they happen.

So apparently things are going so slow, so poorly in iOS 18 that the engineers are working overtime to fix iOS 18 and all of its terribleness so that it's good, but they are losing their ability to focus on iOS 19. So some features that were meant to be out at launch are being pushed back into 19.2 and 19.3.

Okay. I don't know what we're supposed to take away from stories like this, but they do exist. They come up every year. Unannounced thing delayed. Oh, no. Yeah, I don't know. I do find it funny, again, that what's happening internally at Apple? Is it the dog sitting in the chair and the room's on fire? This is fine, right? Like,

What is happening at Apple that we keep getting these stories every year that are almost always wrong in some way? Like iOS 18.2 released fine. I think they had an unexpected RC2, which happens in development. They found a critical bug at the last minute. Uh-oh. And it released two days later. What's the problem? We got...

chat GPT and image playgrounds. We're going to get the new series support in 18.4 as far as we can tell and,

What is this, quote-unquote, like, delay? What is falling behind? What is falling apart inside of Apple that apparently isn't here? Well, excuse me. I can actually tell you that, except I've forgotten the term for it. In Image Playground, you have, like, a sketchy thing, an animation thing that was supposed to be, was it a line art version? Well, where's that then? Yeah. Yeah. That's it. I'm going to Android. Oh, sure. Sure it is. I don't... Yeah. Everyone said...

something else along those same lines or was it just those three? It was line art and there was one that came off almost more realistic.

I forget what it was called. Like it was some sort of portraiture kind of thing. But those are still coming. Apple confirmed to sources saying basically, yeah, they got removed from the website and from the beta cycle, but they're still being developed. So, okay, sure. I guess they removed two options from Image Playgrounds called the tech police. But I don't know.

18.2 is a pretty solid release. I've been running it for a while. I wonder what everyone's making with Image Playground and Genmoji. If you guys want to share that with us on Blue Sky, please go ahead. I'm sure there's some horrific, fun creations being made out there. And you can save your Genmoji as an image if you want to. You just hit the three-dot icon in the editor when you're making it. So, yeah.

Yeah, just had this in here because I just found it funny. To continue off of that, though, the future, iOS 19 is going to be paired with the iPhone 17, which is due in September of 2025. We've got a lot of rumors surrounding that.

Is this device cycle interesting to you at all? You're still rocking the 15, aren't you? No, I did. I skipped. I've lost track. Oh, 14 to 16. That's what I skipped. Thank you. Yeah, so I'm on 16 Pro Max and enjoying it.

Very much. I'm enjoying it enough that I am substantially less likely to go to a 17 Pro Max. I think I'll stick with this for a while. But if something really shook that up, like a slimmer one that was in some way...

a third of the price, I don't know, something like that. I could be tempted again. Right, if they just make it $400, sure. Yeah, because it's Apple, they can afford to do anything, really. And I only want one at that price. They could charge everybody else what they like. I'm trying to be reasonable here.

So I'm entertained by some of the conflicting rumours I'm hearing about it. I think it's going to be interesting if there is a chance of a folding or a slim version or something that is just different. I'm curious to see how that turns out. But I can't say I'm hanging on every word and I feel like I've missed something big this week again. Well, nothing new. There's a very poor rumour of

Pro models having a bar of cameras, so three cameras side by side on the back of the phone, which just isn't going to happen. But the slim phone won't die in rumors. And our co-worker Oliver wrote a little bit here about how Apple's taking the wrong approach with the iPhone 17 slim. Instead of a slim phone, they should be making a fat phone. What do you think of that? Okay. Easier to grip kind of phone. Is that the...

Battery life. Why shave off millimeters of a phone, sacrificing battery life when Apple could make bigger phones, tougher phones that last longer? You know, what is the goal of Apple here? Why are they doing this?

That's good. I mean, actually, you could see, couldn't you, an iPhone 17 Ultra that would be like the rugged version, the way the watch ultra is for those hardy people who probably don't actually go hiking, but could do any minute now. Yeah, that could work.

Actually, I don't know that they have to be mutually exclusive. Well, you couldn't have one phone that's both, but I mean, why Apple can't do both sorts, I don't know. But we're quite on the same page. Apple could sell six iPhones in a year? That's crazy, William. I don't think... I'm sorry, what was I thinking? I think they would run out of phone and material, I think. Yes.

Yeah, no, I don't have much of an opinion here. There are people out there who have very strong opinions over battery, battery life, and health, and all this stuff, and I'm just like, I just use my device until it turns off. And it never turns off because I always have a MagSafe charger in front of me. I love going on Discord or other social medias and just posting my battery graph, which is just a solid bar across the top with a dip twice a day where I take it off of the charger, and it's just like...

And everyone's just like, what are you doing to your battery? It's like nothing. It's it's charged. What do you want? My battery health is still at 100 percent. So it doesn't matter. People, you think too much about charging. Stop it. I did want to move on. One last thing before we close up the show for the day. Apple Vision Pro. Of course, we can't go an episode without talking about it. Oh, but this week, Popular Science made it the innovation of the year. Is that what you're thinking of?

That's one of the things here. I think that was cool, you know, instead of all the other things. AI cheese, Hi-C is in here. Yeah, and transparent television, which I really had to think about for a while there. But now I've thought about it. I at least want to see one, if not buy one. But yes. Transparent TVs look kind of like fish tanks. You know, Apple Vision Pro is kind of a transparent TV, if you think about it.

Okay, a bit of a reach there, but all right. No, it's not. It's actually the opposite. It's an opaque piece of glass you put in front of your face. But the Vision Pro is pretty cool. I do like that it gave it the innovation of the year because it is an innovative product. Even if it's not selling, it is revolutionary and innovative in a lot of ways. But, like, you know, of course people are going to take issue with that. But I think it's a pretty smart product.

approach Apple has taken to the mixed reality AR VR style. So we'll see what the next generation looks like. But until then, we have to deal with the one we have. And...

Apple apparently is working to try and get VR controller support built into the operating system. Of course you went this way because they're VR controllers for games, aren't they? So I was reading to the end of the sentence all games and I think my mind just tripped over into something else. Along the same lines, I was reading that there's a need for finer controls. Like this is the wand I've heard about. People are saying with things like Final Cut Pro, it's quite hard to use your eyes to...

cut very easily in it I take it game controllers would remove that problem for games then

Yeah, it's, there's so many reasons to have hand controllers. Haptic feedback is huge. Oh yeah. As well as just tactile feedback and games, especially if you squeeze a trigger, it's reaction, the vibrations, it's all just a very specific set of things. And games like super hot and beat saber don't make sense without haptic feedbacks and controllers. You

If you're just pointing finger guns at the air, swiping a karate chop across the room, it feels empty. It feels...

than maybe a PlayStation VR experience. Even though PSVR is a worse headset than the Apple Vision Pro, it is the better place to game. So if the PSVR controllers, like DualSense, used to, there was a time you could not pair a PlayStation controller with an iPhone or iPad. You know, that changed. Apple, there was an iOS release that allowed pairing these controllers with iPads and iPhones. So this is the same situation here, except Apple...

isn't really starting from a place from having a UI built for controllers. So I'm not sure what they're going to do other than maybe treating the controller like a mouse and letting, uh, the iPad mouse cursor appear, uh, as you point the controller on compatible apps. And then in applications that use the controller have full access to a controller API, which I hope exists because it, it shouldn't just be PSVR two controllers. Um,

I'm testing these controllers made by a company, Surreal Touch. I can't use them. Turns out you need a gaming PC, and I don't own a Windows computer, so I might have to send them to Mike to let him play with them. I'm working on workarounds, but either Apple has to come out with this first...

I have to buy a gaming PC, a virtual computer will work with this, or I'm sending this to Mike. I don't know what to do here. But they're really nice controllers. I just can't use them. Sorry, it just reminds me of when Apple Arcade came out. Give this a go. I'm not...

opposed to games for some crazy reason. I just don't happen to be drawn to them. And here were several hundred. Let's have a go at one. And there was a Star Trek game. And I thought, well, I like Star Trek. I'll go to that. And the first thing he said was, no, you need a controller. And I thought, I know. I am not going to buy a controller just to try out one game, one service and never come back. Right.

Exactly. I mean, and that's fine. And there's a lot of good touch games. Some games just need controllers. You can't play Resident Evil or Assassin's Creed without a controller. It's impossible. The buttons are there. They're just... You're not going to play the game with a touchscreen. Not well, anyway. But the surreal touch ones, they're nice. I'm excited to write the review, or maybe Michael will write it. But they're very well made. Good VR controllers. They're modeled kind of like the PSVR controllers and stuff. But...

The idea is I would connect a gaming PC running SteamVR, so then I would play Beat Saber or whatever in SteamVR, but then stream SteamVR through ALVR, an application that runs on the Vision Pro, connected to the controllers. So I'm playing SteamVR on Windows. The Windows PC is running the game, but I'm streaming it to the Apple Vision Pro headset. So it's kind of a cheat code, right, to get the VR in there.

And fine. And then technically speaking, it's kind of like how Google had that gaming platform, the streaming platform, where it made its own controller. And you use that controller to control the streamed games. So the controller had a direct Wi-Fi connection to this game.

cloud pc where you'd play the games from it google gave up on it like everything else but it's it's kind of a similar concept except it's all local because i tried that too you can't use a i went to shadow and looked at it you cannot use a streamed pc to do this or else i would be doing that believe me everyone i've tried every everything if you do not have a windows pc in your home probably not going to work sadly so um i i

hey, if Apple comes out with this API in the next few weeks and Surreal Touch is able to tap into it, problem solved. But we'll see. We'll cross that bridge when we get there, I suppose. Actually, have you tried things like Parallels and... Well, Boot Camp's gone now, isn't it? Oh, sorry.

Though it's a step too far. Yeah, it's just I don't... If I have to virtualize the entirety of Windows on my Mac, I don't think I'm going to be able to run SteamVR on a M4 processor. I tried Whiskey, if you've ever heard of that. Everyone, if you need to run a dinky little Windows application, get Whiskey. Don't go and virtualize the entire operating system.

Whiskey's great. Just look it up. I don't, it's all you need to know. It's, you can run just an app, a .exe on Mac OS through Whiskey. It's kind of an emulation layer, but it works great anyway. Nope, can't do that. Whiskey will not. I can install Steam on Whiskey. I can install Steam VR. It will not execute.

It gets all the way to the page where you're opening SteamVR. The loading screen appears and it says error, file not found, whatever. And it's just like, okay, well, never mind. I tried. That's about as far as I'm willing to go, I think, in that project anyway.

You put a lot more effort in than I would have done. So, I mean, I've used Steam and thought even when it worked, it was... I had one game, I was reviewing it, I wanted to play it. Because it was through Steam, did I have five or 20 steps to go through? By the end, because there was also a bug somewhere and it was repeating in the end, and I just, you know, I played the game because I was required to to write about it and I never went back. And that's when Steam was working. So the kind of...

rudimentary pulley system you have created to make this work actually i mean it's admirable um just a heroic failure at the same time i'm sorry i was just making sure um i didn't violate any embargoes surreal touch exists you can go to the website uh you know i don't think it's a secret so there we go okay do you want me to just take out this section though or anything in case there's a

No, no, no. I mean, it's just one of those weird pre-order devices. I don't think there's any issues. People have talked about this device. This is a question that's been raised is, you know, can Surreal Touch get this new feature thing? Anyway, not worried about it because I just looked at my emails and it's just like, oh, here we go. See, I was...

Oh, see, okay, this is what messed me up. I'm in Vision Pro and I haven't configured my mail correctly, so my oldest email's at the top, where on my iPad I have newest email at the top, so I was reading it in reverse. Yeah, there's no embargo agreements or anything. Correct. Other than cutting this section out, we can leave it in. Anyway, so let's close up.

Well, that was a fun show. It took some dark turns, but, you know, busy week for Apple in December. Remember when we used to just, you know, kind of take a nap through after Thanksgiving and wake up in January and get back to work?

No, I was always there with my apple car should be blue. The latest rumors. I got very creative during the December silly season. And those days are gone now because there's actual news. Well, thank you very much, Apple. Of course, yes. Keeping us on our toes. But I would like to...

Well, no, I'm not closing up yet because I've almost forgot. There are no new reviews in Apple Podcasts this week. I went and checked. Nothing new. So if you guys want to leave a review, tell us how we're doing on the show. Have anything to say at all. Just reach out to us there. That's a good way to pop up on the show with your comments. But also, you can reach me on BlueSky.com.

I'm still on Mastodon. You can tag me there if that's where your accounts are, but I am not really active there. Blue Sky really has kind of taken off and all my people are there, so that's just where I'm talking. But yeah, no new reviews this week to discuss on Apple Podcasts, but there's always a chance for next week if you guys leave a review. You can also always just email me at Wes at AppleInsider.com. I get some good emails every week and always happy to hear from you guys. If you

If you want to comment on the AI stuff or Apple vision pro, or Hey, if you listen to Apple music radio, maybe let me know that I'm not alone in the world, but William, where can people find you?

Well, similar things. I'm on Blue Sky and enjoying it. I'm William at AppleInsider.com. I'm also on YouTube with 58 keys. But actually, I would really like to know if this is just me. I go on threads for Apple Insider and every time I go on, my entire feed is full of people saying, like, I don't know...

if you think God is great, hit this heart symbol. It's like God himself wants likes on social media. And, you know, if today is Tuesday, heart this. And you look at it and thousands of people have hearted. But it's like that's all I'm seeing now on threads. It's bots talking to bots. Yeah. Threads is awful. It fell apart a few weeks ago and just never recovered. Yeah.

Engagement bait all the way down. Anytime you see something like that, that's just like, you know, they're testing a new repost function. Repost this to see what happens. And of course, there's nothing happens. Yeah, just pure engagement bait. Worthless garbage content. But hey, luckily, Blue Sky, not yet anyway. And they're coming up with a paid tier. A lot of people are going to be angry about it. But honestly, I think I would be happy to give them money for that.

a little verification badge and some extra features. Like I think they're doing a good job over there. It's an interesting little, they are, and it must be, uh, incredibly difficult operation to run. I mean, all of these sessions with the sheer volume of posts and things, uh, it must cost a lot of money as well as be just difficult to maintain. So I didn't know about that pay thing, but that makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. They must be doing something right. If Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta has to announce new features for threads, right?

Like he, he himself came out and said, Hey, we're working on allowing you to permanently pin your chronological timeline as a response to blue skies, popularity like that, that shows someone scared somewhere. So they're obviously doing something right. But anyway, let's close up. Thanks again for listening. And I'd like to thank our sponsor masterclass once again, and we'll talk to you guys next week.