Let’s watch some TV! Brett and I start this week’s episode of the In the News podcast discussing my list of my Top 30 favorite shows on Apple TV+. You may disagree with a few choices and the ranking (I’ve already been told by a colleague at work that I should have listed Lessons in Chemistry and Shrinking even higher, and perhaps I should have), but I am confident that these are all shows that you should consider watching. We also discuss what Apple may have planned for using satellite technology, the future of AI in Apple products, the new Apple Vision Pro accessories from Belkin, how to buy an iPod, sharing passwords, and more.
In our Where Y’at? segment, we discuss the tale of an iPhone under the ice.
In our In the Know segment, Brett and I kick off the beginning of travel season for Thanksgiving and the other upcoming holidays by sharing some travel tips. Brett shares a great tip for getting travel info in the Messages app. I discuss recent improvements to the Flighty app and recommend paying for that app and/or TripIt Pro.
It has been quite a week, to say the least, and many of us are looking to find some escape from the daily news. Watching a great show can be a wonderful way to do that, and there are so many amazing shows on Apple TV+. As noted by Ryan Christoffel of 9to5Mac, there four shows coming to Apple TV+ this month. Next week, it will be the second seasons of Bad Sisters and Silo. The following week, the new series Blitz debuts, as does the documentary Bread & Roses. In a related post, Christoffel says that the early reviews of Silo’s second season are very positive. But those four are still at least a few days away; what if you want something this weekend? Here is my current ranked list of my favorite Apple TV+ shows of all time: (1) Ted Lasso, (2) For All Mankind, (3) Severance, (4) Slow Horses, (5) Silo, (6) Dark Matter, (7) Trying, (8) Bad Monkey, (9) The Morning Show, (10) Five Days at Memorial, (11) Mythic Quest, (12) Foundation, (13) Hijack, (14) Lessons in Chemistry, (15) Schmigadoon!, (16) Shining Girls, (17) Bad Sisters, (18) Presumed Innocent, (19) Echo 3, (20) The Afterparty, (21) Sunny, (22) Tehran, (23) Shrinking, (24) Physical, (25) Black Bird, (26) Dickinson, (27) Masters of the Air, (28) Palm Royale, (29) Lady in the Lake, and (30) Loot. Ask me again tomorrow and I’m sure the order of some of those will change, so don’t focus too much on the specific rankings, but suffice it to say that those are thirty great shows, and if you haven’t seen one or more on my list, I recommend them. And I’m not even including some other Apple TV+ shows—such as See, Manhunt, Sugar, and Monarch: Legacy of Monsters—that had some good moments but they don’t make my Top 30. And now, the news of note from the past week:
Apple announced that it purchased Pixelmator, a company that makes some amazing software for the iPad and Mac. I use Photomator on my iPad all the time. William Gallagher of Apple Insider shares his thoughts and hopes about the acquisition. I for one hope that Pixelmator’s great apps continue to thrive with Apple in charge, even if we see some name changes and other modifications to fit into the Apple ecosystem. It is my sincere hope that Apple wasn’t just looking to hire some smart computer programmers with no interest in the company’s existing apps.
Apple also announced that it purchased a 20% interest in Globalstar, a company based just outside of New Orleans that provides satellite services, as reported by Eric Slivka of MacRumors. Again, I’m very curious to see what Apple does with this technology in light of this investment. It seems unlikely that Apple would spend so much money on a feature—albeit a potentially life-saving feature—that isn’t used very often. So there must be more to this story.
Belkin announced two new products for the Apple Vision Pro this week. One is a Head Strap that you use with the Solo Knit Band to provide extra support on the top of your head. The other is a travel case. Jason Snell of Six Colors reviews them both and concludes with a thought that I also had when I first saw this product announcement: did Apple reach out to Belkin, encourage them to create these two products, and then work with them to do so? That’s something that Apple has done in the past when Apple wanted to have an accessory for one of its products but, for whatever reason, did not want for it to be an Apple-branded accessory. And as Jason notes in his post, there are some signs of that here.
Andrew O’Hara of Apple Insider notes that when visonOS 2.2 is released, a new feature will be the ability to create a virtual external Ultra Wide display for your Mac.
9to5Mac asked readers to send in some of their best photos taken with an iPhone 16 and Arin Waichulis shows off the winners.
Ryan Christoffel of 9to5Mac says that he is a fan of Apple’s new Passwords app because of its ability to create shared password groups. I do something similar in 1Password by designating some passwords as private to me and others that I share with my family members. Shared password groups in Passwords is more flexible because you can share passwords with any group of people, although for me it would be pretty rare for me to want to share one of my passwords with anyone outside of my family.
Christoffel also notes changes in CarPlay in iOS 18.1, such as a new Siri voice, which I noticed a few days ago. It’s a fine voice—Apple says that it is more natural, expressive, and clear—but it is noticeably different.
Michael Simon of Macworld notes that you can currently get Apple Solo Loop bands in discontinued colors for only $20 on Woot, a big savings off of the original $50 price. I just purchased a Deep Navy one to replace one that I loved using until it broke.
Juli Clover of MacRumors discusses Apple’s litigation with Masimo and notes that Apple said this week “that it is exploring all possible methods to get blood oxygen sensing back in U.S. Apple Watch models.”
Bradley Chambers of 9to5Mac has advice for buying an iPod. Wait a minute … [checks notes] … yes, that’s correct. I did mean to say iPod.
What would your daughter do if you took away her phone for a few months even though she and many others could still easily see it? Malcolm Owen of Apple Insider reports on a man in the UK who is getting the cold shoulder from his daughter after her iPhone was frozen in a public skating rink.
Many people remember a time when using an electronic device to communicate with people around the world meant hearing three words: You’ve got mail. Emmett Lindner of the New York Times notes that the man who spoke those three words, Elwood Edwards, died this week.
And finally, let’s end up with a return to Apple TV+. If you are as excited about Season 2 of Silo as I am, you might enjoy the sneak peek at Season 2 (which I thought had only the lightest of spoilers) and this short video in which the star, Rebecca Ferguson, discusses (but doesn’t really answer) a few fan theories about the show:
Thank you to SaneBox for sponsoring iPhone J.D. this month. In the past, I’ve written extensively about how SaneBox works. In short, you keep using your current email service just like you always have, but SaneBox analyzes the headers of your emails (things like who it is from, who it was sent to, and the subject line) without looking at the body of the email at all. Based on its analysis of the headers, SaneBox moves some of the emails from your main Inbox to another folder.
The end result is that SaneBox lets you avoid the distraction of dozens of non-essential emails in your Inbox. Instead, your Inbox just contains the few messages that really matter, the ones that you want to know about and/or need to act upon. When you have more time, you can click the sub-folder in your Inbox into which SaneBox stores items like email newsletters—things that you want to see at some point, but there is no urgency to read them right away. Or you can click the sub-folder in your Inbox into which SaneBox filters items to be read later—for me, these items are mostly junk messages that were not caught by my email’s built-in spam filter. For unwanted items, you can drag them over into your SaneBlackHole folder, which is a way for you to teach SaneBox’s brain that you never want to see items from that sender ever again.
SaneBox offers much more than what I’ve just described. For example, it can remind you when you haven’t received a response to an email, and it can filter emails in countless other ways. But those core features make the process of reading your email so much faster and so much less annoying.
I’ve been paying for and using SaneBox for two years now, and it is great. For my iPhone J.D. emails, when I look at the Inbox I can quickly focus on the messages that matter the most to me, such as a reader sending in a suggestion with a news story for my Friday In the News post or interactions with someone who matters to me. From time to time, I look at the other folders used by SaneBox and I can quickly deal with those emails, but they are virtually always the email that don’t really matter to me. For my Gmail account, SaneBox has been a lifesaver. I use Gmail when I make purchases from websites, stores, services, etc., and as a result there is so much in there that I don’t really care about. But I don’t want to miss my Gmail emails that do matter. Before I started using SaneBox, I would open up Gmail and see over a hundred messages, most of which didn’t really matter to me. Now, I often see less than 10 messages in my Inbox. Every few days, I’ll take the time to look at the folders used by SaneBox, and I can easily read the stuff that I want to see or quickly delete all of the ones that I don’t care about. It has made such a huge difference to me, and it saves me so much time.
If you want to try out SaneBox to see what a huge difference it can make in your life, click here to get a 14-day free trial with no credit card required. If you don’t like having a clean and tidy Inbox and want to go back to how you had it before, no sweat. But if you appreciate having a better way of working with email, using the link in this post will give you a generous $25 credit for when you pick a plan—and there are lots of different plans offered so that you can pick the one that gives you just what you want.
Thanks again to SaneBox for giving me and you a more efficient way to work with email and for sponsoring iPhone J.D. this month.
A few days ago, Apple released the results for its 2024 fiscal fourth quarter (which ran from June 30, 2024, to September 28, 2024) and held a call with analysts to discuss the results. The fiscal fourth quarter is typically a less important quarter for Apple. The fiscal quarter that we are in right now—the first fiscal quarter of the new fiscal year—is the one that is typically Apple’s big revenue quarter because of holiday sales. Apple’s 2024 Q4 was also unusual this year because Apple accounted for a one-time charge of $10.2 billion resulting from a long-running tax case that Apple lost in the European Union relating to Ireland. But Apple is such a big company now that it can pay someone $10 billion and still have a profitable quarter. Revenue was $94.9 billion, which is an all-time record for Apple’s fiscal fourth quarter and up substantially from $89.5 billion this time last year. If you want to get all of the nitty-gritty details, you can listen to the audio from the announcement conference call on the Apple website, or you can read a transcript of the call prepared by Jason Snell of Six Colors. Apple’s official press release is here. Here are the items that stood out to me.
iPhone
Apple’s iPhone revenue for the quarter was a record $46.2 billion, up 6% from this time last year. Apple CEO Tim Cook said that this was a result of sales growth in every part of the world where Apple sells iPhones.
Apple CFO Luca Maestri—who appeared for the last time on an earnings call because he is transitioning to another role as he prepares for retirement after a decade in this position—noted that the number of active iPhones reached an all-time high this quarter.
iPhone revenue was 49% of all Apple revenue this quarter, which is consistent with the last few years.
iPad
Apple’s iPad revenue for the quarter was $7 billion, up from $6.4 billion this time last year and only slightly down from $7.2 billion this time two years ago. $7 billion in iPad sales is a great number for Apple. As I mentioned three months ago, it is pretty rare for Apple to have a quarter with over $7 billion in iPad sales and when that does happen, it is often during a fiscal first quarter where there are holiday sales. To reach $7 billion, and to do so in the months of July, August, and September where there are no special reasons for higher-than-normal iPad sales is pretty impressive.
Well over 50% of people buying an iPad are buying their first iPad.
iPad revenue was 7% of all Apple revenue—pretty close to Apple’s Mac revenue, which was 8%.
Other
Cook mentioned that the Apple Vision Pro Vision Pro now has more than 2,500 native spatial apps and is compatible with over 1.5 million iPad apps.
AI is a big focus for Apple right now, so of course Cook finished his prepared remarks by discussing this technology: “As we close out the year, we have the best lineup we’ve ever had going into the holiday season, including Apple Intelligence, which marks the start of a new chapter for our products. This is just the beginning of what we believe generative AI can do, and I couldn’t be more excited for what’s to come.” Cook also noted that iOS 18.1 adoption is twice as fast as iOS 17.1 adoption, presumably because of customer interest in AI.
Services, which is a subset of Apple’s revenue that includes everything from the App Store to Apple TV+, saw an all-time record of $25 billion, up 12% year-over-year.
Apple noted that the quarter marked the 10-year anniversary of Apple Pay and the 5-year anniversary of the Apple Card. Maestri noted that the Apple Card was ranked #1 in customer satisfaction among co-branded credit cards by JD Power for the fourth year in a row.
Cook noted that the emails he has been getting from people taking advantage of the new feature to use AirPods Pro 2 to run a hearing test and act as a hearing aid are “staggering and heartwarming.”
Over 75% of people purchasing an Apple Watch are purchasing their first Apple Watch.
There were so many announcements and releases from Apple this past week, and as a result, boy is there a lot to talk about in this week’s episode of the In the News podcast. We start by discussing the new Mac announcements, especially the very interesting M4 Mac mini. Next, we discuss our initial experiences with Apple Intelligence in iOS 18.1. (When discussing the new Apple Intelligence features in Photos, I compared what Apple is doing to the iPad app from Pixelmator, and I was surprised to hear right after we finished recording that Apple is purchasing Pixelmator.) We also discuss the ability in iOS 18.1 to conduct a hearing test and to make AirPod Pros 2 work as a hearing aid, and more.
In our In the Know segment, Brett and I each have a similar tip about Apple Intelligence and notifications, except that we come at the tip from exact opposite directions.
Have you heard the good news? With iOS 18.1 now released, you can now use AirPods Pro 2 to check your hearing. I tested my hearing this week, and my iPhone concluded that my hearing was fine. My wife might sometimes disagree [insert rim shot here]. On the other hand, former practicing attorney John Voorhees of MacStories ran the test and learned that he had some minor hearing loss. Next, he used the AirPods as a hearing aid, and he says that it made a big difference. I’ve heard others say that if you already have expensive ($1000+ hearing aids), those are probably better. That makes sense. But for the countless people who have hearing issues but haven’t yet done anything about it, they now have easy access to a solution—perhaps using devices that they already own—that may noticeably improve their lives. And now, the news of note from the past week:
Apple updated many of its computers this week to add a super-fast M4 processor, more RAM, and more. I especially enjoyed the write-ups from Jason Snell and Dan Moren of Six Colors with their thoughts on the M4 Mac mini, the M4 MacBook Pro, and the M4 iMac. My home computer is an M2 Pro Mac mini, so I certainly don’t need a new Mac mini, but as Dan More points out, that doesn’t make the new Mac mini any less tempting.
If you are interested in an iPad instead of a Mac, Apple released the iPad Air (M2) just a few months ago, and I think that it is the best iPad for most professional users. Unless you want a luxury iPad or you have specific reasons to use a top-of-the-line model (in which case, get the iPad Pro), the iPad Air is perfect. And Amazon is running a substantial iPad sale right now, with some models selling for under $500.
I noted earlier this week that one of the useful new AI features in iOS 18.1 is Clean Up for Photos. But is it ethical to use it? In an article for Six Colors, Joe Rosensteel explains why you can use it with a clear conscience.
There has been a lot of talk about what you can do with Apple Intelligence in the new iOS 18.1. But what if your device doesn’t support Apple Intelligence? Juli Clover runs down what else you get in iOS 18.1, such as the ability to record phone calls.
In the upcoming iOS 18.2, if you cannot find the perfect Emoji to use, you can just use AI to create one that matches the style of other Apple Emoji with the Genmoji feature. Nick deCourville of The Mac Observer provides some humorous examples.
John Voorhees of MacStories notes that Apple has made a minor update to the Magic Keyboard, Magic Mouse, and Magic Trackpad to add support for USB-C. I regularly use a Magic Keyboard and a Magic Trackpad with my iPad and my Vision Pro, and it is a little annoying that I still need to use Lightning to charge them. I wish Apple had added even more new features to these accessories, but adding USB-C is better than nothing I suppose.
Voorhees also weighs in on Apple Intelligence in iOS 18.1, concluding that it is somewhat of a mixed bag. I agree with that assessment.
Bradley Chambers of 9to5Mac recommends the THIRDREALITY Smart Color Night Light if you are looking for a HomeKit-compatible night light. It is $29.99 on Amazon.
I very much enjoyed the first season of Presumed Innocent on Apple TV+, which tracked the book by Scott Turow. David Snow of Cult of Mac reports that while there will be a second season, it will feature a new female lead as the star and a new story, an adaptation of the upcoming book Dissection of a Murder by Jo Murray. Interesting. By making this more of an anthology, Apple TV+ could have an unlimited number of seasons of this legal thriller, and that sounds great to me.
And finally, here is a new video from Apple that shows, in a comedic fashion, how quickly you can use Apple Intelligence to create a Memory Movie. I see that Scott McNalty called this ad “smug and gross” but I think it is cute. And I can confirm from the ones that I made this week that you really can create an AI Memory Movie very quickly.
Yesterday, Apple introduced new products such as a new iMac and updated versions of accessories (keyboard, trackpad) to support USB-C instead of Lightning, but the biggest introduction was the release of iOS 18.1. Although only a “.1" update in terms of numbers, this is a major update because it is the beginning of Apple Intelligence on the iPhone, iPad, and more—assuming that you have a new device that is ready for Apple Intelligence.
Apple plans to introduce Apple Intelligence features over time, and features that are ready today are not as impressive and useful as many that are coming in the future. Even so, there are some big changes. For a more comprehensive overview of everything that is now available in Apple Intelligence, I recommend the following articles:
Note that to use Apple Intelligence, not only do you need to download iOS 18.1 but you also need to open the Settings app, tap Apple Intelligence & Siri, and then ask to join the waitlist to get access to this beta software. For me, permission was granted in about an hour.
In this post, I’m just going to touch on a few Apple Intelligence features that I tried out yesterday.
Siri
The look of Siri is all new. Utter those famous words “Hey Siri” and your iPhone screen becomes surrounded by a wave of color and the screen ripples. For now, I think that the effect is pretty cool, but I wonder if it will become stale over time.
Siri is also a little bit smarter than before. If you stumble over your words, Siri is more forgiving. You can ask limited follow-up questions. You can use your iPhone while you are talking to Siri. And you can ask Siri questions about how to use certain features of the iPhone (or other device you are using). It is sort of like having an Apple Genius from the Apple Store built-in to SIri.
I’d love to see even more improvements in Siri, but this is a good start.
Photos improvements
The major new addition to the Photos app is the ability to remove unwanted items from photos. This is a feature that third-party apps on the iPhone and iPad have had for years, and of course, it has also existed in computer software like Photoshop for a long time. But it is useful to have a great version of this feature built-in to the Photos app. Here are two quick examples.
First, I recently scanned an old picture of me when I was a baby, but it had lots of dust and scratches on it, plus parts of the picture had started to decay and change colors. So I decided to see what I could do with those problems in the new Photos app. Here is the original scan (tap to see larger), which is very much what the actual photo looks like:
I simply zoomed in and circled every dot or every area of the picture that I wanted to fix using the new Clean Up feature. Most of the time, Photos instantly did what I wanted. Sometimes, the effect wasn’t as good, so I would undo, adjust the selection, and then try again. It didn’t take long to have a version of the picture that removed everything that I wanted:
Then I adjusted the colors, and the final result—while not nearly as good as a modern picture—was much better than what I started out with.
This feature is also useful for removing unwanted objects in photos. For example, here is a picture that I took of the beach during a vacation:
But what would it look like if I removed all of those pesky people from the sand who were interfering with my view? And while were are at it, how about losing the big boxes that hold rental beach chairs. Easy peasy:
Modifications like this obviously have some ethical implications, depending on what you are doing with the photo. But if I have a wonderful picture of my family that would look so much better if I removed that one guy in the background, I can do it and have no trouble sleeping at night.
There are other Apple intelligence changes in Photos that I look forward to trying, such as improved search capabilities and the ability to create a Memory Movie just by describing what to include, but I need to give Photos time to index all of my Photos before I can try that one out.
Proofreading
Even the best writer can use a good editor. Grammarly is a helpful product because it can often find mistakes in your writing and offer suggestions to improve your writing, and it does so virtually instantly and automatically without you needing to get another human involved. In Apple Intelligence, Apple has added a Proofreading feature that makes similar suggestions that may improve the quality of your text.
This sounds really useful. However, in the tests that I ran last night, I disagreed with perhaps 75% of the suggestions. Indeed, some of them made no sense to me at all. To be fair, I often disagree with Grammarly as well, but not nearly this much.
I like the idea of adding a built-in proofreader to Apple products. But it needs to work much better than it does now. I think that Apple released this feature before it was ready.
Summaries
Apple Intelligence loves to offer you the ability to create summaries. Have a long email string? Tap one button at the top in Mail to summarize all of the emails. Looking at an article on a webpage is Safari that seems rather long? Tap the button to use Reader View and then tap Summary. And in lots of other places, the iPhone and iPad in iOS 18.1 offer you the ability to create a summary.
Sometimes, this feature works, and when it does, it is neat. But in my limited tests so far, the accuracy of the summary seems rather hit-and-miss. Moreover, I’m not even sure how useful a summary is to me in most of these cases; I’m going to probably need to, or at least want to, read everything anyway.
Let’s start at the very beginning
These initial tools are interesting, and in the case of the Photos app seem pretty helpful, but this is just the beginning. Some features are still half-baked, and some features like writing aids don’t interest me very much. But I suppose that I wasn’t all that useful when I was just a baby in the picture featured above, and I can certainly do much more now. Apple emphasizes that we will see even more Apple Intelligence features in iOS 18.2 this December, and then we will see even more next year. Now that we have iOS 18.1, the age of Apple Intelligence is now upon us. Hopefully, as Apple has the time to work on more sophisticated features, it will develop into something that is really special.
iOS 18.1 will be available in just a few days, so Brett and I begin this week’s episode of the In the News podcast talking about what you should look out for when you install the update. For example, if you have an AirPods Pro 2, you can use the hearing test and hearing aid feature. If you have a modern iPhone or iPad, you can use the first few features that are a part of Apple Intelligence to do things like proofread your writing, remove unwanted things from a picture, use descriptive words to search for photos or create a Memory Movie, improve your notifications, and more. We also discuss initial reviews of the iPad mini, an interesting interview with Apple CEO Tim Cook, nostalgic picture and immersive movies on the Apple Vision Pro, and more.
In our Where Y’at? segment, we discuss (another) example of catching a campaign sign thief using an AirTag.
In our In the Know segment, Brett shares a tip for changing the noise cancellation mode of AirPods, and I explain how you can fix problems with the YouTube app on an Apple TV by updating the software.
Next week, Apple is going to have an exciting week of announcements. In addition to revealing new Macs, Apple will release iOS 18.1, which will include the first examples of Apple Intelligence. For example, you will be able to use Photos search to find photos and videos simply by describing what you are looking for. It will also let you use your AirPods Pro 2 as a hearing aid (in the U.S. and Canada, at launch). Perhaps more interesting is what Apple will include a few months later in iOS 18.2. John Gruber of Daring Fireball says that 18.2 will include “categorization and priority inbox sorting in Mail, Genmoji, Image Playgrounds (including Image Wand, where a rough sketch in Notes can be transformed into a detailed image), and ChatGPT’s integration for more complex “world knowledge” requests. And, for iPhone 16 users, Visual Intelligence.” If you have a new iPhone that can support Apple Intelligence, your device is about to become much more interesting. And now, the news of note from the past week:
Federico Viticci of MacStoriews reviews the new iPad mini, concluding that it is a great additional device for those special tasks that are not handled quite as well on other devices.
Jason Snell of Six Colors reviews the new iPad mini, and he says that it is “great for kids, for people who prioritize reading over productivity, and generally for anyone who can fit an iPad into their lives—but there’s not a whole lot of space to fit into.”
Good Morning America got a first look at how Apple used its audio labs to turn the AirPods Pro into a hearing aid.
Ben Cohen has an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal Magazine based on his interview of Apple CEO Tim Cook. There are lots of interesting little details in here such as Cook’s favorite beverage, all of the devices that Cook uses—and I do mean “all”—his view of the Apple Vision Pro, and more.
In a post on 9to5Mac, Zac Hall explains why the Apple Vision Pro is the ultimate nastalgia machine thanks to the way that it lets you look at your photos. I couldn’t agree more. Here is one example: my teenage son often has limited tolerance for looking at my old photos. However, because panorama photos are so incredibly immersive on the Vision Pro, he was interested in seeing one of my recent ones the other day. Then he started swiping back to see earlier panorama photos. And then again. And next thing you know, he had looked at every single one that I have, going all the way back to my oldest panorama photo from 2005 (created by stitching together pictures using Photoshop). As he looked around in each immersive panorama, I followed along (in 2D) on my iPad, we talked about where each picture was taken and what the experience was like there. It was a fantastic father-son bonding time that would not have been possible without the Vision Pro and its impressive ability to show off these types of photos.
As impressive as a panorama photo is on a Vision Pro, spatial videos are even more impressive. For a while, it was pretty much only Apple offering spatial videos, and every time I watch a new one I find myself wanting more. I recently discovered a Vision Pro app called Immersive India by Parjanya Creative Solutions. This app features incredible high-quality spatial videos of numerous locations in India. There is no narration, but the views of places like Mumbai, Varanasi, Rajasthan, Delhi, and Odisha are impressive. And the app is free.
Hopefully, we will soon see even more impressive spatial videos that don’t come from Apple because Zac Hall also reports at 9to5Mac that Vimeo now has a visionOS app that allows spatial video sharing. I tried it out last night, and it is neat to see 360º videos where you are in the middle of the action. Unfortunately, the definition of these videos, for now, is far less than the 8K per eye that you get with Apple’s videos (and that Immersive India app) so while the videos are immersive, they can be a little blurry. I’m sure that this will improve in time for 360º videos on both Vimeo and YouTube. And hopefully, we will soon have a native YouTube app for the Vision Pro.
You can use an iPhone as a book reader but it might not be very comfortable holding it in your hands for a long time, plus your hands can cover the text. Juli Clover of MacRumors reports on a new $40 product called Bookcase from Astropad that makes it easier to hold your iPhone when you are using it as an e-reader.
Clover also reports that the newest state to add a state driver’s license to the Wallet app on the iPhone is the Hawkeye State: Iowa.
AirTags can be used to track stolen items. And with the election in the United States so close, that can unfortunately include stolen campaign signs. Lucas Ropek of Gizmodo reports on a woman in Missouri who had grown tired of her Kamala Harris signs being stolen so she placed an AirTag on one of them and was able to find the criminal and report him to the authorities. (I posted a similar story in July about a candidate running for a county position in Florida.)
When people need help, the iPhone is often the tool that delivers that help. But Juli Clover of MacRumors reports on a woman in Australia whose iPhone led to her problems: she dropped it between some rocks, and then when trying to recover it, she “slipped and fell three meters and became stuck between two large boulders, hanging upside down by her feet.” Yikes. It took hours to free her. Yikes again.
And finally, Joanna Stern of the Wall Street Journal interviewed Apple Vice President Craig Federighi to discuss Apple Intelligence. It’s a good interview that describes Apple’s cautious approach to the exciting world of AI.
Apple updated the iPad mini this week, So Brett Burney and I begin this week’s episode of the In the News podcast discussing what has changed from the model that Apple had been selling for the last three years and the advantages (and disadvantages) of using a small iPad. We also celebrate ten years of Apple Pay, discuss a financial-related AI feature coming to the iPhone in just a few weeks, discuss the ins and outs of sending text messages via Satellite, talk about expanded Caller ID for companies, address the latest version of the Clicks keyboard, and talk about the newest CarPlay app, the AirPods 4, and surgeons using the Apple Vision Pro.
In our In the Show! segment, we discuss two great shows on Apple TV+—Slow Horses and Bad Monkey—as well as a third movie coming next month called Bread & Roses.
In our In the Know segment, Brett shares a tip for switching pens in Notability (and GoodNotes), and I share some tips on using Apple Pay.
