One major reason that Apple devices like the iPhone are superior to competitors is the great user interface. When I say that, I suspect that you start thinking about how things look on the screen, but sounds are an important part of the user experience as well. Twenty Thousand Hertz is a podcast about the stories behind sounds that you know very well, and the latest episode is called The Sound of Apple. It is an absolute joy to listen to, and it provides the backstory of sounds that you know on the iPhone, Apple Watch, and other Apple devices. This works great in a podcast format where you pay attention to what you are hearing, not what you are seeing. The episode to which I linked is Part 1, and apparently, a Part 2 is coming out on August 14. I highly recommend that you listen to this one. And now, the news of note from the past week:

• Apple released iOS 17.6.1 this week and similar updates for other platforms. If you haven’t upgraded yet, you should do so soon to be safe. As Chance Miller of 9to5Mac notes, this update includes bug fixes that Apple considers to be important.
• John Gruber of Daring Fireball describes a big update to Flighty, my favorite travel app. The app can now both predict and explain flight delays, often giving you better information than the airline itself will tell you.
• Miller also notes that California will soon support storing your state driver’s licenses in the Apple Wallet app, with Iowa and Tennessee also supporting this feature soon.
• David Sparks of MacSparky talks about the new Apple Vision Pro environment available in the Disney+ app (there is also a new one in the Paramount app) and explains why it would be nice if Apple found a way that you can use these environments outside of those applications. I agree—that would be nice—and hopefully, Apple has this feature on its list of future enhancements.
• If you have resisted buying a Nest thermostat for your home because it doesn’t support HomeKit, William Gallagher of Apple Insider reports that the new version of the Nest Learning Thermostat uses the Matter standard, which means that it also works with HomeKit.
• When Apple first announced its upcoming movie called Wolfs starring both George Clooney and Brad Pitt, I assumed that it would first have a long theatrical run before it came to Apple TV+. But Benjamin Mayo of 9to5Mac reports that the film will only get a limited, one-week theatrical release on September 20 and then it will come to Apple TV+ on Friday, September 27. Given the two big stars in this movie and the fact that Apple is already working on a sequel, that surprised me.
• Matt Novak of Gizmodo submitted a FOIA request to NASA to find out which TV shows are available to watch on the International Space Station. He got a response, and it is an interesting list. It includes three Apple TV+ shows: For All Mankind, Severance, and Ted Lasso. Watching For All Mankind while you are in space sounds like a great way to enjoy the show.
• Zac Hall of 9to5Mac shares the story of a man in California who says that his Apple Watch saved his life by alerting him that his heart rate was very low. The doctors told him that he needed a pacemaker immediately.
• And finally, I’ve been enjoying a new show on Apple TV+ called Time Bandits. It is over-the-top silly, but it makes me laugh and has lots of great actors in it. If you are trying to decide if the humor of the show works for you, here is a two-minute clip from the first episode that introduces some of the characters. I consider it to be pretty spoiler-free, so you can watch this clip to you decide whether to start watching the series.

Last week while I was on vacation, Apple released the results for its 2024 fiscal third quarter (which ran from March 31, 2024, to June 29, 2024) and held a call with analysts to discuss the results. This is typically not a big fiscal quarter for Apple, but Apple made the best of it, announcing its best fiscal third quarter ever, with record revenue of $85.8 billion (up from $81.8 billion this time last year). There was also some interesting news on services, which I discuss below. 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 $39.3 billion, down slightly from $39.7 this time last year.
• Apple CEO Tim Cook noted that if it were not for the fluxation between the dollar and other currencies, iPhone revenue would have grown instead of being down slightly.
• Looking at the big picture across many quarters, iPhone revenue has been fairly steady for the last 2.5 years. That may sound boring, but it is a great thing. The iPhone is a killer product that brings in tons of money for Apple, which means that Apple can spend lots of money making future iPhones even better. Virtually every other company in the world would love to have a business that is as good as Apple’s iPhone business.

iPad

• iPad revenue was $7.2 billion, up 24% from $5.79 billion a year ago. That is a huge iPad quarter. Apple has had other quarters in its history with over $7 billion in iPad sales, but it doesn’t often happen outside of the first fiscal quarter, which contains holiday sales. (In 2021 Q1, Apple hit $8.4 billion in iPad revenue; in 2023 Q1, Apple hit an all-time record $9.4 billion in iPad revenue.)
• There is no real mystery behind the reason for the iPad revenue jump last quarter. After not releasing any new iPads at all in 2023, Apple released some great ones a few months ago, including the new iPad Pro M4 and the new iPad Air. I’m sure that there were lots of people—like me—who were waiting to upgrade until Apple released a fantastic new iPad. And Apple did that.

Services

• Perhaps the most interesting news was that Apple had its best-ever quarter for services. Services is a broad category that includes everything from the money that people spend at the App Store, subscriptions such as Apple Music, Apple TV+, Apple One, etc., third-party subscriptions for which Apple receives a share, licensing, Apple Care, Apple Pay, and more. On the one hand, you might say that having a record quarter in services revenue is no big surprise because virtually EVERY quarter has been a record quarter for services revenue for many years now. Every quarter, it goes up a little more. On the other hand, that number is now starting to get pretty big: $24.2 billion this quarter. That made it 28% of all of Apple’s revenue last quarter: less than the iPhone (46%) but more than all other categories combined (Mac, iPad, Wearables). When you ask someone what Apple does, it makes sense for the #1 answer to be that it sells the iPhone, but I wouldn’t have guessed that the #2 answer is providing services.
• Services is a particularly interesting category for Apple. Unlike buying products, which people might do only once every few years, many people pay for the same service month-after-month. That makes it a steady source of income that doesn’t fluctuate up and down. Also, it is a great source of profit. Apple has some of the highest profit in the industry on its hardware, around 35%. But in the services category, it is currently seeing 74% profit.
• Jason Snell of Six Colors wrote a fascinating article addressing what it means for Apple to be doing so well in the services category. It definitely changes what Apple is about. Don’t get me wrong, products are still important; people spend money on Apple services specifically because they use those services on Apple hardware. You need to have the iPhone and Mac and iPad for services revenue to continue to grow. But as Apple looks to its future, making decisions on services becomes just as important as making decisions on its traditional hardware products. This is something new that Apple has never before seen in its history.

I was thrilled to be the guest on Episode 203 of Tim Chaten’s fabulous podcast, iPad Pros. The iPad Pros podcast has been published for over seven years. In each episode, Tim talks to a developer of iPad apps or a person who uses the iPad in a professional setting to get work done. In the latest episode, I explain how I use my iPad in my law practice, and I go into great detail. We had a fabulous discussion; Tim does a great job coming up with questions.

If you have an interest in hearing all about how you can use an iPad to get work done as a lawyer, then you will enjoy this episode of the iPad Pros podcast.

Click here to listen to Episode 203 of iPad Pros.

This week, Brett Burney and I released a special episode of the In the News podcast, and it is one of my all-time favorite episodes. The episode is devoted to our history of using mobile technology. We talk about Sharp organizers, various devices made by Palm and Handspring, BlackBerries, Casio devices, and many more. We start in the 1980s when the term Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) had not been invented yet and come all the way until 2008 when Brett and I purchased our first iPhones.

If you lived through this time as well, you will enjoy our walk down memory lane. On the other hand, if the world of mobile devices before the iPhone doesn’t mean much to you, I think you will be fascinated by the features and limitations of the devices that we used to use.

Click here to listen to the audio podcast, or just listen using your podcast player of choice. You can also watch the episode on YouTube:

One of the big new features coming to the iPhone this Fall in iOS 18 is the integration of AI. When Apple released the beta version of iOS 18.0 in June for developers to start to work with, Apple’s most significant new AI features—including stuff that the company is calling Apple Intelligence instead of artificial intelligence—were not in the beta. This week, Apple released a developer beta of iOS 18.1. Not 18.0; 18.1. And it contains Apple Intelligence. This indicates to me that we will see Apple release iOS 18.0 and the 2024 versions of the iPhone around mid-September, but then we will have to wait another month or two for Apple to release iOS 18.1, which will have some of the first parts of Apple Intelligence. Thus, for those of us who do not run beta software on an iPhone, that means that we will not be able to start to use Apple Intelligence in September, but perhaps we will see some of it in October or November, with even more features added in 2025. And now, the news of note from the past week:

• Apple released iOS 17.6 this week for the iPhone and similar updates for numerous other platforms. But there are no new features; these are just bug fixes and security updates.
• Massachusetts attorney Bob Ambrogi of LawSites reports on a new ethics opinion from the American Bar Association that addresses AI. It is Formal Opinion 512 (July 29, 2024). The opinion says that lawyers don’t have to become experts in AI but they are ethically required to have a reasonable understanding of the capabilities and limitations of whatever specific AI technology that the lawyer uses.
• Julie Clover of MacRumors reports that if you live in Ohio, you can now put your state driver’s license in the Apple Wallet app. I knew that this was true even before I saw that report because my podcast co-host Brett Burney lives in Ohio and he texted me a picture of his license in the Wallet app. In Louisiana where I live, a digital driver’s license is supported but not in the Apple Wallet app; instead, you need to use a special app called LA Wallet that I first reviewed in 2018. I can tell you that after using this app for over five years, I really love knowing that if my iPhone is with me (and it aways is) then my license is also with me, even if I forgot to put my wallet in my back pocket.
• Ryan Christoffel of 9to5Mac provides a first look at Siri with Apple Intelligence based on what is currently available in the beta software.
• Juli Clover of MacRumors describes all of the AI features that are included with the first beta of iOS 18.1.
• While some AI features will definitely be useful and helpful, there can be a fine line between what seems great and what seems somewhat creepy. For example, check out this new video for an upcoming $99 product called Friend, a necklace that you can wear and talk to as if it is a, well, a friend. It responds to you via text message.
• This week, Apple announced that the fantastic Apple TV+ Sci-Fi show Silo will return for Season 2 in November, as reported by Benjamin Mayo of 9to5Mac.
• To use an Apple Vision Pro, you have to be able to use your eyes to look at items on the screen and use your hand to pinch or touch to select items. But what if you have ALS and cannot use your hands? David Snow of Cult of Mac shares the fascinating story of how a company called Synchron came up with a way for someone to just think about selecting an item and then trigger a selection, meaning that they don’t need to use their hands. I recommend that you watch the video linked in the story. It’s pretty incredible.
• In a post for Six Colors and Macworld, Jason Snell wonders if Apple should release a smart ring if it wants to go beyond the health features available with and Apple Watch.
• Braden Newell of Pocket Lint recommends Apple Vision Pro apps for getting work done.
• San Antonio reporter Priscilla Aguirre notes that former basketball player Sean Elliott is recovering after A-Fib treatment that he first learned was necessary because of his Apple Watch, even though he wasn’t seeing any symptoms.
• If you need a power strip, there is a big sale on Amazon on one made by Anker that my wife has used for years: it is currently under $15. It has a unique design, shaped like a cube, and with three sides offering additional outlets and one side offering USB-C and USB-A outlets. And for a few dollars more, you can get a version with a long cord (10 feet). My wife keeps this one at her mother’s house so that she can charge all of her devices when she visits.
• William Gallagher of Apple Insider reports that Apple’s Emergency SOS via Satellite feature on the iPhone saved the lives of four hikers who were cut off by wildfire in British Columbia.
• And finally, here is a silly video in which Jake Gyllenhaal & Nana Mensah of the Apple TV+ show Presumed Innocent try (horribly) to provide definitions for common legal terms. My main reason for including this video is to note that I just finished watching this show and I thought it was great. I would like to tell you more about why it was great, but I cannot do so without spoilers, so just trust me on this one. If you like a good courtroom drama with suspense and twists and turns, this one is for you.

As we get closer to the release of Apple’s new operating systems this Fall, in this week’s episode of the In the News podcast Brett and I discuss text formatting and other changes coming to the Messages app and some great new features coming to the Apple Watch. Next, we explain why it is now possible to run Windows 95 on an iPad, discuss aperture on an iPhone, including how and why it may become more adjustable on the iPhone in the future, Apple Maps in a browser, calling 911, and more.

In our Where Y’at? segment, we discuss why Find My is turned off in South Korea.

In our In the Know segment, Brett has a great tip for switching tabs in Safari on an iPhone, and I discuss changing alarm settings including the chime used to wake you up.

Click here to listen to the audio podcast, or just listen using your podcast player of choice. You can also watch the episode on YouTube:

I often share interesting stories of Find My being used to recover a lost iPhone, but apparently, there is a reason that none of those stories come from South Korea. William Gallagher of AppleInsider reports that Apple disables the Find My service when an iPhone is in South Korea. The Apple website page on Find My says: “The Find My network isn’t supported in South Korea and might be unavailable in other regions due to local laws. In South Korea, you can play a sound on your device, mark it as lost, or erase it, but you won’t be able to find your device on a map.” At first, I thought that the reference to “local laws” meant that Find My was somehow prohibited by government regulation. But it isn’t that—indeed, a similar feature is available in South Korea on Samsung phones. Instead, Gallagher says that the issue is that “South Korea law can be read as saying that all location data must be stored for six months, with an implication that the government must be able to access.” Apparently, Apple doesn’t want to risk turning on the Find My service and then finding itself in a position where it needs to violate the privacy of an iPhone owner. Very interesting. And now, the news of note from the last week:

• Wes Davis of The Verge reports that you can now use an app called UTM SE to run Windows XP on an iPhone, iPad, or Apple Vision Pro. It’s slow, but it works.
• William Gallagher of AppleInsider reports that iOS 18 will add support for Emergency SOS video so that a person who is stranded can show first responders their condition and environment. I have never had to call 911, so it didn’t ever occur to me that video has not worked with 911 in the past.
• There is a rumor that the next iPhone will include some mechanical control for the lens aperture. I don’t know if that is true or not, but Ben Lovejoy of 9to5Mac does an excellent job explaining how depth of field is handled on current iPhones and how it might be handled in the future if this rumor is true. The article does a great job of explaining how iPhone photography works.
• If you like to use the Apple Maps service and want to use it on a computer, even a PC, Chance Miller of 9to5Mac reports that Apple has launched a public beta of an online version of Apple Maps that works in certain browsers: Chrome and Edge on a PC, and Safari and Chrome on a Mac.
• A new Apple Vision Pro environment launched this week called Lake Vrangla, which transports you to Norway, as reported by Chance Miller of 9to5Mac.
• Justin Meyers of Gadget Hacks explains how the new text editing and text effects features will work in the Messages app in iOS 18. Prepare to see things like bold, italics, and underline in text messages, along with new animations.
• Ryan Christoffel of 9to5Mac explains why his favorite new features in the upcoming watchOS 11 are Smart Stack with Live Activities, Pasuing Activity Rings, and setting custom Activity goals.
• James Bentley of iMore reports that each episode of the upcoming second season of Severance costs $20 million per episode to make. By comparison, the article says that Breaking Bad cost $3 million per episode and the final season of Game of Thrones cost $15 million episode. I loved Season 1 of Severance and cannot wait for Season 2. And I know nothing about the cost of making TV shows. But Severance doesn’t strike me as the sort of show that would cost more to make the Game of Thrones. Perhaps this means that we will see dragons in Season 2 of Severance? We’ll see.
• And finally, Apple has a new video that emphasizes, rather dramatically, the privacy features in the Safari web browser. The commercial is called Flock and it reminds me of the famous Alfred Hitchcock movie The Birds:

 

I love my Apple Vision Pro and use it all the time, but I’m always looking for ways to use it more, especially in my law practice. I’m planning an upcoming presentation on the current uses and, perhaps more importantly, potential future uses of the Apple Vision Pro and similar next-generation spatial computing devices in a law practice as this technology matures. If you are one of the few attorneys using an Apple Vision Pro right now and have any thoughts to share on these issues, I’d love to hear from you on what you are doing now and what you can envision doing in the future. If you want to share, send me a note at jeff@iphonejd.com.

Brett and I begin this week’s episode of the In the News podcast by discussing the global outages on Friday morning. Next, we discuss the iOS and iPad OS 18 betas, sleeping with an Apple Watch, AirPods updates, the Overcast app, Emmy nods for Apple TV+, soaring with an Apple Vision Pro, small iPods of the past and perhaps the future, and iPhone-friendly bird feeders.

In our Where Y’at? segment, we discuss Apple Watches in the ocean.

In our In the Know segment, Brett and I discuss standby mode and the Anker 3-in-1 Magsafe charger.

Click here to listen to the audio podcast, or just listen using your podcast player of choice. You can also watch the episode on YouTube:

Apple released the first public beta versions of iOS 18 and iPadOS 18 this week. If you are curious to get a preview of the new features coming this Fall but don’t want something that is quite as buggy as the beta releases aimed at developers, the public beta may be the sweet spot for you. Jason Snell and Dan Moren used the release of the first public beta versions as a good excuse to provide a hands-on preview of many of the new features that are coming—at least, those that are available in the beta version. This excludes, for example, Apple Intelligence, which is not coming out until later this year. Here is Dan Moren’s look at the iOS 18 public beta and Jason Snell’s look at the iPadOS 18 public beta. Even if you don’t plan on installing any beta software this summer, these articles provide a nice preview of what is coming for everyone soon. And now, the news of note from the past week:

• Christopher Lawley has an interesting video interview with two Apple executives, Jenny Chen and Ty Jordan, to discuss Smart Script and Math Notes—two incredible things that you can do with an iPad and an Apple Pencil in iPadOS 18.
• My favorite smart home devices are my Lutron Caséta switches, which are available on Amazon. I last wrote about them eight months ago when I reviewed the new Lutron Caséta Diva Smart Dimmer Switch and Claro Smart Switch, both of which were great for me. Zac Hall of 9to5Mac reports that Lutron has expanded the line to announce a smart dimmer with ELV+ support (which means it works with lots of low voltage configurations, and thus works with nearly all residential lighting types and loads) and new colors for the simple Pico Paddle Remotes.
• I’ve written before about making a portable version of the HomePod mini by connecting an external battery so that I can take it outside. I don’t do this very often—just a few times a year—but it works well for me when I do so. Chance Miller of 9to5Mac reviews a battery that is made to work with a HomePod mini from a company called PlusAcc, and he says that this approach gets the job done. It is $44 on Amazon.
• Speaking of the HomePod mini, if you haven’t gotten one yet because the space gray option wasn’t quite doing it for you, Benjamin Mayo of 9to5Mac reports you can now get the very similar but slightly bluer color called midnight. But chances are, most people will just call them both black.
• My favorite app for listening to podcasts is Overcast. To celebrate the app turning 10 years old, the developer, Marco Arment, rewrote most of the app in Swift, Apple’s modern programming language. As a result, the app is much faster and more responsible. Better yet, it has a great new look and lots of new improvements, all of which are described in this post. I’ve been using the new version for a few days, and I absolutely love it.
• At the beginning, the iPhone was only available on AT&T, and there are still tons of iPhone owners who use AT&T. So it was unfortunate to see the recent news that AT&T was hacked, with the bad guys getting access to information on who users called during a certain period of time. John Gruber of Daring Fireball argues that this is a reason why Apple should have declined to support RCS—the new standard that will make it easier to send text messages to non-iPhone users because of better picture and video support and more—because while RCS has more features than traditional SMS, it doesn’t support end-to-end encryption. Thus, there is a real risk of future successful hacks. Gruber presents an interesting argument.
• The Emmy nominations came out this week, and Apple TV+ earned 72 nominations, the most ever for the streaming service. Sixteen shows were honored, including The Morning Show, Palm Royale, Lessons in Chemistry, Slow Horses, Loot, Hijack, The Reluctant Traveller With Eugene Levy, and more. The winners will be announced on Sunday, September 15.
• The quality of Apple TV+’s original programming is outstanding, but I also like it when Apple brings a select set of older movies to Apple TV+ for a limited time. Lucas Shaw and Thomas Buckley of Bloomberg report that Apple is talking to major studios to explore doing even more of that.
• When watchOS 11 comes out in a few months, Apple will encourage people to sleep with an Apple Watch to feed data into the new Vitals app. Jessica Rendall of CNet interviewed Apple’s VP of Health, Dr. Sumbul Desai, to learn more about this app.
• If you own an Apple Vision Pro, it is always great when Apple releases new immersive content. Yesterday, Apple released the first episode of a new series called Boundless, a six-minute movie in which you take a hot-air balloon ride over Turkey. It’s stunning; I only wish it were longer. Apple also announced this week that other new content is coming in August and September with even more coming later this year. As Jason Snell of Six Colors notes: “This is good. I want more, the more the better, and I’m glad Apple is announcing this stuff in advance instead of leaving us to wait and wonder why there isn’t more content available for the Vision Pro.”
• Ryan Christoffel of 9to5Mac notes that the AirPods Pro 2 will get even better in a few months with iOS 18 because they will gain new features such as nodding or shaking your head to respond to Siri and voice isolation to improve phone call audio quality in a noisy environment.
• A swimmer in Australia realized that he was being carried out to sea and could not swim back to shore. Fortunately, he was wearing an Apple Watch, and as Hannah Ross of ABC North Coast reports, he managed to call emergency services. It took a rescue helicopter an hour to get to him, but he was able to stay on the line and talk to someone the entire time until he was rescued.
• Charles Martin of Apple Insider writes about a man who lost his Apple Watch in the British Virgin Islands while swimming. Eighteen months later, someone found his watch and it was still working and displayed information on the owner, and as a result, the owner recovered his watch when someone sent it back to him.
• Juli Clover of MacRumors reviews the Bird Buddy, a bird feeder that sends pictures and videos of birds to your iPhone. The version with a solar roof is $239 on Amazon. This looks really fun, but I don’t think that I have a location in my yard to put it where it wouldn’t attract squirrels.
• I no longer have a need for an iPod in my life because of the other Apple products that I use, but the idea of a small and powerful device is still intriguing. That is the thinking behind tinyPod, a small device that surrounds an Apple Watch and adds a scroll wheel to create a product that seems similar to an iPod. I don’t know how well it works, but they get points for creativity.
• My father is an architect, so I grew up reading magazines like Architectural Digest that featured amazing pictures of stunning houses. William Gallagher of Apple Insider reports that Laureen Powell Jobs, widow of Steve Jobs, recently paid $70 million to purchase a home in the Pacific Heights region of San Francisco that was first built in 1916 and extensively renovated in the 2010s. Architectural Digest called it the most beautiful house in America. For example, one side of the house has four stories of glass that present an incredible view of San Francisco Bay and the Golden Gate Bridge. It also has a pretty amazing interior courtyard.
• And finally, in 2019, Apple released a video called The Underdogs that told the story of a scrappy team of office workers with a chance to sell their great idea. The point of the video is to show off how the iPad and other Apple products can be used to get work done. Apple followed up in 2020 with a sequel in which the same characters used Apple technology to work from home during the pandemic. The third installment came in 2022 to coincide with workers returning to their offices after the pandemic. (Apple has removed the first three videos from YouTube, but someone put them together into this video.) In 2023, Apple released the fourth video, Swiped Mac, in which the characters worked together to find a stolen Mac. And now, the team is back with a fifth video called OOO (Out of Office) in which they travel to Thailand and use all sorts of Apple technology to get the project done—even the new Apple Vision Pro. Here is the video: