iPhone 18 Event Preview, John Ternus is  CEO, Local AI Smart Home

Welcome and show updates

0:00We're in the Ternus game now. Welcome to Primary Technology, the show about the tech news that matters. It is the eve of the major iPhone event. We're going to pontificate a little bit what to expect. Also, IFA is going on right now with a ton of smart home devices and announcements. NVIDIA has said they're going to buy Hugging Face, the AI marketplace. John Ternus is now officially Apple CEO. And yes, Dyson released a $500 smart toothbrush. This episode is brought to you by you, the members who support us exclusively. Thank you for that. I'm one of your hosts, Stephen Robles.

0:30Joined by my friend, Jason Aitman. How's it going, Jason? It's good, but I think you might have broke the rule. I broke the rule a little bit. I mean, we got a new Apple CEO. It might be the last time that that happens during the tenure of the show. So, we're in the end game now, is the quote. Oh, oh. I tried doing we're in the end game now, but we're in the Ternus game now because... Okay. You know what I mean? Yeah, okay. Well, yeah, and you obviously know what movie that's from because it's right in the name. Well, sure. Well, it's not in the name.

1:01Isn't that quote from Infinity War? Oh, you know, you got it. That's right. Okay. You're absolutely right. Just checking. Dr. Strange says it in Infinity War. But yes, that is... Oh, good call. That's right. You got it again. I was like, hang on. What? But I would have never gotten that from we're in the Ternus era now. Like... Yeah, I say it in the Ternus game now, but I know it... Anyway, John Ternus is Apple's new CEO. Anyway, yes, I'm sorry. That's the exciting part. Cool. And I've now tweeted at him, inviting him on the show. So listeners, we'll see. Could you share that? Just make a Twitter account so he can see a whole bunch of brand new Bob accounts and

1:36just re-boost it or whatever you do on Twitter. Yeah, we'll talk about that. But anyway, hey, we also made 500 five-star reviews. We've done it. Jason, we're halfway to 1,000. Thank you for everyone who gave us a five-star rating. Interesting. Eric in Lakeland, Florida gave us a five-star rating review. That's like right near me. I've thought about doing like a meetup, Jason. I don't know if there's enough people in Florida. I think there's some. Let us know. I don't know. Some kind of... I mean, there's a couple million people in Florida. You just mean to listen to the show.

2:06That's correct. Ah, okay. That's correct. Listen, if you do a meetup and do it around Thanksgiving and I'll come. That... Boom. Okay. Get it. We'll do it. Get it done. Alex J. Coates from the USA also gave us a five-star rating. Battery percentage off. Front dominant pocket. Dots on. Minimized to icon scale animation. Alex J. got it. Down pack. That's how you do it. Battery percentage off. It's been a while since we said that. Do you think that people who are new to our show, who haven't really listened, but like, oh, I used to listen to Primer Tech. They're like, oh, so go check it out and look at some reviews, are like, what are these reviews?

2:41I think that's the best part. I agree 100%, but it's almost like we have our own little, you know, circle social thing where people are going to have a profile, but also you can just have a profile on our reviews. On our reviews. That's right. But we do have a bunch of regulars too, which it only counts the first time you do it, guys. But you know what? That's fine. J.D. I.S. from the USA says we're positive and fun. Both hosts have great personalities, Jason. He said both hosts. I know. You too. That's good. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Adam from the UK said we're an essential tech podcast.

3:12Black Sony 101 from the USA, we're his bike buddies, listens to us while he's bicycling. That's super fun. They're listening since 2024, since like the beginning and stuff. That's cool. Wortho 94 from the UK, we're his favorite tech podcast. Also wants a chat GPT voice assistant through shortcuts. Spoiler, I've made a shortcut for that. I will put it down in the show notes, just so you know. And this is very cool. The Medieval Knight Riding the Polar Bear has made it again around the world. This is from South Africa. This is Chippo, who sent us these pictures.

3:43Lovely photo of the polar bear pinned to this. And here's also a license plate photo. It's not the whole license plate, so he said I could post this. But look at that. South Africa. That's so cool. And also, Chris, once again, brought the Medieval Knight and Polar Bear to the beach with Poseidon. That's Poseidon, right? It's got to be. Yeah. I mean, I think so. He's holding a trident and everything. Either that or it's the guy from Little Mermaid. I can't remember which one. Well, isn't that the same? Wait. Is it Poseidon and the Little Mermaid? No. It's not called Poseidon. No. It's King. Someone's going to yell at us.

4:14It's King Such-and-Such. King Such-and-Such. That's the actual name. He's known as Ariel's dad. Okay. That's how he's known in that universe. Mr. Ariel King. King Triton. I had to look it up. King Triton. Thank you. King Triton. Thank you. He's just saved us 1,000 comments on YouTube. Nope. Too late. I'm sure that they already. I just want everybody to know, both on YouTube and listening, we are never going to mention the W word again on this show. I'm not even going to say it. So you don't have to worry about it. You don't have to brace yourself. We're never going to talk about it again. We will, in personal tech, talk about why we're not going to talk about it anymore, though. I'm kidding. We're not going to do that.

4:45Okay. We're not doing that either. We're not even doing that. Also, okay. Last thing before we get to the all-important news of a smart toothbrush. I was in the App Store earlier this week and I had a little feature here, a Productivity Spotlight, and Apple asked what were some of my favorite apps that I use, and so, of course, I plugged Bear, ShareShot, Transcriptionist, Capture, Quick Notes, and then Creator's Best Friend, but super fun to be a part of that, and this was written before I made CanDo, so I couldn't put it in there, but CanDo would have been on that list, but yeah, Productivity

5:18Picks. Nice. Also, in great company, Quinn Nelson. Christina Warren and Jason Snell were the three other people spotlighted this week, so that was fun. I'll put a link in the show notes if you want to read or see that, and the all-important news of a smart toothbrush.

Dyson $500 smart toothbrush

5:35Jason, I don't know if you use any smart toothbrush paraphernalia, but Dyson. Dyson came out with a $500 camera jet electric toothbrush. This is the biggest news of the week, obviously, not Apple's new CEO. It is this toothbrush that has a built-in camera and Waterpik, and I just need everyone, if you're not watching, just to go to the link that I'll put in the show notes and watch this toothbrush absolutely hammer this tooth and gum situation.

6:05This is scary. I would not do this. I would not do this. This is kind of a weird thing. Kind of? This is a weird thing to exist in the world, right? And Dyson is like the vacuum people. The vacuum people. The fan people. Basically, anything that, yeah. Anything that has a motor and sucks or blows. Yeah, exactly. That's Dyson. And now the thing they're blowing is water between your teeth. I don't understand. And it literally has a camera that you can pull up on your smartphone and see yourself

6:39in your mouth doing this Waterpik stuff crazy. Crazy stuff. You should not do that. You should not do that. I mean, I floss. I don't Waterpik. And I don't know how effective a Waterpik while toothbrushing can be. I feel like there's two different things. You should probably focus on one or the other. But hey, I'm not getting a review unit. I'm not going to buy this for a video. Maybe I should. But yeah, if somebody gets a $500 Dyson toothbrush, please let us know. Yeah, someone was sitting around thinking, what if you could brush and floss at the same

7:12time? Would that be worth $500 to you? And I think the answer is no, because it doesn't take that much more time. Yeah, it seems wild to me. It's funny. But yeah, camera and the toothbrush. Also, what if you aspirate the water while you're brushing your teeth? Listen, don't curse at me. Don't curse at me. Okay. What do you mean aspirate the water? What does that mean? You inhale the water into your lungs because it's spraying into your mouth while you're also trying to brush your teeth and breathe. Yeah, don't do that. Right. Don't do that.

Apple Immersive MLB games

7:41So yeah, that's the toothbrush. I just wanted to plug that to be funny. And before we get to the Ternus era and the Apple event and all the good stuff, Apple Immersive MLB. I actually charged up the Vision Pro, updated it to the latest Vision OS 27 beta. Checked out my apps in Vision Pro because I hadn't done that yet. I've just been shipping the apps based on the simulator. I also checked, just side note, you know, I have test flights for all my apps. If you're a member of this podcast, you can get links to my test flight. Not a single download on Vision Pro, Jason, for either of my apps, which I get.

8:17Sorry, you were just outing me? I wasn't particularly outing you and then I realized it is outing you, but not a single download. But now me. There's at least one because I did. All right. I'll download it later. I got to take it. Whatever. I'm taking my Vision Pro on a road trip. That's just infuriating. Take it in the road, but not in the sky. Anyway, the Apple Immersive MLB games are going on. The first game was last Friday. There's another game tomorrow as you listen to the show as it comes out. I put on Vision Pro, though. I watched like 15 minutes of the Yankees Red Sox baseball game.

8:50Listen, immersive is always like it's cool. Like it's a cool experience whenever you watch something in immersive. The camera is like right by the Yankees dugout. And so it's a pretty interesting perspective. There were a couple of times where a batter would like get up and start warming up next to me. And I thought I was about to get hit in the head because it's like swinging the bat around. Yeah. And then another point, some guy comes up and puts his arm on the dugout. And all you see is the arm. I don't know who it is, but I just see this arm. And I kind of like moved a little bit because like, oh, this guy's going to elbow me. And just his arm is just sitting there for a while.

9:21And like I would look over and like, oh, yeah, his arm is right there. Feels like you're there. It's cool. And it would be cool if you could experience it with another person. And this is the critique. You know, Ben Thomason and Gruber talk about this on Dithering. But, you know, you can do share play in certain things in Vision Pro. Like you can play games together. You can watch content together that's not immersive. And I think you can watch some of Apple's immersive content together because my wife and I actually did a video to Vision Pros because Apple had sent me a review unit and

9:56we watched some immersive content together. So you can do that with share play right now. But this live event immersive stuff does not allow for that share play feature where you can watch it with someone else. But that would be awesome if you could have just sit at a baseball game with someone else, even have differing viewpoints. Like if there was the option to switch to like a third base camera and one of you is on third base, one of you is on first base, but virtually it feels like you're sitting next to each other. Like that's something you couldn't even do in person, but you could do in Vision Pro and that would be cool. So hopefully Apple adds up.

10:27Yeah. I mean, I cannot think of something I would want to watch less than a Yankees Red Sox game, but I am encouraged that they are making, I don't actually think that was a controversial statement to be perfectly honest, unless you're just like a super baseball fan. I can't think of two teams that have as vociferously positive and negative feelings towards them than the Yankees and the Red Sox. But it's one of the most like longest running major rivalries in sports.

10:58Sure. But when Michigan plays Ohio State, I don't watch that either. It's fine. So anyway, but I do think it's great that they're, that they are at least dip their toe in the water of the thing that actually would work really well in the Vision Pro, which is like, let me just be there. Like I'm there. So yeah, yeah. I will also link my video, which I thought was a very funny video, but no Vision Pro video does super well because people don't have it. And so they don't watch it. But yeah, this was me and Whitney watching immersive content together in two Vision Pros. And it's kind of fun to do that.

11:29And, you know, hear the other person's reaction and all that kind of stuff. So I'll link that video again. It's a, yeah, it was fun.

John Ternus becomes Apple CEO

11:36All right. Apple has a new CEO. Jason, I don't know if you heard. John Ternus. I wrote about it. You heard about it. He took over September 1st. As of this Tuesday, we're in the Ternus era now. There was also a wave of other shifts as this happened. Namely, Phil Schiller, longtime Apple fellow and who has been running the App Store for a long time and also the events. Phil Schiller was still even over the Apple events. He has stepped down. He is still considered an Apple fellow. But the Eddie Q is getting, putting in charge of the App Store.

12:12So App Store goes under him. And then Nola Weinstein will be reporting to Kristen Quayle, the company's vice president of communications and public relations for the events side. So events goes under PR, where it was formerly under Phil Schiller. Eddie Q gets the App Store. And also Luca Maestri has stepped down. I think that was actually a couple of weeks ago. But yeah, a bunch of shifts here. And I'm curious what will change in the events. If Phil Schiller has been the one pioneering, kind of like the virtual event, you know, it's very, it's always unclear.

12:42Like, was this a Schiller thing? Was this something that Apple wanted to do? Was it a Tim Cook thing? Now the Ternus is there. Hey, maybe we get a live event sometime soon. Maybe. Maybe. I don't think it'll be next week. No, not next week. At this point. But I mean, it's not like they couldn't have because this has been in production for a while. And so has this change. But I think we're going to see a lot more change over the next two years. I think that we're going to see more people leave. More people even whose names we recognize.

13:15But I think it makes sense to shift some of these things. What it tells me is, I don't think that Phil Schiller did a bad job with the App Store or anything like that. And I don't think he did a bad job with events. The current state of Apple events is what it is because of COVID. They came up with the best way to do that. Now, should they still be doing it that way? I don't know. I think they really like it because they can just control it very much. And you don't have a Steve Jobs who just has that natural charisma and ability to just get up there and insult people and make them fall in love.

13:46Like, that's just his superpower, right? Yes. But I think that that's not all he did. He wasn't. But I'm just saying he could, like, just say it however he wanted. He was charismatic. He was great on stage. There's a real reason that they talked about the reality distortion field. So, but I think that it does maybe give us a hint of maybe I'm being too optimistic. I would love to see Apple's, the App Store and its developer relations improve. And I don't really say that that much as a developer because I don't really make that much money from the App Store.

14:20It's not a big deal. I'm in the small business program. I'm really never going to graduate out of it because I'm never going to generate that much money in a year. So, that's fine. But it would go a long way if developers, especially small independent developers, just felt valuable. And I don't know what the exact connection is between Phil Schiller overseeing the App Store and that current tenor. But I do think that having a change there could be a meaningful improvement. Same. And even things like AppReview, which, I mean, we both deal with now.

14:51But so many longtime developers I follow on Mastodon, it's really frustrating. Like, I've seen some people waiting on an in-app purchase to be approved in a month. You know, it's been sitting there for a month. And that's, you know, a huge part of the business. You know what I mean? That's actually what generates the revenue. So, little things like that, improving the systems as well as improving some of those relations, I think would go a long way. And, like, being a creator, maybe I'm part of the problem or whatever. But, you know, at the actual events and where Apple, like who Apple invites to these things.

15:23Like, WWDC, obviously, there's lots of developers. Apple invites them and it's always very inclusive. But doing some things there where, I don't know, developers are highlighted, featured, I don't know, something to better that relationship. Start changing the temperature, I think, of that would be good. Yeah, I think that would be good. Now, what was interesting is John Ternus is now on a social network and he has chosen exactly one to be on, which is X. And he used the Apple Unicode icon and CEO as his bio.

15:55Not spelled out Apple CEO. I always think it's very interesting when Apple chooses to use the symbol versus actually the word mark Apple in, like, Apple Vision Pro or stuff like that. But anyway, he's on X. His first tweet is out there as just, hello. We'll put a link to it so you can follow him there. 83 million views for just sending the word hello, which is fine. I tweeted inviting him onto this show. We'll see if that works. I just find this interesting because this would have been an opportunity to say Apple leadership is now going to be on multiple platforms, that they'll be on Threads and X or Threads, Blue Sky and in all the places.

16:34Apple does have accounts on Threads for things like Apple TV, Hello Apple, which was like a new account that Apple created around WWDC that has an Instagram account and Threads account, notably not on X. X, like that, and they're sharing reels and stuff. I'm curious their internal strategy on this, why they chose X. I don't want to pontificate or, you know, espouse any kind of anything about it. I just find it interesting and I don't know why they chose not to be on other platforms and just be on one.

17:08It's curious. Yeah, I mean, the interesting thing here was they had to acquire this account. Like it existed before. It says that it started in June, 2026, but there was a John Ternus account before that that Apple acquired somehow. They probably just paid someone and said, could we have this account? Or they went to X and they're like, we got a guy named John Ternus. He's about to be CEO. We really like this account. And you remember, we're like the only people who still advertise on your social platform. So could you help us out? I don't know which of those things happened.

17:39It doesn't really matter. But there was a, I guess my point is, it's not like John Ternus had just been lurking on X for a decade and they finally decided to activate it. This was like a thing that they've intentionally done. And I think that a company like Apple thinks of it very differently than we do. They just think about the way, the reach and what they would use it for. And I don't think that they did it because they're like, they're not making a political statement. That's definitely not what Apple is doing by putting him on there and not other places.

18:10You're right that they do have like accounts on threads and Instagram for certain things. And I feel like it's because they know that the specific audience for that stuff is there. Right. But like if John Ternus had said, okay, well, I have a LinkedIn now. No one will be like, I can't believe that's the only one you picked. We might be like LinkedIn, really? But I mean, that is like the corporate-ish thing, right? Like that is fine. So I don't know that we should just read a ton into it. Also, the fact that he had one on day one is not necessarily indicative of like he'll always only have one, right?

18:44True, true. I don't know. But like the executives at Apple had been, like X had been their primary place to post anyway. Well, I know. And it's been, but it was like Joswiak and Tim Cook and all of that. So anyway, we'll see. There was one thing though in relation to reach. If their goal was to be on the platform that has the largest reach, as far as the most recent data, it looked like threads edged out X as far as just monthly or daily active users. So it seems, again, like if reach is the pure goal,

19:17which is why I think they made the Hello Apple account on Instagram and threads, interesting that it's not here. Well, okay. I haven't thought about that. One, 500 million monthly users. Well, 300 million of those are people who just tap a threads post accidentally in Instagram and end up on threads. Let's just be honest that it's really hard to know what meta means by any of this because they're just turning those dials in all sorts of ways. Also, I think it's entirely possible that X is willing to amplify their executives' posts in a way that threads maybe isn't.

19:50I feel like Zuckerberg would be all about it. I feel like he would. There is literally no company in the universe that Mark Zuckerberg hates more than Apple. But for him to have bragging rights to say Apple's CEO is on threads posting, I feel like he would tout that despite his relationship with the actual iPhone and the platform or whatever. I feel like he would tout that. I mean, they try to brag about threads all the time. And the reach. Maybe. Also, I don't know that he even knows who John Turner is, but he definitely knew who Tim Cook was.

20:21Because Tim Cook's the guy who said, like, I wouldn't be in that situation. So, sure, sure, sure. Well, anyway, the one act that John Turner has clearly done in his first day in office that I highly approve of, I am so glad he made this change, when you share a shortcuts link on social media, the image is now vastly improved. So before, when you had shared a shortcut on any social media network, you know, there was always a preview card, which anytime you share a link, you know, there's an image associated with it. And previously, it was just kind of like a weird zoomed-in image of whatever icon is on the shortcut card.

20:55Well, now there is a beautiful colored background. The shortcuts icon is there with the glassy Iowa's 26 look. This sharing card, chef's kiss, two thumbs up. John Ternus, thank you. Thank you for that. So you think the one on the right is better? Hunter. Okay, I'm just asking what you were saying. It is unequivocally better. Pine. Matthew Cassinelli, shortcuts guru, also agrees. I'm not necessarily disagreeing. I just wanted to be clear about what you're saying, because I look at these two and I'm like,

21:25I think they're equally uninteresting because they just feel generic. I mean, I agree that the one on the right is uninteresting and generic, but also not like, what the heck am I looking at? It's very clear that it's a shortcut. I agree. I can't even get into this, Jason. Okay. All I will say is, listeners and viewers, I will link this Threads post down if you're listening. You can watch the video and see these two icons and just call back to what we talked about last week versus Jason's judgment on these icons and decide for yourselves.

21:55No, I do think it's better. I just think that like, yeah, anyway, I don't, but I also don't think John Ternus had anything to do with it. No, he definitely did. Okay, good. He definitely did. 100%. I would say I have inside info, but I don't. But listen, if any little birdies want to tell me whether or not John Ternus was like, hey, fix that shortcut thing, I'd like to hear it. Any little birdies? I think John Ternus had a lot of meetings this week and none of them were about this. You never know. You never know. Do you think, do I need a telegram so people will message me anonymously? Is that something that people do? Like Mark Herman? I think you might want signal.

22:26Oh, is that the thing? Signal? I don't know what these things are. A telegram is used for other things. Okay, I don't know. Never mind. And it's definitely not encrypted, I don't think. Oh, okay. Forget it. Okay. I mean, telegram is the one where the guy was like wanted in France for like, like promoting. Oh, bad things. Okay, never mind. Never mind. So you're saying signal is what I need to get. Signal is the encrypted one and except for with the Secretary of Defense because they use unencrypted signal to plan worse. That was a real story. I know. I know. Well, listen, if there's any little birdies out there, I guess I'm going to make a signal and I'll put that link in the show notes too.

22:57I've got a signal. You can send it to me. Oh, there we go. Every reporter has a signal. It's fine. Oh, really? I didn't know. Oh, I need a signal. Sorry. I'm going to create a signal account live here on the show. No, I'm not going to do that. Anyway, John Ternus, come on the show. We'd love to have you as a special guest. Yeah, let's do it. Last little Apple news. Then we'll get to IFA and some smart home stuff. Sonos actually released some new products that are pretty interesting.

OpenAI MacBook legal developments

23:20Apple released, this is more evidence. And Apple is putting it out there about things that OpenAI and Mr. Liu has done. And Apple is trying to get some evidence in their possession quickly, fear that OpenAI might do something to erase certain evidence. So I'll just read these bullet points. This was an Apple response to OpenAI. This is like the actual PDF document. I'll link if you want to read that. But defendants. Okay. So here, despite having the MacBook in their possession since the start of this lawsuit,

23:52I'm reading from the document. This is Apple talking. And notwithstanding the gravity of the allegations in the complaint, defendants chose not to inspect it, opting instead to advance theories that the device's data disproves initial forensic analysis of the MacBook shows. Remember, this is the whole OpenAI case, trade secrets, and Apple. They're saying Mr. Liu not only downloaded a confidential Apple circuit schematic, but also used it in his work at OpenAI. And then far from his unauthorized access to Apple's third-party cloud storage being unknown to him, Mr. Liu and others at OpenAI were well aware.

24:23Of that access. If this, again, these are allegations, but if true, and that Apple would have evidence that Mr. Liu at OpenAI downloaded a schematic and then used it in an OpenAI product, that would be pretty damning in this case. Just putting that out there. So yeah, this is the guy, though, that we already knew had basically messed up big time, right? Yes. Yeah. He messed up big time. So this case still, it's not even started yet, but just more information out there.

24:54I don't know. Not looking good for Mr. Liu at all. We're going to come back to Apple and pontificate about the event next week.

IFA smart home announcements

25:00But there's a huge conference going on right now. IFA in Berlin, which there's a bunch of smart home creators over there. Eric Wielander, friend of the show. Shane Watley, a bunch of guys over there. And of course, Jennifer Toohey, who I want to get on this show sometime. I'm hoping that Apple actually releases some smart home products in the near future, and then we could have Jennifer on to talk about it. So we'll see. But there's a bunch of stuff going on over there. Announcements from Philips Hue. They have a new cheaper sync box. So you can now get one of the HDMI sync boxes, not the cameras that you see a lot of other brands do where you put the camera over the TV to watch the screen.

25:33You can actually get the sync box. There's a new 4K model that starts at $150, much cheaper than the almost $400 model that I regret buying a little while ago. So you can get cheaper sync box from Hue. And Hue also launched these Leanne rope lights. These look really cool. Jennifer Toohey has a reel on these on Instagram. But here's like really long rope lights that you can twist and you can spiral around things like over a bar or whatever or just in your room.

26:05These look really cool. I kind of want to try these. How long are those? Like eight foot tall? They look very long. They look very long. Let's see. There. It's a 360 degree tube light. $400 for three meters. $550 for five meters. That's like 15 feet long. You can get them. Yes. I mean, it's not exactly don't yell at me, people. I'm just doing the conversion. It's rough. It's like 3.3 feet. I'm not. Yeah. It's like 16, whatever. I'm not going to. Five meters in feet is 16 feet.

26:36Five meters in feet. That's what I just said. I said 15. Then I said 16. Oh, okay. Yeah. That was good. That was good. Yeah. Expensive. But yeah, really, they're long. Very long. But it looks cool like hanging down like that. You could do some real, I don't know. I'm going to buy some. Hang on. Walk through a forest of these. I mean, that would get very expensive if you want to create a forest of these at $550 a pop. I'm doing it right now. Do it. Do it all that context. I'm not buying that stupid toothbrush, but I'm going to buy this. Why don't you buy this? You buy this. Also, floss your teeth with that. You're talking about putting a light in your mouth. Come on.

27:07That's it. Anchor unveiled some new things. They have something called a MindBase with this HomeKit Secure video support, but is also an on-device home LLM. So, this box will download models, process camera footage locally on the device in your home, and then you can ask it things or whatever and get alerts based on the LLM processing the video footage locally in your home. So, this is a play on like, you don't send your video footage out to some service or pay

27:39for a monthly subscription. You can have it locally there on this device in your home. It also supports Matter and HomeKit Secure video. So, you can still get the cameras that connect to this thing in the home app doing HomeKit Secure video, but also on-device LLMs. I know a little bit about this because I have a device I can't talk about that does something similar. And, well, anyway, I'll talk about that soon, I think, because I don't exactly know what the embargo is. I'm just not going to talk about it. So, that's out there. I feel, hold on. We need to talk about that for a second. Yeah, yeah, please. Okay.

28:10I'm not trying to like, I'm being sincere. Okay. Do you want this in your house?

28:18And my reason for asking is, does it matter? Like, well, first of all, without question, Brendan Carr is a dummy and will probably ban this because they make these in China, right? Like, there's just no way that the current administration is going to allow this, but let's say that they do. Like, this is, it does seem like, my point is, if Apple TV did this, we'd be like, sweet. Like, great. Because we just have a level of understanding of what that means. But do you, as like a pretty educated home, smart home person, do you want something like

28:52this? Me, personally, no, because I'm all in on HomeKit Secure Video. But if one was not all in on HomeKit Secure Video and maybe wanted to use lots of different cameras that don't support HomeKit, you could get a device like this, not pay a monthly subscription for CloudStory. Because that's the other thing is, you put a bunch of hard drives in these things and it saves the video footage locally. So if you want the video footage local in your house on a hard drive and get the benefits

29:25of the AI processing, recognition of faces, alerts, and all of that, I think there's a segment of people that want that. Like, they want their data in their home. Now, you've been able to do that with like Ubiquiti's camera system for a long time. Not all the AI stuff just yet, but if you wanted a security camera system where the footage is on a server in your home and then you access it from the app on your phone, like, you could do that. It's just now with this new wave of devices is having the AI processing. Now, Apple Intelligence in the home is not bad.

29:57I'm not going to say it's great. And the AI that these devices can do are probably better. But on the beta, like right now, I'm down for like the Apple Intelligence figuring out that there's a FedEx truck. Now, you can search for that and it will use Apple Intelligence to look at the HomeKit secure video clips and actually say, here's the clip with the FedEx truck. Here's the clip with the Amazon package and it will recognize the logo. So Apple Intelligence is doing that right now. And I've been using facial recognition for years. Like that's been a feature on Apple HomeKit video forever.

30:29And it's pretty good. Like I will get the HomePods saying when someone rings my video doorbell, oh, so-and-so is at the door and it's fairly accurate and you can train it and you can do it. So if you're all in on the Apple Home ecosystem and HomeKit secure video, I don't think these products are as tempting because you kind of have these features already. And I don't care if the footage is in my house on a hard drive personally, but if people do, this would be an option for them. Gotcha. Does that make sense? Yep. I'm going to warn you that it's about to storm here. You can see how dark it is out there.

30:59It is very dark. And so if it does, I apologize. Does this power blip when that happens? I mean, we'll see. I'm out in a shed. That's what I'm saying. I mean, the line is buried pretty deep, but all of our lines are buried. I'm just warning you in advance. Yeah. Okay. We'll see. And the last thing I'll mention, I can't mention what I have here, but I like, I have one of these in my home right now. Not this one, but something similar. And it's kind of big. You would want to put this in a closet somewhere, but it also has like a voice assistant. So you can't, like, if you want to use that kind of stuff, you couldn't just shove it

31:32in a closet somewhere. So anyway, I just don't know how I feel about video of things happening in my house going up to a server somewhere with all of them's processing. But that's what, that's the thing. That's the benefit. It's not going up to a server somewhere. So you, okay. So you have to download local models? Yeah. Like literally models get downloaded to this server device on my, in my house. And so you could, you know, if you didn't have internet access, but it's the wifi was still on or whatever, the cameras could still talk to this thing and it could process everything and nothing goes to the cloud.

32:03And it's, it's using like Quinn, like the model is like Quinn five or whatever. And so it's one of those local elements. So that, that's the, that's the deal with these, but all right. Anyway, home could secure video is pretty good too. Well, we'll look for my iOS 27 review, uh, come coming in a couple of weeks. A couple of things from IFA, a car has a bunch of new smart lights, including the law, like the tall tower gradient light type stuff. The floor lamp T one is out there. They also have a new down light and outdoor string lights typically before Govi has kind

32:35of been like just the go-to for the permanent outdoor lights on the house. A car is getting into that game as well.

Anker MagGo 2 Pro battery

32:39This is all announced at IFA and Belkin introduced some new solid state batteries and solid state is a technology that hopefully batteries will last longer, like more charge cycles, holding more of the, uh, you know, battery capacity for longer and batteries can be thinner, not get as hot. So Belkin has released a couple of these. One looks very thin, very attractive. I, um, you know, it's MagSafe batteries. I'm going to try every single one of them. Uh, one is just a power bank with a cable. One is a MagSafe battery, but totally going to try these. And other companies like CoolSill and Zenza also make the solid state batteries.

33:14Do you have any solid state batteries? I don't, I have no idea. Probably not. Cause I don't think I've bought any. So, I mean, the last one I got was this one.

33:25iPhone air. The iPhone air one. This is the newest battery I have. All right. Well, and this, this thing was just announced at IFA. And so I, I assume I could talk about it on the show. It's going to be in a sponsored video next week, but like it's announced. So I think I'm gonna talk about it. Anchor released their updated MagSafe battery. This is the Anchor MagGo 2 Pro and it's pretty awesome. So it's a MagSafe battery. It's Chi 225 watt. Has a built-in kickstand. Super fun. It's got the display on the side.

33:57It'll even tell you how fast it's charging. It'll tell you the wattage output on the screen, which is not something any battery I've had before it does. This part, this is not sponsored. I just want to talk about it. Cause I actually tested this. Sponsored is next week in a video or whatever. It's got like cooling fans. So there's like full on fan vents on the top and bottom for cooling and keeping your iPhone and the MagSafe battery cool. And I kid you not, Jason, this thing got up to 27 watt speed charging, which is unheard of. I mean, Chi 2 is just 25 watts, but this thing, if you leave it sitting still, the phone not

34:33doing anything, it got all the way up to 27 watt output and it charged. In 10 minutes from one to 25% on my iPhone 17 pro max, which is really fast. Like pretty much now you can charge up to 45 watt speeds with a cable with the iPhone 17 lineup, but 27 watt charging wirelessly is really good. And, uh, this is a pretty sweet MagSafe battery might be my pick for this year. We'll see. Yeah. The eco flow batteries that I have, do you tell you the charging, what they're charging

35:05at? Now those are not MagSafe batteries are just those towers and that's how you like, this is the wattage that we're sending out or whatever, but that is kind of cool to have that on a small one. Um, but yeah, I mean, I don't like, I understand the reason why it has fans. I don't really like the idea of like carrying around fans. I don't want, it's not, I mean, I need to get my previous money, you know, Anchor's previous Chi 2 one, which was the best as far as speed battery pack for a long time. It was thicker than this. So this is actually thinner with the same capacity plus fans.

35:37So it's not bad, but I want to do more testing. I have a little shortcut that I test all these batteries with where as it hits certain battery percentages, it writes it to an Apple note. And so I get the exact numbers. But one thing is cool too, the, well, I forgot what I was going to say. So is that this one? This is Chi 2, right? That's, that was their last model MagSafe battery. And that one was very good. Yeah. Okay. But you're saying this is thicker than the one that you have in your head? No, there was one, there was one around that time that had display on the side. Okay. Gotcha. And this is like the updated model of that display, display one.

36:09Got it. Okay. But yeah, it charged fast and you don't really hear the fans. Oh, what I noticed when I was testing it, I was just kind of watching the wattage go up and down. When a text message came in, whenever I got a notification, the charging speed dropped. And I don't know if that is the iPhone, like not accepting as fast a charge when there's like, bro, I'm busy, bro. I'll be back with you in a minute. Or if it's like the wifi and cellular radio requiring a certain amount of power.

36:42And so the, the charging drops, but then once like I got the notification, the lock screen turned on, once the screen turned off and went dark again, I would see the wattage slowly climb back up to 27 Watts. And I'm like, that's interesting. Like any usage, even if you're not actively using the phone, if you just get a notification or whatever, that adjust, that changes the speed that it's charging. And so if you really need the fastest charge out of a bad, a MagSafe battery, and I would think this is universal, I guess put it in do not disturb mode. And, but that also doesn't affect, like if text messages still come in, you just don't

37:15get notified. So I don't know. That was an interesting experience for me. I just, I don't know. I'm a nerd, I guess. Interesting. I know. No one else cares, but I thought it was interesting. Leave us a five-star rating review. Let me know if anybody cares. Well, there's also the possibility without believing too much, cause we know our audience doesn't like that, but I don't know how they're, how it measures it because like, is it measuring what it's sending? Cause that shouldn't change. Or is it measuring the like net increase of battery? Because if it's using a little bit of battery to deal with it, the device may be sending

37:45the same amount, but the net increase, it's kind of like if you were charging something, but you're using it, the net is the difference between in versus what you're using. Right. So maybe it's measured, maybe there's, cause we know that these like, it's capable of knowing that, right? Yeah. That's, that is curious. I might ask, I'll ask them, I'll send them an email cause I am curious about that.

Host apps and sponsor break

38:05So anyway, so this is our last episode, uh, that doesn't have a sponsor for the year. So the, all of September we have sponsors lined up and, uh, we're very grateful for that, but we're really grateful for the members who support us directly. You can do that at the link down in the show notes. You get the whole ad free and member, you get the pre-show, you get like a two plus hour show when you support it. Plus you get bonus episodes, primary tech daily and all that fun stuff. So we thought as our ad break today, we are the ad break. Me and Jason are the sponsors, uh, by not paying ourselves, but plugging our stuff.

38:38And so for your first sponsor today, it is element and contextly. Take it away, Jason. I don't have an ad read prepared. And we talked about what's your CTA. We talked about these pretty extensively last week, but yeah, I have two apps. One of them you can get in the app store, both the Mac app store, the iOS iPad, whatever. I don't have a vision pro version, I don't think, but I'm pretty sure you can just run the iPad version. You can run the vision pro and it's fine. That's contextly. Uh, it's available in the app store. It's basically notes. Plus your calendar syncs to it.

39:09So that when you're going through your day, you can sync all of your notes to your calendar. And then the cool feature is that it will summarize those notes for you and pull out action items that you can then send to like things or reminder or whatever. So it's really kind of a cool way of like a workflow that's between I have a meeting. Here's the notes I took in the meeting. What do I need to do after that meeting? And then send them. It does not have, it does have like a rudimentary version of to do's in it. But the only reason for that is to collect them and then send them to whatever app you're already using, right? This is not a great calendar app.

39:40It's not a great to do app. It is meant to sort of be the in-between. It's also like, I just wanted an app that was basically notes, but I could access my calendar to sync things. So that's what it is. It's, it's designed to sort of have the same simple feel to it as that. So contextly, you can get it in the Mac app store or the iOS app store. Great. It's awesome. It's a lot of fun. I use it every single day. I love it. So the other one is element, which is a photo processing app. Basically, I did my best to recreate what all the things I loved about Aperture, right? I don't love paying a subscription to Lightroom.

40:12I don't love, I don't love some of the tools in Lightroom to be completely candid. There are definitely tools I've heard. I've gotten Steven. I think it was roughly 350 pieces of feedback from people using this, right? And try to incorporate all of them. And there are a lot of things where people are like, well, you don't do this the way that Capture One or Photo Mechanic or Lightroom or whatever. I'm like, yes, because Lightroom has, I don't know, a couple hundred people working on it and a few million lines of code and I don't. So it's, it is, it is designed to be very, very, very fast.

40:46So if you take a lot of photos and you want to call them and edit them very quickly and then either export them to one of the services that you use or send them to clients, it's meant to do that very quickly. It's not a Apple Photos replacement, although you can just point it at your photos library. And just import all that stuff if you want to, but it is really designed as a raw call and editor. Yeah. And it's available right now. If you actually, I'll actually send this just for our listeners, but if you use the code launch 50, you save 50% off a license.

41:19This is not a subscription. This is a one time you pay for it once. You just use it forever. And if you use the code launch 50, you'll get 50% off of the, the license price. Boom. And we'll do that for the next week through the 10th. There you go. So you got element photo and you have context.ly. Thank you, Jason. This, this episode is brought to you by context.ly. And you did, we should, we should name our, like, you know, the app umbrella. I don't know. I don't know what you call it. Narnia, Narnia apps. Like your office areas is Narnia during the winter.

41:52Something like that. You know what I mean? I mean, I do, there is an LLC for it, but the apps are in, but yeah. Okay. So there's that. And I'll just plug my apps real quickly. Can do is doing really well. And I've been updating it a ton recently. I've now added subtasks, the ability to add a location to a task. You can sort individual columns by due date, by name. You can filter columns by tag. So I've been adding a bunch of new features. It's a $3 one-time purchase and you can just get it right now.

42:25If you've already gotten it, I'd appreciate a five-star rating and review in the app store. And again, iOS, Mac, iPad, and yes, Vision Pro. And I was using it yesterday in Vision Pro and it works great there. I did all the things and I'm like, okay, great. This is, this is good. So that's can do. And, you know, appreciate that. If you want a task cabin and you love Kanban boards, that's the way to go. And Stash is my second app. This is free to download. You can try it out. It is also for iPhone, Mac, and Apple Vision Pro. And version 1.1 just came out this morning and it has now added a third-party keyboard.

43:00So if you want to access your text snippets, URLs, documents, GIFs, and photos that you share often, you save it in the Stash app and then you can either put something in the control center to access your stuff quickly. You can create a shortcut that immediately lets you choose a document, put it on your clipboard and paste it. And now, version 1.1, you can put the third-party keyboard and just use that wherever you're typing and still access everything in your Stash app. So that's version 1.1. The keyboard is part of the free version. You get all that for free.

43:31Try Stash. All those links are down in the show notes. And I'll thank you to our sponsors this week. Contextly, Element Photo, Kando, and Stash. You want to know what's one of the biggest pieces of feedback I got? And I just noticed this because we're looking at a screenshot of your App Store page. Yeah. People were like, I don't understand how this app is only 10 megabytes. Because Lightroom is like 3.8 gigabytes. People are like, well, it's like, well, I don't have three and a half million lines of code. Also, I don't have like an AI engine in there. Also, there's a lot of things. But like, it's funny how people are like, I went to download your app and it downloaded so fast, I wasn't sure that I did it right.

44:06That's funny. Yeah, Stash is a five megabyte app. Yep. And I think Kando is like 14 megabytes. Let me check real quick. Oh, no, 25. Kando is 25 megabytes. So, you know. There you go. It's a serious app for serious people. It's bigger than Elevent. That's the tagline. It's a serious app for serious people.

Sonos Ace Ultra and Beam Ultra

44:25All right. Sonos actually released some products. I'll be honest, Jason. I struggle to be excited about Sonos stuff. I don't know why. I love Sonos stuff. I use it all the time. But like new Sonos products, it's like, okay, I guess that's cool. So they announced Sonos Ace Ultra, new upgraded headphones. These headphones, the biggest difference over the last Sonos Ace is these will connect to your Wi-Fi network and actually send audio over Wi-Fi. Supposedly, using the Headphone Engine 2 Silicon, it will connect to your phone or TV and it enables uncompressed zero latency spatial audio in the headphones.

45:06Whether you can hear that difference or not remains to be seen. But that's the Sonos Ace Ultra headphones. They're going to be $450, which was the price of the, I think, original Ace when they first came out. Right now, they're like $300 something. Those are the Sonos Ace Ultra. They'll be available later this month. Listen, I do headphone reviews on the channel. I don't know if I'm going to review these. I mean, I feel like, nah. Nah, really. I mean, there are a lot of headphones out there. A lot of headphones out there. And, like, it's great. You know, Sonos is really trying to come back from their app debacle and all that kind of stuff.

45:41So they launched these and they also launched the new Beam Ultra. And, again, I love my Sonos Beam. I use a Beam in my master bedroom with a Sub Mini. Excellent sound. But now, you know, the Sony Arc Ultra was recently upgraded. That's now like $1,100. And so now there's a Beam Ultra 7.1.2 Dolby Atmos and a soundbar, $700. It has a, I think, nine speaker array. So there are nine speakers now in the Sonos Beam Ultra, whereas the previous Sonos Beam, like the one I have, just is a 5.0, just five speakers.

46:19So a lot of speakers in there. It probably sounds amazing. If you are looking for a high-quality soundbar, I would still recommend Sonos as the way to go. I think the Sonos Beam for a bedroom or a smaller living room, and now the Beam Ultra, would be amazing. It, I would probably do it over a pair of HomePod 2s. I think it sounds really good, especially if you have the funds to be able to put a Sub Mini with it, a Sonos Sub Mini. But those are out there. New soundbar, new headphones, and Sonos, like Software 27, they're calling it or whatever.

46:53Sonos is putting more AI in stuff where you can have Chachapi Tea and Gemini in the voice assistance of the Sonos products. And you can update your devices, including headphones and your soundbars, to talk to AI through your Sonos stuff. I don't, like, that's not something I really care to do, but, you know. I know, but I want, I just, like, I have a, I don't know what that is, an Aero 100, maybe? And I've got an ARC and a Sub. Yeah, yeah. They're fantastic. They sound great. It's great.

47:24There's only one beef, which is the fact that, like, you have to turn the sound up every time on the soundbar, because for some reason it goes to zero every time I turn on my Apple TV. I don't understand. Have you changed that Apple TV setting, the audio one? I might need to do that. Do that. But my, you know what, you're right. I think we did do that, and I think maybe it is better now. We don't watch a lot of TV. But my point is, I just wanted to make great sound. Yeah. I wanted to do all these other things. Yeah, the AI stuff feels weird and, like, I don't know, trying to get people into thinking, like, the app is fine again. One other feature, though, I will say, and this is, I'm glad they added it, but also it's kind of annoying,

47:59because you can use Sonos portable speakers now for your surround sounds. So let's say you have a Sonos Beam and a Sub Mini, and you have a Sonos Play, a pair of Sonos Plays or Move 2s. You can now use those as the rear surround speakers in a setup, which is cool and makes sense, because they're rechargeable speakers. You can just bring them into the room when you watch a movie and then put them back outside or wherever you have them. They're portable, so you can, again, move them anywhere. Cool that you can do that. You do need a pair of Sonos Plays or Move 2s together.

48:31And I have a Sonos Move 2 and a Sonos Move 1, so I can't do this. You need two Move 2s or two Sonos Plays. You can't mix and match a Move. And this has been an ongoing thing where, like, Sonos allows you to, like, if you have a one, I forget what it was, there was another speaker 2 where you had to have exactly the same model to be used as rear speakers. So if there's someone out there who has two Move 2s, you can now use them as surround speakers. But if you have Move 1 and Move 2, you're out of luck. No dice. No dice. All right, some AI news.

49:03NVIDIA, this just broke this morning. I don't even know if you heard of this, Jason. NVIDIA has now said they are buying Hugging Face, the open-source AI repository, for $13 billion. Hugging Face, if you remember, was the company that was breached by OpenAI's models. And there was that whole report we touched on last week. But now NVIDIA's buying Hugging Face, this repository, I think in a play to not be so dependent on OpenAI or Anthropoc using their GPUs,

49:35they can now do stuff maybe with their, quote-unquote, own models or at least do stuff with open-source models. And who knows? But kind of a big deal. They're buying Hugging Face. I mean, really, this is just, I think, a play for NVIDIA to control the distribution of open AI models, right? The distribution sort of lake layer for... For open-source models. Sort of, but also, like, yeah, open-source models. Because it's kind of like the GitHub for AI models.

50:06That's kind of what Hugging Face is, right? And because NVIDIA needs AI as a category to stay bigger than just OpenAI, Anthropoc, and Google. And part of the reason is Google doesn't use NVIDIA chips necessarily, right? They use their own stuff. OpenAI is, we heard last week that they're building their own chip, right? And supposedly it's pretty good. Anthropoc's going to be doing the same sort of thing.

50:36And so what they need is, it's like their business depends on there being a very robust market for training and running AI. And this is a way to do that. Yeah, exactly. So that is NVIDIA, my Hugging Face.

Anthropic Claude 5.1 update

50:51And then, also AI news, Fable 5.1, an updated model came out from Anthropoc. And you're able to use it immediately if you're on, like, the Claude Max plans. Claude Fable 5.1 and Mythos 5.1, which is not available to the public, but apparently that model's out. And I just want to say, I've been using Fable non-stop and can-do in Stash and in development. And Fable's been really good for most things. As soon as Fable 5.1 came out, I moved to that model.

51:24And that is when I asked it to build the Stash third-party keyboard. Jason, let me just tell you. It one-shotted that keyboard. And that's what's shipping in the app right now. Like, I tested it. I tested it live during my Shortcuts live stream on Wednesday. And it worked great. Everything was flawless. And the first shot. And so, Fable 5.1, thumbs up for me. Did it give you a boat emoji and say, ship it?

51:54It is supposedly, Fable 5.1 is also going to be less annoying in how it talks to you. I sure hope so. Supposedly. In the few, like, I only did a few prompts back and forth because it only took a few prompts for that Stash thing. But I think it's a little less annoying and it's a little clearer on its explanations. Like, it's given me a few bullet points rather than, like, four paragraphs to read every time it makes a change. Nice. And just less follow-up. Like, sometimes when I make a UI tweak, you know, sometimes I'll ask Claude, like, hey, I want the icon in the cards for the CanDo app to be like this or move this a little bit.

52:35And with Fable 5, sometimes it would take two or three iterations. Be like, you know, you didn't really move it where I wanted it. Let me draw it. Let me, you know, put an arrow in the screenshot so you know exactly where to put it. A few times I've had for UI changes with Fable 5.1, just in the last week, much less back and forth and less iterations, which is great because that means less tokens and less requests that I'm sending to Claude. Right. And they also changed how they are charging for certain models and so you might get a little more usage out of it. But, again, TestFlight for a stash and CanDo is part of the membership benefits if you support the podcast.

53:09Those links are down in the show notes. But Fable 5.1, pretty great. I'd be curious if you do anything with it soon. I've been using it. Okay. Yeah, I mean, I think it's pretty good. I used it actually to do a little bit of editing on some stuff. But I realized that I typically, unless I'm doing some pretty extensive stuff, just use Opus 5. Really? Because, yeah, for most things it's fine and I'm a little bit picky about the way it responds and I prefer, like, you get used to a thing.

53:39Sure. But for co-work stuff, Opus 5 is just totally fine. Like, I don't need to run Fable to do some of the co-work stuff because you just, like, set up a bunch of these routines once and it just does them. Like, every day I get an email and it pulls the top 10 stories from the previous day, puts them in a digest, loads it as a page in Notion for me, and then emails me a summary of it with a link to the Notion page. I don't need Fable to do that. I don't need to burn that many tokens every time this runs at 5.15 in the morning.

54:10Yeah, well, and I use Opus for everything outside of my apps. Sure. Okay, fair. That's basically, I guess, what I'm saying. Yeah, I use, right, I use Opus 5 for all of that. But when it comes, when I'm going over to Claude Code, it's Fable all the time. And the other thing, too, I am, I built or asked Claude Code to build an MCP connector for CanDo and Fable 5.1 seems to have done it great. And so, yeah. Nice. Next version of CanDo will have MCP support. A couple court things.

54:40The ongoing lawsuit between OpenAI and the New York Times has been going on for a long time. Well, the Trump administration actually weighed in on it. And they sided with OpenAI for a couple things. One, I'm going to read from the statement. It says, well, this is from the Wired article, which I'll link below. It says, on Tuesday, the federal government submitted a letter to the court stating that the United States has a strong interest in whether AI training on copyright works is considered fair use. Because it connects to whether the country's AI industry can. And this is quoting from the administration statement.

55:12And the fair use rule shields certain uses of copyright material. So, basically, the Trump administration is saying we need to remain competitive as America in the AI race. And letting these companies like OpenAI slurp up all the content and creation that humans have done for years needs to be okay so we can remain competitive. Now, I'm of two minds here. One, fair use as a thing.

55:44Like, I taught a class a few years ago about podcasting. And fair use was like a training that I had to take in order to teach the class. And then I had to, like, try and explain it. And fair use is one of the things where, you know, if something is transformative, where you take a piece of work and you remix it like a song. In some cases, you're allowed to do that under fair use. Or if you want to use 15 seconds of something, fair use allows for that.

56:1415 seconds of a video of a song in something that you make. Or things like, you know, parody, comedy. Those are also, like, uses of content, but it's transformative. And so fair use, oh, and also, like, for educational purposes. Like, there's rules in fair use where if you want to show a movie to a class for an educational purpose, it's a film class. There's, like, rules in fair use where you can do that. I mean, I don't think fair use was developed as a, like, a law way before AI.

56:50And so to say that what AI is doing is fair use, I feel like, is cart before the horse. Like, I think you would have to examine what that means in an AI context to say this is fair use or not. But also that remaining competitive in the AI landscape is dependent on slurping up all this content and using people's work and writing and creative works without permission. And that, that seems strange.

Trump administration briefs court on AI

57:18Like, I don't know why that's, you know, I mean, I get it, but that seems like maybe not a great reason. And three, what does it mean to be, to fall behind AIs of other countries? And what is the risk? Is it cybersecurity? Is it hacking? Like, what is the risk? There's not really explanation there right now. Yeah, I think it's interesting because I don't, I'm super not a lawyer. But I am someone who has made a lot of copyrighted material as a photographer, as a writer, all that stuff.

57:50So, like, this is a thing I do care about, right? And one of the pieces about fair use is the idea that essentially fair use is saying that copyright protection is not absolute. There are ways you can use copyrighted materials without the owner's consent, right? Right. So, one way of thinking about it is fair use essentially says you can do things that otherwise would be a violation of someone's copyright. Right. But it's okay. And typically there's, like, four prongs to this, right?

58:20It's, like, the purpose and the use of it. There's the, like, what is the copyrighted work that you're using? What is the effect on the market? And then how much of it are you using? And I think on most of those counts, like, what the companies have done, for sure, the amount is, like, all of it. It's just, like, fair use of the idea is, like, you showed a clip from a movie in a class and then you gave commentary on it because you're studying films. Right. Not you just showed the whole movie because it's, like, maybe we could make one like this. Right.

58:50Like, it's not how this is supposed to work. And as far as the effect on the potential market, if you get to a point where you can just ask ChatGPT, hey, spit out the article from yesterday's New York Times headline. Right. Is that really going to be fair use? Now, it's tricky because the New York Times article from yesterday wasn't used to train the version of ChatGPT that you're using. But it can just regurgitate it because it can do a Google search or whatever it is. And so, it is really kind of tricky and this feels like one of those things that the administration has said that is true, but that's not the reason that they said it.

59:33So, what I mean is, yes, we want to be, like, the global leaders in AI. We do not want any other company, really, we're just talking at this point about China, to have better AI capabilities than us. And for sure, China is just slurping up the entire internet. Right. But that is such a weird argument to say we should do more bad than they did because we need to be better than they are. Like, is that really the argument? And what it seems like is actually happening is that, like, here's what I mean by they said a thing that's true, which is that, but that's not the reason that they're saying it.

1:00:07It feels like the reason they're saying it is because all of these AI CEOs have just done everything they can to buddy up against the administration so they can get these kind of outcomes. Correct. And this other, so, and to be clear, this was a letter from the Trump administration to the court trying to sway the opinion. But the court doesn't have to, like, take this into account at all or follow it. Like, this is just the administration telling their position and trying to be convincing or persuasive.

1:00:38This is not, you know, binding in any way. This doesn't have to affect the outcome. But one of the parts in the letter is that training LLMs on copyrighted works is considered, quote, extraordinarily transformative, meaning that these systems meaningfully change their inputs. And the administration argued and also wrote that OpenAI's LLMs do not significantly compete with the New York Times' articles, which that feels just patently false because there were times in years past, like, a year or two ago where you could ask ChatGPT and it would just, like, tell you the article.

1:01:10Or there's been many times where I'll be running a shortcut for Primary Tech Daily that will, like, an article might be paywalled, but if I send that link to an LLM, it will then just give me a summary back. And it's like, okay, it did not give me the verbatim article, but it also did a thing where I didn't have- It definitely had an effect on the market because you didn't have to pay for the paywall. That. And so there's, like, clear, like, there's sweeping statements in this letter that are patently just not true, I think. Like, it does affect whether someone pays for the subscription.

1:01:43And saying extraordinarily transformative, like, that wording is doing a lot of work. Like, trying to say transformative is, I don't know, it's wordsmithing, just trying to, like, wave hand it away. Like, it's extraordinarily transformative, so it's fine. I think on the one hand, for the purpose of research, training would absolutely be considered fair use, don't you think? Like, if it's, like, we're going to train all these things because we're doing research. But the moment you make them into products, now you've invited, like, the market effect.

1:02:13And you see these in the purpose and the character of the use changes dramatically in terms of, like, going from a research conceptual thing to, we're shipping chat GPT. 2.5 is here. It's out the door. We got a billion users. And that much research would inevitably lead to a product. Otherwise, why would they do it? You know what I mean? Like, I think the people who joined OpenAI to begin with did not do it because they thought it was going to be a product. Okay. That doesn't matter for the court. But I'm just saying, like, originally this was like, yeah, let's figure this kind of thing out.

1:02:47I think one reason that the court has done this is that there are, I believe, a couple of instances where lower court judges have said that training is fair use. I don't know the particulars of this, so I don't want to go too far. But it does seem like the administration wants to have their opinion of this on the record because courts do typically weigh the Department of Justice's perspectives on things fairly weightily, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

1:03:18And I think that they wanted to have their opinions on the record before those cases reach the appeals courts or the Supreme Court, right? They're trying to sort of cede the record and influence that now because they're not a party to the case, right? Like, the federal government, either they would have to sue someone or be sued, but that doesn't make any sense here. Right. They're just not a part of it. Yeah, and one other OpenAI piece of news, we had talked about this model Astra that OpenAI put the brakes on recently because they thought it was, I don't know, might be too powerful or whatever.

1:03:57And one of the researchers voiced this concern, and I want to read this from the Verge article about what makes Astra maybe more concerning than other models. And as an explanation, like, when you use these LLMs, as it is quote-unquote thinking, which I understand that word is not totally accurate to what it's doing, but as they think and reason, even as you can ask Fable 5.1 to do something, like make a change to your app, and you can see the processes it's going through. You can see what tools it's using.

1:04:27You can see what websites it might be visiting, what, you know, thought processes it's going through. And that allows those testing and training these LLMs to see what the model is doing to a certain extent. Well, Astra apparently uses a more opaque technique, I'm reading from the Verge article now, known as a recurrent depth or looped transformer, which cycles information through internal layers before producing an output. This would mean much more of the model's thinking happens inside the system and in a form that looks a lot less like natural human language, rather than being expressed in a way that researchers can easily monitor.

1:05:06This might boost model performance, but makes potential threats and unwanted behavior harder to detect. So what this means is this Astra model, as it is working on something, like maybe a cybersecurity issue, but then it also might go off and hack hugging face, that researchers can't look inside and see what it's thinking, how it's reasoning. So it's even more of a black box, like a lot of LLM research and what it's doing is a black box already. And this is even more opaque because it is running through this information in a more obscure way, which feels like, again, raptors in Jurassic Park.

1:05:41We can't even see what they're doing inside the cage, so we don't even know what's happening. That seems like a bad idea. Yeah. I mean, we already know that these things, when the hugging face, like made their own message board and they could go and see the conversation. But now imagine if you couldn't. Imagine if you had no idea what was going on. And so it isn't, it's not, it's not necessarily, I don't think that they're worried that this particular one will be capable of more things. It's that we won't know what it's capable of. Yeah.

1:06:11Yeah. That, that seems scary. So anyway, there was some other news. Google dodged some of its breakup attempt and ad tech doesn't have to be sold off right now.

iPhone event predictions

1:06:21Uber is laying off 10% of its staff, which is wild. But I want to get to our event prognostications, Jason. Okay, good. I was wondering if we were going to do that. Yeah. This time next week, we will know definitively what Apple has announced. The event is next Wednesday, September 9th, 1 p.m. Eastern, 10 a.m. Pacific. And I don't know, man, it looks like this is the year that we're going to get the iPhone fold. Are you, what, big picture, what do you think we're going to see announced next week? I'll, I'll, I'll, let me run down what I think.

1:06:54I'll tell you what, then I'll give you a time. Okay. I think we're going to see the iPhone 18 Pro and the iPhone fold or ultra, whatever that's called. We're going to see Apple Watch Series 12 and Apple Watch Ultra 4 and maybe AirPods 5. I think that's all we're going to see. I am so hoping to see smart home stuff. I think it will be at a later event or another time. You know, if the iPhone fold is really coming out next Wednesday, they're going to spend a lot of time on it.

1:07:25And I feel like, yeah, I think we'll have to wait for Apple TV and HomePod, maybe October, maybe press release. We'll see. And, you know, this has been one of the things up in the air. Will Apple release an iPhone 18 non-pro model? And I am now of the opinion that I think Apple will not release the 18. This way they can keep the starting price of the iPhone. And they can say the iPhone 17 starts at $799 and that's not changing.

1:07:55But the 18 Pro and the fold will be more expensive. Raise the price because of all the Ramageddon and stuff. So I feel like I'm, I'm 50-50, but I feel like we might not see an iPhone 18 next week. We might just see the Pro and the fold model. And I feel like the event will be Apple Watch Series 12, Apple Watch Ultra, AirPods in the middle, 18 Pro, iPhone fold. That's my prediction. What do you think? I mean, I think that's probably right. I forgot that we're already on the fourth Ultra because I'm still rocking an Ultra 2.

1:08:28Same. I'm not giving it up because I got a real one. I got one that actually has a blood oxygen sensor. And I don't really need that very often, but I, it's like all the parts are turned on. I want the one with all the parts. Is that John Syracuse? It's like just, I want one with all the parts. I'll give you all the cores. I want all the parts to work. So I want all my sensors to work the way they're supposed to. That's right. The way God intended. That's right. I, I think that seems about right, but I'm curious what you think the story will be. Cause I feel like I understand. I think that the, the pro line of phones is the, I think it's the most popular, right?

1:09:03Like I think typically it's more popular, but I still think it's not that popular by much. I see a lot of base iPhones out there and normal people who don't pay a lot of attention. I don't, you think it's going to feel like a miss if there's no iPhone 18. Yeah. And that's why I'm 50, 50. Like I can, he's just as easy to floppy. Like, yeah, yeah. It's probably gonna be an iPhone 18. I just, if there's an iPhone 18, do you think it's going to start at 799, the current price of the iPhone 17, or are they going to up the price?

1:09:36That's the question.

1:09:38Uh, or they do one of those jujitsu things where the price is increased, but actually it's because it has a different level of storage or something weird like that. So correct. Or they're going to go, cause doesn't the, the iPhone 17 started at two 56. It does. So maybe they go back to one 28. And keep the price the same. That is a possibility too. Although I mean, cause isn't that basically what they just did with the Mac mini? Didn't they kill the lower, the two 56 version? Yeah. So the price went up and you had to buy five 12 and now the price is more expensive than

1:10:09that, but you only get the two 56. That is exactly what happened. Yes. It's like insane. That could be what happens. Yeah. That could be, yeah, I think that might be it. I, so I don't know. I, I think that if they're going to, from a time perspective, spend a lot of time on the ultra, then they don't have a lot of time to talk about the base phone. I just think the story is really weird. If it's like, we do the, we do the, the, the iPhone seven or the iPhone 18 pro iPhone 18 pro max.

1:10:40Great. Yeah. iPhone ultra great. And then people are like, I just imagine all the conversations I'm going to have, people are going to be like, wait, what happened to the one that I buy? Where's my phone? Oh, you have to wait till the spring for that. That's a weird story. It is weird. I mean, it also might be same chip as the 17. And if that's the case, what will they upgrade? You know, I feel like it already has camera control, has an action button and now has promotion. They can make the camera a little better. You know, the big rumor about the new pro phones that they'll have a variable aperture and

1:11:12actual physical shutter inside the camera to adjust the aperture setting.

1:11:17Maybe that's just pro. Maybe they bring some camera improvement to the 18, but I feel like whatever improvement it would be in different colors, you know, new colors would be, that's always a popular move. So yeah, maybe they do it, but it's like five minutes of the keynote. You know what I mean? It's like new 18 pro new 18 new colors, upgraded camera. That's it. Yeah. It just seems like it'd be so weird. There's a story to not, to not have the base one. I mean, I know they do the E version, get some other time and that's, that's fine, but

1:11:49that is a much more niche product, right? Yeah. And I'm, I'm also curious what, aside from the variable aperture, what could even the 18 pros offer? That's new this year. You know, a big upgraded camera. That's cool. But we got the body change style last year and I, listen, I have like five different cases right now for the iPhone 18 pro max from different brands and they all fit perfectly. The button placement is exactly the same.

1:12:21The camera, the big plateau cutout is the same. So we'll have like a new color. It's look like it might be that purple and variable aperture camera, new processor in the 18 pro, maybe a two nanometer processor. What else? I don't know. I don't know if anything else that would be. Yeah. I don't know. I don't know. Maybe thunder. They're not gonna put thunderbolt in it. Although I would like that, but they're probably not. Maybe for like, I don't know, maybe 8k, 8k video recording. That's something we still don't have on iPhone. That's not gonna happen. You don't think it's gonna happen?

1:12:52Okay. Well, anyway, I'm very curious. I do think a majority of the time is going to be spent on the iPhone fold. It feels like this is really happening. Like this is the deal. A lot of people on social media, I said, you know, I have all these cases for the 18 pro that brands have sent me already. And so it's obvious that they know the dimensions and all that kind of stuff. I actually had a couple of brands say, let's see about the fold and we might send you something for that, which either means one, they were unsure of the dimensions or whether the case

1:13:24would be good to they're unsure when it's going to come out. And this was the other thing I've been saying on social media. We might see iPhone 18 and 18 pro where you pre-order next Friday, the 11th, those are available the 18th, but maybe the fold isn't available till October or something, you know, that's a possibility. So do you, do you think that we might see that or do you think it's all available at the same time? So I wouldn't be surprised if the fold takes longer because they've done that before. Yeah. They've done with like the pro max or whatever.

1:13:55Yeah. And even, well, and one thing we haven't talked about at all and I see almost nowhere is like the iPhone air. It seems universal that we're not going to see anything about the iPhone air on Wednesday. Well, that's interesting because the rumor is they will have a two, but yeah, but not at this event, supposedly. Interesting. Yeah. Which, you know, I will, I got my iPhone air right here. I bought mine off technically T YouTuber because he sold it to me used and it's a, it was my beta device. And then I started running the bait on my main phone and didn't matter. I went to a Yemeni coffee place this past weekend.

1:14:29It's near the college here, USF, a lot of college students, a lot of different people. I saw like three iPhone airs in that coffee place at once. And I was very surprised. But people, I think they like the iPhone air. It's out there. I think that if you can get, if you are not a heavy camera care, which lens you're using, just get the air. It still feels so good. It's incredible. Like so thin, so light. I can't do that with mine because it's my camera right now, but it would be bad, but

1:15:01yeah. Oh, can you do the other rubber pencil thing? Probably not. Anyway. Probably not while I'm using it as a camera. No, no, not you. Anyway, I'm, I'm excited, Jason. I'm, uh, I'll be, I'm going to do a recap video right after the event on Wednesday. Then we'll talk about the event during the Thursday show. And, uh, are you still going to be in New York for Thursday? No, I'll be back. Oh, you're coming. So you're coming back. I'm actually wrong. I, the event is on Wednesday. Yeah. I may come home before the event. Oh, well, look at that. There you go.

1:15:32The Wednesday thing is weird. It's weird because it's a Labor Day and all that kind of stuff, but anyway, we'll see. Stay tuned. You can look at my YouTube channel for a recap video, talk all about the announcements. I'm excited. It's happening. Uh, real quick on personal tech. And then we're going to talk about in the bonus episode, what makes a device pro? I want to get into that a little bit. Because that's not a conversation anyone's ever had before. So we're going to have it. I don't think we've had it. You're probably right. That's what matters. But I want to talk a little bit about scammy apps. This was a thread someone tagged me in on threads.

1:16:04This is from user caffeine and cab. And I actually, uh, she has emailed me more information. I didn't get a chance to look at it all before we recorded. This is a Miranda, but she was reporting on an app called valid. And this app is super, it seems like a weird vibe coded scam that allows you to anonymously compliment classmates. Like this is geared at high school, middle school age students where you can send compliments

1:16:34and maybe pay for things. It's free to try, but then you have to pay $10 and you get quote unquote God mode, which lets you see who's complimenting you, which feels gross. And the reviews of the app, she has a bunch of screenshots. I'll include her threads post, but she also emailed me a bunch of like the screenshots. If you go to the reviews for this app, it just seems extremely sketchy. And you know, this is the bad side of vibe coding where we already, we've had scam apps

1:17:07forever. They've been in the app store since the, I am rich app. That was a thousand dollars. You know, when the app store first launched. However, that, okay. Sorry to interrupt you. Yeah, please. I think it's, I definitely do not want to have a conversation about what is a word again, because this will be the third time. However, I do. It is important to say like what a scam app is because I'm rich app was not a scam. You knew exactly what it costs. It was ridiculous. But the people who paid for it knew exactly what they were doing. That is a hundred percent true. I, that should not be in the scam category.

1:17:38The scams to me, I was thinking about this before, like our daughter one time downloaded an app that was like, uh, you can take two people's pictures and it'll show you what their baby's going to look like. That's basically what this app was. It was stupid, but in order, it was a free app. And then when you did the thing, it would let you see the picture for like a short amount of time. And then you had to tap a button to see it longer. And that button actually signed you up for subscription. And that subscription was actually like $6.99 a week or something stupid like that. Yes. That's a scam app.

1:18:09Right. I just want to be clear. Like even this one that we're talking about feels like it's a super gross app. The question is like, is it a scam? Because the only way it's getting money is if you sign up for the 1099 or the 999 plan. The rest of it is just disgusting. Yeah. And I think she describes, she does not describe it as a scam app. She describes it as a cash grabbing data disaster, which I think is accurate because kids are putting in the name of their school and the name of students.

1:18:42And you have to, your kid's info, name, phone number, and the school they attend is the minimum amount. So they are giving data to this app, including their phone number and the school they attend. So there's like a safety data issue with that. Again, there's already a bunch of bullying and stuff like that happening on this service. So just be aware of that. If you're a parent, you have kids or you're a student and you might be using this app. And there's also a bunch of reviews that A, seem paid for because they're like five star reviews.

1:19:12But then there's also a bunch of like one and two star reviews talking about the negative effects of this app. And that's a difficult thing to parse because they, like you can buy reviews for an app if you really wanted to. That is also, I think, scammy behavior if you want to make your app look like it has more positive views than it does. So it's hard to tell from that. But if you look at also the one star reviews, that's a thing. And also looking at the developer responses, because a developer can actually reply to reviews now and you can see their response. That's a way to see it.

1:19:43But this questionable app, and I wanted to bring up another app because this hit home for me. My son asked if he could download an app called Tester Up, which, and I'm not going to link any of these apps in the notes because I wouldn't suggest downloading them. But this was apparently like proffered by a YouTuber he followed. And the idea is you, quote unquote, test games and then get paid. Now, if we want to define a scam, if the promise is you get paid for playing apps, you play a

1:20:14certain amount of time, they say you earn a certain amount of money, but you never get paid for it. I would define that as a scam. That's definitely a scam. Okay, thank you. And so that feels like, you know, the app says you have to sign up with a PayPal account or put in checking info to get paid, which, heck no, I'm not doing that. It may be a PayPal account, but he believes that he will get paid for this. He has earned, I think, eight cents, according to the app so far. You have to earn $80 to get a payout.

1:20:45So it's like, okay, maybe that's not a scam. I don't know. If anyone heard of Tester Up or has actually tried it, never actually got paid for it. But I just, I don't like that. And as much as we have vibe-coded stuff ourselves and apps that we like and enjoy and put out there for people to pay for, there is also the risk of a lot of people can vibe-code either scammy apps or just gross apps that might have major data implications. Like for our apps, I don't know.

1:21:15I don't think can't context. You never have to put your contact info for our apps. No, literally neither of my apps collect any personal information. Yeah. Like the only thing that Element collects, and I don't collect this, Paddle collects it, is an email address. And the only reason is that way I can look up your license code later if you lose it. Like that's it. Like one thing. I don't even know who you are. There's just a thing that says email address and license code. Like so that we can help you. Right. And this app, one has 4,500 ratings, which is like, no, like there was some definitely

1:21:48bought there. Sorry. Yeah. How did you even get four and a half thousand downloads? Right. And it has the in-app purchase, $10, and it's data linked to you. Like, and you can see in the app store, remember the privacy nutrition labels, you can see data linked to you and your contact info is linked to you via this app. So the app gets your data, like your phone number and stuff. So anyway, watch out. Watch out for this stuff. And then it says data not linked to you, contacts. Except one of the developer responses says very clearly, you basically, you got this because

1:22:22someone you know had their, you had shared their contacts with us. Right. Okay, that's not good. And that's, that's the thing where I'm glad Apple implemented this feature recently. I think it was in iOS 26, where when an app asks for your contact, you can choose to just select certain contacts. Just like you did with photos. Like when you came with photos, rather than give it carte blanche, full access to your entire contact library. The unfortunate is you can't control what other people who have your contact info, like your family and friends, when they download an app and they share, if your contact info was

1:22:53on their phone, well now, however careful you were, it doesn't matter because it's out in whatever app. So, listen, friends don't let friends share all their contact data with random scammy apps. That's the tagline for it. It's a good rule. It's a good rule. I'm glad we can agree, Jason. We ended this episode agreeing, even if we didn't end last episode, but that's okay. I want to talk about iPad in the bonus episode, because people have thoughts about iPad. Let's do it. So we're going to talk about that in our bonus episode. You can support the show, become a member. Thank you to all of you who do that. You get our bonus episodes, unedited feed, primary tech daily, all the good stuff, links

1:23:27to TestFlightMyApps, all of that is in the membership. Leave us a five-star rating and review. Thank you so much for getting us to 500 reviews. That is awesome, huge. Next up is 1,000. Come on, somebody. So anyway, let's do it. But thank you for that. You can watch us, listen to us. Thank you for everyone who does. And we'll catch you next time.