A new wave of Apple devices plus some very useful updates were the focus of the October 20, 2026 meeting. Apple rolled out additional OS 27 enhancements for Mac, iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch, plus tweaks to Apple TV and HomePod.
After reviewing why you should upgrade, and the dangers of delaying, we explored changes, additions, and deletions to the various operating systems, and took a quick tour of new hardware, including:
- New HomePod mini
- Apple Home Collection (from third-party manufacturers)
- New Apple TV 4K
- Apple HomeView
Among other things, there was also a 142-page slideshow, with lots of details.
Notes from the October 2026 meeting on OS 27 and new toys
Yes, 142 pages of notes.
Video of the October 2026 meeting on OS 27 and New Toys
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Transcript of the October 2026 meeting: OS 27 and New Toys
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18:29:52 So why don’t we start with some Q&A questions and answers. If you don’t ask questions, I’ll come up with some.
18:30:03 Anybody have a question?
18:30:07 Not yet. I have a Mac, and I don’t really know how to use computers a lot. I can do… I can do quite a bit. I just I want to join this group for the last couple of years, and I could never get to it.
18:30:20 Okay.
18:30:21 So I’ll wait and see what comes up, and then if I have any, I’ll let you know. Thank you.
18:30:28 Mm-hmm.
18:30:25 Yeah, probably somebody will say something that’ll prompt you to want to know more about it.
18:30:30 Any questions from anyone?
18:30:37 In your experience, what?
18:30:39 What’s the remedy for…
18:30:42 A Mac that has paused or stopped syncing photos and other, you know,
18:30:48 other apps to iCloud.
18:30:51 Um, the… there are a number of reasons why I can stop syncing to iCloud. One is you have it turned off.
18:31:00 That’s the big one. The second one is that you have too much stuff, and it’s filled up the space in iCloud. The third one is, believe it or not, not having space on your computer. If you run out of space on your computer,
18:31:16 It uses the computer to kind of gather together temporary files for syncing. And if you run out of space on your computer, it can stop syncing. If you run out of space in iCloud, which is the most common reason.
18:31:31 stop sinking. And the other one is you can turn it off. I know some people will, they’ll turn off
18:31:38 uh, sinking on one device, but then they’ll turn it on on another, or vice versa, and what they think they’re doing is they’re…
18:31:47 If you sync photos, it’s going to sync photos regardless of where they come from, whether they come from your Mac or from your iPhone or your iPad. So if you try and turn it off on one, you’re turning it off for everybody.
18:32:01 And that’s not intuitively obvious, but the whole point of a cloud sync is to be able to sync it from everywhere, and you don’t have to remember where you were or what you… what device you had when you did something. As an example, if you sync
18:32:16 passwords just from your phone, and it didn’t sync from your Mac. That’s kind of pointless because it’s easy to type in a password on a Mac. It’s a lot harder on a phone, so if you type in passwords or a bunch of stuff on your Mac, and then you’re out someplace at a restaurant and it’s asking you for what is
18:32:34 the password for New York Times and you don’t know what it is, and it’s not synced, you’ll be annoyed. So the whole point is to sync everything. And if you turn it off on one, you’ll probably turn it off on everything. But usually the biggest ones are…
18:32:51 out of space on iCloud or you run out of space on your Mac. If your Mac doesn’t have some space to work with, it just a lot of things stop working. The rule of thumb that I say is that if you have
18:33:06 16 gigs of RAM in your computer, you should have at least three times that much free disk space. Why 3 times? It’s completely arbitrary, but if you’re…
18:33:20 If your Mac needs to what’s called page out stuff, you’re running out of rooms so it saves stuff to disk temporarily.
18:33:27 It needs room for that. And if it doesn’t have it, things just get really slow or they stop working, and you don’t know why, and you think it’s poltergeist. But it’s not poltergeist. It’s usually just a lack of space.
18:33:41 Thank you.
18:33:44 Any other questions?
18:33:47 Uh, no, I’ve never used cloud, iCloud. I’ve always been afraid of it.
18:33:54 Because I feel like things are going to go into outer space somewhere and I’ll never find them. But, um…
18:33:59 But he says you should use iCloud.
18:34:04 Okay.
18:34:03 Yes, I’m a big proponent of iCloud. When I moved, I’m from Washington State, but I was in purgatory for most of my life because my father was in the military and then my spouse was in the military. When we moved from the East Coast back to Washington state, the first thing I did
18:34:22 was buy more space on iCloud and sync everything. Because that way, in the move across the United States, if the movers lost my computer, or my spare hard drives, or anything at all, I’d still have everything, because it would be up in the cloud.
18:34:38 You want to think of the cloud as basically a storage repository that’s not near your computer. One of the biggest problems people have, I’ll give you.
18:34:50 It sounds like a roundabout story, but there’s a point to it. I have a niece who took baby photos on her phone and she ended up losing her phone at one point.
18:35:05 And her oldest son at that time was 13. His baby pictures were on the phone, as were the other two children that she had. She had never backed them up.
18:35:16 They’d never been copied to a computer or anything, so the only baby photos she has of her children basically are ones that I’ve sent her, because she would, you know, send out.
18:35:28 baby announcements and whatnot. So I’ve provided her with a bunch of photographs of her children from 1, 2, 3, 4, 8, 9, 10, 11 years of age, because she didn’t have them. If you have it in the cloud, that’s a place that it’s not near your computer. Why is that important?
18:35:48 This one woman who was an artist, she had a computer in her paint in her creative studio, which was she mostly did paintings. She decided to get into sculpture one time.
18:36:03 Just because she’s an artist and she was planing away on this piece of metal and pieces of metal got into her computer and shorted it out. So even though she physically had the computer, the computer was no longer functional. And her backups were in the same room and when the computer caught on fire, she lost the backups.
18:36:24 So you having something that’s not in the same room as the computer, not in the same place as your iPhone.
18:36:31 a place that gets stuff stored is a really, really good idea. And the Apple Cloud is really just a series of computers scattered throughout the… actually, the whole globe that store your data, and it stores it encrypted. It’s encrypted
18:36:48 On your computer, it’s encrypted going to Apple’s iCloud, and when you pull something back its encrypted. When you hear stories about people had their iCloud account hacked, it’s mostly a celebrities who wrote about their favorite cat whose name…
18:37:04 Tutsi or something, and so somebody typed that in to guess is that was the password for their iCloud account, and it was. So basically, they publicized their password in a public forum. In terms of just breaking into your iCloud account, if you don’t have a password, it’s really next to impossible.
18:37:24 Uh, you may have read the stories about the FBI spending tens of millions of dollars trying to break into someone’s iPhone after they were arrested for something, because it’s just…
18:37:37 If the owner doesn’t give us a password, it’s really very
18:37:41 difficult to get in.
18:37:45 So I highly recommend using the cloud. One gotcha, if you live in Clallam County is network speed. When you push up to the cloud, I have something like 200,000 photographs.
18:38:03 pushing that up to the cloud all at once would take a long time. And if you have a slow internet, it’s going to take even longer. So, you might want to check your internet speed. The easiest way to do that is fire up your browser, go to Google,
18:38:20 the search engine and type in internet speed test, it gives you a box and you press a button, and it’ll tell you how fast your connection is. And the reason why I recommend using Google for that is that Google’s not tied to any particular provider.
18:38:35 Um, most providers, like, we don’t have them here, but if you had Xfinity or somebody else, they’ll say, you run a speed test. Well, the speed test goes between you and the people supplying you with internet. So, it’s going to be fast, but it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s fast going
18:38:52 anybody else other than the internet provider. If you use Google speed test, you’re not getting your internet from Google, and it’s a much more reliable measure of how fast your speed is. And if you have slow speed, it’s going to take a long time to get to the cloud. If you have slow speed,
18:39:11 Um, do I have it here with me?
18:39:14 Another way to…
18:39:17 Back stuff up.
18:39:19 This, it’s not obvious, but this little square is a, well, this is a one terabyte drive, one terabyte means it’s a trillion bytes worth of data on this drive. Most of you will have…
18:39:35 you’re um
18:39:37 Your startup computer on your computer is either half a terabyte to a terabyte drive, which means that this one little tiny thing here can store the entire contents of your drive. And because this is a solid state drive, it backs up very quick.
18:39:55 This USB drive is much older technology. It’s much slower to save it to it, but this is a half terabyte, so two of these is the same as that one drive, and these are much more inexpensive. The trouble is that saving it to a USB drive takes forever, but the nice thing about USB drives is they’re tiny, you can stick in your bank deposit box, you can email it, not you can’t email it, you can mail it to a relative and have off-site storage that
18:40:24 There are lots of ways to back stuff up, but not backing stuff up is a bad idea, and backing it up and having the backup right next to your computer is a bad idea, and having everything on your phone, only on your phone, is a really terrible problem.
18:40:40 Because if it’s a portable phone and you carry it around with you, you can drop it, it can fall overboard when you’re taking pictures of Mount Rainier from the ferry. It can do all kinds of stuff. And so having it someplace other than on the phone is a really good idea.
18:40:58 Okay, so on my Mac, it’ll tell me that there is an iCloud and I can connect to it or sync things to it.
18:41:06 Okay, I’ll take. Yeah.
18:41:05 Yes, um, however, there’s, there’s a gotcha here. The iCloud account that comes with free with your Mac is only 5 gigabytes.
18:41:19 And five gigabytes doesn’t get you much. A paid subscription to more space, it costs money, but it’s not that much money.
18:41:30 You can buy a lot of space for not that much.
18:41:34 Okay.
18:41:35 And who do I buy it from?
18:41:39 Oh, okay.
18:41:36 You buy it from Apple. If you go into iCloud on your Mac, it’ll actually have a button there saying that you can buy more space.
18:41:45 Oh, okay. I won’t take up everybody’s time for this now, but thank you very much.
18:41:50 I’ll look into that.
18:41:52 Any other questions?
18:41:58 What did you…
18:41:57 Anybody buy an iPhone duo yet?
18:41:59 What did you use to make the picture of the puffin with the
18:42:03 whatever that new gadget is.
18:42:07 Yeah.
18:42:05 Oh, the home view. I used Google Gemini for that.
18:42:10 Okay.
18:42:11 However, that’s going to be, if I get that far, that’s going to be something I show you today with Apple’s new image.
18:42:20 playground, I…
18:42:22 tried the same thing with Apple’s image playground, so she’d ask me about that.
18:42:28 But I use Google Gemini for that. I have an account with Google that I’ve had forever, a paid account, and I don’t use it for asking how to balance my finances or anything like that. I use it basically just for
18:42:45 doing things I can’t do, and one of the things I can’t do is draw.
18:42:52 So…
18:42:52 You either, huh?
18:42:54 Pardon?
18:42:58 Well…
18:42:55 You either, I can’t draw either.
18:43:05 Yeah.
18:42:59 I’m good at page design, typography, and things like that, but the drawings themselves, no, that’s not my forte. I used to run a newspaper editor, and there was a reason why I had a…
18:43:11 the artist.
18:43:14 She was much better at drawing than I was. She was a terrible writer, so no competition.
18:43:24 Anybody have an iPhone Dua?
18:43:29 I’m expecting the answer to be no for quite a while.
18:43:32 Unless you happen to have $2,000, you just…
18:43:36 Feel a need to spend.
18:43:39 I don’t know, I still just am nervous about a folding screen. It just doesn’t sound like it’s gonna be robust.
18:43:48 Well, actually, people who have been playing with them say that they were surprised at how robust it is, but anytime you have a moving part, you know, the regular iPhone is basically just a brick. You can beat somebody with it.
18:44:02 But anytime you have a moving part, yeah, that does make it a bit more fragile. And this past week I saw…
18:44:11 Somebody on a fishing boat accidentally tossed their phone. They were talking on the phone with one hand and they were directing somebody to do something with another, and they got a right because this person wasn’t following what they were doing. So they gestured with the other hand in the
18:44:36 Yep.
18:44:29 went flying, it didn’t go overboard, but it hit the cabin, which was made out of steel and bounced around a bit. And it did work, but I am not sure what would have happened if there had been a duo. The other thing about the duo that I’m not fond of, I’m left-handed and it’s aggressively
18:44:49 Right-handed. I’m not sure I’d like that.
18:44:53 That’s good to know. I’m left-handed, too.
18:44:57 Um, this, uh, Apple, uh, engineer that, um, good friends with who recently had to retire because of health reasons, um, we were talking about things that we liked and didn’t like, and he also did not like the fact that it was uh
18:45:12 right-handed, because he too is left-handed, which is, I’ve known him for 25 years and never realized that.
18:45:20 Anyway.
18:45:21 Are the… are the duos shipping now?
18:45:24 Um, the duos are supposed to start shipping…
18:45:28 I thought it was the 23rd.
18:45:32 Um, sometime in the future, I don’t know, I don’t remember. And there are already rumors that they got overwhelmed with more orders than they expected, and a lot of orders will be delayed for a while.
18:45:47 Um, something like that is really, really hard to judge.
18:45:53 the market for in advance. So, uh, I was reading this article that was saying it was, you know, Apple really screwed up, and no, they didn’t. You’re taking a shot in the dark.
18:46:06 And you really don’t know how it’s going to go. The iPod, when it first came out, a lot of people thought that was Steve Jobs’ pet little project and nobody would want one. And they sold out on the first day and it took them several months to catch up.
18:46:22 So you just can’t you just can’t tell.
18:46:28 Any other questions?
18:46:31 What happens if you turn off, if you have…
18:46:35 Encryption turned on for your hard drive, and you turn it off.
18:46:39 If you turn it off, what it does is it basically, well, it depends.
18:46:46 It depends upon what operating system you’re using because the newer Mac operating systems are technically the internal, the startup drive at the least. If you have external drives, it gets more complicated. But the startup drive is encrypted.
18:47:03 If you’re running OS 27, it’s encrypted. It’s encrypted on your iPhone, it’s encrypted on your iPad. That startup drive is already encrypted. If you also use something like, what’s the name, File Vault, it gives it a different kind of encryption as well. So it’s kind of double encrypted. If you turn off the…
18:47:25 File Vault encryption that gets rid of one layer, but it still leaves the drive itself encrypted. If you were to take it out of your machine, try to stick it in another machine and read it, you couldn’t.
18:47:36 So it depends upon what kind of encryption we’re talking about. The other thing…
18:47:41 Yeah, if you turn off… if you turn off FileVault, you can turn it back on.
18:47:46 Yes.
18:47:47 We don’t, yeah, it doesn’t do any bad things to your data.
18:47:50 Uh, no.
18:47:56 All right.
18:47:52 Uh, it just, it does take time though. It’s not a quick on and off thing because it does go through a process that it needs to do its thing.
18:48:06 For home computers, I never recommended FireVault, but I was doing…
18:48:10 I work for a science agency, and I sometimes needed to recover somebody’s drive after they did something stupid. And if they turned on FileVault, it was almost impossible for me to recover anything. If it wasn’t activated, there were ways that I could get into it, especially if they gave me their username and password, but if that was
18:48:30 with FireVault, it was almost impossible to get back into it. So I didn’t recommend that, but for things like anything that you move, like a…
18:48:40 MacBook Pro, FileVault’s a good idea. Uh, and some of the things that Apple does won’t work unless you turn on File Vault. Some advanced security.
18:48:52 Security majors won’t work unless you turn on file vault. So it’s a…
18:48:57 I wish I could say that it’s a clear cut, but the kinds of things that Apple is trying to do to protect you are in layers. And you can wear a parka in the middle of the summer, or you can wear a bikini in winter. You have a choice.
18:49:13 Personally, I don’t want to wear a bikini at all, so I try for the middle ground. But iPhones have been encrypted from day one.
18:49:26 And they’re really hard to break into. Same with the iPad because the…
18:49:32 Max…
18:49:33 You can add so many other things to it, scanners and hard drives and RAIDs and so on and so forth, it becomes a little bit more complicated. And that’s why Apple has different ways of encrypting different types of things.
18:49:49 And also the newer drives, the high capacity drives that are like 5, 10 terabytes, they use encryption by default. They don’t store things linearly. Used to be in old ones, you fill up the outer rim of the hard drive first and then towards the center.
18:50:07 In the new ones, no, they deliberately scatter it all over because they found out it was faster to save and retrieve it if you didn’t put it in a rigid pattern, because that way it didn’t have to go hunt for spaces. It already had a map of what was open, and it just filled those things in.
18:50:21 But that requires.
18:50:24 So that requires more drying.
18:50:28 intelligence, the computer that runs your hard drive is actually fairly bright and it just gets…
18:50:35 Weird.
18:50:39 Weird means I could explain it, but you’d all hang up.
18:50:43 So…
18:50:49 Any other questions?
18:50:54 Yes, I have some friends that have Android for whatever reason, and some of them I can text and some of them it won’t deliver.
18:51:05 Any ideas?
18:51:07 Um…
18:51:11 I have, well, my niece now has an iPhone, so it’s a little bit different. The protocol that Androids use to deliver things is called SMS, Simple Message System.
18:51:26 I don’t remember what the second S stands for. But anyway, it’s a way to send text messages back and forth. And by default, you can only send 140 character messages. You can’t send anything longer than that and so on and so forth. Well, Google’s worked around that, still using the SMS protocol.
18:51:42 It’s a fairly simple and a fairly old protocol.
18:51:45 And it’s designed to work from phone number to phone number, which is why the phone service used to charge for text messaging, even though it cost them nothing, in terms of the amount of wire space that it took up in order to send and receive text messages was next to nothing.
18:52:03 Um, when Apple came out, they didn’t like… people didn’t like having to pay for, uh, text messages. So, with Apple Came Out, if you sent it from one email address to another email address, it doesn’t go over the regular
18:52:18 audio phone lines, it goes as data, which means that the phone companies couldn’t charge for it. And that really torqued off the phone companies, but eventually they surrendered and they said, okay, we won’t charge you for text messages.
18:52:30 If you send something from a Mac to a phone number, it should go through. If you send it from a Mac or an iPhone to an email address, that’s…
18:52:46 trickier, because depending upon the age of the Android, what kind of protocol is set up, and who manufactured it, and a whole bunch of other things, it may or may not work. I always try to send things to people’s email addresses, rather than their phone number.
18:53:04 My daughter lives in England. They still charge for text messages in England. If I send it to her email address, she doesn’t get charged. If I send it to my son-in-law’s email address, he doesn’t get charged. It just goes as data. And among other things, it’s faster.
18:53:21 If she sends something to
18:53:24 somebody else, and she sends it to their phone number, and she sends it to their email address as well. Believe it or not, those are two different types of text messages.
18:53:35 And they’ll show up separately in your inbox. One was sent to your email address, one was sent to your phone number. So why something doesn’t work when you send it to an Android, did you send it to the phone number? Did you send it to their email address? How old is their Android?
18:53:51 It could be a whole bunch of things.
18:53:56 The current version, and something I might mention today, the current version of Apple Messages that’s in OS 27 will retry to send a message if it can’t go through. The old one, if it didn’t get sent in a limited amount of time, it timed out.
18:54:12 out. And quite often, it’ll time out depending upon where that other person’s located, if they have the phone turned off, a whole bunch of things. It’s…
18:54:21 In other words, I don’t have a clear answer for you, but it’s a common problem.
18:54:27 Well, I send real long messages to the one person that can’t.
18:54:31 some reason, I always forget that she doesn’t get them. And so maybe…
18:54:35 Yeah, the problem with long messages and complicated ones, especially if they have poor bandwidth, is that it just… the phone on the other end just might give up.
18:54:47 Because it just can’t handle that. Again, because the original protocol was only 140 characters. When I used to send things to my niece, she’d laugh because I would send long messages too, so instead of getting one message, she’d get 15.
18:55:05 And she’d have to, you know, read one of 15 to a 15, 3 of 15, and she thought that was hilariously funny. And I would forget that she did… she had an Android, and I’d send her things like PDFs or pictures and so on and so forth, and that would just choke.
18:55:21 But now that she has a Mac… now that she has an iPhone, I don’t care. I just send her anything I want to. It’s like any conversation. If you’re talking to somebody who doesn’t understand your language, it’s going to be much harder than if you share
18:55:37 the same language, and Android is definitely different. Here’s a trivia question for you.
18:55:42 owns the Android operating system.
18:55:46 Google.
18:55:48 Google.
18:55:49 Google owns Android.
18:55:52 Yes.
18:55:53 In the Android operating system that’s on Kindle, for example, the Kindle runs an Android operating system, it’s in violation of Google’s copyright, and Google has been suing them for years because they’re not, according to the… you can use Android operating system for free, but you can’t make it proprietary.
18:56:13 Amazon did.
18:56:15 Hmm.
18:56:17 So
18:56:19 So while you were in the subject of sending texts to either a phone number or email address, how do you, you know…
18:56:30 If you’ve got both pieces of information in your contacts, how do you get it to send it to your phone number, I mean, your email rather than phone number?
18:56:43 When you, when you first create a text chain and you press that plus button, do you type in a phone number? Do you type in the email address?
18:56:53 Hmm? Okay.
18:56:53 If you type in the email address, it goes email. If you type in the phone number, or if somebody sends it to you phone number to phone number and you reply, at that point you talking phone number. That’s why you can have a conversation with the same person.
18:57:09 Your sister-in-law shows up here and she shows up here, and she shows up here. And why does she show up three times? It’s because each one of those used a different method, or she included somebody else in one of those. So if she included somebody else, that’s another string.
18:57:24 It can get really complicated.
18:57:27 Cool.
18:57:26 I have a question.
18:57:28 But keep in mind that it’s a simple messaging system. It’s not a…
18:57:32 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
18:57:33 Not very bright.
18:57:36 I have a question.
18:57:37 I can barely hear you.
18:57:39 Okay, I have a question. Can you hear me now?
18:57:42 Not much better, but go ahead.
18:57:45 I don’t know why that is. Well, I just am wondering, though, if I’m just, when I go to send a text message,
18:57:54 The contact…
18:57:56 Uh, how do I know if I’m sending… I just enter somebody’s name, and so I may or may not have both
18:58:04 or destination information pieces in my contacts, so how would I know which way I’m sending it?
18:58:11 Well, there is a… there is a way to cheat at this, that I learned several years ago, and that is if I’m sending it to someone that I know has an iPhone,
18:58:21 And when it says phone number,
18:58:24 If you hover over the phone, it’ll actually pop up with the choice for iPhone. If you type it in, if you type their email address and say that they have, when you type the phone number, if you say it’s an iPhone.
18:58:38 That is something that your machine will then use as saying, oh, they have an iPhone, so I can send this as data.
18:58:46 But you have to know that they have an iPhone. If they have an Android, and you say it’s an iPhone, that trick doesn’t work. But like my daughter, I can send it to her phone number in England because her phone number in my contacts says it’s iPhone. It doesn’t say mobile, it doesn’t say home.
18:59:04 And it’s something that you actually have to hover it over, and you’ll see that you have a choice. And one of the choices is iPhone.
18:59:12 Are you talking about when you enter information in your contact list?
18:59:17 Yes, and when you enter it into contacts.
18:59:24 It’s been years since I’ve actually checked. I should go look to see if that’s still the case.
18:59:40 Uh…
18:59:47 You know, the sign-in sheet.
18:59:49 Yes, I do.
18:59:55 Um, hmm.
19:00:00 I will paste that into the chat window.
19:00:05 I’m pasting
19:00:07 seen in the sign-in sheet, I use the sign-in sheet to find out, among other things, who came to a meeting. Um And sometimes that’s the only way I know of who the people are. And when you fill in the sign-up sheet, please put in a first name and a last name.
19:00:24 Just put in like James, and that doesn’t help me much. So
19:00:30 But that should be in the… in the…
19:00:33 the chat window.
19:00:38 Any other questions?
19:00:41 Going back to the, I just got a new Android. My other one was also Android, but it was eight years old and it just died on me. But anyway, I have an Android and I’m looking at it where I fill in all the contact information for somebody. Normally, I don’t put an email address. I just have their phone number.
19:00:59 and everything else. But if I were to put their email address on that.
19:01:05 on my phone, how…
19:01:07 How does that change when I text them?
19:01:15 Oh, okay.
19:01:09 Well, since it’s an Android and that was an iPhone trick, the answer is I don’t know that it does. On an iPhone, if you’re sending it from… Apple developed the technology to send text messages as data rather than as an audio text message.
19:01:26 So Apple developed that and it was proprietary with Apple for quite some time. And Google then later on kind of adopted that too so they could have, among other things, longer messages and so on and so forth. But it’s really a…
19:01:41 It’s really an iPhone trick. On an Android. I have had Android phones, but not recently.
19:01:49 The federal government gave me an Android phone until we got rid of them all as a security risk. So that was the last time I ever had an Android phone.
19:02:00 No.
19:01:59 It’s interesting, Boeing wouldn’t let us have iPhones because they thought they were a security risk, but that was a long time ago now.
19:02:08 Yeah.
19:02:11 Hmm.
19:02:11 Most security professionals today, they have an iPhone and they have a MacBook. They don’t have a Windows machine. They don’t have a Linux machine. They have a MacBook and they have an iPhone.
19:02:30 Any other questions?
19:02:34 Oh, it’s after 7. Mr. President, is there anything you would like to say?
19:02:43 Ah, .
19:02:41 Nothing that I can think of. That’s weird, but answering when you asked that question.
19:02:50 Um.
19:02:50 I’m going to show you a bunch of slides
19:02:56 I had a good friend who recently worked for Apple for years and years and years and recently had to retire because of health. And he was a source of a lot of information that I’ve had over the years.
19:03:09 a long slideshow, but I’m going to go through most of it really, really quick because there’s just a lot of stuff that’s come out in the last.
19:03:19 couple months that I went to cover. So I’m going to share my screen.
19:03:26 If I’m lucky…
19:03:30 in a slideshow now a bunch of stuff.
19:03:33 I have no idea, yes.
19:03:35 And… there it is!
19:03:37 That’s my screen.
19:03:38 Oh.
19:03:40 Can you all see me scream?
19:03:42 Yes.
19:03:43 Yes.
19:03:44 Okay.
19:03:46 First, a little, and I’m going to post these slides on the website, so the fact that I’m whipping through them, don’t worry about it, they’ll be on the website if I remember. Uh, benefits of upgrading.
19:03:57 A lot of people, they try to put off things forever because they say, well, somebody’s going to have a new update and so on and so forth. But there are lots of things you can do. The new operating systems are actually faster in most respects.
19:04:13 have refined interfaces, better accessibility, much better security because they’ve patched existing security holds, and they also have a bunch of bug fixes.
19:04:28 that it makes it worthwhile. The other thing is that they also quite often have performance improvements because they figured out how to do things faster, have updated drivers, and in particular, battery efficiency. A lot of people, when they upgraded to
19:04:46 iOS 27, they said, oh, it took forever to update. Well, that’s because they hadn’t bothered to index things beforehand, but once it got over the…
19:04:57 the um
19:04:58 process of indexing everything, people are noticing much better battery life on iPhones and iPads. So there are lots of benefits to updating and if you didn’t see Apple’s keynote address, it was actually quite, quite good.
19:05:15 It’s available on Apple’s site and it’s worth watching.
19:05:22 You dinner.
19:05:23 Something that I want to emphasize that a lot of people have criticized that Apple was late to the drawing board when it came to artificial intelligence, because there’s a big artificial intelligence
19:05:39 push right now, people are spending literally trillions of dollars on it. And this article I like, it was published in Computer World, which is more of a trade magazine than a popular press thing.
19:05:53 And the article basically says that Apple wasn’t late to AI, it was the adult in the room, that what Apple was trying to do was not flash and dazzle.
19:06:05 Apple was not trying to put people out of work and have companies save money. Apple was trying to provide benefits to the user. And I’m going to have this link in the slide deck so you don’t have to copy this really, really long.
19:06:21 URL, but it’s a…
19:06:24 I approve of the editorial. Just a real quick review of the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max. They come in two different sizes. They come in different colors. The thing that’s really interesting about the Pro Max…
19:06:40 is that it has this new aperture. Most phone cameras don’t have an aperture. An aperture is a mechanical shutter, this mechanical screen that increases or decreases the iris for the camera.
19:06:57 And that allows you to change, among other things, the depth of field, the amount of light coming in, and so on and so forth. In the iPhone 18 has an aperture.
19:07:10 For a photographer, that’s a real…
19:07:15 powerful feature for somebody who is really a photographer. If you just go and take snapshots, it’s not going to make any difference, but if you’re… if you like to take really good, well-thought-out photographs, having the ability to control the aperture is
19:07:31 is a huge plus. The other thing that it has, which is not of…
19:07:37 benefit to most of you, probably, is that it has this new reference image. It stores, uh, if you ask it to, it stores a reference image, which is an unalterable original of something. And that’s useful for things like news reporters, that’s useful for things like artists, so that if somebody comes up with an altered image, you can say,
19:08:01 No, no, I have the original, you don’t, and I can prove it. So this is something that’s of interest to me, but I don’t run a newspaper anymore, so it’s not as…
19:08:11 What’s interesting is it would have been like 30 years ago.
19:08:16 But that’s another big thing with the new machine. And they have done amazing things with the battery. The battery life in the 18 is astounding. I have a friend in Denver who recently got an 18 and she’s just…
19:08:32 She went from a 16 to an 18, and she was just astonished at how long
19:08:40 the battery lasts. There’s also the iPhone Duo, which has gotten a lot of attention. Here’s what I was talking about when I said it’s aggressively right-handed. The buttons for it are on the right-hand side, and because it’s wider than a regular iPhone,
19:08:55 That’s those…
19:08:55 Uh, if you’re left-handed, it’s really hard… I can’t… I can’t visualize me easily
19:09:02 working the buttons. It would be something I’d have to work at.
19:09:09 in different sizes depending upon whether if you open it up, which is kind of cool, you can do multiple things at once on it, which is cool. It’s got this amazing hinge. Somebody was mentioning the thought that the hinge that the Samsung and other foldable phones have.
19:09:26 a weak point. Apple spent a lot of time on the design of this hinge. I’m just really impressed with it as a piece of engineering. And the other thing is, for a $2,000 phone, you can also turn it into a nightlight just by
19:09:40 Mm-hmm.
19:09:41 Hold it over and just stick it up there while it’s charging at night.
19:09:48 Something else they recently came up with was the Apple TV 4K, which is a new
19:09:58 Apple TV that has more.
19:10:02 Storage space, so among other things, it supports Apple’s AI and as an example of the kind of things it can do, it has, you can have it with a home security cameras set up. That was a big part of Apple’s presentation talking about it. You could do home security stuff with it.
19:10:22 It has the remote that comes with the new Apple 4K TV, has a built-in, essentially AirTag in it. So if you lose the remote, and trust me, if you have an Apple TV, not being able to find the remote is a common thing.
19:10:38 built into the new remote. And what’s even more interesting is the remote is backward compatible with the last two generations of Apple TV. So if you have an older Apple TV, you can buy the new remote and you’re in good shape.
19:10:53 It has links in with Apple’s new Apple Home system, the ecosystem, which I’m going to talk about in just the next slide to come to think about it. So you have an integrated view of what’s on your…
19:11:09 What your home is doing, the ceiling fan’s on, the shades are closed, the speakers are off, the lights are on, all kinds of different things that you
19:11:17 You can check right on your phone, and you don’t have to be at home. You can be away and check that. This is something that was designed for Apple Home, but it’s made by LG. It’s an indoor camera, and the indoor security camera.
19:11:33 And it actually has a tilt mechanism, so it can tilt up and down and you can set it so that if you leave, so as you come home and you don’t want it tracking you all the time, it’ll turn itself vertically so that it’s not looking at you. But that’s the part.
19:11:49 the new Apple Home appliance from LG. LG also has a new smart thermostat that’ll automatically turn the heating or cooling off when you leave the home or go on trips, and it’ll turn it down in the evening because people like
19:12:06 to sleep in a cooler environment than they work in and during the day, or vice versa depending upon the season. They have a new
19:12:20 I’ve been reluctant to go with electronic locks because the
19:12:27 The people who made the locks might have been lock companies, but they were not very good at security, computer security. And I have a friend who likes to go around and break into computerized locks. This one is made by
19:12:42 I don’t remember who made this but it’s a deadbolt lock that you can either tap on it to let yourself in or you can let yourself in with your phone and the security on it actually looks pretty good. But my friend hasn’t had one yet to see if he can break in.
19:13:01 That’s probably the least interesting thing for me, but for a lot of people, if you leave the house and you accidentally lock yourself out, the nice thing about a computerized lock is you can get yourself back in without having a key and without having to call the fire department or a locksmith.
19:13:20 The HomePod Mini is a two works with a new ecosystem and among other things, you can get this nice little, the HomePod mini can act as a kind of a hub for all this stuff. So it can collect all this information and send it off to your phone.
19:13:35 And the new HomeFod penny can also pair itself up, so you can have separate left and right stereo speakers for your Mac, or you can use it with a set of four regular HomePods and HomePod MIDIs.
19:13:49 have a surround sound with an Apple TV, if you have an Apple TV. This is something I actually spent money on, which the new Apple Home View, it hasn’t shown up yet, but it’s basically
19:14:03 a smart device that you can set on a counter or on your kitchen table or on your desk or something, and it’s got Apple Intelligence built in so you can talk to it and give it, uh, tell it things to do, such as you ask it a question about
19:14:20 uh, the cyanotype process, and it comes back and tells you what the cyanotype process is. Uh, you can get a list of what your appointments are for that day, because it has access to your… to your calendar. You can use it to
19:14:36 sing along with somebody’s song because it’ll show lyrics to their songs as a plays music video. You can have different kinds of faces on the front of it to match your inclination.
19:14:51 The speaker on it has got microphones and speakers all around it, so you can talk from pretty much any direction, and it’s got tweeters. No, it’s got woofers in the bass.
19:15:04 Projecting down, and allegedly it’s got decent sound. Um, I will find out in a couple weeks when mine arrives. And it also can be used for FaceTime video. And you’ll see that we’re having a conversation here with people,
19:15:21 place else, and you can do this with the HomePod. And this is kind of a default different things you can do with it. Just get the time or play with other things.
19:15:38 And all of these things were introduced just over a very short period of time. I did not mention the Apple Watch, but I talked about that briefly last.
19:15:47 month and I didn’t talk about the new um uh
19:15:53 I’ve had talked about that previously last month, too.
19:15:57 Since these are all new things, it helps if you have some reference materials. Take Control Press has books on the new AirPods, your Apple account used to be called Apple ID. That’s the…
19:16:10 account that you use to register your devices with with Apple, and it also gives you access to Apple Mail and contacts and all that sort of stuff. And they’ve got a book on how to control your Apple Account and what to turn on and off, and all kinds of different things. Take control of Apple Watch.
19:16:26 Uh, take control of FaceTime and messages, take control of Find My and AirTags. I thought Find My and AirTags were simple, but I found out from this book that, no, there’s things about it that I didn’t know. Take control of Golden Gate, which is the operating system, the macOS 27 is…
19:16:47 called Golden Gate take control of photos. I know people who have been using photos forever, and they do not even know the first thing about photos. So I highly recommended this if you take a lot of photos. Take control of iOS 27 and iPad 27. Note that this is an update.
19:17:06 Um, it came out in August, and this is the… if you buy the original version, the update’s free. Take control of Siri, AI and Apple Intelligence if you’re just interested in Siri AI and Apple Intelligence.
19:17:21 It’ll tell you about how they work across all the different devices. The operating system updates were for pretty much everything that Apple has, not listed here, but it was also updated are the
19:17:37 operating system used in the HomePods was also updated.
19:17:43 But even if you don’t have something that can be updated, there are still updates out there for iOS 26 and macOS 26. These are security updates that
19:17:57 That you should update if your machine can’t be updated to the current version, at least update what you have.
19:18:10 The, as you see, there’s updates for Sequoia going clear back to iOS 15.8, macOS 15.8.
19:18:22 Compatibility. I’m not going to read this, just basically, if it runs max silicon, if it runs Apple Silicon and it’s a Mac, it’s compatible. For iOS, it basically needs anything from the SE 2nd generation and iPhone 11 up to the present.
19:18:42 For iPad, it’s, um…
19:18:46 This is much more complicated. Basically, iPads are difficult to figure out anyway because they…
19:18:54 They all look the same, but the insides are different. Watch compatibility goes back to the Apple Watch Series 9.
19:19:04 And the TV compatibility goes back to the previous two generations.
19:19:10 Apple Visions for all of them. Apple intelligence capability is basically iPhone 17 and 18 for a full experience and a lesser experience with 16 and 15.
19:19:27 In Apple Intelligence for Silicon is basically anything. Although, even though I say that the Apple Intelligence was anything that’s got Apple Silicon.
19:19:38 It depends upon your processor and the amount of RAM you have as to how responsive and how complex the processes are that you can use.
19:19:49 do.
19:19:51 They redesigned the interface so that the new Siri looks quite different than the old one. The preview has been redesigned, the chess has been redesigned. The Finder has a slight redesign.
19:20:07 The liquid glass, a lot of people didn’t like the fact that it was transparent. You can now change the level of transparency, so you can have it opaque on the right, or you can have it very transparent on the left. I never found that a problem, but a lot of people
19:20:22 dead.
19:20:24 They now have contextual memories as always, you’re doing certain things, a contextual memory, a menu will pop up in front of your other menus rather than trying to have an endlessly long list of choices, it’ll just be context-sensitive, and whatever you
19:20:40 you’re doing, it pops up with another menu on top of the previous one. They got rid of a bunch of superfluous I like this is a…
19:20:50 Hard to say what application this is, but in the previous operating systems, they had these little icons on the side that just took up space, and they got rid of those. That may seem minor, but for people like me who like a lot of space.
19:21:04 We appreciated it. Another contextual memory within Finder, you’re looking at something, you hover over it, and it’ll pop over what different things you can do with it, that particular item.
19:21:19 You can…
19:21:21 On the iPhone, you could tell it to refresh by pulling down on the screen. You’re in something, you pull down on the screen and it would refresh that. And they’ve adopted that for some things now in macOS 27 as well. Instead of pulling down with your finger, obviously you pull down with the mouse.
19:21:38 They’ve changed some of the icons. One thing that they changed that I do not like, and I’m warning you before I get there, is it used to be when you pulled things out of the box, there would be an explosion would occur, and there’d be this poof,
19:21:54 As it made it go poof. And they got rid of that, and I’m very unhappy that they did that, just throwing things out of the dock was… used to be a lot of fun. They have a bunch of accessibility things that I’m not going to read, but basically improvements for people who are blind or low vision, uh, people who have
19:22:11 problems with sound, just a lot of different things in adjustments that you can change to the interface so that it’s less confusing to people with, uh, who are blind or have low vision. The camera
19:22:27 Even if you don’t have one of the new ones, new iPhones, the camera has a bunch of features that are tied in with Siri. They’ve had this for some time, but you can actually…
19:22:40 Take a photograph of something and ask Siri what the heck it is, and they say, this is a Virginia creeper, or that’s a Volkswagen, or whatever it is you happen to be pointing at. But it does a lot of other things. It’ll identify plants, animals, landmarks, all kinds of stuff.
19:22:57 plates of calories on a plate of food, you can split a bill, all kinds of stuff that they added.
19:23:06 You can have a reference image, as I mentioned, just on the newest iPhones.
19:23:12 um and it’s got more information on that they changed the camera controls so that you can now have more camera controls than you had before, but rather than having this endlessly long menu, it’s context sensitive. So it depends upon
19:23:29 What it is you’re doing as to whether or not you’ll see it. You have to pretty much ask for it, but just different ways of doing things.
19:23:39 Play is now available with the new
19:23:44 with Siri, which is useful if you just kind of casually ask your…
19:23:55 car to drive to Chipotle in Port Angeles with a stop at Texaco. I don’t think there is a Texaco around here, but you can ask it, things like that.
19:24:03 You can get video support in CarPlay, which I was horrified by, but then I read the little caveat. You can play video on your… on the screen inside your car, but only if the car is not moving. As soon as the car moves, it
19:24:19 it out, and you can keep the audio, but you don’t get the video. The idea of people watching movies while driving cars
19:24:27 did horrify me.
19:24:29 FaceTime now has some extra features that I’m not going to bother with. Find My has been improved with some much more precise finding, but it also now allows you to turn off
19:24:45 Sharing your location for 12 hours. That’s in case you’re going to buy an anniversary gift and you don’t want your significant other to know what you’re doing, and you can customize that so it’ll start on a particular time.
19:24:59 I was recently, well, it was in May, I was in San Francisco, and I was afraid that the person I was with was going to get lost because they’d never been to San Francisco. And so I had them turn on location sharing. Well, with this new feature, after we left San Francisco, it could have automatically turned it off, they wouldn’t have to
19:25:18 forget and leave it on for months at a time. The new home app.
19:25:24 can do a lot of different things like come back with messages telling you about very smart devices and things that it’s seen. This depends upon you having equipment that can take advantage of this. And the Home app can update all the TVs in your home at once in case you have more than one Apple TV.
19:25:45 MAPS has improved overhead views of various and sundry objects, and you can do, as I mentioned earlier, you can do what it calls natural language search for routing and maps.
19:26:01 And for certain cities and Seattle’s not one of them, you can also get, you can point to something and it’ll give you information about historical places.
19:26:16 And you can also have local lists. So you can have what’s the…
19:26:22 trending for this the best restaurant in some place, and things like that.
19:26:27 that.
19:26:28 You can remove the… a lot of people were accidentally sending voice messages and they’ve removed that in the interface. You can still do it, but it used to be that they’d hesitate their finger on the microphone and instead of typing, it’s sitting there and it’s recording them saying,
19:26:47 But why isn’t it letting me type? And it records that because they think they’re typing and it’s not, it’s recording it. They remove that out of the interface so that you wouldn’t accidentally send recordings. But you can turn it back on if you want to.
19:27:02 And you now have control over the speed back. A lot of blind people will listen to their messages at ultra-high speed, and a lot of other people have trained themselves to do that too. And you can set the speed of playback.
19:27:15 You can write messages with Siri, you just ask it to…
19:27:24 respond to a particular way. It has a list of things it can do for smart reminders and all kinds of things. A lot of these things are tied
19:27:35 into Apple Intelligence and you may not realize it, but it’s all part of Apple Intelligence. They have new drawing tools that you can actually draw now in the message.
19:27:46 in messages and send drawings that you actually drew in messages.
19:27:52 You can create Genmoji on your phone on the fly. So if you want to send something, I’ll show you an example. I have a friend who has a tuxedo cat and she said that…
19:28:07 Tuxedo cat. I didn’t know what a tuxedo cat was, she had to explain it. And she said it was sleeping in a box, so I sent her a Genmoji of a tuxedo cat sitting in a box. And this is what I was talking about, it’ll send
19:28:23 automatically try resending messages that didn’t go through. Given where we live at the edge of the known universe, this is a handy thing.
19:28:32 Not so great if you’re sending large things like photos and PDFs and so on and so forth, but just for simple text messages, it’s really nice that it’ll just automatically try and resend it, because it could be that you don’t have a good signal, or they don’t have a good signal, or…
19:28:49 We both don’t have a good signal. The cross-device syncing of messages has never worked very well, and I’m still not convinced that it’s
19:28:58 working that great now, but they say it is.
19:29:02 Uh, they’ve greatly improved the Android interoperability, um, and this talks about the technical parts of that, which I don’t care about.
19:29:12 This, as far as I can tell, still doesn’t exist. They’re going to be bringing out a feature that will have your phone or your Mac automatically fix compromised passwords using the Password app. But as far as I know, this still hasn’t — still doesn’t exist. It’s kind of a complicated thing to do.
19:29:33 I’m not surprised that they’re still working on it. In photos, you can do all kinds of photos, like you can add to things that are on
19:29:42 screen so you can add content there that you didn’t have before to extend things. You can identify as a category things that you took with your own phone, as opposed to photographs that lots and lots of other people did. Identity documents are things like
19:30:02 um, uh
19:30:04 Drivers license, credit cards, things that…
19:30:08 are tied to you and our documents. And they’ll have that as a new category to collect things on. You can now add keywords to photos. You can do that before, but it was not as easy as it is now.
19:30:24 Uh, you can take a video of something you accidentally took a video of something, but as you’re going through it, you can say, oh, that’s a really nice pose. You can stop at that frame and save that frame as if it’s a photo.
19:30:37 You could do that before, but you had to. It was painful. And now it’s a menu option.
19:30:46 And this shows it in action, sliding down the slide, you come to the point where you want, you can save that frame as a photo. You can rate photos.
19:30:58 If you have a lot of photos, you went out and you took eight dozen identical photographs at a birthday party, you can go through and mark it as five stars or ones that you want to send to people, and the other ones just do whatever you want to with them. I mentioned adding keywords. I’m going to skip over the things about
19:31:17 Safari, because it’s a little bit more technical, except for one thing, which is the notify function. You can set up Safari so that as that change takes place on a web page, your phone or your Mac will notify you.
19:31:32 And most often you want to do this for things like price changes. You’re hoping the price goes down or you’re hoping it doesn’t go up or whatever. And if there’s a change to that web page, it’ll notify you that the change has come through and it’ll do it in a…
19:31:48 variety of different ways. So.
19:31:53 It’s something that people, once they get used to using it, will probably have a field day. There were applications that you could buy that would do this, and now
19:32:03 Safari will do it for you.
19:32:05 Uh, weather has different ways of displaying weather. Weather’s one of my favorite apps, possibly because I used to work for NOAA.
19:32:18 When you’re taking photographs, it’ll give you things that are…
19:32:24 in context, for example, it found somebody’s birthday today in contacts, or it’s telling you that this flight that you’re interested in is doing something, so you’ll get notifications having to do with things that are contextually relevant.
19:32:39 You can set different ringtones and volumes for different alerts and functions. Things that were removed.
19:32:50 Rosetta, which is the ability to run Intel applications, was removed from macOS 27. However, after you install it,
19:33:01 It’ll remove it when it’s installing. After it’s installed, you can reinstall it on OS 27. However, in OS 28, it won’t. You can only do this in OS 27, but they did remove that.
19:33:18 And.
19:33:19 If you try and run something in Rosetta’s not installed, it’ll come and prompt you and say, hey, would you like to install it? And you just go through and tell it to do its thing. It has multiple different ways of having you go through
19:33:35 your apps to tell you that things are not compatible. It’ll have…
19:33:42 different finder tags. It’ll have different ways of searching for things. You’ll get warning messages popping up on the screen. You can go through and…
19:33:55 It’ll tell you things that it has on the machine that aren’t formidable, compatible. You can use a terminal command, this really horrible terminal command that I have down here at the bottom. You can copy-paste that into Terminal, and it’ll print out a listing of everything that you have that’s dependent upon
19:34:13 Intel, the system information application will also give you a list of things if you sort by kind, it’ll tell you all the Intel apps. And I mention that because
19:34:26 The next version of the Mac operating system will no longer support Intel apps. So it’s the first time in…
19:34:34 over a decade,
19:34:37 that you won’t be able to run Intel apps.
19:34:41 Also removed is Bootcamp, which I don’t think any of you have ever used. They’re getting rid of the DVD player. You can still play DVDs, but the DVD player itself is missing. The airport utility has been removed and the reason why it’s been removed is that the
19:34:58 Airport.
19:34:59 time capsules use the Apple file protocol, which is no longer support, so you can’t back up to time capsules anymore, so they got rid of the time capsule utility. Encrypted HFS+.
19:35:15 Which is kind of an in the weeds thing that probably you’re not using. That has been removed so you can’t use that anymore. There was a terminal utility called HDIUTIL that has been removed. It’s been
19:35:32 replaced with disk util, which has been there for some time. And something else that I think is really cool, you can now go onto Apple site and get schematic drawings of their various pieces of technology. And I have the
19:35:48 link to that in the slideshow.
19:35:52 And that is 141 slides in…
19:35:59 Nut.
19:36:00 too long. You know, I don’t think I made any changes.
19:36:05 Any questions about that?
19:36:12 You covered it pretty well.
19:36:14 Well, I covered a lot of things.
19:36:17 Got this.
19:36:17 Before I show you some things, I wanted to ask if you have any questions.
19:36:23 You mentioned that printer drivers were updated.
19:36:28 Printer drivers, Apple has a massive amount of printer drivers, and that’s because it uses something called cup.
19:36:38 Yes.
19:36:37 I don’t remember what it’s called. And their public domain printer drivers that people write for their printers. You might have noticed that when you go and buy a printer, they don’t come with a disc anymore because most computers don’t have disk drives anymore.
19:36:53 Uh, they don’t have optical drives, they don’t have floppy disks, so you can’t get a printer driver anymore. So how do they come with it? Well, on the Mac, the best way to do that is if you have a new printer, don’t download a driver from their website, just go into the printer setup,
19:37:08 and tell it to go find the printer on the network, and then find the driver for it, and it’ll probably find the driver. But yes, they regularly update them. That’s not a new thing. They just…
19:37:21 They just mentioned that. The only time I’ve ever paid any attention to custom printer and actually for printers, I don’t bother with custom stuff. I do for scanners. I have a, uh…
19:37:38 Fujifilm Photo Scanner, and I did download the driver for that, because I can give it a stack of 50 photos, press a button, and it just zip!
19:37:49 scans them all, and I don’t have to pay attention to it. So, for me, that’s useful, but for a printer driver, I just use the ones that come with the Mac. And as long as you update your Mac on a reasonable basis, then it’s not a problem. Which reminds me, I have a question for you. How often do you people check to see if you’ve updated your Mac?
19:38:14 update it all the time or whenever it calls for it.
19:38:17 Well, here’s the thing that I noticed. A lot of people, they have laptops, and with the laptop, they use the laptop, and then they shut down the laptop and stick it away. If the laptop was shut down for a day or two, a week, a month,
19:38:33 It didn’t get any updates.
19:38:36 So I recommend, particularly if you have a laptop, to every time you boot it up,
19:38:42 Run an update, because there’s a good chance that some update for something came out while it was shut down. If you have a desktop machine and you leave it on all the time, uh, and there’s no harm in leaving it on all the time, even a big iMac,
19:38:58 If you’re not actively using it, it uses less electricity just sitting there than a 70 watt light bulb.
19:39:07 And sometimes much, much, much less. If you have one of the more modern iMacs that doesn’t have a hard drive, it has a solid state drive, it can use like five watts just sitting there.
19:39:22 Even though it’s turned off most of the time, it will check for updates. And if there’s an update, it’ll go out and grab it. So leaving your Mac on and having automatic updates is an option for a desktop machine. But if you have a laptop,
19:39:37 Most people don’t do that. So every time you boot it up, go check for updates and update. Because if you boot it up and you use it for 15, 20 minutes, and then you shut it back down again, it’s a good chance that it didn’t have an opportunity to do an update.
19:39:53 Because the Macs don’t like doing updates if the human being is doing something. So it just won’t check while you’re banging away on it.
19:40:03 Excuse me, I have something called My Passport.
19:40:07 plugged into my computer, do I need that or should I unplug it?
19:40:15 Yes, something.
19:40:11 My passport is probably the name of a drive. That’s the trade name that Western Digital has for their backup drives.
19:40:22 So you probably won it.
19:40:25 Oh, I do. Okay.
19:40:27 You should be able to see it, it should be some box sitting on your desk someplace.
19:40:30 I do, it’s right, it’s sitting right here, that’s why when you said we don’t need some things and some things we should have, but I thought, do I need this passport?
19:40:38 Um, if it’s turned on and, uh, it, yeah, it’s, it’s an external hard drive.
19:40:44 Yeah, it just keeps back. I do genealogy research, so I think that’s when I got it, and I’ve been doing that for years, so it’s just sitting there.
19:40:52 Yeah.
19:40:52 Okay, thank you.
19:40:55 Any other questions?
19:40:58 Before I show you a couple things.
19:41:01 Okay, I gotta show my desktop again.
19:41:04 If I remember how to do this. Ah!
19:41:16 That’s not where I had it.
19:41:23 Well, actually, the easiest way is to just bring it up.
19:41:32 La-de-dee
19:41:42 Gonna bring up the…
19:41:45 Website.
19:41:47 If it decides that it wants to do that.
19:41:51 Come on.
19:41:55 And that’s none of those are what I want.
19:42:00 Okay, on the Straight Mac site, there’s this picture of a puffin.
19:42:06 looking at an Apple HomePod.
19:42:09 And I did that with Google Gemini.
19:42:13 He said I wanted a photograph of…
19:42:18 Frustrated, puffin, looking at him.
19:42:23 the Apple HomePod, and that’s what it came up with. I tried that using Apple Image Playground. This is Apple Image Playground, and that’s not what it gave me. It gave me all kinds of things. Well, I mentioned the TuxedoCat, this is the TuxedoCAT.
19:42:41 box that I made for someone. It’s called the tuxedo cap because of the black and white which is something I didn’t know. I wanted to frustrated pumpfin looking at a HomePod and this is the best that image playground could could give me. Now that’s not
19:42:57 A bad illustration, but it doesn’t have the same detail as Google Gemini. However, Google Gemini tracks everything you send to it, whereas this
19:43:09 Often with a home view, that took place entirely on my Mac. Apple doesn’t know I did that.
19:43:18 And that’s what it came up with. And I said I wanted… I had a conversation with somebody who has to carry a work phone and their own personal phone with them, and they were complaining how much of a… they’re a plumber. They were complaining how much of a trouble this was, and I said, well, if you have an iPhone, most of them have two
19:43:39 SIM slots, and you can carry just one, and one is the work number, and one is the home phone number. And they said, well, no, that’s not what I do, so I sent them this photograph of a puffin with two iPhones. Puffins really can’t use their wings as
19:43:54 fingers, but, you know, I like the idea.
19:43:59 When we were talking about the radio’s reception that Elk would give, so I created an elk with a Wi-Fi antenna on it.
19:44:08 had and waiting for the Washington
19:44:12 Washington Shakeout drill that was last Thursday. I made this to promote it and here was a puffin exercising its right to vote with a drop-off ballot.
19:44:27 And you can do it in different styles, that’s one style. This is a different kind of style.
19:44:34 And you had a different kind of style and another different kind of style. And here’s a puffin that’s stuffing the ballot box with more than one ballot.
19:44:46 These were all done with Image Playground, and to do that, what you do is you press this plus button up here, and it says, what do you want to do? And you can describe what is that you want to do. And let’s try.
19:45:04 photo of a
19:45:08 Dragon
19:45:11 18, a pizza.
19:45:20 And it’s sitting there thinking about it, and here’s a dragon eating a pizza.
19:45:24 There are different styles that you can ask it to do.
19:45:31 How do I get the different styles?
19:45:40 Nope, that’s not what I want.
19:45:45 Hmm… .
19:45:50 I can’t remember what the different styles are.
19:45:55 I should have written a note for that, but you can have things that are done as an illustration, or you can have it done as a kind of, uh…
19:46:06 Anime style. And this is what it came up with. But if I said,
19:46:18 illustration of a
19:46:21 dragon eating a pizza.
19:46:24 It’ll probably look different.
19:46:32 And that doesn’t look much different to me.
19:46:35 Oh well.
19:46:41 A suggestion on what I should have it draw.
19:46:48 Ah, I see, that’s, that’s where it is. Dragon.
19:46:54 Eating.
19:46:59 Pizza.
19:47:07 Okay, so this is an illustration of a dragon eating a pizza, which is very different from
19:47:14 that.
19:47:19 And
19:47:21 A Genmoji, which is a… I know we already had the Genmoji, a sketch.
19:47:39 A sketch of a dragon eating pizza. You can see this looks like a pencil sketch.
19:47:45 of thing.
19:47:46 This is Image Playground, and it’s on your Mac, and it’s also on your iPad, for that matter. The Genmoji, which you can now do essentially the same thing within Messages, there’s a little plus button.
19:48:01 button down in the lower right left corner on your iPhone, you press that in messages and it gives you a list of things you can do. Memojis and emojis and all sorts of things, but if you say you want a Genmoji, you can
19:48:17 create these kinds of things. On the iPhone, you can also speak to it. This thing, as far as I can tell, does not have a…
19:48:27 A voice.
19:48:30 a way to input via voice on the Mac.
19:48:35 At least I haven’t figured it out yet.
19:48:37 Any questions about that?
19:48:40 Because I want to show you what it looks like with Google.
19:49:00 photo of a dragon.
19:49:05 eating a pizza.
19:49:22 And…
19:49:23 That looks much more realistic than what you can get with Image Playground.
19:49:31 If you look over here on the side, you’ll see that Google has a list of everything I’ve ever done.
19:49:38 with, uh…
19:49:40 with.
19:49:41 Gemini.
19:49:43 And…
19:49:46 That could be good or bad. Like, I made some hash codes. Hash codes are basically codes that you use to generate pseudo-random stuff for, um,
19:49:56 passcodes and so on and so forth. And I said, I wanted hash codes, and it kept all the hash codes that I created.
19:50:05 And it’s now part of Google, because when you do something with Google Gemini, it belongs to them.
19:50:11 Um.
19:50:12 It’s not exactly certain, even if I wanted to, if I could claim ownership.
19:50:18 Um, and…
19:50:19 And sometimes, depending upon what you do, it’ll actually earmark it with a symbol saying that was…
19:50:29 created with Gemini. Notice in this photograph that the people in the background, because this is a dragon, it automatically filled it in with… this is an English town, and these are…
19:50:40 English peasants of around 1500, because, you know, it’s a dragon. Now, exactly why a dragon would be eating a pizza, um, is a good question.
19:50:52 But.
19:50:54 It’ll have to wait for another day.
19:50:58 Speaking of which, this has code generation, what I did was I told it to generate 140 hash codes consisting just of capital letters and numbers. And so it generated 140. And I decided that I wanted
19:51:15 uh, four-character passwords using uppercase alphanumeric, and it came up with 140. This was…
19:51:25 I wanted these because we were thinking about having a vote with 140 people and I didn’t want them to all create accounts. And so the easiest way to do it was to match up the hash code.
19:51:37 more explanation you wanted, but Google is keeping this and I really
19:51:42 You can’t do anything about it. That’s just the way that it works. Apple’s stuff that they do with Apple Intelligence, as much as it can, it does on your computer. So we probably did all of this on the computer. It only goes outside if it’s something that it doesn’t know, and it knows what a dragon looks like, it knows what a puffin looks like.
19:52:03 It doesn’t know like if I asked about some kind of special kind of bridge or something, it might need to go out and find out what that bridge looks like. You can also, if you notice when…
19:52:16 I’m creating a new image, I can come over here and I, well that I wanted.
19:52:25 I want to go here. I can upload a photograph, or I can load a photograph this way. It’ll go through my photos and suggest things that it can…
19:52:38 work with, or I can decide the shape of the
19:52:44 of the image, if I want a square, a portrait or a landscape.
19:52:49 So it’s actually fairly clever, but it’s deliberately limited by Apple’s security so that nobody else on the planet knows that
19:53:01 what it was that I was asking it to do. It will also not allow you to do certain types of things.
19:53:19 It probably won’t allow me to do this.
19:53:30 Oh, actually it did. For a lot of things, it’s kind of self-censoring, it won’t do things that are considered offensive or anything like this, and given the current political climate, almost anything can be considered offensive by someone.
19:53:44 So I wasn’t sure if it’d allow me to have a politician arguing about tax policy, but it did. And it made that as an illustration because I hadn’t changed it from the previous one. So there are some limitations upon it, but on the whole, I’m actually quite pleased with the way in which they did it. It’s a balance of
19:54:03 of utility, uh, versus privacy and security.
19:54:08 Other things that have Apple Intelligence built into it though.
19:54:15 I’m going to
19:54:22 Go out.
19:54:25 And look for something.
19:54:43 I told it to give me the text of a boring.
19:54:47 insurance policy.
19:54:53 The boring company is Musk.
19:54:58 company that
19:55:02 that drills holes and things. Uh, I didn’t know there was a boring insurance company.
19:55:32 And when’s a piece of boring text is what I’m looking for.
19:55:52 Okay.
19:55:54 I just grab some text.
19:55:57 And…
19:56:04 If I can remember what the icon looks like…
19:56:10 I can’t…
19:56:30 Pages.
19:56:41 Here’s some boring text that I taped pasted into Pages and
19:56:49 I’m going to tell it to make this more
19:56:53 Readable.
19:57:06 And…
19:57:08 I…
19:57:38 I don’t actually use pages that much, and I forgot where
19:57:43 writing tools are.
19:57:45 But it has writing tools now to make things…
19:57:49 Easier to understand. And of course, I lost track of that.
19:57:59 Something on the right column where it would say style and up one of these.
19:58:05 Yeah, that’s what I thought.
19:58:06 Change. Yeah, then it changes your… yeah, that.
19:58:10 Changes to those.
19:58:12 The fonts and the…
19:58:15 Yeah.
19:58:16 Style lay, style and layout. Yeah.
19:58:18 Now that’s the… Oh.
19:58:21 No, that’s not it.
19:58:24 Next.
19:58:26 Oh, those were the only two things I knew.
19:58:29 Yeah. Well, anyway, it has the ability using
19:58:33 Artificial intelligence to go through the text and make it more succinct, make it friendlier, make it more bureaucratic. And it’s built into pages. And unlike…
19:58:45 Microsoft Word, it doesn’t keep a copy of your text. There’s another program out there, there’s another company out there called Grammarly that will
19:58:54 Check your text for spelling and grammar and whatnot, but Grammarly keeps your text.
19:59:03 And Apple Pages does not. It doesn’t even talk to Apple, it just does it all on your machine. And it would help if I remembered where it does that.
19:59:18 Oh, yes!
19:59:12 It looks like there’s might be an icon for Siri right straight up on that top bar or on the top bar of the window.
19:59:21 Yes, you’re right.
19:59:21 Right there, yeah.
19:59:24 Okay.
19:59:27 rewrite it so that it’s friendlier.
19:59:37 That’s interesting.
19:59:48 Hmm.
19:59:40 And it’s it’s not only friendlier, but it’s also much shorter. And you’ll notice that among other things, it made it a bulleted list, which is
19:59:49 kind of bureaucratic, but
19:59:52 It’s a quite powerful tool. I am in the process of writing an article about using artificial intelligence in writing. And I’m not going to have you read the article because I’m not done with it yet.
20:00:06 I will at least bring it up to give you the
20:00:11 idea of it. Where is it?
20:00:20 Kind.
20:00:23 And…
20:00:32 When I was in seventh grade,
20:00:37 I read…
20:00:41 Bridge over the River Kwai.
20:00:42 I had seen the movie in Texas. It cost me a dime to see the movie. And so I read the book in seventh grade and I was struck with this paragraph.
20:00:54 This is a one-sentence paragraph.
20:00:57 And my English teacher said that one sentence paragraphs were anathema, that she would flunk us and we had a one-sentence paragraph, and she also would flunk us so we had a run-on paragraph. So I came across this, which is copyright out of the book,
20:01:13 And I was fascinated with it, because it’s a one-sentence paragraph, and it actually makes sense to me.
20:01:21 And so I went through various artificial intelligence applications to look at it. Microsoft Word thought it was fine. The only thing it didn’t like, and it shows you right here, Microsoft Word was once worthwhile to be one word instead of two.
20:01:38 But it’s not complaining about anything else. Patients into Grammarly and Grammarly took one look at it and said, you need to upgrade to the pro version, which costs money.
20:01:49 And so I went through various and sundry tools to see
20:01:55 What artificial intelligence would do with this. And I got it down to a fairly short pieces of text, but what I was intrigued with is that they all were not nearly as good.
20:02:10 My own feeling is that for professional writers, they’re not in any danger of being replaced, but for people who need assistance at writing things and they have written out an idea and they just need somebody to go through and make
20:02:26 make sure that they didn’t change case or turn plurals into singularities and things like that.
20:02:33 Artificial intelligence can be useful, but what I’ve seen is a number of professional, theoretical professionals, lawyers, physicians, writers, editors.
20:02:47 using AI and getting caught because either it doesn’t make sense anymore or it’s obviously not their work and it doesn’t sound like them.
20:02:57 is going to take quite a while before artificial intelligence.
20:03:02 takes over. You might have read these stories, uh, it was in the papers, I don’t know how much you paid attention to it. That was one of the grounds for
20:03:14 Rudy Giuliani losing his law license. He filed several briefs that were written with artificial intelligence, and they had made up
20:03:24 court cases, and the judge.
20:03:28 And judges in those cases were kind of torqued off, and he did it not once, but three or four times. And that did not go over well. There’s probably been something nationwide, like 300 lawyers have lost their law licenses for…
20:03:43 submitting bogus cases in their briefs. So, there are dangers, because, yes, they will make stuff up, because it’s a language tool, and if you tell it to go out and find cases that support something, it’ll come up with cases that are vaguely similar, and it’ll just make up the details to make it sound like it supports them.
20:04:05 submitted as fact when it’s not.
20:04:08 So there are definite limitations to artificial intelligence, but in terms of correcting your spelling and punctuation and tense.
20:04:19 There’s nothing wrong with that. I wrote my first word processor. I programmed it myself in Microsoft Basic. I wrote it on a TRS-80 microcomputer, and that was my first word processor. And when a commercial one came along.
20:04:35 We looked at it and thought, well, okay, maybe I’ll get that. And I put it off for several months, and then somebody came up with a word processor with a spell checker, and I immediately bought it.
20:04:49 If you’ve ever written a bunch of graduate papers, after you’ve read the same page 13 times, everything looks either
20:04:59 horrible, or it looks perfect, and you just want to you sick of it, and you want it to go away.
20:05:05 And with the advent of the computer, we’re even inventing new ways to create typos, such as doubled words. Doubled words if you’re typing on a typewriter happens when you come to the end of a sentence, and then you press the carriage return.
20:05:20 moves across and you start typing again, you double the word there because you forgot that you actually typed that on the previous line. Double words show up on computers all the time because you revise the sentence and you cut stuff out, and in cutting it out, you either cut out too much or too little and you end up with
20:05:37 phrases, or you end up with this AP story I was reading this morning. The entire first paragraph lacked a verb.
20:05:46 And it’s really hard to figure out what’s going on if there’s no verb. So there are lots and lots of nouns and adjectives, but there was no verb, so you didn’t really know.
20:05:56 Why? And that was the opening paragraph of the AP story. So it kind of
20:06:04 was a problem with the, uh, with
20:06:06 understanding it. So spell checkers and things like that, I’m all for that. But are they going to write a novel? Not a good one.
20:06:19 That paragraph that I showed you is really, uh,
20:06:25 extremely well-written paragraph, and if you’ve read the book or seen the movie, it makes perfect sense. And if you haven’t, it just looks like a really long sentence. But I’m not finished with the article yet, so I’ll tell you what the…
20:06:39 what the result is when I finish it. Any questions about anything I’ve covered? Because I’ve talked about technology,
20:06:46 Hardware, software, artificial intelligence, security.
20:06:51 A lot of stuff.
20:06:58 I wonder if anyone has any experience yet with apples.
20:07:04 Internal…
20:07:06 security camera that you showed us pictures of.
20:07:10 As I understand it, you have to buy…
20:07:13 Much more additional space in iCloud to store all the footage and so forth.
20:07:18 Oh, oh, that LG camera that I showed you, that’s… that
20:07:25 camera was made using Apple’s design that’s being manufactured by LG, so it’s LG’s security camera, and I don’t think it’s actually released yet.
20:07:35 There are other companies, though, that do have security cameras that exist right now that store it in Apple’s cloud, but you have constraints that you can put on it, like only show the last, only store the last
20:07:51 8 hours or 12 hours or three days or whatever, and it depends upon the resolution. Obviously, if it’s a 1K camera, then it’s going to take up a lot less space than if it was a 4K camera. The other thing that makes a difference is the amount of compression that you have.
20:08:10 and the frame rate. Video that you go see in a theater is actually at 24 frames a second, and the zoom that we’re looking at right now saves things at 60 frames a second.
20:08:25 Which is just more stuff that is being pushed out.
20:08:30 So the compression, the number of frame rates, the size of the image, all of those change the storage requirements. Plus, you can go through and just say only store this much, only store that much. But I know that one that I saw I had didn’t purchase it.
20:08:46 You could store like a month’s worth of video and it would take like three quarters of a gig.
20:08:53 But it only turns on the camera when something changes.
20:08:58 So if it’s at night and nothing’s moving and nothing’s happening, it doesn’t really store much. But during the day, if there’s a tree outside that’s blowing and creating shadows inside, it might store six hours of
20:09:14 shadow of tree on the…
20:09:17 floor just depends upon what’s going on. But those cameras exist today. Apple’s not introducing the security camera. What Apple did was they partnered with LG and LG is making the camera.
20:09:32 to Apple’s specifications, and it’s going to work with Apple’s home system.
20:09:40 Is that either
20:09:42 clearer, more opaque.
20:09:44 Yeah, I didn’t realize it wasn’t yet available.
20:09:47 Um, I think they’re coming out, like, next week or the week after that. But it’s not… it’s not going to be an Apple product. It will be sold on the Apple Store, though.
20:09:59 Thank you.
20:10:00 And probably other places as well.
20:10:03 Other questions?
20:10:11 Um.
20:10:11 Say thank you.
20:10:13 Well, thank you, thank you for…
20:10:16 Sticking with me.
20:10:18 Send suggestions as to what we want to do next month. Next month, among other things, is a busy month for me because my church is kind of busy with things like Veterans Day and Thanksgiving and things like that.
20:10:35 If you have suggestions on what you want to do, fine. And also think about whether or not we’re going to have a meeting in December. Quite often we don’t because Decembers are also busy.
20:10:49 Send in suggestions and thoughts.
20:10:55 Thank you, good night.
20:10:57 Yep, thank you.
20:11:02 Nate.
