Leo [00:00:23]:
So, Gary, you've had a busy day yesterday. What's been happening in the world of Apple?

Gary [00:00:27]:
Yeah, so yesterday was Apple's worldwide developer conference, main keynote. This is where Apple, it's for developers, so it's focused on the operating system and what's coming next. And also a lot of developer stuff, like what tools will be available to developers, things they can add to their apps and such. But it's where we hear about the new operating systems, like for instance, iOS27, that'll be coming out in the fall, same thing for Mac OS 27. And a lot of people just, you know, who aren't developers like to pay attention to it because it's like, what's to come. And yeah, Apple basically did that. They used to, in the old days, they used to go and announce Maybe a new MacBook Pro or something as well or something else. Nothing like that recently.

Gary [00:01:16]:
And this one definitely was not like that. Like no hardware, no hardware announcements. It was focused on the operating systems. That's it. And one of the things that was interesting is the operating systems have been getting closer and closer together in terms of the features, the design and all of that. And this time they didn't even try to break it out into like, let's talk about iOS now, let's talk about IPADOs now, let's talk about macOS. They didn't do that at all. They just talked about features across all, all of them.

Gary [00:01:48]:
So they occasionally would say, well, here on the Mac you can do this with how Windows look or whatever, you know, a Mac specific thing. Or on the iPhone you can do this specific iPhone thing. But they just sprinkled that in throughout. They talked mostly just about all the operating systems at once. And they got the name of the new Mac operating system out of the way immediately. Sometimes they change that to the save it to the end. And I was surprised. I really think, I thought they're going to stop doing that at some point.

Gary [00:02:18]:
And I really thought it was to be this time. But right away they got on it and it's called Golden Gate. So they, they're calling it Golden Gate. Maybe next year. I, I, you know, maybe Golden Gate is like, that's the penultimate name and then they'll be done and IO Mac OS 28 will just be Mac OS 28.

Leo [00:02:35]:
I'm kind of getting sick of it if they do that. Yeah, I just, I envision the complaints. It's a completely meaningless thing. But I mean, the, the, the crowds are going to arise in protest because it needs a fancy Name, even though it'.

Gary [00:02:50]:
I guess. I mean, the other operating systems don't have it. I think people like me, I'm starting to get tired of it because people have a hard time, you know, especially being every year, year after year, for like 15 years now. It's hard. It's like, what was. Was Sonoma first or Big Sur? Like, you know, trying to remember, like, what year was each one at. It just. It's too much.

Gary [00:03:14]:
So I, for one, somebody who loves those names wouldn't mind it if they would just be like, okay, that was fun. And maybe we'll. Maybe they'll just have it. It'll be like, here's the code. The developer codename. But that's true.

Leo [00:03:28]:
All they really need to do it is prioritize referring to it by number.

Gary [00:03:32]:
Yeah.

Leo [00:03:33]:
With the code name in parentheses. That would be enough.

Gary [00:03:35]:
They're setting it up like. I mean, they really did refer to macOS 26 more than any other previous version of macOS. They really called it that. So. So anyway, so, yeah, they made it as one big block, which really made it short. It was only a little over an hour because they just jumped around and talked about features across all of them. They didn't say, here's what's new in the iPhone. And then talk about, here's what's new in the Mac.

Gary [00:04:00]:
Oh, and you're getting that iPhone feature on the Mac too. Like, there was none of that. So a lot less repetition. I, of course, focused mainly on Mac stuff because that's my thing. And plenty of other people focus on the iOS stuff and all of that, but I wanted to really focus on the Mac stuff. I've been doing that for a few years to just try to hone in when they. When they're announcing new stuff, what's new for the Mac, and, you know, stick with that. And for the Mac, there's a couple things.

Gary [00:04:31]:
One is, of course, a lot of people had complaints about Mac OS 26 or 25. 2520. See, I'm getting confused. It's happening. Tahoe. Tahoe. You know, liquid glass people. There's.

Gary [00:04:47]:
Some people didn't like the rounded corners. Some people didn't like the glass effect. Some people didn't like how they moved. Some of the interface items, like how they. They look and everything. So there's definitely a bit of a rollback.

Leo [00:04:59]:
Yeah.

Gary [00:04:59]:
Like, for instance, the sidebars and a lot of Mac apps, there was a sidebar, and then on top of the sidebar, there was like a layer of glass that was Smaller than it. And then the buttons were inside of that. So he had like these three layers. You had the window, then you had the glass, and then he had the buttons on top of the glass. And people complained, that's too many. Just put the buttons on the window, you know, so they seem to have rolled back that they made the corners less round. They also are giving us a slider. And basically on the left is, you know, liquid glass.

Gary [00:05:32]:
On the right is kind of the tinted look of the previous version, Mac OS Sequoia. And you can go between those two.

Leo [00:05:39]:
Right.

Gary [00:05:40]:
So you can do ultra glass. On the left, you can get rid of the glass completely and just it's still kind of a translucent look that takes on the color of what's behind, but that's all. They can't really see any detail. So. So you got that slider. So they rolled back the design a bit. The other thing is that they emphasize that they're going to be focusing on optimizations and speed. And a lot of people talked about, oh, they're doing another Snow Leopard release.

Gary [00:06:13]:
A long time ago there was Leopard. I think it was Mac OS 10.5 was leopard, snow leopard was 10.6. Everybody says, oh, with Snow Leopard, Apple said they're not adding any new features. They're just fixing bugs and improving things. Which was not true at all. And Apple may have actually said like, oh, we're focused on optimizations. But they say that in some way or another for every version of macOS. And Snow Leopard actually had a bunch of new features in it that everybody likes to forget that Snow Leopard did.

Gary [00:06:44]:
And it's the same thing here. People are like saying that Apple's focusing on it. Oh, see, they said we're focusing on optimizations. Yeah, that doesn't mean no new features. Clearly there are new features, but it looks like they're focusing on responsiveness, like just making things faster. Things that have a little animation that take a second, it's like, let's have that take a quarter second. Let's have this thing. Why is there always a delay when you click here before you see this? Let's make that less time.

Gary [00:07:13]:
So they showed a bunch of examples and it almost sounded to me like they went to every software department for every version of the or every part of the I of the OS's and said, we need you to make things zippier. So that's like an edict, you know, that came out, they showed some examples, you know, and I think it'll. This will be good. People like that. And It'll create a nice feeling. You know, people update, they'll be like, oh, everything seems faster. Even though it's just really an animation or something. That's right.

Gary [00:07:47]:
Now, as far as new features, just about all the new features were AI based, right? Which.

Leo [00:07:52]:
Imagine that.

Gary [00:07:54]:
Yeah. So, you know, the big one is. And they're calling it Siri AI. There is speculation it'll be called Siri 2 or something like that, but Siri AI. So we go from like, Siri is everything before, and then this is going to be Siri AI. And the, the main thing is that it's all kind of integrated with a chatbot now. So you could ask Siri things and you'll get more of a conversational response. And that conversation can include asking for information, you know, you know, having, asking for feedback on things and all of that.

Gary [00:08:32]:
Just like you expect with Jet GPT or Claude or something like that, or Gemini. And this is, you know, not unexpected. It seems like Siri's got its own kind of app, but it's still integrated with the operating system. Matter of fact, you know, Mac users use Spotlight for a lot of stuff. You know, you hit command space and then you can search for files, you can launch apps, macOS, Tahoe added a bunch of stuff like access to shortcuts and Clipboard and all of that. And they're just adding Siri to that. Instead of having Siri being a separate interface, they're saying, oh, okay, you just go in a Spotlight and if it's looking like you're asking a question, right, it's going to go and, you know, be a. An AI response to that.

Gary [00:09:15]:
We'll have to see how that looks when they actually release it, because they released the developer beta yesterday and I got it. But Siri AI is a wait list kind of thing. So first of all, it means it's probably not out yet at all. Like, I don't think anybody's gotten like, oh, I was first on the wait list and I'm in. Like, I think it's going to be a week to a month, who knows, before the first people get in. And then they'll just kind of like let people in as they roll in more servers to handle stuff. And so right now it doesn't look any different, doesn't work any different. But we'll see how that goes as like probably future betas or whatever.

Gary [00:09:59]:
But it'll be interesting. You ask something and then it'll break it. If it can do it quickly, it looks like it's just going to do it. But if it's more of a conversation that you're starting, it'll break out into its own app with a window where it can display information and you're just chatting back and forth.

Leo [00:10:16]:
Right.

Gary [00:10:18]:
There's also a lot of functional bits to it. A big part of it was you could select files. So you can pick a few files right now you bring up a context menu. You can do stuff like batch, rename or move the files or do stuff. One of the things is you could just activate Siri. So then you could say, oh, can you do whatever with these files? These are reports on something. Can you tell me based on these four reports that I've selected what this is?

Leo [00:10:50]:
Does it have agentic capability? And by that I mean just as this example, can you ask it to say, combine these four reports into another?

Gary [00:11:00]:
Yeah, it looks like you can. And you kind of can do it now a little bit. Like you can ask it to create something that's a numbers document from whatever, but it looks like it'll just be a lot easier to do that. We've got that. But also a whole bunch of other functions. Apple started building little functions in like you select some text and say summarize this or correct the grammar or whatever. But now it's got a bunch of stuff. Three that it's adding in Safari are actually pretty powerful.

Gary [00:11:33]:
One is simple. It's tabs dealing with tabs. So you know you have 60 tabs open as people do. You could ask, you'll be able to ask Siri AI or activate something that groups them together by topic. Okay, so there are going to be some people that hate it and say they hate it because they already, you know, there's email grouping now. Like there's already like you can have like if there's three major categories or whatever and you can have categorization and people complain about it even though you could turn it off. They just like to complain. It's just if you don't like it, turn it off and move on with your life.

Gary [00:12:08]:
But you know, don't complain about something you're not using. Or worse, don't continue to use something you're complaining about. But it'll probably be the same thing here with tabs. There'll be people that complain that it got it wrong, you know, because they have something difficult, right? They have like five tabs open that have obviously to do with travel and a trip and another tab that's kind of travel related. No complaint, it gets grouped in with it. But yeah, you'll be able to do that, which will be nice for people that have a ton of tabs open. The other two are pretty powerful. One is going to be called something.

Gary [00:12:42]:
One is called something like notify me or something like that. Basically what you'll be able to do is you'll be able to ask Ziri for this webpage, let me know when a change occurs, let me know when this news source reports on this, or let me know when the price on this reaches something or whatever. And it'll say, okay, and then you can go away. Like you can, like, it's unclear whether you can just leave, you have to leave the tab open or you could just close that tab completely and then you get a notification like a week later, hey, you wanted me to keep track of this webpage. It, you know, the thing that you wanted happened and you could be like, oh, take me to that page. Which is, could be kind of interesting and powerful.

Leo [00:13:31]:
It is interesting. It's also something that's been happening with online services for like the last 10 or 15 years, right?

Gary [00:13:38]:
Yeah.

Leo [00:13:38]:
It hasn't been built into the OS. You could go to a service, give it a URL and just tell it, email me when it changes.

Gary [00:13:45]:
Yeah, well, but this is changes in a specific way that AI needs to interpret. Like you could say for instance, like, keep the. My local weather station, like if it mentions any chance of thunderstorms today or whatever, like, send me a notification. I mean, that's pretty simple one.

Leo [00:14:05]:
I like the idea of throwing it at an Amazon page and say, tell me when the price goes below 10 bucks or something.

Gary [00:14:10]:
Or when this, when you know, a product page, it says coming soon. Say, tell me when this says that it's going to, you know, it's out or coming out or whatever. Or like a Reddit subreddit when it's, you know, like even an article on. On Reddit and say, notify me when somebody complains about this or something. There's that. But the other one is interesting. So you could do extensions in Safari, just like Chrome and Firefox and all of that. So they're introducing a feature, create a custom extension so you can be in Safari and say, I need an extension that does this and it will make an extension that's not something you would publish to an app store.

Gary [00:14:57]:
It would just be an extension for you. It would show up as your own custom extension that does something. So that's going to be really interesting to see what the capabilities of that are. But right now there's distraction control In Safari, which is you can click on things like ads or navigation bars or whatever and say, get rid of this. And it poofs away as dust, little dust animation. And then it kind of remembers, like, you go back to that page and it remembers that you didn't want this element or that element. I mean, web designers get around it with ads by having the ad reload all the time or whatever. But you could go and say, oh, every time I visit something at Reddit or something at Apple, discussions, automatically do this with the page and change it in some way.

Gary [00:15:47]:
Switch into Reader view, get rid of this distraction, whatever, and make that into an extension. So we're going to have to wait to see what that is now in photos. It already had a cleanup AI feature. The Safari stuff not in the developer beta yet. Most of the stuff I've talked about so far is not in yet. But these photos things are actually, I've played with these, so there's already a cleanup feature. They made it better, right? Because it's new AI and new models. So they made the cleanup stuff better.

Gary [00:16:22]:
I haven't tried a comparison, but you can clean stuff up, get rid of objects and photos or people in the background. Now they've added two new ones. One is Extend, so you can extend the photo beyond its current frames, fill it in stuff that you could do in Photoshop and all that, but you can just do it right in the foot in the Photos app. Now the other one is Reframe, which basically then breaks out, like, the subjects from the background and perhaps even other elements. And then you could change the camera angle and this will tie in with the extend, because sometimes it will need to extend things. Sometimes it would need to fill in what you couldn't see behind the subjects, but you can kind of change the angles and stuff. So, yeah, I have, you know, mixed feelings about these because, you know, I hate changing stuff in your photos. But there are uses.

Gary [00:17:18]:
Like, I wouldn't want to change it and say, this is my photo now, you know, of this thing I took.

Leo [00:17:24]:
Right.

Gary [00:17:24]:
But it is fun for posting stuff online. Like, fun stuff online.

Leo [00:17:28]:
Absolutely.

Gary [00:17:29]:
Just be like, here's a photo of, you know, whatever me standing in front of, like, something and, you know, just reframe it a little bit to make it a little bit nicer. And you're just. This is just the version you're posting to Facebook. Right. The photo you've got is the original photo, you know, the one you share with close friends and show in a slideshow. That's the original But a fun thing to post online, so that's kind of neat.

Leo [00:17:53]:
I use the equivalent in Photoshop because, like you said, it's been there for a while. I use the canvas extend all the time because many photos come in at 16 by 9 resolution or aspect ratio. And for some of my uses, I need something very specific that is different than that. And especially since it's just vertical bars on the right and the left of the photo, it ends up being a really nice way to do that, to just make the picture a little bigger than it was and it still is the picture, right?

Gary [00:18:26]:
Exactly. I mean, whenever you have to work with framing something like, say, putting a photo into a video, and it's just like you're in the photo. And unfortunately, because of the framing, for you to look like you to have like as much of your body or head or whatever in it as you want, there's not enough now on the right or left.

Leo [00:18:47]:
Right.

Gary [00:18:48]:
To fill the frame. And you don't care about what's over there. It's a bunch of trees. It's a bunch of. You're gonna. You're gonna put the title up over it or some information or whatever. You just need to extend the grass in the sky so that the other side frames the subjects correctly. It's really handy for that.

Gary [00:19:06]:
And that's exactly what this does. So that's pretty cool. Now, the big one, and this is another thing that works now in the beta is there's this thing called shortcuts. In macOS and in iOS and iPadOS, shortcuts allows you to automate stuff. You control apps in the operating system and do all this stuff and create these little programs that do things really super useful and super powerful. And they've been around for a while. You'll be able to use AI to build them. And this works now.

Gary [00:19:36]:
So you can go into shortcuts. And before you would say, yeah, create a new shortcut, Then it's like, okay, add your actions, build your thing.

Leo [00:19:43]:
Right.

Gary [00:19:44]:
You can do that still, of course, but you could also just describe the shortcut. And I tried it, and it works. So, I mean, I just said, ask for a photo from my photos library. Put a word, a watermark word over the whole thing, export it as a file at this size. At first I thought it didn't work. It said, here it is. And this is a description of what it does. It throws it back at you, saying, this is what it does.

Gary [00:20:12]:
I'm like, well, did you build it? I'm like, oh, you did build It. The whole thing's there. You can go in and change it because it's kind of literal. Like, there was like, oh, this isn't what I intended. But you actually did do what I asked, like when I read what I said and it worked. And that one worked right away, and it really built it in no time. It kind of impressed me almost, because I also asked, like, go to this subreddit, look at the articles there, and only give me a list of the titles and links to things that are actual news. Like, I wanted it to basically skip all the little people complaining about stuff for my local subreddit and just give me things.

Gary [00:20:56]:
When people are saying this happened, you know, there's news this, you know, and. And it did it. Except that it either hallucinated or created or. Or found something that's kind of a hidden feature of Reddit. Not everybody has access to where it got the Reddit page as a JSON, it doesn't work. When I ran it, it was like, it can't work. Nothing was returned from this URL. And I tried it and it was like, nothing's returned.

Gary [00:21:25]:
I'm like, so where did it get that? It was possible to get JSON data, but the impressive thing about that was looking at the rest of it. It used an AI prompt inside of it because you could do that in shortcuts. You can run something through. You can say, here's a list and then run it through an AI prompt and there was a AI prompt built in there. Take this list of Reddit articles and pick the five that are the most news, like dealing with current events and blah, blah, blah, and avoid this. And that was like a prompt that the AI wrote to filter through. So if it had just been able to get a JSON version of that Reddit page, it would have worked.

Leo [00:22:05]:
Interesting.

Gary [00:22:05]:
Which is a lot further than I thought it would get. Like, I didn't think. I thought it would actually say, like, it can't do this, or it would return something really bad. Like just, here's the Reddit page and that's it, you know? Right. So it'll be. Yeah, it's interesting. This is going to be really useful for a lot of people who want to use shortcuts that just don't have the programming ability, all of that. So that's really cool.

Gary [00:22:31]:
Now that's all the AI stuff. Apple did keep talking about privacy with AI. They're going to have a lot of this on device and they're dividing it up now. The latest hardware from the last about two years will be able to do more on device than older hardware. Okay, makes sense. More processing power, more AI processing power. And it's great that they're not saying, well, we're only doing AI on device for all the devices that can handle this, that can do macOS, you know, Golden Gate and the latest version of iOS and stuff. We're dividing it up and saying that the older stuff is going to use the servers more.

Leo [00:23:13]:
Okay.

Gary [00:23:13]:
And the newer stuff will do more on device. And then they'll both go to Apple's private cloud compute, which is going to be, you know, you know, a foundation from Gemini. You know, we all know that. But it's going to be Apple's privacy wrapped around it. And then they even mentioned more about going out beyond that to get world knowledge. When you're asking for stuff that the model's not going to know, it needs to do the research.

Leo [00:23:39]:
Right.

Gary [00:23:39]:
That there'll be a privacy layer on top of that. So it looks. My guess is the way that works is that your question will, you know, run an additional prompt saying look up, you know, information about this medication.

Leo [00:23:53]:
Right.

Gary [00:23:54]:
And that'll go into Apple's stuff and get thrown in with everybody else's.

Leo [00:23:59]:
Right. It'll all just look like it's coming from Apple.

Gary [00:24:02]:
Yeah. And then it'll just come back through that private layer and then get. And then your AI prompt will get that information and then handle that and give you the information there. It'll just break it all into pieces. So the outside world just sees Apple. People are asking a bunch of, you know, asking for information, but doesn't know who, you know, which Apple users are doing that. And they also said that, you know, they will make it transparent. They'll be outside.

Gary [00:24:32]:
You know, people will be able to continue to look at how they do things and kind of check on Apple to make sure that it's doing it like that. So that is basically everything. The other. The only other interesting thing is, is that Apple, instead of just leaving us all with like, oh, that's really cool. And then the fine print is, hey, this is all for the US in an English. Right. The rest of the world's got lots of asterisks and footnotes. They actually talked about it.

Gary [00:25:02]:
There was like a disclaimer, took actually like a full minute or two saying that this stuff isn't going to be available in the EU right away, that Apple's got to work with the EU to figure all this stuff out in terms of, like the EU laws.

Leo [00:25:20]:
Right.

Gary [00:25:22]:
And yeah, Usually Apple just basically doesn't say that. They just do it and say, not available in the EU yet, or whatever. But they said that and then they added also China. They have to work with the rules and regulations in China as well. So it's almost like they moved a little bit more towards splintering the features into, here's what the US gets, here's what the EU gets, and here's what China gets, and things will change at a different rate. The US is going to get everything right away. I mean, Apple is, after all, a US company. And so it's not like there aren't.

Gary [00:26:05]:
There aren't things that stop them from doing stuff in the us. They're just drawing the line there. If they can't do it in the us, it's not going to be because of a privacy law, then it's not going to be in there. The US is the top line, then the next line down is the eu, and then there's another line for China. Things are just going to have to be different because of all the different regulations in terms of privacy, in terms of AI use and stuff like that.

Leo [00:26:31]:
So it's funny because it almost seems like the EU and the China are at opposite ends of privacy in the

Gary [00:26:38]:
sense, which is why it's hard to draw a line and say there's this line and that line. It's like they're two separate things, like, because certainly, yeah, privacy is less, but then what the government has access to is more.

Leo [00:26:52]:
Right, exactly.

Gary [00:26:53]:
You know, so it's like privacy, you know, but at different types of privacy, at different types of capabilities. Exactly, yeah. So it's going to be interesting to see and certainly be complaints about it. But, you know, the. I, you know, I look at it as, well, the, the alternative is just to say, well, everybody gets what the EU gets. But, you know, I mean, as someone in the us, it's like, I don't want them to do that, but also I want them to hold the EU and China and the US accountable for, like, hey, we can't. We can do this feature for people and they want it, but we can't

Leo [00:27:28]:
because you won't let us.

Gary [00:27:29]:
Yeah, there's a rule or something. And a lot of these aren't privacy rules. A lot of these are commerce and consumer rules that, you know, saying that, like, for instance, you know, if Apple says, well, you can do this, but another AI company says, well, they won't let people use our model. They have to use this model only to do it. Right. And in fairness, you have to, should be able to switch from using Apple to using our thing. So Apple's just going to say, well, we're not going to let anybody do anything. It sucks.

Gary [00:28:06]:
But certainly you've got two things at odds because a lot of this stuff, of course that the regulators are going for in the EU is good. It's good stuff.

Leo [00:28:15]:
Sure.

Gary [00:28:16]:
But sometimes they're going too far because they don't maybe understand the technology or they're not willing to move fast enough.

Leo [00:28:25]:
I think understanding the technology is a big piece of it. I mean, you know, there's the, the canonical example that we're all sick and tired of and that's the cookie consent pop up that you see all the time.

Gary [00:28:35]:
Yeah, exactly.

Leo [00:28:36]:
Which, which makes absolutely no sense and absolutely no difference.

Gary [00:28:40]:
Yeah.

Leo [00:28:41]:
And yet that's the kind of stuff that comes out of the eu. Yes, their motives are good and some of their laws, some of the regulations are good, but they need to be grounded in reality. Maybe if Apple's working with them, they'll be able to, they'll be able to influence.

Gary [00:28:58]:
Yeah, we can hope so. But until then there's going to be lots of complaints and it means lots of tutorials. I will do will be basically show something that you can't do in the EU and then I'll have people who are angry at Apple or angry at the EU about it complaining about my video like it's my fault and also complaining that I don't mention it, but I don't want it to turn into the cookie pop up thing.

Leo [00:29:25]:
Right.

Gary [00:29:25]:
Like I don't want to be my videos just riddled with little pop ups or me having to say exceptions and me having to take all this time to do stuff because I have to read all the footnotes, find out what's possible, not possible and then a lot of times the footnotes aren't enough and there's just no way for me to have like an A Mac that is somehow set up as an EU Mac working in the EU that, you know, it's like that's not going to be possible for me. So yeah, I'm just not going to, I'm going to talk about stuff. And the thing is, it's like if you're, you know, where you, if you're where you are and there's a restriction, I'll try my best, but I, you

Leo [00:30:06]:
know, can't be all things to all people.

Gary [00:30:09]:
Yeah, I can't, I can't, I can't do it. So anyway, that pretty much sums that up as I said I got the first developer beta, so I'm playing around with it, but it'll be a while, I think, before we have the Siri AI stuff.

Leo [00:30:22]:
I was going to ask when the ETA was for the actual OS release.

Gary [00:30:26]:
Yeah, it's the same as always. So we'll have the developer betas now. They said public beta in July, which is the same as always. And fall, which probably means September. I wish it would be actual fall, like after September 21st, because I'm actually planning on traveling a lot. September. But usually they say fall and then they release it like September 15th and it's like it's not fall. But yeah, it'll be fall.

Gary [00:30:56]:
Somebody people are starting to refer to as fiscal or academic fall, you know, which is like, you know, which is September 1st. They just say September. Right, Deborah? October, November, that's fall for like fiscal and academic and business reasons. And December, January, February, that's winter, you know, and it kind of makes sense in a way. I mean, we do think of September is fall. We do think of December is winter.

Leo [00:31:24]:
Right.

Gary [00:31:24]:
And we do think of marches. Spring. It makes sense. But that's technically not what it is, of course. So, yeah, there we go, that grumpy old man thing there about the seasons, you know.

Leo [00:31:39]:
Yes. Old man shakes fist at cloud Equinox.

Gary [00:31:43]:
Damn it, it's the equinox, so.

Leo [00:31:45]:
Well, cool. That's a lot of interesting stuff. It's funny because the item that I added turns out to relate peripherally to some of the things that you've talked about last week at. I think it's called Google I O. They announced many things, but one of the things that they announced were changes or upcoming changes to Google search, which naturally got a lot of press and as is the case, a lot of misinterpretation. I've linked to their blog announcement in the show notes, but basically they are the. The headline is that they are a new era for AI search, which had everybody thinking that they were going to change the default search in Google to be AI based. And what's happened, of course, is that they've added instead right now an AI mode button.

Leo [00:32:47]:
So if you actually go to google.com and take a look at the search box, it's the same old search box and it does the same old thing, even though that keeps changing. But there's now a button off to the far right that says AI mode, which basically switches you into a chat with Google. And what I thought was interesting about that, I actually worked on an article just the other day about this. It'll publish in a couple of weeks. AI has been infiltrating search for a long time. We've known this, we've seen this, we've complained about it. Certainly a number of people have complained about it. That many Google has the current default Google search.

Leo [00:33:32]:
The regular Google search is now essentially an AI summary followed by sponsored links, followed by, if you scroll down far enough, the actual search results that you are expecting. So AI has already infiltrated Google search results. This to me is just them trying to compete with what people are actually doing. People are actually going to other sources for search. The number of people that are using ChatGPT as a replacement search engine is actually kind of scary, right? They're going to ChatGPT, they're typing in their question and they're assuming that the answer that they get from the AI is to going correct. I think what's happened here is that Google has recognized this and they say, well, we have an AI. Why aren't you using that? You know, just use that, click this button and you're in Google's AI search so that they can compete in the same way with what people seem to be interested in actually doing. Now, it was misinterpreted apparently at some point that Google was going to make this the default experience that if you go to google.com what you were doing was interacting with their AI search.

Leo [00:34:44]:
And as a result of that misinterpretation, DuckDuckGo started to see a whole lot more traffic as people were saying, no, nope, nope, don't want to do that. DuckDuckGo supposedly lets you choose. I ran an experiment. I basically ran the same query across a couple of different search engines and I went to DuckDuckGo and I was actually very disappointed. Not because of any AI, although there was an AI summary off to the right. Not at the top like Google is pushing it, but the fact that there was, at least for my search, like a page and a half of sponsored results before the actual search results. So I mean, yeah, DuckDuckGo is great and I know they have to pay their bills and they're supposedly more privacy focused, but it still wasn't the best experience. I did run the same query through ChatGPT and certainly got the AI response we all expected.

Leo [00:35:43]:
Expected. I ran it through Google's new AI mode and got the AI response that we all kind of sort of expected. For the fun of it, I happen to use Kaji Kagi as my search engine. For the record, it's paid. I have to pay for it. And again, for the record, since I keep getting accused of this on my videos, no, they are not sponsoring my recommendation. I do not get money from them. I give them money to use their product.

Leo [00:36:15]:
And I ran the query and I was shocked to get a lengthy AI generated response at the top, which kind of scared me because I thought their whole point was to be in more control. On a hunch, I went looking for settings and sure enough, I, you could turn that off, but it's even more interesting than that. And the behavior you described for Siri kind of made me realize how related this is. If this feature is turned on, if your search ends with a question mark, they run it through AI because they think you're asking a question that could then be answered by AI. If you leave off the question mark, you get search results, plain old familiar links to other sites that actually answer your question. I thought that that was a very, very interesting way to approach the problem because it really does mean that you're in control depending on how you ask your question, and even then, only if you have that feature turned on. So there's just a bunch of AI related turmoil in search. And I think it's going to get worse before it gets better.

Leo [00:37:45]:
I think that what you described Siri as doing is an example. I don't know if it's better, but it's basically just another example of, you know, there's a lot of, a lot of experimentation and a lot of reaction going on in the search space as people get either annoyed by AI or flocked AI and all of the search engines end up having to do something.

Gary [00:38:11]:
Yeah, I think part of it is even if you dislike AI, as a matter of fact, if you're one of the people that's likely to dislike AI for stuff, you're probably also somebody that disliked search. And there's a Venn diagram overlapping of those things. Because search is. People have complained since the dawn of the Internet, dawn of the web, you know, that search is bad, right? It's not giving you the results you want. It's throwing up junk and spam and, you know, web pages and stuff. And that continues to be the problem. If you just use regular search. And this is true, there is no perfect one.

Gary [00:38:51]:
There's Google, DuckDuckGo, Bing. They all, you know, if you search for things a lot, you're still going through pages and pages a lot of times to find something that, you know, matches what is you're kind of looking for. And you complain a lot that why is Search still so bad. It's 2026. Right. So if you're somebody that's like, oh, AI sucks because AI hallucinates and it gives me wrong answers and it's, you know, all of this, you probably also are like, search sucks and all of that. So it's kind of the thing. It's like, okay, but is AI search, you know, taking the best of both or the worst of both? I, I find, you know, sometimes I'll start just.

Gary [00:39:31]:
I'm using DuckDuckGo mostly, but I'll do a DuckDuckGo search, maybe a Google search for something. I want to find a webpage. I don't want to do AI. I want to find a webpage about this. And I look at the results and I'm like, I'm like, all right. And I go over to Chat GPT just because I happen to have the window open or something.

Leo [00:39:51]:
Sure.

Gary [00:39:52]:
And I'll say, can you find a web page for me that blah, blah, blah, you know, whatever it is, and it'll return the results. You know, it's like, oh, thank you. Okay, it did a better job. But maybe it's self selecting. Maybe it's the fact that there are just certain web pages that AI is going to do a better job finding for you and certain web pages where you didn't need to bother to go to AI, Your first Google result is going to get you there.

Leo [00:40:15]:
But I think your example shows something that a lot of people don't think about.

Gary [00:40:20]:
Yeah.

Leo [00:40:22]:
You didn't ask Chat GPT for X. You asked chatgpt specifically for a web.

Gary [00:40:28]:
Yeah, I was asking it to be a search engine.

Leo [00:40:30]:
Right?

Gary [00:40:31]:
Yeah.

Leo [00:40:31]:
And so much of what people complain about in both search and AI chat.

Gary [00:40:39]:
Yeah.

Leo [00:40:40]:
Is controlled by how they phrase their question. And the better you can do that naturally, the better the results you're going to get.

Gary [00:40:53]:
Oh, yeah.

Leo [00:40:54]:
And the, the, the what's different now is that phrasing a search better is a different, almost a different skill set than phrasing a chat better. There are similarities, you know, provided enough information, be clear, you know, all that kind of stuff, but they're almost different skill sets. And I think that one of the things that's interesting about AI chat is that the skill set overlaps with talking to a person. If I ask you a question, the better I can be, and the clearer I can be in asking you that question, the better you're going to be able to answer it. And the same is true for AI. Anyway, you mentioned Bing briefly as your list one of the things that's not showing up these days in popular alternative search engines is Bing. It's just not being as successful as Microsoft ever wanted it to be. As it turns out, linking to another news article in Windows 11 upcoming, they are actually going to make it possible to have the default search in Windows not automatically include Bing search results.

Leo [00:42:18]:
Right now, if you use the built in Windows search for something and you're searching for a document on your machine or an application on your machine, it's going to throw that to Bing anyway, just in case you wanted some web results. And that's very annoying because it's true. Even if your default search engine is not Bing, they still use Bing for that. So apparently there's going to be an option to turn that feature off and turn off the feature that also includes the Microsoft Store in every search, which is also something that people complain about. I'm not searching for something online. I'm not searching for an app. I'm searching my machine for something. Can't we just focus on that? So anyway, like I said, a whole lot of turmoil in the, in the search space.

Leo [00:43:08]:
So. So what is cool this week?

Gary [00:43:15]:
Well, let's see, for me, I, we talked last week, you know that a lot of series are ending and I. Another one that I watched that ended was Hacks. Did you watch hacks?

Leo [00:43:31]:
Never watched hacks.

Gary [00:43:33]:
Oh, it's good. Yeah.

Leo [00:43:36]:
What's the one line description

Gary [00:43:40]:
comic. See an older woman comic played by Gene Smart who won a bunch of Emmys for it is basically hires a joke writer helper who's a young millennial and to, you know, help her with some jokes or writing some stuff and they become friends and it's about their relationship as she navigates through like career of like trying to get a late night talk show and you know, put on different shows and do different things. So a lot of different scenarios and situations and a lot of other characters in a bigger ensemble cast certainly. So it's humorous but also it's a great, it's a great show between a friendship show between two women of very different ages throughout So a half hour episodes, a lot of fun and it had a nice satisfying conclusion.

Leo [00:44:42]:
Which service is it on?

Gary [00:44:44]:
Hbo.

Leo [00:44:45]:
Okay, cool. I might have to look into that. So I was thinking earlier today, you know what, what's been cool in the last week and I really haven't stumbled onto anything. You know, sometimes we just don't run across the book or the show or the whatever that, that tickles our fancy each week. And I was Thinking, okay, where am I spending some of my downtime, right? Where, where do I go? And of all things gosh, about six months ago, I reactivated my World of Warcraft subscription. I played it for many years, you know, like maybe a decade ago, and I fired it up again because I find it. First of all, it has, it's still a thing, it's still going. It's not nearly as popular as it once was, but it's still got millions of players.

Leo [00:45:37]:
The game, you know, has proven to have longevity, it's still applicable. And what I use it for is stress relief. And it is, honestly, it still fits the bill. Going out and killing virtual monsters, I find very, very, like I said, stress relieving and therapeutic. So anyway, I just thought I would throw out World of Warcraft as my ain't it Cool for this week because it's as old as it is. And apparently I'm not alone in coming back because when I fired it up, it turns out that there are several options specifically tailored to easing re entry for returning players, which was kind of interesting. So anyway, World of Warcraft, having fun with it. It's like I said, it's stress relief, which is something that I think a lot of us need these days.

Gary [00:46:36]:
Yeah.

Leo [00:46:38]:
So self promotion. I wrote an article a long time ago. I've updated it recently. It's called you can't unring a book bell. What really happens to your data when you post Anything online? It's askleo.com 24288 and as the title implies, it really tries to drive home the fact that when you post something online, even something that you think is private, you lose all control over it one way or another. It can be copied, it can be shared, it can be posted, it can be stolen. All the kinds of things that you can, that you. You are worried about can happen.

Leo [00:47:22]:
And I think it's a very, very important reminder for people to understand. I'm not saying don't post anything, obviously I post lots of things all the time, but just be very aware of all of the traps that that are out there that could cause something you, you post or share with the intent of it being private. Escaping that bubble.

Gary [00:47:50]:
Cool. I will point to my most recent episode, 3 Ways to Keep icloud files and photos local. So yeah, it's fairly easy to tell icloud. Like I want this to always be cached locally. You can do it for everything. You can do it for single file and you could do it for like folder. It's fairly easy to do But a lot of people don't realize it.

Leo [00:48:17]:
So when you say that, do you mean that it's. But it's still all stored online?

Gary [00:48:22]:
Still all stored online. But it's just.

Leo [00:48:24]:
You just want to make sure that there's copies on your PC, on your machine?

Gary [00:48:26]:
Yeah, yeah. What's cached only and what's only available online? Because obviously, a big reason to use a cloud service is to have some of your data offloaded. You know, you've got a small drive, you have a lot of files, so you can do that, but you want to make sure, like the project you're working on now or your employee, important files are always local so you don't find yourself offline and unable to get to them.

Leo [00:48:50]:
I should do that with OneDrive because it has the same set of features. I typically do it from the perspective of backing up. One of the things I promote very heavily is that you need to back up the files you have stored in OneDrive or any cloud service, be it iCloud, OneDrive, Dropbox, or whatever. And the easiest way to do that for people, if they have the disk space, is to just make sure that it's all downloaded so that when you back up your PC, everything gets included.

Gary [00:49:15]:
Cool.

Leo [00:49:17]:
All righty. Well, once again, I think that wraps us up for another week. As always, thank you all very much for listening, and we will see you here again real soon. Take care, everyone.

Gary [00:49:28]:
Bye.

Leo [00:49:28]:
Bye.

Gary [00:49:29]:
Bye.