Podcast Summary:
Jeff and Tim treat Apple’s big show like a fun night at the movies, and the take is refreshingly simple. iPhone Air gets ultra thin with 256 gigs standard, while the Pro models flex 48 megapixels and clever software. But for confident blind users, the win isn’t megapixels, it’s brains. Center Stage keeps you framed, dual recording grabs you and the scene at once, and on-device smarts promise better OCR and object recognition. AirPods 3 hold the price, boost sound, add heart rate, and flirt with live translation for easy, bilingual chats. Apple Watch leans into health, sleep, and fast top-ups, with SE keeping it friendly on the wallet. Prices feel steady, choices feel sane, and the event’s audio description shines. Upgrade if it fits your use case; otherwise, a fresh battery and enjoying the moment might be the best feature of all.
Full Transcript
{Music}
Jeff: In a world where blind life doesn’t wait. Where skills are learned, not given. We don’t wait for tomorrow. We do it today. Real skills, real tools. Real life. I’m Jeff Thompson and Tim Schwartz. This is the blind drive. Let’s get started.
Intro: Three. Two. One.
{Music}
Jeff: Welcome to the blind drive. I’m Jeff Thompson, and with me is Tim Schwartz. Tim, how are you doing?
Tim: I’m doing good. How are you doing, Jeff?
Jeff: I’m Aww dropping.
Tim: I guess you are dropping. Well.
Jeff: Yeah, I like to say jaw dropping in a sense, because in your situation where you’re running. What, the 13?
Tim: I have the 13 mini and I had the Watch Series four and I’ve lost it. So I’m no watch right now with the 13 mini. So this was definitely a dropping, jaw dropping all kinds of droppings.
Jeff: And they did do some droppings there for major items. I think one really the iPhone air to me was like less than a quarter of an inch thick.
Tim: That yeah.
Jeff: It’s 0.22 of an inch. So 0.25 would be a quarter of an inch.
Tim: Yeah.
Jeff: But then if you get the MagSafe battery pack, which brings it up to 40 hours of charge, because people are really worried that, you know, it won’t get a full day. But Apple Tim says a full day. Yeah, I guess the dynamic Island area covers the whole top part of it. So that cuts down a little bit of it, but I guess the battery is what makes it so thin because it covers the whole thing and all the mechanics are put behind that bump or that dynamic island area. I think it’s going to be a slim, stylish phone, but when you put one of those defender cases on it, I don’t know how thin it’s going to be then.
Tim: Which is usually what happens in my case anyway, because I get the nice, pretty phone with a nice new shiny sheen to it and then slap on a case. So yeah.
Jeff: Wait an extra week for that special color, right?
Tim: Exactly.
Jeff: I never really worried about the color of my phone.
Tim: I never did either. For years I got the product red just because, you know, they would put money to charity and then in years where they didn’t have it, I just got black or gray or whatever. I don’t really care. It’s going to have a case on it anyway.
Jeff: I remember got the white one, so I got a white case because it seemed fitting, because I wanted white and all that. And I didn’t like having a white case because it just shows everything you’re doing. You know, you’re out in the yard working on something. You’re using your phone to check stuff out. You always had to worry if it’s clean or not, because if it’s white, well, it’s probably dirty.
Tim: Probably.
Jeff: I’ve gone with the black ones after that just because I don’t want to have to worry about it.
Tim: Yeah, I can’t see it. What do I care? No, but I, I’m the same way. I’ve, I’ve always just put a black case on them and whether it’s for just the protection of it anyway or just because it blends in with everything, it doesn’t show the dirt like you said. So, you know, slap a black case on there and be done with it.
Jeff: Did you see those phones are coming in five colors now? I mean, teams going all out. He’s going for the whole box of crayons here with the sage. What is there a miss blue.
Tim: A light blue? Yes. And the sage is like a. Is it a dark green?
Jeff: It’s a green.
Tim: It’s a green.
Jeff: It leans towards. It’s one of those colors that everyone will say, that’s sage. No, it’s kind of a no sage. No, it’s. But you can have it now and you can show people what it is now.
Tim: Yeah. It’d be like, here’s what it is. I, I won’t be getting the sage, but you could get orange. Sounds like a creamsicle or pink.
Jeff: There you go. You got all the colors to choose from.
Tim: And my wife is excited to get the lavender. You know, that dark, that purple color. But she wants the 17 Pro and it doesn’t have lavender. It is only 17. But God love her. She’s had the same thing we did. She goes, well, I’m just going to go buy a purple case and put it on it anyway. And I’m like, that’s my wife, I love you.
Jeff: I had to write that letter to Tim Apple and say, dude, dude, you’ve wrecked my moment. Yeah, I like the choices people have because some people think that’s important, and I like the choices they’re given with people with phones. I mean, why would you want to slim? I think it’s just because people like her who are. I’m just going to say like a business person. Someone that has a suit on, a nice suit and they have this phone. I would say it’s an accessory, because then you just reach in and you have your phone. Can you have two phones with the same number?
Tim: Yeah, I’m pretty sure you can, especially nowadays with The Sims. You probably can.
Jeff: So some people are probably getting all colors just for dressing attire and the occasion.
Tim: Oh sure. Yeah. Mhm.
Jeff: Saint Patrick’s Day break out the sage.
Tim: Right. The orange put a like a black one of those bumper cases. Not a full case. Put a black bumper case on it. You got a Halloween phone.
Speaker5: Oh there you go. Yeah. So when Tim’s listening to this he’s going to thank us.
Tim: Yep. Giving him new marketing ideas for their their lineup of colors as if they haven’t already thought of some of it. Maybe.
Jeff: So which phone caught your attention?
Tim: You know, they all caught my attention. If I was a seeing person, I would be just drooling. Even more so on the Pro and the Pro Max that I can speak. You know, from my wife’s research on this already, she was looking at the cameras and going, it has what? Now it does what it’s got how many megapixel. And you know, she’s just freaking out because she, she loves taking photos and videos and all kinds of things. She is our photographer in the house, so I would usually be very enticed by that. But the 17 just a regular old 17 is fine for me. I like the air, the idea of the air. I honestly think that this is probably an early first step in a foldable phone. They want to see how thin can we get this and how strong can we make it? How robust can it be at that thin of a style? And if not next year, probably the year after, we’re going to see them probably do a foldable phone. At least that’s been some of the rumors. So I like the idea of the air. I think it’s fine, you know, but I’m that type that just likes to have a good, robust feeling in my hand. Not that I need a big, thick phone. I don’t need a brick. You know, my 13 mini is fine with its case on it. That’s a nice phone to hold, and I don’t feel like I’m going to break it in my hand or I’m not going to, you know, throw it across the room, although I throw it across the room all the time anyway. But, um.
Jeff: Did your team lose?
Tim: Did my team my team lost. Yeah, just tossed it. But yeah. So like the the 17 for me is actually really nice. I like the update for the cameras, but I don’t know how much that affects somebody with low vision or blindness as far as OCR or object recognition, because nowadays cameras are so above and beyond, you know, so good.
Jeff: We started with.
Tim: Yeah, that at this point the cameras I don’t think are even a problem anymore. It’s the software, it’s the intelligence. What are they going to be able to do with the information that it’s looking at? And that’s all the artificial intelligence and the what are the machine learning that they have in there. And that is very important. Obviously with the Pro and the Pro Max.
Jeff: They say they have 348 megapixel lenses, one wide angle, one telescopic, one for the regular stuff like you’d be doing with IRA. When you’re asking a question of them, they’d be by default using the wide angle so they could capture more area. Now, I would think with a 48 megapixel camera that the IRA interpreter on the other end of the camera, seeing your video would be able to have more detail rather than what we’ve used in the past, like the meta ray ban glasses. Some people say the detail for OCR or the detail for them to read something that you’re looking at isn’t crisp. So I’m wondering if the, you know, 48 megapixels just sounds like you’re, you know, what did we start out with? Four, five, six?
Tim: Something like that. Yeah, I think it was four.
Jeff: I heard a rumor that once you’re up near eight megapixels, that’s a camera. Representation of a photograph is what we could decipher. And once it gets past that analog camera or a film camera couldn’t replicate it because it gets no. And they’re up to 48. Now, this is beyond Polaroid. Beyond.
Tim: Well, I think most of the idea behind the 48 megapixel being that it is so far beyond. It’s so much of the processing of what it’s doing to get that megapixel. And now with these phones, yes, it’s doing a lot of it in the hardware, but for a long time they’ve done a lot of it with the software to really improve the quality of what it’s capturing and what you’re able to see and all that. And they claim that there is a better color quality, you know, better color, hue, crispness to the image. So for those people that are still using like a much, much older phone, and if you’re having problems with object recognition or OCR or things like that, I mean, yeah, at this point these levels of phones are going to be far and away above and beyond anything we’ve ever had before.
Jeff: Yeah, I was always looking for that as the phones got bigger, like the 12 MP, and then it got bigger than that. When I saw 48 today, it was like, huh?
Tim: And three of them.
Jeff: We were trying to see the difference between 8 and 14. But now it’s three times that at 48, you know, it’s like whoa, whoa, six times eight is 48. Whoa. But will it make a difference? Like you said, the software. We’ll have to see how everyone opens up to that and hopefully all the developers are working that out. We should be able to read stuff on the second page right through the first page. Pretty soon we’ll be speed reading.
Tim: You could take a picture of a book and have it get half the book without even opening the cover. That’d be fantastic.
Jeff: Yeah, I’m kind of thinking if I was to upgrade, you’re running the 13 mini, so you’re like, what’d you say you are? And I’m just oohing.
Tim: Yeah. When we were talking before we came on, yeah, I was like, ooh, ah I really like it. And yeah I think you’re still just an ooh. But you’ve got the what did you tell.
Jeff: 14 Pro.
Tim: Max. 14. Yeah. So so that makes sense.
Jeff: Yeah I’m looking at it. I think if someone has a 1615 maybe they might be looking at it like, um, you know you have to evaluate yourself, you know, is there anything on here that is going to change the way you use your phone? I mean, the center stage feature.
Tim: Yeah, that’s really nice. If you’re somebody who does a lot of face time or maybe even you go out and want to record a lot of things because, like you were alluding to the 15 and 16 series has the Apple intelligence in it has all that newer, cooler software stuff. So if you’re coming from a 15 or 16, that’s the bigger decision. Is this with the camera upgrades and the center stage, is that enough to make you decide to go ahead and upgrade? Because center stage, literally like it does with the Max, it will take your image whether you’re looking in the center or you’re, you know, off just a little bit like some of us, not just on our phones. Um, you know, it’ll center you in the frame and make sure that that you are, you know, right there, focused and centered. And I like that especially for people who are blind or visually impaired. Like, I don’t necessarily know that I’m always looking right in the center or have my face centered. I know I forget how many years ago it was when they put the eye tracking, you know, where it would actually remake your eyes to make it look like you’re actually looking at the screen. You know, that’s kind of a nifty feature, but I’m usually looking so far away from it, probably that it probably doesn’t know what to do with my eyes, but. But I like the idea of being able to be automatically centered. They’re going to have it where you can actually record on both cameras at once. They showed I had to get a description of this. They showed where your front facing camera would show you up in the corner, and then whatever you’re filming on the backside would fill the rest of the screen. You could then record both sides at once.
Jeff: So like a FaceTime call? Yeah.
Tim: Yeah, like a FaceTime call. But actually recording both sides. I’ve already heard a lot of influencers and, you know, online, you know, people, podcasters, etc. saying this is fantastic. This would be great for reaction videos. And so the kids are going to love this for TikTok. You know, they can record themselves reacting to whatever they’re also showing. So, you know, that’s probably a lot more to do with that for this feature than anything. But at the same time, I kind of like it. I like the idea of being able to record my reaction to something while I’m recording something else and have that. So I think a lot of the upgrades with the camera are really cool. It’s the idea of what is it going to do for us as people with low vision or blindness? And like we did say before, you know, taking it back to this, OCR is fantastic. Object recognition and text recognition, all of that is so good already. It’s really more about the AI and what they’re doing with it and processing it. I just don’t know how much these camera upgrades are really benefiting us at this point. It’s just a nice new shiny. That’s really cool. If you’ve got some vision or even if you are blind. I know there’s a lot of blind photographers out there. This has got to be very appealing to those people.
Jeff: I like that 256 gigabyte. So the storage, you know, that’s basically the starting point. You know, even for the Apple Air phone, it’s like mm. That’s my phone. I haven’t found that I needed more than that I really haven’t.
Tim: No I have 128 gig with my iPhone 13 mini. And I do have to delete things once in a while, but it’s not bad. I mean, I’ve had to get used to not having music saved in Apple Music. I just have to stream it all, and I’m almost always on Wi-Fi and I have unlimited data, so that doesn’t really bother me to stream it. But if I had to do 56, I probably would download a few more albums or playlists to have on the go or, you know, movies or more audiobooks, things like that. Yeah, with the 128, it’s a little a little problematic sometimes, but 256 being the starting point, I like that, I really like that. That’s now going to be the base.
Jeff: Now on the iPhone, air is going to start at basically a thousand bucks, you know, 990, you know, and then when you get into the other ones, you’re looking at 1099. And then but as soon as you go in there and you click on a couple things, you might jump it up a little bit, but starting at 256, that’s where I’m at. So that’s fine for me. So I like that part of it. I used to always have to bump that up one, you know, like we were saying, people are going to have to make the decision if they want to incur the cost of a new phone trade in the other one. I would say if you already have the 15 or 16, I think the 18 would be the one to wait for.
Tim: I would. Yeah, I think that would be fine.
Jeff: If you’re down to 80% on a battery, you can get for 200 bucks or so, you can go and get a new battery, get that done. Takes an hour or so like that. If you’re having trouble with your battery. I’m running a 14 Pro Max and my battery is down to 84%. So can I make it another year? Probably not, but I we’ll see where it goes to and stuff. I can talk the talk and every once in a while then it’s like, you know what, I’m doing it. And it’s sudden when it happens to me, it’s like, fine, I’m tired of this. I’m going to do this. You know, when I used to have to delete a lot, gosh, what were we running when we first got these phones? 32 gigabyte.
Tim: Something like that. Maybe a 64. Yeah. My first ever iPhone was a three GHz, and I don’t even remember what that was. 32 probably. Yeah. 32 gig hard drive. I don’t know how I even survived the dark days.
Jeff: And then they have the AirPods three. They’re coming out, but I like that they left them at the same price. Basically all the stuff I saw today, the prices were like, that’s normal. I didn’t see a big jump anywhere in any of this stuff. And that AirPods three, you know better bass, but they also have the heart monitoring so you can get the heartbeats and stuff. And I don’t know how much information Apple’s actually getting out of sticking a probe in your ear. Mm. It’s not just for music anymore. But I do like the AirPods. I have the AirPod pros two.
Tim: So do.
Speaker5: I.
Jeff: I do like them. I have to admit, I’m not the one that they always fall out. Every once in a while. I can tell they’re ones getting loose and I push it back in and I feel like I’m Shrek out there getting it in my ear so I can use it. But they’re convenient and they’re inconspicuous is the word I’m looking for in a sense that I can just wear them and when I need to, I put it on transparency and it’s just like I’m outside. And one time I started up my saw and they actually turned off transparency because of the loud sound. So that’s a little bit of protection.
Tim: Turns mine on and off when my daughter comes rushing into the house or comes over to say something, all of a sudden it just drops. I’m like, ah, no, go back.
Speaker5: Oh yeah.
Jeff: Well, they do have that in conversation when you’re talking to something.
Tim: But the conversation.
Speaker5: Yeah.
Jeff: The other thing I saw that they’re built into them. I think it’s an H1 chip.
Speaker5: Yep.
Jeff: Live translation. So if you’re going to speak French to me and I was going to speak Italian to you, it would interpret that in conversation with us back and forth.
Tim: I really like this feature. They talked about this or kind of I maybe they didn’t talk about it. They it got leaked earlier this year that this was going to probably happen. Yeah. With, you know, two people talking with AirPods, it will automatically translate both. Like you said. I liked, however, that if one of the two people didn’t have AirPods, whatever you would say, it would translate it into the other person’s language on your screen so you could be speaking and just show them your screen, and it would show them what it is that you’re saying, or vice versa. So I really like that. And like you said, it could be two completely doesn’t have to be English necessarily just to whatever languages. And yeah, you’re going to be able to discuss things with people, talk with people. And I love that. That’s like Star Trek come to life. You know, it’s just like, okay, I don’t know their language, but okay, let’s let’s flip a switch here and we can now communicate. I think that’s a fantastic thing. Now it seems like I don’t know that they really said this directly, but some of the reading I was doing that live translation might trickle down to the AirPods Pro two. I’m not sure. I think that’s something to put a pin in, because it sounded like that might be. There was a couple of people I read online that that seemed to think that that was going to be the case, so have to watch that, because if that’s the case, I may not get the Pro three.
Jeff: We need sales. We need.
Speaker5: Sales.
Tim: Right. Exactly.
Speaker5: Stay at the top.
Jeff: You gotta have people cash them in and move on to the biggest one. I wonder if you said something to me like, yeah, that’s a fact. If it would translate it to Minnesota and say, yeah, for sure, you betcha.
Tim: It.
Speaker5: Might.
Jeff: That would be a neat trick to have it do that type of stuff to, you know, dialects.
Tim: I’m already doing that with my Amazon Echo. There’s times where I’ll say things in very clear, well-spoken English and it doesn’t understand me at all. So I’ll throw some sort of random accent on it, and all of a sudden it understands me and I’m like, wait a minute, that shouldn’t be right. But yeah, that’s what we need. We need dialect translation, not just total language translation.
Jeff: I like the prices at 259 for these. They say the base is going to be better. They said that there’s better air conductivity from the outside, the inside. So you’re going to get a better sound, a wider range of sound. I’m not sure if I’m crazy about the PPG. I think that’s that’s on the watch. The this one has the where the sensors. So it feels the heartbeat and stuff. But the watches will get into that. That has the PPG where it actually takes pictures of your vessels and stuff like that so it can actually monitor. They say they’ll be able to monitor if you’re having high blood pressure, which usually there’s not too many symptoms for that. But it’s getting into the health thing. And I think that’s safety first.
Tim: And I do like that because that was the thing where I know some people were shaking their heads at the heart rate monitoring within the AirPod Pro three. But if you’re a runner and for example, maybe for whatever reason, you don’t already have an Apple Watch or you don’t use an Apple Watch. Now, if you’re a runner and you’re or you’re working out or exercising, you probably want an Apple Watch. But to have that heart rate monitoring, you know, if you’re out for a run or you’re working out or something like that, you know, making sure that you’re okay and all that, you know that I think that’s really good. I’d rather have it than not have it. I guess if it’s going to be baked in, why not? But like you said, we can already do some of that with the Apple Watch. But now that you can monitor, you know, whether you have hypertension or high blood pressure, like you said, I like that I don’t personally have high blood pressure. My my wife does battle with that sometimes. She was actually just recently in the hospital for A-fib, which is something that the the watch also can, you know, detect and look at. So, um, the fact that they keep putting these things in the watch, I love because you could just say, well, the watch is just an easy way to access whatever, you know, whatever you want to access and get information and notifications on your wrist and your workouts and exercise stuff, but then adding in all the health benefits with the high blood pressure and the heart rate monitoring and their cycle tracking.
Jeff: Tim, you haven’t closed any rings today.
Speaker5: Yeah.
Tim: That’s the story of it.
Jeff: Shame you.
Speaker5: Too.
Tim: It does shame you. It absolutely shames you.
Speaker5: You should.
Jeff: Stand.
Speaker5: Up.
Tim: And now they’ve got that that virtual assistant that will, uh, pop up in your fitness app, on your phone and on your, your watch to encourage you to continue your exercising and all that. It’s like as if the closing of my rings wasn’t enough. But but no, I like that too, though I like that’s a nice use of artificial intelligence. Being able to have a companion there in your fitness app and on your watch that’s motivating you and, you know, say, hey, you got five minutes to go or you’re almost there, you know, whatever. You know, one more rep. You know, I like that. I think that that’s that’s helpful. You know, some people might roll their eyes at it, but I think it’s kind of helpful. But but know to be able to do all these things with just something on your wrist, like you said, scanning the vessels in your arm. And like I was saying, they, you know, does cycle tracking for women in a way that, you know, it can decide what’s going on there and give you important feedback? I don’t know how it does that, but it does, and I love it. I like that they think about that kind of stuff.
Speaker5: It looks.
Jeff: For changes. There should be a constant, but then there’s changes.
Tim: There’s a blip. Yeah.
Jeff: It also has a sleep monitoring. So I don’t sleep with my watch.
Tim: Before I lost it I slept with mine because I do suffer from sleep apnea. Now I do have a CPAp machine and all that. And so I work with my doctor closely on it. But I still when I had my watch and didn’t lose it, I would wear it to bed. And it worked really nicely to tell me, you know, the different parts of the night where I slept the best or I didn’t sleep so well and with all the new features, because like I said, I had the series for wherever it may be, God rest its little soul. It did a good job, but not a great job. And so if I got either, you know, I could get last year’s model and I’d be blown away. But especially with the new sleep tracking and sleep apnea things that it’s doing with, you know, the software, again, going back to, you know, using the software to really provide you with statistics. Statistics. Easy for me to say. Um, you know, to really break it down and explain to.
Jeff: You I’m not editing that.
Tim: Okay, fine. Well. It’s been a day. It has definitely been a day. It’s always that kind of day with the Apple events.
Jeff: We’re talking about trying to get this. We’ll do it right after the show. We’ll do this, we’ll do that and we’ll race. Our watches would be going, Jeff, you’re killing it today. What’s going on?
Tim: Your heart is very elevated today.
Jeff: I like this to soak in because it’s new information. I think they did a great job at moving around the presentation. And if you want to watch his, uh, any Apple event, you can go to Apple.com and then click on the links to it. It’ll go to the events and then you can pull it up. They replay them anytime you want to do it, and you can get it on your phone too, or on your Apple TV. Go down to an app. There’s an Apple app that has Apple events in it. You can replay them all day long and everything. I remember I used to record them, so I have information that I realize it’s always there. It’s it’s Apple.
Tim: I noticed earlier today that it was actually in the App Store. If you went to the App Store right at the top of the screen, it it had as a event for the day and you could tap on it there and then it would take you to the Apple TV app in order to watch it right there on your phone. So, oh yeah, they were pushing it everywhere. And then of course, because I have audio description turned on by default on my phone, when I went to the Apple TV app to watch it, it automatically kicked on the audio description, which was fantastic and was really well done. The presentation itself is obviously well put together that, you know, they kind of know what they’re doing, but the narration for the audio description was really, really good. There was actually at the beginning I can’t remember exactly what the description was, but when it showed, like the logo and the animation of the logo for this particular event, they had it scripted out to where it described exactly what was going on and how it was animating and all that kind of thing. And the transitions were described very, very well. I think I said this to you before we were recording. There was a part where I don’t know that anybody said it out loud in the presentation, but the narrator for the audio description was talking about a point where they were using artificial intelligence or the Apple intelligence, and the narrator mentioned that the 17 in that particular scene was using the Screenshare feature, where you can take a screenshot and then just ask, what is this I’m looking at? Like, just like you can do with any other, you know, seeing AI or ChatGPT or anything like that, just take a screenshot and it’ll then see what’s on your screen. So if you’re like, I don’t know what’s going on, I can’t find this button or is there a link on the screen? What’s going what am I missing? Is there an email address? You know, whatever it is you’re trying to find.
Jeff: Who’s injured on my fantasy football team.
Tim: Yeah, exactly. I’ve done this. Yes. Uh, you know, I’ve done this. I’ve done my baseball team and my football team. It’s like I’ve done that with ChatGPT. And it’s an easy process with ChatGPT because you go in, you just change it to, you know, screen share. It turns off your screen curtain automatically. So it can literally see your screen and just go somewhere and say, okay, here’s the screen I’m on. Tell me what we’re seeing or, you know, list the players that are here or whatever. And to be able to do that natively with the phone, you know, any of the Apple intelligence phones. So 15 seconds forward, like I said, I think you have to you have to take the screenshot and then ask what’s in it. But so, you know, it’s a press of two buttons and there you go. And you can ask it anything in about your screen. And the fact that the the audio description narrator mentioned that I went searching for that after the event, and I couldn’t find anywhere where somebody actually mentioned it aloud. It must have just been visually on the screen, but the narrator said it and I’m like, ooh, I feel special.
Jeff: Yeah. It makes you wonder if that’s a prelude to what’s more to come if the apple glasses ever come out. Who knows?
Tim: Well, that’s the dream, isn’t it, Jeff? I mean, the idea that if we could get apple glasses, that is like the meta frames or like, you know, Google Glass of old or what Google’s working on now. That’s the ultimate dream that that’s the idea of being able to.
Jeff: It is interesting when you do have a person, you’ve been in a situation, a person that gets it, that understands that you what you want to take in. I went on a canoe trip and I actually stopped and I pulled up access AI from the IRA app, and I took a picture and it told me a quiet river running down with a canoe. And it gave me the fluffy. You know, I got it set for fluffy. And so I took another picture of the same thing, and it was pretty close to what I wanted. And now they’re talking about this stuff coming out live. Like, I was talking about a beta program coming up here. I think it has to do with live video. And I think other companies are doing. Everyone’s doing something of this nature somewhere.
Tim: Doing that with the meta frames where, I mean, they already have their live.
Jeff: Remember that video that came out a while, what, nine months or ten months ago?
Tim: They’ve got the live AI, and I know they’re going to be working on expanding that here in the very near future. And then, like you said, the promise of an apple glasses or, you know, the solos.
Jeff: And Apple will have an API. What is it, an API?
Tim: Yeah.
Jeff: Yeah. That will open it up for people that are doing the right thing. You know, the accessibility and stuff like that. They’re going to start to open that up. That’s what I heard.
Tim: Well yeah. Because they have that larger access to their app store and their whole, you know, built in system there. Whereas like meta has to get partnerships right now you can load up audible and be my eyes because of partnerships, Spotify and Amazon Music and things like that. And use that with your meta frames. But they have to reach out and actually make that partnership happen. Whereas Apple I mean, there probably are partnerships, but they already have the App Store and the developers will get that API from Apple. And just like with the Vision Pro, they can just go ahead and create an app for it and put it in there, and it can be available widely. Instead of having to wait and hope that somebody’s going to get a partnership made. So again, that that is that ultimate dream of being able to have the Apple glasses do it. Because imagine being able to have something that’s already native built in and you’re just wearing it all the time, like we already do, you know, try to do with our meta frames and, you know, solos and things and just ask it questions and just say, hey, what’s that? What’s this? You know, describe this to me. So that’s where I’m going to be dropping all my money. If and when that happens.
Jeff: What I want is if I’m going from point A to point B and it knows my interest, so it learns. It learns what I like, what my interests are and what my curiosities are. And if this is and I know ChatGPT knows that I’m a woodworker, know I’m a DIY because when I ask questions. Oh, and since you’re good at woodworking, this shouldn’t be a problem for you. It has a history of me. So when we get to this point, when you’re walking through navigation style, which I don’t think any of them suggest using it for navigation. But if you’re taking a tour and it’s giving you feedback, I want it to be geared towards me. Like what would catch my eye if I’m going along? Some people, they go by a thrift store or antique store and they never glance at it. It just goes by where I’ll take that double look in a sense, you know what I mean? Or if they have a motorcycle shop, I might bend my neck if I could see it well enough, you know. But. So I wanted to do that. Or a guitar store. Those are things that I take that slower step and go. Do I have the time? No, I don’t or whatever. But when it gets to the point where you can personalize it so it knows you almost better than you do, that would be kind of cool.
Tim: And I think we’re in the early stages of that. I mean, really honestly, AI itself is in its infancy and it’s only really been majorly available to the public for, what, maybe a couple of years? There’s been versions of AI for decades in a way, but in this kind of form, with an actual agent that in a large language model that can actually process what they’re doing and providing with you, this is still fairly new. That said, my ChatGPT just like yours. You know, in talking with me, it knows so much about me. But then I did. I don’t know if this is right or wrong, creepy or not or all the above, but you go into the personality settings and you can tell it about yourself, your interests, your favorite things. You know, your personality. Then you can go in and tell it the personality that you want it to actually have. You know, I’ve got it very specific to a personality that I want it to be like kind of like a, you know, a friend that you’ve known forever. I’ve told it. Here’s the curse words that I don’t mind you using. Here’s a couple that I’m not sure that I’d be comfortable with you using. You know, here’s how all these kind of different things, like you, you can program it to be whatever you want, which can be scary and daunting, but it can be very, very helpful. But like you said, with being able to tell it, hey, I’m, you know, this age and I’ve been in this kind of business in my life and I have a podcast and I do, you know, blogs and, you know, all this kind of thing. It actually recommends things to me all the time. If I’m asking about something, it’ll say, is this something that you’d like to consider using for life after blindness? And I’m like, I wasn’t actually going that way with it. But yeah, actually. Okay, tell me more. You know, to actually be able to recommend that.
Jeff: Oh, and the rabbit hole starts.
Tim: And then the rabbit hole. Absolutely. And that just kills me. I’ve gone down so many different rabbit holes building, like, audio only web based audio games.
Jeff: Oh, yeah.
Tim: You know, or building. You know what? Just putting together all kinds of projects. And like, we talked about fantasy sports and, you know, all the different things that it can do. So eventually I think that you’re going to get that dream that you’re walking down the street with your watch, your phone, your glasses, your AirPods, your all apple loaded up there. And it’s going to say, hey, by the way, you’re going to be passing this woodworking shop or, you know, the next block is a motorcycle dealership. Do you want to stop in or do you want me to provide you information about this place so you can decide if you want to stop, or it knows restaurants that you’ve visited or places you’ve been based on location, you know, services and things and be like, hey, I know that you frequent, you know, this particular restaurant, there’s one coming up here soon. Do you want to stop in or do you want to make a reservation? That kind of contextual AI, I think, is absolutely going to happen. I think it’s already slowly starting and it’s only going to become more and more. It’s a matter of what we do with it. And you know, how we accept it or not.
Jeff: That’s kind of like if you have stuff like that. I remember I used to use Blindsquare. Do you remember that?
Tim: Yep. I still actually use it from time to time.
Jeff: When I’m on a city bus, and I used to go from end of town to the other end of town, I would turn it on and it would lay out these points that some people put there, and it would just start naming your location and then points of interest. I guess they were. What I’m trying to think of is how do you do this? If you’re navigating and walking like, uh, there’s a bench. Watch out a banana peel. Oh, okay. Okay. Straight ahead. Oh, and by the way, Jeff, there’s a wood shop to your right. Banana peel. You know, this overload of information, it’s going to be almost impossible to be a knee jerk reaction, to respond to your environment, to gather information about your points of interest around you. That’s why when I use most of this stuff, like, say, I’m at a hotel, I’ll sit down with a coffee and I’ll do a look around. I’ll say what points of interest are near me, and I’ll get this idea of stuff that’s there. Just like looking at a menu before you go to a restaurant, I get an idea of what they’re serving up. Like, I’m not going to go into a seafood restaurant and order a hot dog because I didn’t look at the menu.
Tim: That would be.
Jeff: Strange. I like doing my homework a little bit with a coffee. I’m just not like.
Tim: Oh, we have to write.
Jeff: But I don’t want to do it while I’m lost between 16th and a half street and zenith. Why isn’t it 17? It’s a zenith. I want to just be able to move about, get where I want to be. The ideas have already been planted, but.
Tim: Yeah, well, I think when you take GPS information like we had in in Blind Square and still have because I, I use it all the time to be the navigator in the car, I feel like I’m, you know, participating. My wife’s driving and I can pull up blind square and be like, well, I see that there’s a, you know, a Burger King, you know, two exits away or whatever, and you can have it read, you know, the streets as you’re literally as you’re passing a street, it can call it out to you and say, here’s where you are, which is good for driving or walking. And then, you know, tell you about restaurants or, you know, other venues or whatever. So taking that type of technology just with GPS and that spatial awareness, add that to glasses of some sort that have, you know, like your favorite featured lidar. Um, but lidar in the sense of maybe you have glasses that have several cameras embedded in the glasses and it can use lidar. It can use the cameras to see what’s around. You can use multiple microphones to hear what’s going on around you, and be able to process all of that with artificial intelligence. And then either guess what it thinks that you’re going to want to know, or be readily available to answer any questions that you need to know.
Jeff: And it just hit me, Tim. It just hit me.
Tim: The lidar hit, you.
Jeff: Know, we need AI, conscious AI and subconscious AI.
Tim: Yes. There you go.
Jeff: Because the conscious you’re walking, you’re dodging shrapnel on the sidewalk. You know, you’re point A to point B subconsciously you’re hungry.
Tim: Yeah. It’s like, you know, based on your metabolism, your heart rate, and, you know, your activity. Yeah. We don’t believe that you’ve eaten in a while, so maybe you should stop and get a bite to eat.
Jeff: And since you didn’t wear your watch, we don’t know what you’re going to want. It’s very interesting where this stuff is going. I’m glad we’re part of the experiment in a sense that we’re using it. We’re testing it.
Tim: I mean, in a way, aren’t people who are blind or visually impaired the stress testers for all of this? If it works for us, it’s definitely going to work for everybody else. The way that we’re talking about this, I almost feel like in the next, you know, 5 to 10 years, a blind person with a possible Apple Glasses, an iPhone, AirPods and a watch, we might navigate better than sighted people with all this technology or something.
Jeff: We don’t even know that’s coming out. That just.
Tim: Kind.
Jeff: Of works.
Tim: Yeah, an implant.
Jeff: Like the glide that the glide got delayed. Maybe we’ll all be pushing those popcorn poppers all over the place and see what happens. But no, I’m not knocking it at all. I’m just saying it’s just foreign to me right now, a little bit. A guide dog was foreign to me at one point until I started to realize, you know, if you go to a convention, you’ll realize how good those dogs are. It’s like, I want one, you know? It’s like they just grew like they, you know, how you go to shopping centers. And they used to have those carts over there. You put $0.50 in and you can push your kid around in the shopping cart or something like that at the malls and stuff. They should have like a line of dogs over there. Yeah, take one and just go over there and grab the handle and go. You know, that glide, you know, might be the thing for blind people at a convention. If they have enough there. Would you like to rent a glide for the $65?
Tim: I think you’re on to something here, Jeff. You got some entrepreneurial ideas here.
Jeff: You never.
Tim: Know.
Jeff: They probably already doing it somewhere already, and we just gotta get out more. That’s the thing with all this stuff. Will we get out more? I hope so.
Tim: We’ll just stay here in our studios and dream.
Jeff: Talk the talk. Alright, well, I think this is good. It’s just a chat about this stuff that came out. Like I said, I’m in no hurry. I want to let it settle in. I’m looking at the watch because my watch is cracked and I haven’t been wearing it. I have the five. Well, wherever it is right now.
Tim: I’m in the same boat. Maybe our watches are together somewhere. My four and your five have Disappeared into the, you know, vast depths of the universe. Yeah. The abyss. And they’re just there laughing at us.
Jeff: Yeah, because they actually work fine for what I use them for. They actually work fine. They told me they shame me, you know, they tell me all the stuff.
Tim: I got plenty of humans that can.
Jeff: Do the thing. Yeah, I get a I put it on. I’m going to wear my watch for the day. I go up and up the steps twice or something because I forgot something. You’re killing it today, Jeff. But I think they put on a good event. I think the people have good choices right now. The prices didn’t jump so up so high. It’s all attainable if you were in the market before. So I like the SE. That really puts it into affordability for people. 259 on the watch. That’s a good starting point.
Tim: Yeah, I was very happy with the price points because like you said, the 256 gigabyte is the the minimum now for all the phones, but they priced it at the same price as any of the two 56 gigabyte phones were last year. So it’s in some cases it might feel like it’s more expensive, but actually compared to the same, you know, same hard drive space from last year’s series, they’re the same price. And that’s great, because I know that there was a lot of concern that they were going to jack up the prices, you know, two, three, $400 because of the economy and inflation and, you know, all kinds of different, you know, things that are political that we won’t go into here. But, um, but thankfully, they found a way to not jack those prices up and make it in the same. Which makes it you can debate whether it’s affordable or not, but at least keeping it the same makes it reasonable. And, uh, you know, being able to still have that entry point and, you know, in the SE, like you said, with the watch and, um, all those kind of things. So I, I think it was a well done event. I like everything I almost kind of feel like I might end up getting a watch, the AirPods and the AirPods being the bottom of that priority list, most likely. But I like it. I think that it was a good direction. I just want to see more artificial intelligence because I’m a junkie for artificial intelligence, and if I can get more of that natively on the phone and not have to do as much, you know, paying 20 bucks a month to ChatGPT, I would love that. So once they really roll that out, I’ll be delighted. But I think for now though that it was it was well done. It was one of the the better, more interesting, I think events, fall events that they’ve had in a while.
Jeff: I think my urgency of not needing something dramatically this time, like back when I had the 12, I was leaning in. I was leaning in because I just wanted to know I got the 12 because leader and then the 14 was a nice step up. I’m glad you could make it. I’m glad we could talk about it because, uh.
Tim: Yeah, absolutely.
Jeff: Like I said, go check out the event yourself. If you wanted to dig into all the details about the ceramic, the scratch resistance and all the all the nits that brightness.
Tim: The brightness of the screen and the.
Jeff: 3000 nits.
Tim: The ceramic glass front and back. I mean, there’s a lot of things that we obviously didn’t talk about here that get in the nitty gritty. But yeah, as you and I discussed and we’ve said getting into the nitty gritty and the tech specs and all that, we don’t want to bore the poor people.
Jeff: It’s your use.
Tim: Case. Exactly. It comes down to your use case for what you’re personally going to do. Is the camera going to be what you want? Is the brightness going to be helpful for you? All those different things that are there. The hard drive, the Ram, you know, for processing all this battery, you know, the battery life.
Jeff: Battery.
Tim: Battery ever the the watch is now a 24 hour battery cycle. I’m like, okay, there we go. 24 hours on the watch. And I think you can charge it like 80% and ten 20 minutes. So yeah that.
Jeff: 15 15 minutes.
Tim: 15 minutes.
Jeff: Eight hours.
Tim: Yeah that’s fantastic. So there’s a lot of that that maybe we didn’t cover.
Jeff: But again we just did.
Tim: Well I think we just did. We covered the whole event there in about 20s. But that said though like there are deep dive things that you can really get involved in technologically. You know, as tech nerds, we have and we could. But I agree with you. I like talking about what is this really going to do for us? How does this matter? Does it matter? You know. Is this going to be helpful for our everyday use cases? I think ultimately that’s what people care about.
Jeff: I mean Apple on the new watch okay. So you go out and you want to get this new watch the 11 right. It comes with two new watch faces. That’s something they never opened up for people to develop. Watch faces for the watch I mean whoa Tim Cook two new watch faces. I’m getting it. I’m wearing my Seiko watch. I got it for my anniversary this year. And you know what? I’m wearing it. And it’s so nice that that’s all it does. It just lets me inconspicuously check the time. It’s like, nice. And I forgot my phone today and we went up and got our haircuts. A friend comes over and we went up to. And my niece cuts hair at a professional place, you know, but it took some time and stuff like that. But when we left and I realized I forgot my phone, I was like, naked. Yeah. I was like, oh my gosh, Tim’s going to send me a message and I won’t be able to respond. What’s my fantasy football team doing? I mean, it’s Tuesday. It’s the best day to forget your phone, right? So I was like, going through this thing. And then all of a sudden I said to myself, okay, Jeff, forget about it. Forget about it. You’re here, you’re in the car. You’re talking. There’s people, there’s environment, there’s you’re getting your hair. And then I let it go. And I had a great time, you know.
Tim: Be in the.
Jeff: Moment. So I hope people remember be in the moment. And this watch craze that I’m going through right now because mine’s broken. It’s a five. Yeah. Okay. I’ll probably get a watch. And Lori needs to get a watch too. And her phones the SC and she’s down to 80%. She got the warning. Oh no 79. She got that battery warning.
Tim: My phone’s at like 72 or 3 I think. So yeah. It’s it’s that time. Yeah.
Jeff: All right. Well Tim thanks a lot.
Tim: Appreciate it.
Jeff: People out there thanks for listening. Thanks for the responses we got back from the last show. Love it. Till next time Tim.
Tim: I appreciate it. Thank you Jeff.
Jeff: All right I’ll get the lights.
Sound effect: A light switch clicking off.
{Music}
Jeff: For more podcasts with the blindness perspective check us out on the web at www.blindabilities .com. On Twitter at Blind Abilities and download the free Blind Abilities app from the App Store. That’s two words, blind abilities.
And if you want to leave some feedback give us some suggestions give us a call at 612 367 6093.
We’d love to hear from you. I want to thank you for listening and until next time bye-bye.
[Music] [Transition noise] –
When we share-
What we see
-Through each other’s eyes…
[Multiple voices overlapping, in unison, to form a single sentence]
…We can then begin to bridge the gap between the limited expectations, and the realities of Blind Abilities.