Mac Mini Gets Pricier, Siri Payout, and iOS 27 Rumors

Tom Anderson (00:01)
This is Basic AF episode 87 show notes for this and every episode can be found at basicafshow.com. What's up everybody? Tom Anderson here joined as always by the man, Jeff Battersby. Hello, Jeff.

Jeff (00:16)
Good morning, Tom Anderson. Welcome to my show. I'm good. I'm actually doing really well. You know, it's stroking. I've been stroking, and not the kind you're thinking about.

Tom Anderson (00:17)
How are you, sir? Smoking still? Pick up smoking again?

Yeah, God. Okay, all right. ⁓ We did right? Well, pre show chatter led us into that. So that's my fault. ⁓ Yeah. Mm I'll take it. I don't care. A quick PSA public service announcement. Okay. Next month, we're going to be switching up our website a little bit with the host going back to the Buzzsprout.

Jeff (00:27)
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. We started off well. No, no, you know, it's stroke voice. Yeah, it did kind of, right. Yeah, it's always your fault,

Tom Anderson (00:52)
provided website. everything stays the same domain wise still basic afshow.com. It'll look a little different for the five of you that actually go to the website to listen for those of you that listen in your podcast app. What difference does it make really? ⁓ But just a heads up there. ⁓ Real quick, want to say thanks for the great feedback on our last episode with Bill McLean, where we were taking a look at our AI workflows. I think that show turned out really well. People seem to enjoy that discussion. ⁓

Jeff (01:00)
Ha ha ha ha!

Tom Anderson (01:20)
I think primarily because we think we were pretty balanced in that. We weren't too much fanboyism. I don't think there's a whole lot of that in. Right. Which I think was pretty good. So we talked about what's working, what's not. And then we may have had some thoughts on the CEOs of those AI outfits. So if you haven't listened to that one yet, go ahead and check that out. And a quick promo, if I may. The last, and it's going to roll into our first.

Jeff (01:27)
No, I think there was a lot of not fanboyism, actually.

Tom Anderson (01:49)
topic. The last couple of newsletters that I've sent out have focused on Apple Notes. And so if you are a regular user of Apple Notes, you may want to check those out. The first one is four things we're setting up today, which will help you with finding things in Apple Notes relatively easily. Help you out with that. And then the most recent one from this week, were four fast ways to capture to Apple Notes, because if you're like me,

Jeff (01:54)
Yes. Yes.

Yes.

Tom Anderson (02:18)
You can hold a thought for about 26 seconds and you better write it down pretty fast. So have some tips in there for that. So if you have not seen those and you would like to tomfanderson.com is where they can be found. And if you want to sign up for the newsletter, there's a subscription thing right up there at the top. It's free. There's no charge or anything. ⁓ so you can take care of that there.

Jeff (02:40)
Indeedy. Yes, indeedy. Yeah, you know, Apple Note's kind of a thing. ⁓ We, at least I, ⁓ use it a ton. You are now kind of recommending using it a ton, making it a new feature. And as we know, our good friend Bill McLean, who appears here regularly, ⁓ he...

He bounced back and forth between that and about five other note taking apps on a weekly basis. But he always comes back home to Apple Notes. Poor dude. I don't know what his thing is. Yeah, he's troubled. I think it is a means. And I love you. I love you, Bill. Trust me on this. He uses it as a means to procrastinate, think.

Tom Anderson (03:15)
He does.

Tormented.

Jeff (03:36)
He has other work to do. finds things to do with notes, which I get. I totally get. yeah. it's a notes is, and we may as well step into it. ⁓ Notes is a really, really powerful application that Apple continues to make ⁓ more and more powerful as time goes on. So we got some thoughts. So why don't you talk about what came out on your newsletter?

Tom Anderson (04:04)
that's all I was going to say.

Jeff (04:06)
Yes. that's all you were gonna say. We weren't gonna talk about. No, geez. ⁓ good God. All right. So one of the things we're gonna throw. Yeah, yeah, come on, touch it. Touch it, Tom.

Tom Anderson (04:09)
Yeah, it was just, I weren't going to deep dive into it. No, that's a teaser. If you want to see it, you go read it. ⁓ no, but real quick though. ⁓ no.

So, ⁓ I talked about search and how search isn't just for titles in notes. ⁓ it will actually go into the content in the notes and not just the text. So if you've got PDFs attached to your notes or photos you've taken.

OCR, all of that stuff, and look through it. You can make smart folders. think you use smart folders as part of your Forever Note setup, right?

Jeff (04:47)
I do use, yeah, yeah,

I do, yeah, absolutely. And ⁓ it's great. It works brilliantly. ⁓ Smart folders, basically you give it a criteria for my purposes, just using a tag ⁓ to one of the hashtags that you can put in and using that to collect a bunch of items that have that same hashtag.

lot of that for me is related to various writing projects that I have going on. Just gives me an easy way to get to get to those. ⁓ But smart folders can really use any criteria you want. Apple is kind of changing it up a little bit. So I haven't had time quite yet to to go through and deal with some of those changes. ⁓

Apple, like one of the things that Mattias had put in there or get had given to people that were using ⁓ using his tool. And you might recall that we had ⁓ we had Mattias on the show a little bit ago. And he was great, great guest might like to have him again sometime to talk about what some of those changes are. But it has screwed up the way that the way that the

⁓ shortcuts work. No surprise. ⁓ Yeah, Apple Apple has has a gift ⁓ has a gift for kind of screwing that stuff up. So ⁓ if you've been using if you've been using forever notes, you may want to go have a look and see what it is that he's he's updated on the website because there's there are some changes and those changes are kind of a

Tom Anderson (06:19)
Right.

Jeff (06:43)
was just giving me a list of things because it wasn't looking at the title anymore. So anyway, all that to say you can use smart notes to add any type of criteria you can you can you know, add dates, you can look for keywords, number of other things that you can use to be able to very easily pull up a very specific selection of notes that you might want to have and I haven't used this much.

yet, Tom, but I did send you a I did send you a link to it the other days, there's a pretty much a free app, it's not 100 % free, you can do the pro version. think it's like $8 a month. But there's a essentially a plugin for the notes app called pro notes that

The free version gives you a formatting bar, gives you access to markdown, which you may know that you can export notes in markdown now, which is really nice. But it gives you access to markdown slash commands. can have by the by directional links in their templates that they offer. And then there's a day, $8 a month version that actually uses AI. So

care about that? Heck no. ⁓ But the free version, really good, gives you a lot of pretty powerful tools that brings notes kind of into the realm of craft. ⁓ And maybe you said notion, right? I've never really used notion, but ⁓ it brings up a nice formatting toolbar, right, with whatever you've ⁓ highlighted in text and gives you the ability to do a number of different things with that, including, ⁓ you know,

Tom Anderson (08:23)
Mm-hmm.

Jeff (08:36)
You can write in Markdown and it'll handle it appropriately. Number of slash commands. So you can create blocks. You have the ability to put in tables and things like that using this plugin, which I wasn't even aware that you could have extensions or plugin capabilities in notes. So nice little feature.

for making things easy to format. Really kind of like it and I haven't played with it much other than to have installed it and I'd recommend that you try it. We'll have a link to that in the show notes, by the way. As always, because we're...

Tom Anderson (09:14)
All right.

We will. Yes, we will. Yeah.

And ⁓ just a quick wrap up on the craft and Notion piece. It brings it in line just for the text formatting and text handling part of it, not the databases or collections or some of the other things that those apps will do. But slash commands, though, once I got used to using those, and it's hard to not have it because it makes it so quick to format and add new sections and stuff like that.

Jeff (09:27)
Yes.

Right.

Mm-hmm.

Tom Anderson (09:46)
So,

Jeff (09:47)
Yeah, nice little feature. And like I

said, free. unless you need to use AI, the only other thing I'd like and you know, who knows if the pronouns guy maybe the pronouns guy on that might be kind of fun. But the the only thing I'd like to do is be able to send the guy some money. But I don't want to do 799 a month. So yeah, yeah, I'd like to be able to. Yeah, exactly. Just to say, I appreciate the work that you're doing with this, because it really is. It's pretty nice.

Tom Anderson (10:06)
Like a one time thing here's 15 bucks or something.

Jeff (10:16)
nice feature.

Tom Anderson (10:19)
All right.

Jeff (10:19)
Alrighty.

Tom Anderson (10:21)
Okay, so in the news of late, exactly quite a few things. So we talked a couple of episodes ago about the scarcity of certain Mac.

Jeff (10:24)
Ta-da-da-da!

Tom Anderson (10:40)
items in the lineup, in particular the Mac Mini and the Mac Studio. And that continues to be the case. And of course, there's obviously an upgrade coming, a refresh at some point to take them from the M4 to the M5, we assume that's coming. ⁓ And some of the higher end configurations, had discontinued, or not discontinued, but they were hard to get. think a few they took off the website, I guess they just didn't have them.

Jeff (10:42)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Correct.

Tom Anderson (11:10)
And then some of the other ones, if you go to look, they're 10 to 12 weeks out for delivery. But here in the last week or so, Apple has, at least for now, discontinued the base 599 Mac mini configuration, which was the 256 gigs of storage with 16 gigs of RAM. Ramifications from that means the entry price for now, maybe forever, who knows, is $799.

Jeff (11:24)
Mm-hmm.

Ha ha ha ha ha.

Tom Anderson (11:41)
which is the 512 gig storage. So it's not, think that that product existed. So really what they've done is they've just dropped the low end and gone with this. It's still 699 in education. We're going to talk about that a little bit more in a minute because there've been some changes there as well.

Jeff (11:53)
Yes.

Yeah, related, there's talk that, I was at the Apple Store yesterday, so it's necessarily 100 % true at the moment, but there's talk that they might be ⁓ dropping the low-end Neo, which is the new one, the new ⁓ Apple laptop that is quite phenomenal.

Tom Anderson (12:32)
apparently

selling like mad.

Jeff (12:34)
Yeah, I believe it. They're super good computers. They're really amazing. ⁓ Yeah, so and for entry level computer, you know, they're better than anything. Get your hands on Chromebook, PC or otherwise. So it really is good stuff. But there there is some chatter that ⁓ Apple will be dropping the low end of those, which kind of makes sense to me anyway. You know, the. ⁓

Tom Anderson (12:36)
Mm-hmm.

Jeff (13:02)
bigger hard drive, same RAM because of the chip that's in there, the 18 chip only takes only goes up to eight, eight gigs of RAM or only allows addressing for eight gigs of RAM. ⁓ But in having touch ID makes a big difference. So if they were to drop it, that makes a ton of sense. So we shall see we shall see but my suspicion is

the ⁓ disappearing Mac minis, Mac studios is because Apple's about to do a refresh and so, you know, why waste components on stuff you're not gonna be selling anymore? Why, why?

Tom Anderson (13:45)
Could be. Yeah.

And Tim Cook addressed that in the earnings call last week. Wasn't this this week? Well, this, as this show publishes, it'll be the week before last, but, ⁓ they, he says the supply constraints likely won't recover for several months, ⁓ because of the global memory chip shortage. So that continues to be a thing. Prices continue to go up. So that's going to be an interesting thing too.

Jeff (13:50)
Mm-hmm. Was last week. I paid no attention to it, but...

I would imagine.

Tom Anderson (14:14)
upcoming or incoming CEO, John Ternus, he's, he's gonna have some work to do managing all of this with his supply chain folks, which Tim Cook obviously was a master of supply chain. So he was. Yep. So but I'm sure they'll figure it out eventually.

Jeff (14:20)
Yeah.

Yeah, he was a supply chain guy. Ternus is a hardware guy. So we'll see. We'll see what happens.

100 % accurate as they do. So anyway, all that to say. So I might as well say why I was at the Apple Store since I said I was at the Apple Store. So it was really weird about a week ago, two weeks ago, two weeks ago. ⁓ Because of my stroke, I had not been using my standing desk, just because it was a lot to stand and try to write. So I started rearranging that. ⁓

Tom Anderson (14:35)
Yes.

Good.

Jeff (15:02)
no longer teaching online Apple certification classes because there is no such thing anymore. ⁓ So I removed my standing desk, know, removed that little piece of it and was setting it back up as a sit down place so I could do writing. And I plugged my MacBook Pro into my studio display and my studio display would like connect and then go up, connect and then go up.

connect and then go off was really annoying. So I thought I was having a studio display issue. But I plugged my Mac mini that I'm using right now into it, it worked fine. So clearly not a display issue. But I did make an appointment with the Apple Store in Danbury and went went there to take I brought the display and made an appointment for the display though.

by the time I was going there, didn't think that was where the issue was. ⁓ They could not figure out what the issue was either, but we kind of narrowed it down to there's something going on ⁓ with my MacBook Pro. So let me just tell you, boys and girls, AppleCare paying for that is well worth your while because they were

going to replace the logic board, the top case, the battery, all the fun things ⁓ for a total of $0.00. So they had to order the ⁓ they had to order a logic board, they had everything else in stock, but they needed to get a logic board in. So they, they called me on Friday, right Thursday, called me on Thursday, they say the parts were in.

I went there on Friday and the last time I was there I was looking at either a Neo or the idea of grabbing the MacBook Air to play with for a little bit. So I ⁓ dropped off my MacBook Pro and actually ended up picking up ⁓ a MacBook Air and just to play with it to see what I think of it. And then I'll have a couple of days with the two of the

side-by-side determine whether I keep the MacBook Air and sell the MacBook Pro or return the MacBook Air and keep the MacBook Pro. The reality is, like I said, I'm typing. There's no... It's a glorified typewriter ⁓ that I do some photo work on, but I will say that MacBook...

air is really, really nice light little clicky for me at the moment. I think I can make some adjustments, but like when I when I hit the trackpad and it to select stuff, it's like click, click. It's like jumping out at me. I did set this up at this point in time with excuse me, with no like the only thing I haven't installed any of the usual software that I have on there. I just I just

installed Highland Pro. And so I could write and so I'll play with it that way. interesting adjustment, I didn't even put email on it. So when I don't answer you, Tom, it's not because I don't love you. Because my in. Yeah. Yeah, that's it. I'm almost at that point. It's so funny because I looked at it and and again, stroke has changed things a little bit for me. ⁓

Tom Anderson (18:35)
Just leave email off of it and you'll be like, this is even better.

Jeff (18:50)
I barely check my email now. You know, there's some things that I'm looking for that I'll that I'll look at. So who knows? Maybe I just need a. Maybe I just need a glorified. ⁓ Typewriter and and you know, there's something to be said for that, so I haven't. I haven't put anything on that to speak of other than Highland Pro, but a really nice computer, super lightweight. ⁓

I didn't realize holding it side by side yesterday with the Neo, it is actually a little thinner than the Neo is, which I didn't realize. Not much, but enough.

Tom Anderson (19:25)
Mm-hmm. Just a smidge.

Jeff (19:32)
And we may as well ⁓ throw this out there too. I think you at your university where you work are recommending the MacBook Air as the standard, that correct?

Tom Anderson (19:46)
Yeah. Yeah. Nothing's changed there for us other than it's M5 now and not the M4.

Jeff (19:51)
Right. And what's the standard config for that?

Tom Anderson (19:54)
Uh, standard config now is 16 gigs of Ram 512 storage is the base model. Um, we do bump the cores up on the GPU, uh, not from the base model up to the next one, which I think is eight, 10, 10 or 10, 10, 10. can't remember what the core count is. Uh, and then we were adding the 70 watt charger just because did fast charging. Um, cause figure of routes, you know, Oh crap, didn't charge last night and I got a class lease. If they plug in and they get

Jeff (20:00)
Okay, yeah.

Tom Anderson (20:25)
15 minutes charge, we'll get a couple hours out of that. ⁓ But since they put the adaptive charger in with this batch, we decided not to do that anymore.

Jeff (20:27)
Yeah, that's great.

Tom Anderson (20:36)
But yeah, so that's what we've got. In fact, we just got 100 more in this past week for summer stuff. It's about to start and we're going to start working on fall stuff here pretty soon.

Jeff (20:45)
Nice, and do you let them choose colors or is it standard? Okay.

Tom Anderson (20:48)
No, they're all silver. Yeah.

One year we accidentally ordered the space gray or space black, whatever it was at that time. And it looked great. But what we would find is, you you knock it around a little bit as is prone to happen on a college campus. They, you know, any little ding and you'd see the bright aluminum underneath of it. And so like little nicks and scratches and things were really apparent. And so we were like, yeah, that's why we did the silver. Okay. We won't make that mistake again.

Jeff (20:55)
Yeah.

Students do.

pretty, pretty bad.

And you have, have you updated your, this is a personal site for you, but what's the best Mac for college website yet?

Tom Anderson (21:26)
that will be updated in next month. Probably not that long, but yeah. And no spoiler. mean, it's going to be the MacBook air and five with a kind of section for the Neo there to accommodate that. Cause I think in some situations that's probably going to be okay. Yeah. But just to get a little concerned going three, four years out, like what might happen then, but.

Jeff (21:29)
Okay. All right, cool.

Okay, all right, cool.

The Neo. Yeah, I would say for people that aren't doing...

Bye.

Tom Anderson (21:55)
You know, the MacBook Air properly configured is going to be $13,000, $14,000. Just buy a new Neo in two years. Same amount of money.

Jeff (21:55)
Yeah, MacBook Air's gonna.

Right,

right. Yeah, it's interesting because my brother Greg, who has been on the show as well when he took the 12 hour trip from L.A. to the Bay Area in his new electric car, ⁓ he texted me last night, his girlfriend's daughter's headed off to college and was asking me what I'd recommend. And she's going to art school, actually, is where she's going to go. ⁓ good for you.

Tom Anderson (22:13)
Good times.

Mm-hmm.

Jeff (22:31)
being at a college that has a large video component, correct? You have students that are doing a lot of video work there, music and that kind of stuff. ⁓ plenty of bang for your buck in those MacBook Airs. So that is what I recommended to him. So Greg, now you've heard it from Tom, the college guy. ⁓ college IT professional. ⁓

Tom Anderson (22:39)
Mm-hmm. Yep.

IT professional of sorts.

Jeff (23:00)
Yeah, so ⁓ that's his deal. So MacBook Air, more than sufficient. And a really, really good computer. I'll let you know, and by the time we have the next show, I'll let you know whether or not I'm keeping that or my MacBook Pro. And keeping that or keeping the MacBook Pro, we'll see. After a little side by side comparison.

Tom Anderson (23:28)
be good. And speaking of buying Apple products for school, ⁓ for years, you've been able to go to the Apple education store online and buy something at a discount. They have tightened up that a little bit here in the last week, where Apple now requires the unit days verification for education discounts here in the good old us. So

Jeff (23:42)
Yes.

Mm.

Tom Anderson (23:57)
What does that mean exactly? Well, that means if you go to the Apple education store, and you want to buy something at a discount, which is usually like 100 bucks, so not nothing like I take advantage of it. There's just more requirements, like they're doing a little more verification around it. And so what you'll need to do with this unit a system, you have to have an email address.

from your educational institution. So.edu most likely a student or staff photo ID or another valid education document. So the ID part is new, ⁓ for the Apple store. Anyway, there's other places that use this. Unities is used in lot of different ways. ⁓ but one of the things that they have done too, in addition to that is they have added the Apple watch series 11 Apple watch S E and Apple watch.

Ultra three to the education store, which is nice because now you can get a temp up to a 10 % discount on on the watch. So could save you anywhere from 30 to 70 bucks, give or take for that. So just be aware of that if you're planning to do it. If you know if you are legitimately you know, student, not a big deal. If you're gaming the system a little bit.

Jeff (24:57)
Yeah, that's nice.

Right.

which I will say, so about a year, maybe a year and a half ago, ⁓ my mom upgraded her iMac and we were at a store, I will not divulge which one, but while we were about to buy it, they basically said, do you know a teacher? Which, you know, my...

Tom Anderson (25:40)
you

Jeff (25:42)
My sister-in-law is a teacher. Her daughter is a student and they live in the house with my mom. It's like, okay, education discount for you. So, tightening that up a little bit, ⁓ which makes sense. Makes sense.

Tom Anderson (25:56)
Yep.

So people who was intended for all along can still take advantage of it. All right. ⁓ so.

Jeff (26:01)
Yeah, absolutely. And if you wait

a little bit longer, I think it's another couple of weeks, ⁓ Apple usually throws, if you're heading off to college or to school, ⁓ throws AirPods or something at you. So definitely worth the wait if you're in the market for this to see what happens. Yeah, exactly.

Tom Anderson (26:16)
right further.

Yeah, back to school program should spin up here pretty soon.

Yep. So maybe you wait until June, if you can. And speaking of June, which is next month, we're just about a month away from this year's worldwide developer conference, where we'll get our looks at the versions 27 of all of the operating systems. ⁓ Fresh rumor for that. ⁓

Jeff (26:30)
Yes,

Tom Anderson (26:51)
as we've talked about before, you know, Apple is going to be working with Google.

Jeff (26:58)
Mm-hmm. Gemini.

Tom Anderson (26:59)
Gemini is whether or not Jeff likes that or not. ⁓ To power some of the kind of the next generation on device plus private cloud compute Siri functions. ⁓ Yeah, it's coming real soon now. ⁓ Any day. And so, but additionally, they are according to this rumor anyway.

Jeff (27:03)
Don't.

I'm sorry, am I laughing? We'll see what works. Yeah, right, any day.

Tom Anderson (27:27)
is they're going to expand the offerings for third party AI that you can use. Because right now you can add you can add chat GPT to Apple intelligence. So if you ask it something and it's like, would you like to send this over to chat GPT? And you can and it will give you responses and everything. The rumor says they will add Gemini to that as well as Claude. So you'll have

Jeff (27:39)
Yes.

Tom Anderson (27:53)
It like up to three choices for what you want your overflow AI to be. Just very excited about all of that. I suspect he'll buy pro accounts of all of them to max out. Okay. Sounds good.

Jeff (27:55)
Mm-hmm.

Nice.

Just absolutely, want them all. I want them all.

Claude might work for me. But on the rare occasion that I actually use that for something, which I do occasionally use it. ⁓ But yeah, no, not my back. Tom wouldn't hire me. That's the kind of guy I am.

He loves me, but if I were coming in and he asked me about AI, I'd say, you I use it a little bit, he would say, sorry, pal, next customer.

Tom Anderson (28:45)
You're out. There's well and there's rumors that also that we will get a standalone Siri chat app. Have you seen those rumors Jeff? Have you seen? Yeah, I think German did that and it's German so you know is what it is but ⁓ so it's it's going to be like a

Jeff (28:46)
Yeah, you suck.

which I do, so there you go.

I haven't seen that. Where was that?

He's pretty good actually.

Tom Anderson (29:12)
chat assistant, kind like you would open up chat GPT or Claude, you would open up like a Siri app and you would talk back and forth. So we'll see. I don't know. Yeah, right. ⁓ And then related to Siri. You know, Apple sometimes gets these class action lawsuits, Jeff. Yeah, believe it or not. So if you recall,

Jeff (29:18)
Great. And, Gat, I'm sorry, I don't understand that question.

What?

Tom Anderson (29:42)
Back when the iPhone 16 series of phones were released, that's when that was the WWDC leading up to that, where they were talking about the new advanced Siri and look what it'll be able to do with all of these Apple intelligence features on device, know, contextual awareness of everything. Hey, your mom's flight's coming in. You better go pick her up. that kind of stuff. Uh, yeah, well they, you know, we just said we're still waiting for that. And so.

Jeff (30:03)
huh.

you

Tom Anderson (30:11)
Uh, they were, there was a class action lawsuits that accused Apple of false advertising and unfair competition. Um, because it sold those as kind of like the big feature for the 16 series of phones.

Jeff (30:20)
Yes.

And I'm just under the wire with the 15 Pro Max.

Tom Anderson (30:33)
Yes. And so you looks like are eligible for a payout. It's $250 million settlement, which to poor broke guys like us sounds like a boat ton of money. then you think.

Jeff (30:34)
So, five dollars. Five dollar.

Yeah,

if it was at least one of those millions was coming to me.

Tom Anderson (30:54)
For Apple, it's a rounding error.

Jeff (30:56)
Right. Yeah. It's like, oops.

Yeah. ⁓ change. want my pocket change?

Tom Anderson (31:02)
Yep. Uh, but, um, the eligible devices for this. if you have six, iPhone 16, 16 E 16 plus 16 pro or 16 pro max. any of the 16 series, 15 pro or 15 pro max. And that were purchased between June 10, 2024, March 29, 2025, you are eligible.

Jeff (31:04)
Yeah.

Tom Anderson (31:31)
Do you fall in that window? Okay. Yes. And you purchased it June. After June 10th or before, I think you probably had it before. I don't know. You're not going to get you five bucks. ⁓

Jeff (31:32)
I do, yeah, the 15 Pro Max. have the, I have.

I don't know.

I don't know, I'd have to go look and see.

Probably not.

And

the other question is why does this not also include Macs that were purchased with ready for Apple Intelligent.

Tom Anderson (32:01)
Good question. Maybe just because it was heavily marketed for the phone. don't know. I have to read through that. The payout. Okay, here's where it gets good.

Jeff (32:07)
Yeah, it was.

Tom Anderson (32:18)
$25 for each eligible device, though that could increase up to $95 per device if volume is low.

Jeff (32:27)
Gotcha.

Tom Anderson (32:28)
So, ⁓ those email, they'll, they'll start to send out email notices, ⁓ for that and four or five weeks it looks like. So I always get those cause I forget and I'm like, this is totally a scam. I'm not filling that out. So I have to remember this one second, maybe get 25 bucks. And I'm sure I'll find some way to turn around and give it right back out, you know, to Apple on some subscription.

Jeff (32:37)
Later.

I fill them all out. Get those checks in the mail.

There you go. Woohoo!

It's Apple.

Tom Anderson (32:58)
Yep. What else we got?

Jeff (32:59)
Yeah,

I don't, not a lot. It's been a quiet week or two that we've had. WWDC, Where it's all, yeah, we should get a 26.5 update.

Tom Anderson (33:08)
We're in that sweet lull right before the conference. We do have some updates coming out next week, looks like, or this week.

Yeah, so those will come out. Maybe the last or next to last updates will, like big updates, like dot something updates that we'll get. Like they'll continue to do security updates and everything for 26, but new feature updates are probably going to wrap up here as we head into the 27 versions. And then we'll get into our discussions on whether or not to do the betas.

Jeff (33:31)
Of course, always.

Yes.

Yeah, well, I always do, so.

Tom Anderson (33:48)
Yeah,

I usually do some too. Um, and I remember last year I did the Tahoe beta on my Mac book air at work. Cause you know, I need to test our wireless and stuff. And, it had some type of a bug anywhere was, I don't know if it was cash files or log files and it would just fill up the disc. Remember that I'd clear off 40 gigs and like two hours later, I'm out of space again. was like, man, this is not good. So actually I had to downgrade.

Jeff (33:56)
huh. Right, right, all that.

Right, remember that. That was pretty ugly.

By the way, speaking of Wi-Fi, the new MacBook Air I have has the upgraded Wi-Fi. What is it? Wi-Fi 7? Bro, it's super fast. Like, I'm absolutely amazed. last night, decided to do a test. It was like, I'm getting full bandwidth on my laptop. It's like, whoa, okay, I could do that. Yeah.

Tom Anderson (34:26)
Mm-hmm. Seven? Screaming.

Mm-hmm.

Crazy.

Jeff (34:46)
That's pretty amazing.

Tom Anderson (34:46)
Yeah. Yeah. I got a new 15 inch MacBook air at work just came in a couple of days ago and I need to set that up, get my data transferred over. Like I got enrolled in our system and everything. Uh, I had the 13 inch model, like you're testing. Uh, but I was running, it's hard to work on that for me after you get used. Cause I've got a 27 inch display here. I've got a 27 inch display that I plug into at work.

But my laptop at home is the 16 inch. Uh, so it's serviceable when I'm working on it, cause it can put, I can lay out my windows enough, but the 13 inch was so tight and. You know, being in my mid fifties, little hard to see sometimes without blowing the text up. And then you see even less on screen. Uh, so I, I got the 15 inch. So I'm looking forward to trying that out, but the M5 like the one you're testing too. So that'll be good.

Jeff (35:15)
And you're not OK when, yeah.

Cough

Yeah.

Nice.

Yeah, no, the Wi-Fi is smoking fast. Again, I don't know what, know, not like transferring crazy files. Yeah, that one, yeah, that's actually nice for that kind of stuff and copying files down. ⁓ Yeah, but it's ⁓ crazy, crazy just how fast it is. And... ⁓

Tom Anderson (35:55)
When you need it, it'll be great for those updates, those 10 gig updates.

Yeah.

So speaking of wifi, a bit of a personal story here, Jeff. So, well, it's, it's, yeah, it's PG rated. So, you know, we're considering moving. Okay. And you said wifi and this is why I bring it in. Cause it's kind of funny. Um, and so we're looking at different places, uh, and we're kind of in this spot where, we don't want to buy new, if it's from like,

Jeff (36:14)
Yes, sir.

Okay, not too personal, Tom. This is a public show.

Yes, you've said that, been looking at houses.

Tom Anderson (36:40)
a national builder because all those are put together like shit. ⁓ so I don't want that. We did find a regional builder that has like a good reputation. ⁓ and we checked out some of theirs and they do actually seem to be pretty nice. ⁓ don't know if I'm going to go that route or if I'm just going to go buy something that was built in like 2006. and cause the house where now is built in 1997. ⁓ and yeah, nothing. And I hate to say it is like,

Jeff (36:42)
Mm-hmm. Great.

Old sold.

Tom Anderson (37:11)
It's just so expensive. It's just ridiculously expensive. but my wife and I are at a standstill or we're, we're on our standoff or something here. We're at, it's a moment of light tension. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, we found a place is nice, you know, little piece of land. Got the regional builder was going to, you know, was building stuff there.

Jeff (37:14)
crazy.

⁓ Great. You're guaranteed to lose, but go ahead.

Tom Anderson (37:41)
So these are more remote. They're not really, I wouldn't say they're really rural. They're out, as we say in the country a little bit, but they're 10 minutes from town, right? They're not like in the middle of BFE nowhere. And so we're like, all right, this, yeah, this looks pretty good. you know, so there's well and septic, but there is no like broadband internet services out there.

So our option would be Starlink. Right? Which Starlink is pretty good, right? For satellite, like pretty good. Um, so I was like, I can't do Starlink. I was like, you know, sure if all I was doing was sending text messages and emails and stuff, you know, it'd be fine. Cause I read on Reddit, you know, people that have it seem to like it because they're in really remote areas. So they're just glad to have something. Um, but I do think it's, it's fairly decent, but.

Jeff (38:10)
⁓ geez, no thank you. Yeah, not giving that dude any of my money, but go ahead.

Mm-mm.

Tom Anderson (38:39)
And so that's where we're at. She's like, yeah, but what about that? And then we get into, she's like, well, they say they're considering running fiber out there. And I'm like, yeah, I don't buy on what might happen. So this is the tension in the Anderson household is over high speed internet. I blame you for this, Jeff, because of this fine podcast and other things. So.

Jeff (38:53)
Right. Yeah. You can't. Right.

Yeah.

You're welcome. Yeah.

Tom Anderson (39:09)
If any of you have suggestions on

high speed internet and semi rural locations. Feel free to send them in feedback at basic AF show.com. think star God, I'll take the star link first. But I told her, I was like, do you realize how the kids will revolt if we go from like gig fiber to star link and they're trying to play games and install 45 gig game updates. And that just sounds awful. So we shall see.

Jeff (39:17)
Yeah, right. DSL.

Yeah.

All right. Well, that's kind of interesting. Yeah, that's you know, scary prospect to be certain. All right, last thing.

Tom Anderson (39:41)
Yeah.

Mm hmm. Or I just go

off the grid, completely off grid, shut it all down. So maybe you move in with us. just go. God, would be so weird.

Jeff (39:50)
No, that's where I'm headed, pal.

What do you say, Tom? We're

gonna put a ring on this now? Is that the deal?

Tom Anderson (40:02)
Well, live up in the mountains and get weird as Eminem said once. Yeah. All right. What do you got? You said you had one more thing.

Jeff (40:06)
my god. Okay, good times, good times. right. Just,

yeah, just stupid stuff. Not really stupid, but ⁓ I think I mentioned this before that I was reading Nnediakor for his Death of the Author. I'm gonna highly recommend that. We'll put a link in. It's an interesting book. It's not really about AI. It's more about...

kind of the integration of humans with robotics with a Nigerian twist. It's a really, really good, really good book. So I finished it a couple weeks back. so Needy, that's spelled N-N-E-D-I.

Okorafor, O-K-A-O-R-A-F-O-R. ⁓ And I read one of her books in graduate school, Who Fears Death, that was also really quite good. And this is right up there with it, really a good book. And the other one that I'm reading is a book that I started after I finished this one. It's book called Playworld ⁓ that kind of looks at this kid's life ⁓ from

Reagan era, is like almost when I became sentient, you know, early 1980s. That's ⁓ when I came online ⁓ through actually take that back Carter and then then and then Reagan. So really also a well written book that I I'm liking a lot. And I think the guy's name that did that is Adam.

say Adam Smith, but I'll tell you what it is. Hold on. We'll put links to both of those in there. But these are two really good books. I read a lot of books. You can get them, you know, in your usual fashion. think a friend of mine's listening to a core force book ⁓ using the Libby app. ⁓ So, you know, from your local library, if you're not getting that, and I picked up my copy. It's Adam Ross is the guy's name, Adam Scott. ⁓

So really kind of interesting novel, kind of twisted in some ways, because the story opens up, know, he's reading. He talks at the very beginning about.

The fact that he's... Hold on.

trying to hold off on coughing and I just couldn't do it. He starts out by saying that when he was 14 years old a 34 year old woman was in love with him. It's a little twisted in that way. Yeah, exactly. ⁓ But it's more complicated than that. It's a really, really well written novel. ⁓ And I highly, highly recommend it. ⁓ Came out in 2025.

Tom Anderson (43:11)
Okay.

Jeff (43:27)
a kid's a child actor ⁓ and has complicated, interesting relationship with his father who's also an actor but not as good or not as popular as the kid is. And then a bunch of other dynamics related to the weirdo woman who falls in love with him. So good stuff, good stuff. That's what I recommend, Tom.

Tom Anderson (43:46)
Good.

Alright, excellent.

Jeff (43:53)
And with that, I think we're done.

Tom Anderson (43:55)
We are. Wrap us up, Jeff.

Jeff (43:57)
So,

all right, so first of all, I wanna say thank you for listening.

It's a big deal that you do that. so we'd like to ask you to recommend that, you know, if you're listening to us, that you tell other people about us. We kind of hang in steady at about 250 regular listeners, I think. And we could definitely use more than that. That would be a good thing. So like us on your favorite app, particularly on Apple podcasts, you know, give us a review. I don't think we've had a review in a minute. So.

you know, come on, give us a review. next up, we've got Psychokinetics. That's our show music, Celsius Seven. Grateful to Psychokinetics for letting us use that. And we hope that you take some time to listen to their music as well. And then our podcast artwork by Randall Martin Design, who does brilliantly. That's it, Tom. We're done.

Tom Anderson (45:01)
All right, sounds good. As Jeff said, we do really appreciate you hanging out with us and we'll see you in a couple of weeks. Till then, do have a great rest of your day or your night.

Jeff (45:12)
See ya!