Beep boop - this is a robot. A new show has been posted to TWiT…
What are your thoughts about today’s show? We’d love to hear from you!
Beep boop - this is a robot. A new show has been posted to TWiT…
What are your thoughts about today’s show? We’d love to hear from you!
Watching the episode now, I’ll update this post as I watch. My initial impression is: omg! Jason is such a cute host. I love him roleplaying as Leo. Great job Jason!!!
I would love to be able to one day use the Camera Control on iPhone like a trackpad. I never owned a blackberry (but my dad did) and I remember how cool the ball and the pad felt to navigate the UI. Although ergonomically it would be pretty painful trying to use either your left pinky or right thumb (depending which hand you hold the phone in portrait) to scroll on that side button.
I love what Andy said about why Apple didn’t improve the AirPods Max: you can’t improve if you got it right the first time hahaha
From the transcript. Andy:
I mean, I give Apple a lot of ribbing about how the implication is that they only want to save the lives of people who also own iPhones. I still think that why can’t I buy an Apple Watch and pair it and use my Mac or my iPad as an activation device? But that’s neither here nor there.
It should be easy for Apple to facilitate Apple Watch activation from either of these devices, but Apple clearly sees little upside in doing that. Fans of the Apple Watch are compelled to have an iPhone, and maybe that increases iPhone sales a bit. I’m somewhat surprised that the EU isn’t mandating that Apple open up the Apple Watch, too. I’m with Andy: it’s for the children!
Maybe Apple is reasonably close to having the watch go untethered. TTBOMK, the Apple Watch and the HomePod are the only products still requiring tethering to another Apple device.
I suspect that 2025’s Airpods Pro 3 will have sufficient capacity to allow all-day operation without recharging. That would definitely make them more viable as hearing aids.
Will they need to be connected to an iPhone at all times, though? I’m interested in how this hearing aid feature will work.
My 2022 Samsung buds have a hearing test and hearing enhancement feature, although it’s not called a hearing aid, I assume because it’s not approved as a medical device. Pretty impressive, like having bionic ears but it seems to amplify everything. It struggles in noisy environments such as restaurants and parties where I think dedicated hearing aids with very directional mics that isolate voice frequencies do better.
Definitely an iPhone for the calibration exam (show in Apple’s presentation). It’s again interesting that (AFAICT) you can’t do that calibration with an iPad. I have no idea on the demographics, but I feel seniors are far more likely to be in the got-an-iPad-but-not-an-iPhone crowd and not have access to this stuff. I hope I’m wrong and this procedure will work on iPadOS 18.
I think automating/democratizing the calibration is a major win. I watched a dear friend deal with the gyrations of this electronic calibration with the Eargo hearing aids. You had to book a online appointment with the remote audiologist and describe your issues over Skype. They would queue a download of the updated settings to your hearing aid charging box which would then configure the hearing aids. They had different modes that you had to switch between through [some convoluted mechanism]. Gadzooks! The procedure reminded me of the famous Tom Lehrer song (also available on iTunes):
First you get down on your knees
Fiddle with your rosaries
Bow your head with great respect
And genuflect, genuflect, genuflectDo whatever steps you want if
You have cleared them with the pontiff
Everybody say his own Kyrie, eleison
Doin’ the Vatican RagGet in line in that processional
Step into that small confessional
There the guy who’s got religion’ll
Tell you if your sin’s original
If it is, try playin’ it safer
Drink the wine and chew the wafer
Two, four, six, eight
Time to transubstantiate […]
Maybe the Eargos work fine for the masses, but I fear many just gave up at some point. And, with their “pro” version, they wound up being more expensive than AirPods Pro. I think a lot of those OTC hearing aids were pure junk and have been discarded. Part of me hopes that major swaths of the hearing aid industry get Sherlocked into oblivion. Side note: the Google Craptions that Shelley noted in this episode were definitely present in Tom’s fine concert video. “Doing the mattock” just doesn’t cut it.
@Leo: it’s awesome that you provide those AI-generated transcripts of TWiT shows. Thank you.
I’ve ordered the Air Pods Pro 2 and will compare their hearing aid features to my audiologist fitted $7000 Oticons. I suspect I will be returning the Oticons. I’ll fill you in when I get back on 9/24’s Macbreak Weekly.
As someone who really does not like iOS ( I have a work iPhone and do not like it), I would be one of those who would like an Apple Watch that I could connect to Android. or standalone., So, for me, Apple has lost two sales - both an iPhone and an Apple Watch.
I have to agree. From what I’ve seen, the Apple Watch is probably the best smartwatch on the market. But the fact that you need to tie it to an iphone limits their reach. I’d buy one in a heartbeat (no pun intended) if it would work with my Android.
If you do that, maybe your story can end up as a blip on the next Apple event intro video.
Leo Laporte recently returned his medical grade hearing aid and has switched over to AirPods Pro 2. Now he can hear clearly without embarrassment.
Since you weren’t buying an iPhone anyway, that sounds like only one lost Apple sale.
WRT offering Apple’s brand-new calibration on Android, I can see both sides of that issue. Control of quality of the hearing aid function is problematic if they’re not in control of the app and the OS. OTOH, it is awfully nice to have the AirPods Pro 2 hearing aid functionality available to everyone who desires them. If Apple provided the calibration interface on iPads and allowed the AirPods Pro 2 to have their complete hearing aid functionality on Android devices, that would be a pretty nice way for Apple to sidestep the problem. It might even give a little bump to iPad sales.
I’m sure that Apple has discussed this thoroughly in-house.
The hearing test is part of the Apple Health app I think, so it should be on iPad too.
I was tested for hearing loss about 10 years ago when I worked for FedEx Express at their Indy Hub. Do to it being at the airport and a very loud work environment, earplugs were required but they did annual testing to determine if you had loss of hearing from the vibrations of the machines and the noises from the jet engines. I showed a slight hearing loss then I was told but not enough to need hearing aides. I’m interested to see if 10 years later what a hearing test would show.
I had a test a few years back, nothing of note wrong. I have always had problems hearing conversations, so I went to an audiologist that does free testing, to see if I had hearing problems, but I didn’t, everything with my ears is fine.
It seems to be my brain can’t filter conversations out of the “noise”, words come in serially and get put together serially, regardless of who is speaking, which means, if there are several people speaking at once, I get each word as it arrives and can’t sort it into who said what, leaving me with a “word salad”, as they say in German. Very frustrating, I often have to ask people to repeat things 3 or 4 times, if there are other people speaking.
If I am concentrating on, say, a film on TV and my wife starts speaking, the first half a dozen words or so disappear, before I realise she is speaking and I have to ask her to repeat what she said, which makes her annoyed, or I have to guess what the missing words were, which I usually get wrong and that makes here even more annoyed!
More Andy off the cuff BS! When discussing the taxes that the EU is telling Apple to Pay to Ireland, which Ireland says Apple doesn’t owe them Andy made the comment Apple Ireland would be a “PO box above a schwarma shop.” Apparently Andy has never visited Apple in Ireland, as I have multiple times, or he would know that Apple’s Cork Campus “Ireland is home to more than 6,000 Apple employees and a sprawling campus in the city of Cork. As Apple celebrates its 40th anniversary in Ireland, the original manufacturing facility has expanded and is now part of a campus that includes AppleCare, Operations, Logistics, and a variety of other teams staffed by a diverse group of employees representing over 90 nationalities. Cork also serves as Apple’s European headquarters, supporting customers across the continent and beyond.” Little research before talking is in order…
Correct, and in the 80s they had a big facility in Silicon Glenn, but tax dodgers remain tax dodgers and it really annoys people.
In 2019, I think, I might be a year or two out, Google made around $400M in the UK from advertising and services, yet they paid a grand total of under $2M in tax for the year. Everything disappeared offshore, the Google Ads employees in the UK actually worked for Google Ireland and all their sales were booked through Ireland and in Ireland, the money was paid on to a Google entity in a tax haven that owns the copyrights and patents on everything they sell and the local entities make “no” profit, because no matter how much profit they make the bill for patent and copyright royalties almost covers 100% of the profit made.
This harms competition, because local companies can’t do these tax dodges and the giants don’t pay into the economy and the treasury on the same scale as other companies, depriving the citizens that spend their money with those companies with the tax money they should be paying. It is one of the reasons why Europe, and much of the rest of the world, has such a bad opinion of big business, they come in, destroy competition and drain the country of its wealth, returning nex to nothing in taxes.
People are rightly upset, other businesses which can’t afford the infrastructure to have entities in tax havens to syphon off all their profits are at a severe disadvantage - they have to pay their 40% in taxes, instead of less than 1%, how are they supposed to compete? But, of course, it isn’t Big Business being in the wrong, they just loop holes in the law to their advantage and politicians won’t close the holes, because that would affect their backhanders, sorry, lobbying money, but they still let the press make Big Business out to be the villains to the public.
You make fair points! My issue was with the comment from Andy! Must be a really large PO Box above a giant shawarma shop to fit all of Hollyhill and the 6000 Apple employees in it!!! Stupid comment…
AirPods Pro does have a feature called Conversation Boost. This would probably help.