New HomePod! New public betas! New iPhone 16 Pro leaks! (CultCast #656)

press I feel like I'm forgetting something terribly important I guess we'll find

out we'll see about that let's see here let's see here are we live that's

the question on everyone's mind oh bye

Joe I think we are boom am we live I think

oh you're right shoot I forgot to do it that's too bad even after you said it

shout out to Jeff crumpley he's got to walk his sweet buns out of here in minutes hey wait a second

me too that's crazy yeah I gotta be walking out the

door in an hour and 20 minutes Griffin you think we can do it yeah uh you know

this week I have no no doubt we can get this and done in an hour with Lou not

here messing everything up constantly interrupting and interjecting and putting his opinions in and trying to

steal my picks for future Keynotes it's going to be easy we got caveman here we

got Jay Cruz here who wants a yeah Lewis is not even here to complain

about it let's see another one you'll have to pay for it oh man we got Hugo last dropping the big bucks here for

elcy we got Jose

I'm not gonna try and say that last name because if I if I mispronounce that it's gon to get me in big trouble uh Jose

says podcast listener first time listening live well welcome Jose glad to

have you here hopefully after seeing the live production you'll consider coming back but I'm dubious about that after

you've seen one okay audio listeners aren't missing much I'll just say that oh come on

that's not true I think the visual component of this show is the best that

there is in the Tech podcast world is there is there a Tech podcast that does it better than this I don't think so I

really don't they're all using I mean first of all they don't have this level of eyebrow movement no one's got it

maybe of Jack Black oh that's pretty good wow that's pretty good see there's no way they're going to see that in the

audio and the level production not great no

one's for streaming live I I'll agree with you yeah I I think this is the best there is now the content itself okay

that that's debatable uh yeah lisis isn't here unfortunately we'll talk about that on

the show rip Lewis we missed you he had a good run though I think we're ready to go

live um go ahead and queue up Mrs you know

who and we'll get this thing Roland shout out to Dipsy do for joining us live we got a whole lot of stuff to talk

about today my goodness and I would actually say adequate time

to talk about it normally I feel like we might not make it I think we're going to make it this time we might actually get

through all these doors but we'll see no promises all right make you Mrs you know who oh Mrs

D where's my darling little Lewis oh he's not here Mrs T oh that's a shame he

probably wanted to know that I'll be making love to El K this weekend that's

great I should I should have set up Griff cam for that

cuz his reaction was even worse than Loose as normally is but this D we don't

want to hear about any of that in fact I feel slightly nauseous which tells me it's time to start the show so if you

don't mind I will get the music rolling let's see am I on the right screen I have no

idea what's going on uh I think I am so we're going to go ahead and get it rolling in three two

hello and welcome to the co cast the best 30 minute Apple conversation you're going to hear all week long I'm your

host that's the wrong button airon Ela join me today with ls Wallace out of

town he might be going to his town so out of a

precaution out of abundance of precaution he'll be sleeping in his ghilly souit this weekend in a

field near his home in R Ohio he's a rider for C back Griffin

Jones is here the secure bunker where I uh where

my office is located is on extra high alert this weekend as you should be CU I don't even know where leis is do you no

he I mean for all I know he could be on a flight to Columbus as we speak he is on his way there he has his bandana on

it's like that scene from Rambo man he's on his way to come discuss if not for the steel bars outside this window he

could just burst through at any moment yeah I don't know man he's pretty strong he's he's pretty stout he might be able

to just rip those bars out the window and come climbing through like Jack Nicholas in The Shining but I actually

don't know where leis is for real like do you actually know where he went I don't know I I have genuinely know that

I love that neither of us even bothered to ask him I actually feel bad about

that leis well I hope you're doing well Le wherever you are I hope that you're having a great time he's probably on vacation he he might even be in Italy

but Lewis will be back next week and then the griffer is going to be out next week now where are you going do you want

to say uh I will be going to England the motherland the Queen's land how long

London Town how long are you gonna be there for oh just uh I think until Tuesday or

so Thursday to Tuesday you're gonna go for less than a week to

England well I mean I'm going to I'm going to England on uh Leander canny's

budget that he LK is sending you the Jolly Old England is he going with you no no I'm not

saying he's he's paying me to go there I'm just saying like you know he he he does pay me every month see not made not

made of money what do I look like okay leader is sending you somewhere on

his dime I was like he has truly turned a new Leaf I don't think that ever actually yeah I don't think he ever paid

my way anywhere he paid me to go places like once I was there but I don't think he actually ever bought like a plane

ticket although he did let me stay for free in his hotel rooms so there was that well he he paid for me to go to

California when I was invited to WWDC two years ago oh wow it's getting soft

in this which was very generous whole age um all right well let's see here we got all sorts of stories to talk about

this week um before we do that I want to give a quick shout out to Hugo last in

the chat with a $25 Super Chat and there's nothing here he didn't ask us to

say anything he didn't make any comment he just wanted to give us 25 smackaroos

thank you for that generous $25 Super Chat Hugo last keeping the show going

going right into Elk's pocket unfortunately I really need to figure out how to change the routing on that

cash so that I can grab part of it or maybe even all of it I'll have to worry about that later we're going to talk

about an allnew homep pod just dropped today boy oh boy you guys are really going to like this one if you're a fan

of the hod this one's going to be perhaps the one that you've been been waiting for we're going to talk about the new public betas that are now

available if you've been wanting to try some of the public betas well now is your chance to do so I might hop on

board this might be it for me but we'll see uh really important feature coming to the photos app if any of you have

been around to hear me talk about my problems with iCloud photo storage or

the photos app this is going to be a feature that you're really going to value and I if we have time I'll maybe

talk about my strategy to secure my photos because if you think they're secure in iCloud

photos baby I would not trust iCloud photos with the safety of your photos not after

what happened to me and what continues to happen I might add and what you maybe didn't know could happen because you

just think that it's fail safe it's definitely not uh Griffin is going to tell us about some more iPhone 16 Pro

features that leaked uh we going to talk a little bit about Apple's insane new stock price

which has got up hugely hugely since April and I'll

tell you what my Apple stock is now worth and then we're going to wrap up

with a review of a product that I wish I had been sent but they gave it to Griffin instead and um well I won't spoil

because because I begged and emailed them constantly over the course of a few weeks okay so you nagged them so that's

a strategy I didn't try congratulations they actually sent something to you so that would be cool this is definitely a

product I'm interested in hearing more about before we dive in let me see here

see I knew I was forgetting something I didn't have my notes up I want to say thank you to built this episode is

brought to you by built rewards earn points by paying rent now when you go to join built.com cultcast that's join

bt.com cultcast I also want to thank Squarespace for supporting this episode

did I put up browser mode oh thank goodness that was close one

Squarespace is the place to go if you need a website and it's where I host the

cult cloth. cult cloth. Co for a variety of reasons so here's one Squarespace

blueprints Ai and SEO tools you can start a completely customized website

with the new guided design system Squarespace blueprint choose from professionally curated layouts and

styling options to build a unique online presence from the ground up tailored to your brand or business all with the and

optimize for every device easily launch your website and get discovered fast with integrated optimized SEO tools so

you show up more often to more people and grow the way you want plus and this is an important one if you plan on

selling products flexible payments make checkout seamless for customers with simple but powerful payment tools except

credit cards PayPal and Apple pay and in eligible countries offer customers the

option to buy now and pay later with afterpay and clear pay you can sell products and services of all kinds dig

digal products you can sell memberships sell courses sell files that customers

can download like PDFs music and ebooks you can create an outrageously high

quality product like CT cloth sell it to the masses it's the closest that you'll get to having your very own US Mint

trust me I know uh let's see here squarespace.com cultcast squarespace.com

cultcast get started get 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain with code cult casset checkout

squarespace.com /cast thank you to Squarespace for supporting us they've been with us for

like seven years so if you're thinking about getting a website please uh use

our link so that they know that you sent us wait reverse that so that we know

that you sent us no that still doesn't work so that they know they know that we sent you from our show all of those

things all right thank you to Squarespace let's Dive Right In to the first St you want to know about the

brand new homepod well trust me you're going to be excited about this one it's a big big deal if you've been waiting

for a new homepod to come out is this the one with the screen

well maybe it's got a screen on top but it's the same screen that the homepod mini has always had because it's just a

new homepod Mini and you you haven't been a fan of the black you don't like the white you don't like the orange you

don't like the yellow you wish there were something else but guess what my friends now there's a new color it's a

new midnight color am I right boy I'm looking at the picture are you trying to troll me here

Griffin there's no discernible difference those genuinely I'm told by Ed who wrote this article those

genuinely came from Apple's own marketing promotional marketing images from their press release so they have a

new color a new midnight color option but it looks almost the exact

same as the old option did they just change the name if you if you didn't like the color before you can now buy

midnight which is like 1% darker unbel it is a very slightly different color I

I do actually see that it it to me it actually looks 1% lighter like it's just slightly lighter but that could just be

like the lighting on the actual product I feel like I'm being trolled here but this is real so there is a new now hold

on a second if we go to Apple's website do they say new when you go

to homepod oh that's a good question they did put out this this whole press release about it but I don't know if

they mark it as new on the website we got we got to check now my guess is that they probably don't uh so here are some

more details um although it's still a dark color it's also green because apple

is making it using 100% recycled mesh fabric the homepod mini launched in 2020

in white and space gray and in 2021 they added yellow orange and blue and just

earlier this week they dropped space gray for the new midnight color uh now

here's the thing that makes this like twice as funny Apple's whole thing is it

now the homep Pod is 100% recycled fabric if you order this one color but

uh I was listening to the upgrade podcast this week and Mike Hurley said that he actually checked the original

homepod press release for the homepod mini and apparently before it was already 90% recycled F hey you know what

that's 10% not only is it only 1% darker but it's also only 10% more

recycled yeah well when you sell I was going to say Millions but that's probably way higher than they actually

sell hod we're talking about here yeah exactly it's homepod m they probably sell like hundreds a month so maybe from

that perspective it's not better but you know what hey incremental improvements incremental Improvement they they they

got it from 90% to 100% recycled material okay yeah it doesn't say new so

apparently it's just a new color well look let's not linger here too long uh they could have done literally nothing and I don't think anybody would

have noticed dude I'm not even sure they did do anything it looks exactly the same to me it literally looks exactly

the same like on our store we have the on in our article on CAC we have the picture side by side I wonder if this is

an error it's literally the same photo so now I don't know what to believe but anyway if you're looking for a new

homepod Mini now there's a new color I wouldn't buy one full price anyway wait for them to go on sale they're nice

speakers they're I not worth $100 in my opinion I think they're probably worth 80 Max which they go on sale to all the

time so there you go let's move on and forget we ever mentioned this homepod

update what else do we have let's talk about oh the public betas now this actually might be interesting to people

because we have new ones out right yes so public betas of iOS 18 iPad OS 18 Mac

OS aqua and watch OS 11 are now out uh if you're not familiar installing public betas are actually much easier than they

were before you don't have to to install a beta profile from the web you can actually do it directly in settings you

just go to settings General software update and then after a moment you'll see like a new option on top that says beta updates yep you can tap that and

switch to the iOS 18 public beta directly from there it like literally takes like 10 seconds weirdly there's no

public beta for vision OS only a developer beta but there's no restriction on installing a developer

beta so you can just to do that and it's the same I don't know why they're not

making a I don't know why they're they're not making a release called public beta but anyways I'm running the vision OS beta oh and I've been running

iOS for a few weeks now uh it sounds like you're interested in getting on that train yeah I was going to ask like

what's the stability like on iOS 18 because I want to install it but it it they're they're they're often so bad

when they first launch I'm not trying to have everything break on my phone I'm

surprised that beta 3 is the public beta because I was showing a friend who who was over just a few few nights ago like

oh yeah I'm running the pre-released version of Iowa so you know I'll show you all the cool features and then I tried to edit my home screen and it just

completely didn't work oh and I was like oh yeah you can customize control center too and I like you know brought that

down tapped and held on it and it also completely didn't work and broke so yeah maybe wait until beta 4 okay so it's not

there yet is what you're saying yeah okay that is surprising we're on beta 3 you think they would have ired out a lot of The Kinks but you know what's always

surprising to me is how there are Kinks right up until the very last version I

mean they really have those Kinks and those bugs in a buggy state right up

until they launch it's crazy and then right when the launch happens lo and behold everything just goes away you

know so I don't know if the developers are just taking their time to fix them

or if these things are very hard to fix and so it takes them forever what's that law that the amount of time you set for

a task to be done will be how much time it ends up taking you there's like a law

Force like that I can't remember the name of it another theory that I've read is that around mid August is when they

start to prepare for the iPhone launch and so like around mid August they have like a a feature freeze where they don't

make any more changes because they have to flash millions of iPhones with the version of iOS before they go in boxes

before they get shipped all around the world for like the early September launch date and so like the theory is

like so between mid August and mid-september all of the engineers are basically only doing bug fixes and that's why the last

few betas like suddenly turn around oh okay well from the chat s go for it uh

and there was also you know the story that we've been talking about all through the year that like apple developed this special system where they

can update phones in the Box inside the Apple store before they're actually unboxed and they might use that to like

basically mean that iOS 18.1 is instead iOS 18 .0 and it's

available the same day that it is for everybody else you know they get like an extra round of bug fixes before the

phones are actually out G from the chat saying I have been running all the current iPhone all the

all the current betas on my iPhone 15 Pro very stable for me way better than years ago okay maybe I will try it uh

caveman from the chat is it really as simple as turning on the betas turning on the beta updates and settings now yes

it is they have literally made it one click it used to be a little bit more involved where you had to like install a

certificate which I don't think you need to do anymore or maybe it happens as part of the process like you don't even

need a paid developer account to join the developer beta I know that is so weird so then really what is the point of the public beta I mean it I guess

it's like in a different state of I I strongly encourage people to do the public beta instead of the developer

beta they're released at the same rate but the public beta is like one day after the developer beta is out so it's

really like the developer beta is released on Monday the public beta is released on Tuesday but you get the same number of updates but if there's like a

catastrophic error in the developer beta which there have been like in very

recent history like there were reports that like an iOS 17 developer beta was like you know breaking people's phones

or something like that the public beta is a little safer because they can pull them out if there's a catastrophic

problem okay well there you go there might be other small differences I'm sure there are differences that's why they have two versions as what they they

would just have the one but I think I'm going to go for it let throw caution to the win going install it I mean if they

fix most of the big major stuff how bad can it be I mean if some of the stuff's not working although you said you're

having problems with the photos app right well I'm not having bugs with the photos app I just don't like it oh okay

well and I'll I'll have a I I'll have once again linked to my U article that I wrote over the weekend in the show notes

all the problems that they have in the photos app it's really it's like I I like their broad idea and where they're

going with it but I think there's a lot of design problems that I I'd like them to fix yeah well hopefully they will fix

those things and they don't think that they're just the the new features of the app uh not needing to be fixed well

there is one feature coming to the photos app which I think is going to be

really super useful and uh it is the ability to identify and recover

corrupted pictures in videos now this is invisible for us now I if you have

corrupted images in your photos Library you likely have no idea unless you've

tried to load the videos or the photos on your Apple TV or your phone or something especially your Apple TV like in

4k which the videos don't load in 4k anyway don't get me started on that but

you'll notice that some of the images like if you have if you're using the images as screen savers you'll notice

some of them look really pixelated and it's like why does that picture look so bad it's because it's loading like some super low resolution version and the

higher resolution versions have been corrupted they're not available or something and I think this happens all the time and you really should be

checking your deleted folders as well just to make sure that iCloud isn't just randomly deleting photos like I checked

a little while ago and I found like 3,000 images that had been placed in the deleted folder that I don't know how

they got there and I had to restore all of them and if I never checked I would have lost all those images they just

would have been gone forever and I have no idea how it happens no idea I didn't delete them and

the other problem is you'll go to play a video from like five years ago and I think we just lost Griffin but I'm going

to keep going until he comes back I tried to play a video and it wouldn't

play it had been corrupted and so from the story iOS 18's redesigned

photos Apple gain a recovered album I got you gin you're back he froze actually I noticed it because the

background noise like there's like this lowlevel hiss that I'm hearing disappeared and I was like uhoh

Griffin's gone but welcome back um iOS 18's redesign photo app will gain a

recovered album to help you restore damag photos or videos it will only show up when the app detects corrupted media

not in your photo library so you can actually do something about it the new recovered album will appear under the

utility section of the photo zap do you have this on your photos app Griffin have you

checked I have haven't checked okay you may need to update first but um I'm

looking forward to trying this out while not common you can lose photos or videos from your iPhone due to database

corruption it can also happen when using thirdparty apps that do not have access

to the photo library to prevent the loss of such content Apple plans to introduce the recovered album the app will scan

your phone automatically for damaged photos and videos that can be recovered only then will the recovered album

appear in the utility section of the photos app Apple says your iPhone will scan for corrupted media files when you

upgrade to iOS 18 I'm sure that's going to take a while uh especially if you have a huge Library like I do if the app

finds corrupted media you can either recover the D the damaged files from the recovered album or delete the files

permanently oh great sorry we can't fix them go ahead and just delete them you

don't you don't these thousand photos we can't show them to you anymore would you like to just delete them it's like yeah perfect that's what I want to do just

lose them forever uh there does not appear to be any way to initiate a scan manually like the

recently deleted album you must confirm your identity using face ID or touch ID to get into the recovered

folder let's see here it looks like there is also a iOS iOS 17.5 bug that

has caused photo database corruption for some so look you got to be careful you

got to be careful my friends this has happened to me before it's probably happened to you and you probably don't

know it and I have come up with a new strategy to make sure that my photos

don't get corrupted and I I realized this is not going to be a strategy that everyone can use but it's something that

you can try if you have a NZ and it's kind of complicated I'll just run through it high level but basically what

I do is I have all of my photos being downloaded um via iCloud the iCloud

photo app on uh my PC where I have a ton of hard right space I have all the

full-size files being pulled down Griffin's trying to call me back let me add him back into this conversation um I

have all the fullsize photos being downloaded to my PC and then I have a backup procedure that pulls those files

onto my Nas so that I should always have a fullsize picture stored off of Apple's

servers let me see if I can add him back to this gripster you there

yep there you go dude what's going on with that Ohio Internet it's being even worse than

normal it completely crashed so I'm now I'm now going off my phone tethering oh really well it sounds better okay I was

just regaling the people um with my iCloud photo backup strategy which

involves a NZ so I realized it's not going to work for everybody but dude you you really should be doing something I

would not trust Apple servers for your data um yeah the thing is like um iCloud

itself isn't a backup iCloud is like the source of where your photos are but it's not a backup because thing if things go

wrong there and you don't have it anywhere else well you've just lost photos that is like that's not a backup

strategy you need to have a copy ideally locally on your Mac and then prbly

another copy on an external storage yeah on like a high drive or a hard drive or something by the way your audio your

audio is getting a little B gbly there so we'll see if um it sticks around you

should check to see like do you have any like backup service or anything running like it seems like something might be going on or it could just be that rural

internet oh wait but you you disconnected from it now you're on your phone yeah okay so it should be fine um

yeah I know everyone thinks is iCloud as backup it's weird to think that it's not

backup but it's definitely not and so it's something to pay attention to and if you can back it up somewhere else I

definitely would you would hate to lose all those St those photos and videos the other thing too think oh well it's on my

phone so if it's on my phone then iCloud is backup well not if the changes between your phone and iCloud sync to

each other so delet it off iCloud then they delet it off your phone too that's true they're basically synonymous I also

downloaded all of my photos and videos from iCloud uh a couple times

whoops for some reason my camera a g screwed up when you disconnect it I have

no idea why um is that working oh good I downloaded all the all the photos from

iCloud and when I got them the format was very confusing it gave my file names

all sorts of strange names um which isn't a big deal obviously but it seemed

to me like a lot of my photos and videos were missing I couldn't really find all

the different files and also it gave me a bunch of like Excel files full of

metadata that I had absolutely no idea what to do with I I I didn't know what

to do with any of that metadata and I don't think that the metadata that were attached to the files when they were

uploaded were were part of the files anymore and I think they were part of like the um the Excel files that it

downloaded and I'm like what am I supposed to do with this I have no idea what do you do with 100 Excel files

their CSV files full of metadata who who knows I don't know like the easi thing

to do on a Mac is you can just go to your home folder and then you click pictures and then there should just be a

file called like Photo library. like photos library or something like that you can just hold down alt and then just

like make a copy of that and that that's the easiest way to do it on a Mac at least okay just make a copy of that

photos Library file itself yeah that's not a bad that's not a bad strategy

actually um if you're on a Mac that's actually a great way to do it and then just keep it on a hard drive you just

have to remember to keep doing it and then overwriting the file every time you want to go make that transfer and the transfer could be quite large

um and then also if you are not storing your full optimized size files in on

your Mac I don't know if that actually gets you to where you want to be because

you uh are not going to have the full image files on your local machine that's

true yeah uh anyway so something to try out once you get the new beta installed

to see if uh you have any corrupted videos or photos and I bet you I bet you

you do and you don't know it and hopefully it's nothing that you really value because I lost stuff and you don't

even know what it is I mean there were some videos and and photos that were obvious like there was enough of them that I could tell what they were but a

lot of times they're just gone forever uh let's see here before we move

on oh yeah we're talking about iPhone 16 Pro next and those new rumors but I do

want to thank built for supporting this episode is is brought to you by built

rewards and let me just tell you I paid rent for a long long time and I know a

lot of you out there pay rents lots of people pay rents and unfortunately it's

just something that you have to do in your life I lost my browser hold on a second I'll pull this up so that we could have built on the

screen and I was always looking for a way to earn rewards on those big rent

payments because you're spending so much money but when I was paying rent there was nothing I mean there was literally

no way to do that you just had to cut a check and that money was gone but for all of you now there's built every month

pay your rent and watch the built rewards roll in use points to Jet off on

a dream vacation put your points toward a flight or hotel stay with 500 plus

Airlines and 700,000 plus hotels and properties use your points to sweat it

out redeem your points the book Fitness Studio classes you can also use your

points toward a future rent payment or toward a future down payment on a home

even if you're still rocking the old school rent check Vibes built rewards

has got your back they'll mail a check for you it's like having a personal rent paying assistant earn points by paying

rent right now when you go to join built.com cultcast that's Joi NB

lt.com cultcast make sure you use our URL so they know that we sent you join

built.com cultcast to start earning points with your rent payments today and

thanks to billt for supporting this episode okay let's talk about iPhone 16

Griffin we got some hot new rumors here and while you do this oh your camera's

back fantastic now they can see you talk about it too yeah so this was

speculation over the last year you know it was part wishful thinking a little bit but now we finally

have confirmation at least not really confir we have another rumor suggesting that it's actually true the upcoming

iPhone 16 pro and pro Max will seemingly use the same 5x tetr prism camera as the

iPhone 15 Pro Max Apple plans to use the larger sensor um but there actually

there has a little downside though that won't come to any changes to the camera sensor this year

so Apple switched to a 5x telephoto sensor on the iPhone 15 Pro Max last year the smaller iPhone 15