New Apple Devices and iOS17 Launch

00:44

S1

Hello everyone. Welcome to Talking Tech. This edition available from the 26th of September 2023. I'm Stephen Jolly. Great to have you with us wherever you're listening, perhaps through Vision Australia Radio, associated Stations of Australia or maybe the Community Radio Network, there is also the podcast. If you haven't caught up with that yet, all you need to do is search for the two words talking tech, and then it can come usually on a Tuesday afternoon just after it's been produced. Another option is to ask your Siri device or smart speaker to play Vision Australia Radio Talking Tech Podcast. Vision Australia Radio Talking Tech podcast. 

With me, someone who can explain all this tech stuff really well. Vision Australia's National Advisor on Access Technology, David Woodbridge. David, the new Apple devices iPhones and Apple watches are now available for purchase.

S2

They are indeed. So we've got the iPhone 15, the 15 plus the iPhone Pro and the iPhone Pro max. And so basically the smaller ones, the 15 and the 15 pro with the 6.1 and the plus and the max one is your 6.7 diagonal inch screen. So they're now available to purchase. And of course, the Apple Watch Series nine and the Apple Watch Ultra two. And what I noticed on the Web, they were saying that particularly for the Apple Watch Ultra two, if you've already got an ultra one, there's really no point update to the Apple Watch Ultra two. 

But if you have a series four watch, which is going back a fair way, they are suggesting that you might want to update to the Series nine. If you have a series six, 7 or 8, They reckon the extra functionality in the Series nine is not dramatically besides the, you know, the being able to see it in very bright light. The screen is very, very bright now. But besides that, yeah, there just a few things to think about before you rush out and spend your good, well-earned money.

S1

And iOS 17 hit our devices last week.

S2

Yeah. Now, look, I've got very complacent because I remember we, we talked off air. I mentioned one thing about the, the side switch on the side of the iPhone and I called it a different name. And I suddenly realised that for you, iOS 17 is a completely new experience. I've been beta testing it since, what's it been, June this year. So how have you found iOS 17 overall as a sort of a brand new user, so to speak?

S1

Well, it reminded me of other times when I download new versions of iOS, it appears snappier at the start. That's nice. Some of the sounds are a little bit different. I noticed that notifications behaves a little differently, but that's all resolvable when you go to the settings and you've got to keep that in mind that sometimes things haven't actually been taken away, but they might have had their default settings changed. In the case of notifications, you just go to settings accessibility, then within accessibility, voiceover and then verbosity, and that deals with punctuation and also notifications, whether they be for the lock screen or the banner notifications, you know, where those big ones come over the top of an article you might be reading. Et cetera. 

So there's little things like that that that change, it's well worth digging a little bit deeper. And you see that it's not actually sort of very much the same, like it's basically as it was, but with new enhancements and tweaks and there's quite a few of those. David There's a very nice coverage of this from Jonathan Mohsin with his current Living Blind Fully podcast Edition 250, where he spends a lot of time going through not just the iPhone 15 Pro and some of the physical features and functionality of that, but also a lot of time with iOS 17 and there's some useful little tips you can pick up from that.

S2

There's actually a huge amount of some of the extra stuff that I've been using. I've been using it for such a long time now. I just take it for granted the way it works. So things like the fact that you don't have to use the magic words, he says, I try anymore and the reason why I'm spelling is that because you can actually use the the second word now to activate our beloved personal assistants. And we've also got extra voices for the Apple's personal assistants, plus the fact that this is what I like. You can speed it up a bit faster or he up a bit faster, depending on what voice you use as well. 

And the other thing that somebody reminded me the other day, too, we've actually got new ringtones for the iPhone and some of them are really, really cool. So if you go and check out your sound settings on your iPhone, some of the new ringtones are actually very, very nice indeed. So that might be something else that people might want to play with as well.

05:36

S1

macOS out this week, Sonoma.

S2

So this again is a lot of stuff under the hood and all up it makes it a you know, a good update. But can I ask people to pay particular attention to preview, which is the app that we use traditionally to read PDF files on the Mac And Apple supposedly has done a lot of work behind the scenes about trying to allow you to navigate structured tagged PDF files such as headings, links, tables, and one of the major issues with PDF files was if you tried to read by say header one and then header two and then jump down and say the next heading level two trying to navigate past all the sub subheading ones, it never worked properly. 

So if you're a PDF user and you want to check out preview on the next version of the Mac OS, let me know and just email me at David Dot Woodbridge at Vision Australia. Org And I'll be very interested to see what you think about the new improvements.

S1

I want to go back to iOS now, the Magnifier app and some interesting stuff in there now.

S2

Yes, just remember now and this is particularly with the pro versions of the phone. So this is the 12 pro, the 13 pro, the 14 pro, and the 15 pro, as well as the max versions of those in the magnifier app. We now have five detection modes now. So we've got people detection, which is what we used a lot in Covid to find out how close the person was to you. We have door detection and that door detection also supposedly also tells you, I haven't tried this out for a while about which way the door opens and where the handle is. We've got image. 

So it will actually look at an image and tell you what's actually in the image text. So that's basically optical character recognition. So if you point your phone at a sign or anything else for that matter in your pantry, it'll add to you. And of course the new one quite dramatically, along with door detection in iOS 17 is point and speak. 

And that's where you've got a touch screen surface. You point your finger at a button and it tells you what the button is based on, again, the camera. So if you've been avoiding that app. For a while. Go and have a look at it again, because now you've got those five interesting things to have a play with.

S1

Magnifier. Easy to find. Now, there are still a number of devices you buy through Apple that use the lightning connector, aren't there?

S2

There are. So whilst, you know, we've got all excited about the iPhone with its new Usb-c and the iPhone 15 line up my 14 pro max still uses lightning so does the 13 and the 12 and the. If you've still got those phones around the place. I've got three magic keyboards in front of me that use lightning. My trackpad external trackpad for the Mac uses Lightning. My version one and two of my AirPods Pro uses lightning for the charging case, my AirPods Max, which costs $1,000. They still use lightning and a few other things as well. 

So if you're like me and you've gone very much into the Apple universe, particularly before they're different types of hardware, then just have a think about what you're doing and what cables you might need. I'm still going to hang off a little bit until Apple starts to update some of their other stuff, so that's when I'll start to update. But at the moment I've got too many gadgets still on lightning to justify, you know, even thinking about updating to another usb-c only device.

S1

Tell us about the integration of FaceTime and Apple TV or Apple TV, 4K, whatever that means.

S2

So the 4K is just basically it's the way that movies are made these days. You can watch it in dramatic video, blah, blah, blah, cinema mode and so on. But what this really means is that if you run your Apple TV 4K, specifically in your lounge room on your say, 60 inch or 80 inch television screen, then what happens is with iOS 17 running on both the Apple TV 4K and your iPhone or iPad, then the video that you're looking at. So your grandchildren or your family on the screen from overseas is on your big screen. And then the camera and the audio is coming out of your iPhone or your iPad. 

So it's really Apple saying, you know, you can have your family and your lounge room because you can imagine, you know, seeing people and grandchildren and people's drawings and everything else on this huge screen is going to be absolutely amazing. So I think that's one really great thing. But just remember, it's definitely the Apple TV 4K, It's not the Apple TV HD. If you don't have an Apple TV 4K, then you won't have FaceTime as an icon on the home screen of the Apple TV.

10:32

S1

But it really is a case of getting your loved ones into your living room from a long way away. It's not just like a little thing. You'll look at it on your phone or whatever.

S2

No, no. And we tried it out with my daughter. We were able to see my 20 month year old grandson's attempt at doing some crayon drawing and it was amazing because Elon said you could see a lot more detail on this huge screen that you could on her, even her iPhone 14 pro max screen.

S1

Not only Apple events this month, we've had an Amazon one and a Microsoft one. Tell us about the Amazon one first.

S2

The Amazon one was interesting because along with announcing some new hardware, so they announced I think it was the Amazon show, eight new version and a fire TV soundbar and a new fire TV stick. And then as far as some stuff to do with the A lady, as I like to call it, they also mentioned the fact that she or he will be turning into an artificial intelligence system, which you won't need to use the magic word for, and you'll be able to say something like, Let's chat. 

And like ChatGPT, you can indulge in a conversational flow with the artificial intelligence. Now it's coming live in the next several weeks or so. I just tried it here and it said this feature is not currently available in your region. So let's hope that it's not only just in the US, but it's worldwide as well. So stand by for that.

S1

Microsoft, their event.

S2

They announced some new hardware, so they answered announced the new surface, Studio two and the new surface go Now the surface go apparently is primarily for business. It's not for the normal consumer, but the studio one was, again, lots of up to good internal updates as far as the processor and memory and everything else was concerned. But the exciting thing and yes, you probably guessed what I'm going to say is they also talked about copilot, which is another fancy way of saying artificial intelligence and what the co-pilot will do. It will suggest things for you to do. 

So when you're writing an email, it might suggest different ways of writing that email or when you're looking at a chart in an Excel spreadsheet, you can ask it to perhaps extrapolate some particular some data under that chart and so on. So that looks really interesting because basically there's a new Windows update coming out this week. And I'm not 100% sure whether the copilot was going to be this week or coming out in October. But stand by for that. And it's going to be really, really interesting, particularly for us. Narrator Screen reader users and of course draws and other screen readers as well.

S1

Gutenberg and a lot more books available.

S2

Normally on Gutenberg, you've got a whole range of electronic books. When I'm in electronic, I mean like text only books that were traditionally use your screen reader or other system to read. And what they've done, they've used a really nice sounding speech synthesizer, which you could almost not tell it wasn't a human to read these books out. And I've tried a few online and they were quite interesting. 

So if I didn't know any better, I'd say it's a person reading a book with a very formal way of pronouncing words. But no, it's extremely doable. It's not awful. And you can definitely listen to them. Remember, with Gutenberg, they're all books out of copyright, so they're not recent ones, but there's some really, really good books in there as well to read.

S1

Explain how you get access to them.

S2

You log on to the Gutenberg website, particularly for the audio files, and I've got the link in the show notes because I find sometimes Gutenberg websites a bit hard to navigate. So the link in the show notes will take you straight to the web page.

S1

Terrific. Just before we go, a reminder of where everyone can find details of what we've been talking about in this and previous editions of the program.

S2

Indeed. So as always, you can check out my blog site, which is David, would it be a dot podbean pad B com.

S1

David would be dot podbean podbean to write to the program.

S2

You can write to me at Vision Australia where I work, which is David Woodbridge, how it sounds to Vision Australia. Org.

14:47

S1

David-dot-Woodbridge at Vision Australia-dot-org. This has been talking tech with me has been Vision Australia's National Advisor on Access Technology, David Woodbridge. I'm Stephen Jolley. Take care. We'll talk more tech next week. See you.