Everything Apple Updates

Evan Starnes (00:03.746)
This is Blind Level Check, the show where accessibility meets innovation meets humor, and they all come together like a good sandwich. I'm your host, Evan Starnes, and this week will hopefully be a bit of a shorter episode than usual, as we are very much in the midst and almost through our big giant transition of recording platforms and podcast hosting platforms and stuff like that, but...

Goodness gracious it has been quite an undertaking and I'm really excited for it in the end of course because it does mean that I'll get to spend more time, know, once it's all over and done with on things like our original podcasts, including this one. And that means hopefully that I'll finally get to do what I've been talking about for probably over a year now and generate and put out more content, more demos and just more fun stuff.

for everybody to listen to and engage with. part of that I'm actually hoping to start doing this week if I've got the time to do it. Otherwise, it is definitely on the radar and it is going to be a series that I will be starting up and releasing on Thursdays. And this is not an original name. Plenty of people have had this idea before and they do it already on their own platforms, but

I wanted to start Throwback Thursdays, mainly because, you know, everybody that has listened to the show for some time now is probably familiar with my love for old technology. I don't use the word obsolete here because I don't like it, but you know, that's just my opinion. But I wanted to have a place to highlight some of this old technology, be it old talking clocks or note takers or just anything that

would be considered vintage. Anything from the early 2000s going back from that. 80s, 90s, heck if I could find tech from the 70s to talk about, you bet I'm going to a little demo or a podcast on it. yeah, this should be a fun little mini series, sorta like the BLT Bytes, but a little bit more laid back, less tutorial-esque.

Jonathan Price (02:24.937)
and honestly I'm trying to make the BLT bytes that way too but just a fun way if you are fascinated with old technology or maybe you own one of these devices and you want to go down a trip go on a trip down memory lane I really hope that you will enjoy this series and you know if you've got suggestions or comments of course you're always welcome to send them our way but goodness gracious

I've got to end this rant now because if I don't this is going to be a really long episode. What I wanted to discuss this week is the new Apple products that were recently released last week and go over at least the quick and important things that matter to us blind and low vision folks.

There are plenty of YouTube channels and podcasts out there that have done in-depth reviews of all of the new specs and performance improvements and things with these new devices. So, you could always go check those videos out. I'm not going to spend too much time going over the nitty gritty detail of every single product because that would take forever. But I wanted to go over the new lineup of products, talk a little bit about them. And before we get into this...

Before we get into the products themselves, I'd like to say that all of these products that I'm about to talk about are now available and you can purchase them from an Apple store or from the online Apple store or you can go on Amazon or other online retailers, but I always recommend if you buy an Apple product going directly from Apple for the best deals and of course if you're a student, get that student discount as well.

If you want to snag yourself a brand new shiny MacBook or a brand new iPhone 17E, then you are now able to go do that. And you probably should before they get snagged up by everybody else. Either way, they'll have more, but you know, if you really want to get your hands on them now, now's the time to do it. All of these new Apple products will be coming with a new N1

Jonathan Price (04:39.615)
chip and this isn't the main processor that runs the entire phone but this is the little chip that handles all of the wireless communications you know Wi-Fi Bluetooth cellular data I'm not sure if it handles the satellite connectivity but either way it's the chip that handles all of those wireless communications and this new N1 chip will improve things like

network reliability especially if you're on a 5G cellular network and there's a lot of people on that network aka a crowded network Bluetooth performance and also battery performance because Which means hopefully 5g will not drain your battery near as much as it used to on older iPhones Let's start with their at least in my mind biggest launch for this year

And that is the new MacBook Neo. This is a brand new MacBook to go alongside the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro. And this is an affordable MacBook aimed at pretty much just the average consumer. Somebody that wants something that runs, a computer that runs macOS to do some light productivity work, Word documents, web browsing. You probably could even do some

creativity stuff, I'd be curious how well it runs logic, but this MacBook starts at $599 and for a MacBook that is pretty much unheard of until now. But this is a good computer if you're a college student or you know, if you maybe haven't used the Mac before but you kind of just want to dip your feet in and see what it's like.

Some things to consider with this computer though is that it starts off at 256GB base storage with 8GB of RAM and the base model does not come with Touch ID. So if you want Touch ID on your MacBook Neo, you're going to need to upgrade to the next tier which is 512GB of storage. But all MacBook Neos come with 8GB of

Jonathan Price (07:01.321)
RAM and interestingly the processor that runs this computer is not the Apple series of processors, the M1 through M5 that are found in all other Macs. They've gone ahead and actually put an iPhone processor and it is the A18 chip and that is the same chip that is found in the iPhone 16 Pro and

If you're wondering why they didn't do the A19 from the 17, I think they did that because it made it possible for them to keep the price tag at $599 more than likely with the fact that chips and silicone and computer hardware is getting just gradually more and more expensive at this time. Some of you may be thinking, well, goodness, they put an iPhone chip in this thing. It's got to be...

really really slow and there's no way I could even do basic word documents or anything on this thing without it lagging but that is actually not the case. In fact this is kind of a spec that blew my or statistic that blew my mind in a way. This MacBook is faster than the original M1 MacBooks that came out just a few years ago despite the fact that it has an iPhone chip in it so

Effectively that means my iPhone 16 Pro is somehow more powerful than the laptop I only bought a few years ago and that's definitely pretty... that was definitely kind of a... I don't know... pretty mind-blowing thing to think about and maybe it means it's time for me to upgrade my M1 MacBook Air that I bought a few years ago but either way it is a lot more powerful. I have not seen it physically but

I imagine it shares a similar design to the newer MacBook Air's. does not have MagSafe and charges with USB-C. But apart from that and the fact that the base model does not have Touch ID, there aren't really that many other compromises to speak of. They do say the SSD in it, the solid state drive, is slower than the MacBook Air, the MacBook Pro, but

Jonathan Price (09:25.074)
Unless you're doing, you know, a lot of video rendering or production kind of things, you're not going to really notice it. And honestly, if you're doing that kind of stuff, you really should spend the extra money and get either the Air or the new Pros that they've come out with. They also introduced an upgrade to the MacBook Pro and MacBook Air, as I've said, and those are now

Upgraded to the M5 chip and for the Pro you get the M5, M5 Pro and M5 Max processors. The M5 MacBook Pro starts at $1,699 and the MacBook Air starts at $1,099. The MacBook Air now comes with the base 512GB of storage and the MacBook Pro comes with the base 1TB of storage and they all have

a base 16GB of RAM. With the new MacBook Pro, they've doubled the speed of the SSD so again, you're doing creative projects, you're definitely going notice a performance boost.

Jonathan Price (10:48.231)
The open Claw trend is pretty big. know, if you work with a lot of AI based programs, you know, not necessarily large language model things like Clawed, but even programs like Logic, which has its own set of AI based tools for editing and removing vocals and stuff like that. These new M5 Macs have eight times the AI

performance compared to the M1 series. yes, the M1 can indeed run, you know, AI models locally, but supposedly it's going to be incredibly fast and a lot faster than the original M1s. Hopefully they'll also update the Mac Mini and Mac Studio to be on M5 as well, because I know a lot of people out there love to get the Mac Mini to run, you know, local large language models and things like that.

This definitely sounds like quite a performance improvement. They've also introduced a new iPad Air with the M4 chip inside and that starts at $599. Last and certainly not least at all, they've introduced the new iPhone 17e to succeed the iPhone 16e that came out last year.

And this is effectively the new budget friendly or I don't know, I guess you could say budget friendly iPhone, kind of like along the lines of things like the iPhone SE, but it starts at $599. There's a theme here, of course, as you can probably tell, but there are some significant upgrades with this iPhone 17E that if you were considering getting one in the past, maybe this will sway your decision a little bit.

Or if you're on an older iPhone like an iPhone 12 or 11 or the first or second gen SE, this might give you quite the reason to upgrade. The biggest improvement with the iPhone 17E is the addition of MagSafe. And it's unclear why they did not add MagSafe to the iPhone 16E, but either way,

Jonathan Price (13:11.611)
It's in this phone, so if you've got MagSafe accessories, know, the wallets or MagSafe charging docks or battery packs, they'll now work with this iPhone and you'll have the advantages of, you know, MagSafe. So certain MagSafe enabled battery packs will let you see their battery life or they can do firmware updates over MagSafe to those products. So it's great to see that they've added that and that that's no longer going to be a compromise should you go with an E.

It still has a single rear facing 48 megapixel camera. And if you do things like Aira, Be My Eyes, or Be My AI, Seeing AI, any of these apps that use the camera for OCR or image recognition, it'll do just fine. yes, Aira does have the ability if you have an iPhone with dual cameras, they can switch or use the other opposite lenses. But personally, I've

They've had that feature for a few years and I haven't really run into a situation where I've needed to use that feature. And honestly, unless you are extremely, if you are a photographer or videographer and you need the extra camera performance, then maybe go with something like the iPhone 17. But this single camera will do perfect for everyday use. And honestly, in my opinion,

And this is of course an opinion, but I think it's nice to just have one camera. I only really use one camera. It's less stuff to clutter up the back of the iPhone. They also now start at a base 256GB of storage going up from there. And they have the latest Apple A19 chip. Now would I get one of these iPhones? At least for me, no I wouldn't. Right now because I have the 16 Pro.

Also, you know the fact that this iPhone does not come with lidar at least for me that is definitely I don't know I'd rather not go without it because I still use it But I've heard a lot of people that don't really even use lidar, you know, they got a pro phone thinking that it would have all these benefits and you know, I did the same thing and then you know turns out maybe you use it once or twice and Then kind of forget about it. So

Jonathan Price (15:40.296)
I think that's going to be much of a compromise, if you're getting your first iPhone or upgrading from an older iPhone, this is definitely a great option. Well, that's going to be it, honestly, because I didn't really want to spend a ton of time, but I wanted to cover at least the important specs and details of these new Apple products.

a guest on to have a more discussion format of these products, but this is not going to be the last Apple release this year, and I will have plenty of other opportunities to have guests on and to do more fun Apple talk episodes. But I just wanted to talk about these real quick, especially since they came out last week, trying to stay on top of the tech news here on VLT.

Either way, if you enjoyed this podcast, you have suggestions, questions, or comments for me or any of our other podcast hosts, please send them to feedback at aftersite.org or leave them in voicemail form at 720-712-8856. Anyway, that's going to be it for this episode of Blind Level Tech. I have been your host, Evan Starnes.

and I'll talk to you all again next Wednesday.