Intego Mac Security Podcast

Apple in 2024: AI, EU, and USB-C – Intego Mac Podcast Episode 377

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A major data breach of U.S. telecoms took place, and very few of them have yet to admit it happened. Age ratings on Apple App Store apps are misapplied for hundreds of apps that are age inappropriate. What’s Apple doing about it? iMessage Notification scams are proliferating, and we have another example. And Apple released a lot of hardware this year, and in a way, AI helps us understand why.

  • Apple TV+ free weekend
  • The USB-C charging mandate arrives in the EU — here’s what that means
  • You can love or hate AI, but it’s killed crappy 8GB versions of pricey PCs and Macs
  • Cybersecurity firm’s Chrome extension hijacked to steal users’ data
  • App Store has hundreds of ‘risky’ apps rated as appropriate for kids
  • More telcos confirm Salt Typhoon breaches as White House weighs in
  • Scammers are committing hospice fraud
  • Apple Launched These 25+ Products This Year
  • How to Use Image Playground and Genmoji on iPhone, iPad, and Mac

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    Transcript of Intego Mac Podcast Episode 377

    Voice Over 0:00
    This is the Intego Mac podcast—the voice of Mac security—for Thursday, January 2, 2024. This week’s Intego Mac Podcast security headlines include: A major data breach of U.S. telecoms took place, and very few of them have yet to admit it happened. Age ratings on Apple App Store apps are misapplied for hundreds of apps that are age inappropriate. What’s Apple doing about it? iMessage Notification scams are proliferating, and we have another example. And Apple released a lot of hardware this year, and in a way, AI helps us understand why. Now here are the hosts of the Intego Mac podcast. Veteran Mac journalist Kirk McElhearn and Intego’s chief security analyst, Josh Long.

    Kirk McElhearn 0:51
    Happy New Year, Josh

    Josh Long 0:54
    Happy New Year.

    Kirk McElhearn 0:57
    I hope it’s going to be a prosperous and happy new year for you and yours. And I look forward to 2025 which is a nice i like the roundness of the 25 you know, being a quarter of 100 I like round numbers like that.

    Josh Long 1:05
    Yeah, 2025 should be a big year, hopefully for Apple. And we’ll talk a little bit about that in a minute. There’s some good things on the horizon.

    Apple offers a free weekend of Apple TV Plus

    Kirk McElhearn 1:14
    Okay, we want to start by talking about Apple TV Plus is free weekend. And Apple announced this on Twitter, and it’s surprising that they didn’t announce it anywhere else. They didn’t announce it with a press release on Apple’s newsroom website, which is where they put all their press releases. And so there is a free weekend. If you are not yet an Apple TV plus subscriber, you will get from Friday January 3 to Sunday, January 5, the entire catalog with no subscription fee. Now there’s no surprise that they’re doing this because the second season of severance is coming out, I believe, on January 17. So they’re giving people a weekend to watch the first season of severance and hopefully be hooked by it and subscribe for the rest of it. But I’m told by people in the know, in the US, this is a huge football weekend. So Will people have time to watch? I think it’s 10 episodes. Severance. You haven’t watched severance yet, have you?

    Josh Long 2:06
    No, I haven’t. I haven’t seen it yet. I’m not into football either, so I may.

    Kirk McElhearn 2:11
    I think you should watch the first episode at least to understand what it’s about. You might get hooked from it.

    Josh Long 2:16
    Yeah, I have heard it’s good. I think, I think you’re the one who’s actually told me that it’s it’s worth watching.

    USB C is now required by the EU and why no new iPhone SE yet?

    Kirk McElhearn 2:22
    So good is relative worth watching. I would definitely say, yeah. Okay, so we have a big change as of yesterday. So we released this on the second as of January 1, USB C is now officially mandated in the European Union, and this has made some big changes for Apple’s product line. If you look on any EU country, you will find that they no longer sell the iPhone 14 or the iPhone SE. So Apple has always sold the newest iPhone, the previous year’s models, generally another previous year’s model and the SE, so they would have a product line in the US. It goes froM429, up to infinity, depending on how much you want to put into your iPhone 16, pro, Max, Ultra. Now if you’re in an EU country, you’re limited to relatively expensive devices. I looked in France, and the iPhone 15 starts at, I think, 829, or something, which is twice the price of the iPhone. SE at 429, this is like Apple has always, at least for a long time, had this iPhone product line where you could start out at a low price, and every time you’d bump up 50 or $100 or euros or pounds, whatever, you’d get a slightly better device with more features, etc. And this is like cutting the rug out under all the EU countries. Just think of people who got some extra money for Christmas, or often, I know in France, people give gifts on New Year’s Day as well, and they want to go get an iPhone, but they realize that they can’t afford any of the iPhones.

    Josh Long 3:49
    Yeah, I feel like this was a big fumble on Apple’s part. So there were a bunch of moving pieces. I actually fully expected that we would get a fourth generation iPhone SE in 2024 around the March or April time frame when they usually release the SE phones, and when that time period came and when we didn’t get a new phone, I thought, well, that’s kind of weird. In retrospect, I now have a little bit more context of the whole Apple Intelligence thing, which was yet to be announced. Right? It was, it was really Apple dug into that a couple months later at WWDC, and then it became apparent why Apple may have decided not to release an SE phone this year. So the thing is, the timing of it all was that basically the only the chips in the 15 Pro and newer are able to run Apple Intelligence. And so it would have been a little bit awkward for Apple to release a phone and then a couple of months later, say, Oh yeah, by the way, this new phone is not going to get Apple Intelligence. So it was awkward enough that the 15 which Apple was still selling. By the way, when they announced iOS 18 was not going to get Apple Intelligence, you had to have a 15 Pro or newer. So the timing of it was just a bit awkward. And, you know, there was no way Apple was gonna put the 15 pros chip when even the 15 was still being sold. It just wouldn’t make any sense. So I get why Apple decided that it was going to wait until sometime later to put out the fourth gen iPhone SE. But why not put it out in December 2024 like it would have been the perfect time frame to do that, because, you know, it’s you’ve had the new iPhone sixteens out for a few months already. It would be a few months before they usually release the new models. But also then you wouldn’t have been cut off in all the EU countries and not being allowed to sell your current se in those countries. It seems a little bit nutty. There’s a lot of things that I think Apple fumbled here.

    Upside to AI makes 16GB RAM conventional standard

    Kirk McElhearn 5:59
    Well, I don’t know if nutty is the appropriate word for talking about a financial decision of a company that seemed to be worth $4 trillion but I would agree that there is something that doesn’t make sense, that maybe they were caught short in designing a new iPhone SE that needs a chip that might not fit in the body, and will the new iPhone SE have touch ID or face ID and So but yeah, they were quite short on the whole thing, and we won’t see one for a while. I think it’s a shame for European people. It’s one of the biggest markets in the world, you know, US, Europe, Japan, China, those are all big markets in the EU is a huge market for them. We’ll see what happens. Maybe we’ll see something come out in we sometimes get iPads in January or February. Maybe we’ll see an iPhone SE at some point soon, but I think that just missing this Christmas period, when people tend to get extra money. It could be a Christmas bonus from work. It could be, you know, money for gifts, and people might want to get a new iPhone, and they’re going to balk at paying the price of a more expensive one, if they’re not used to buying the top of the line model. We have an article that caught my eye in Ars Technica. Not going to spend a lot of time on it, but the headline is quite interesting. You can love or hate AI, but it’s killed crappy eight gigabyte versions of pricey PCs and Macs. And Josh is smiling. He thinks this is funny and it’s not serious, but it’s true that when you buy a new Mac now it has a minimum of 16 gigabytes of storage. You used to have to pay $200 euros or pounds to go from eight to 16 gigabytes. The last time Apple up the storage was in 2017 when they went from four to eight gigabytes, and that was a big deal. Then you’re actually, if you’re buying a 16 gigabyte iMac right now, you’re saving $200 from a few months ago, when you would have had to pay $200 extra for that extra memory in the device. And we’ve all, we’ve long recommended to people who want to do more than the minimum to get that extra memory. Now, if you get 16, don’t waste your money on getting 24 or 32 it’s probably not worth it unless you have professional needs.

    Josh Long 7:59
    Well, I think this is a little bit funny. Is just that? Well, first of all, I think there’s definitely a market for eight gigabyte devices, right? Like you don’t necessarily need more than eight gigabytes of RAM. It all depends on what you’re going to use your computer for. I always have told people, for years, look, if you’re if all you plan to do is literally nothing more than web browsing and checking your email. You don’t need more than eight gigs of RAM. If, however, you want to do more than that, if you want to use multiple apps at a time, you want to do any kind of like audio or video editing, you definitely need more RAM. So you could save a little bit of money by going with the eight gig models. But now, I guess the point of this article is that, for the most part, you’re now able to get the baseline price that you would get eight gigs before. Now you’re getting at least 16 gigs of RAM. So you can do a lot more at the baseline price without the baseline price increasing. And so that’s a good thing.

    Kirk McElhearn 9:03
    Exactly, and this is for both Macs and PCs. And you know what it cost for them to put 16 gigs instead of eight gigs? It’s like peanuts, right? They charge you 200 bucks. And it may be cost them $1 or two when they’re especially when it’s built into the process of the way it is now. So I just think it’s a good thing that we’ve moved ahead. 2017 was the last time we went from four to eight gigabytes. If we go back enough years, we’ll find that we had from four to eight megabytes. That made a big difference. And you know, people back then said you don’t need more, and you’re never going to need more than 64 kilobytes of RAM. Anyway, a few malware stories this week. Josh doesn’t like the headline on bleeping computers cyber security firms. Chrome extension hijacked to steal users data. Is actually a lot of Chrome extensions that have been hijacked again, aren’t they.

    Chrome extensions continue to be toxic

    Josh Long 9:49
    Right. And the reason why there’s that headline is because this was one of the first organizations that someone noticed had been compromised. Cyber Haven’s not a company that. I’ve ever heard of before, but apparently their extension was compromised. And then it turned out there was a researcher who posted on social media that several other extensions, including a couple of VPNs, had an extension that got compromised. At least five extensions are known to have been compromised and had malicious code injected into the extension. So apparently, the way that this happened was through a phishing attack, and somebody who had access to the code and was able to modify those extensions clicked on a phishing link, and then the threat actor was able to compromise the extension put malicious code into it. So we’ve mentioned before, and it’s worth repeating that you should not be using extensions any more than absolutely necessary. If you’re going to use a browser extension, it should be from a developer that you trust and trust that they know security well enough that they’re not likely to click on a phishing link by mistake and allow somebody else to hijack their extension and use it for malicious purposes. The one extension that I use and recommend that people use if they want an ad blocker for a chromium based browser is u block origin. That’s the only one that I trust, because I feel like the developer knows security and is probably not going to make a mistake like this or sell out to somebody. So that’s the one extension that I’m willing to trust and like pretty much, I don’t use any other browser extensions because of that.

    Age ratings on hundreds of App Store apps are intentionally misleading

    Kirk McElhearn 11:37
    Okay, a couple of child safety groups looked at apps on the Apple App Store, and they found that there were hundreds of apps that are risky, inappropriate for children, yet they are labeled as appropriate for children as young as four. And I mean, this is not surprising, Apple responded to this, saying, We try hard to do this. Blah, blah blah. Developers are required to provide queer age ratings, blah, blah blah, but the truth is that they don’t check and they can’t because most of this app review is automated, and no one looks at the apps. And you know, it would take 10 to 15 minutes to look at an app and see what it does, and they have so many apps that they just don’t have the time to do it. So it’s not surprising if you want to install any apps on a child’s device, you should always check the apps first before you give the device to your children.

    Josh Long 12:23
    Yes, don’t trust the age rating that is, again submitted by the developer, and then Apple just signs off on it, usually with only a cursory review of the app. So that’s a really important point here, and I think that’s kind of the main takeaway from this research. So apparently, there were at least a couple 100 risky apps that have been identified, and 25 of those were chat apps that, according to the researchers, connect kids with strangers, one of which was described by the research as being nothing but pedophiles. So again, all apps that are rated age four plus. So be very, very careful before you just allow your kids to install whatever app on their device.

    Kirk McElhearn 13:09
    I don’t know about you, but if I had a kid these days who was four years old, I wouldn’t give him an iPhone. But that’s just me.

    Josh Long 13:15
    Right. Fair point. Well, obviously you do have to to keep that in mind. But also, at the same time, don’t just assume that age ratings are going to tell the whole story, because they don’t.

    Breached telecom networks won’t publicly acknowledge attacks

    Kirk McElhearn 13:25
    One more before the break, we recently talked about soul typhoon, which is a threat actor that infiltrated a bunch of telecom networks. And apparently there are more telecom networks that were infiltrated, and I believe we already had AT T and Verizon confirming that they were infiltrated, and there aren’t many left that haven’t confirmed, and we just have to assume that every single telecom operator was infiltrated, because you can’t prove a negative.

    Josh Long 13:48
    Well, kind of so the part of the problem is that the US government has named nine organizations that were part of this attack that were breached, but they haven’t actually revealed all the names of these companies, so at&t and Verizon have both come out and made statements saying, Yes, we were among the nine, and we have identified the attacks and who have kicked them out of our networks, and so well, therefore, now it’s safe. Now you can send text messages again, even though there is zero security, there’s zero encryption on text messages. Don’t send plain SMS, text messages with important information, sensitive information, like passwords. I would not assume that just because they think they kicked everybody out of their network, that they definitely have kicked everybody out of their network. I can’t tell you how many times I have, you know, cleaned PCs for somebody who’s who got infected with spyware or some kind of malware, and there were, like, dozens of infections. And then they think that their device, their computer, is clean, and. And it’s like, do you really know your computer’s clean? Like, unless you’re reformatting and reinstalling the operating system from scratch? Like, you don’t really know, because there’s a good chance that something is still there and it just hasn’t been detected, and especially when you’re talking about nation state level threat actors, like, if you think that you’ve got gotten them out of your network completely, I would be a little skeptical of that, like, I mean, they got in there somehow in the first place, and you didn’t notice. So I would take it with a grain of salt that at&t and Verizon say that they’ve kicked out all the bad guys from their networks.

    Kirk McElhearn 15:36
    Okay, we’re going to take a break. When we come back, we’re going to talk about some scams, and we’re going to talk about the many products that Apple launched in 2024.

    Voice Over 15:45
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    iMessage Notification scams broaden in scope

    Kirk McElhearn 16:56
    Okay, we’ve talked about these recent text message scams. In fact, I’ll link in the show notes to an article that Josh wrote about these they’re coming through I message and not your normal text message. And the one that we’d seen a lot was from the United States Postal Well, claimed to be from the United States Postal Service, saying that you’ve got a package and you need to click a link to check something. Josh got a new one recently. Tell us about it.

    Josh Long 17:18
    Yeah. So this is nearly identical to the other ones that we’ve been seeing, except this one seems to be targeting people in California, perhaps because it specifically talks about Fast Track. In California highways, there are fast track lanes that are toll lanes that allow you to get through faster so you can prepay, and fast track is is a way to do that. Not everybody necessarily has a fast track account. If you’re from out of state, they’ll send, they’ll send you a bill, right? They’ll they’ll look up your license plate and and send you a bill. But a bunch of text messages have been going out lately from for me, I’ve been seeing these coming from a country code indicating that the messages from the Philippines, these are I messages, at least the ones I’ve received, and they say something like this, please pay for fast track lane on and then the current date. In order to avoid excessive late fees and potential legal action on the bill, please pay the fee in time. And then they give a link. It’s not active yet. Now this is kind of clever. We may have mentioned this before in the context of these fake package delivery texts, but what they’ll say is please reply with a yes, indicating that you want to receive their messages, then exit the text message and open it again to activate the link or copy the link to your Safari browser and open it. So basically they’re saying they’re acknowledging the fact that these links are not going to be enabled by default in an unsolicited text message, and they’re giving you instructions on how to activate that link so that it will be a clickable or tappable link. That’s kind of clever, that they’re doing that, but this is also a sign that this is a scam, so be very careful about this. No no matter what it claims, whether it’s saying there’s a package delivery issue or anything else, you should always, always be skeptical about any unsolicited text messages or I messages.

    Hospice fraud is Medicare fraud

    Kirk McElhearn 19:13
    Okay, there’s another scam that you discovered about hospice fraud, and this goes beyond just text messages and emails. These include fake ads, phone calls and even door to door visits.

    Josh Long 19:23
    Right. A couple weeks ago, the US, Federal Trade Commission released a consumer advice report saying scammers are committing hospice fraud. These scammers are targeting older adults with calls, texts, emails, fake ads and even door to door visits. So this is a pretty elaborate campaign, and they claim that they’ll set you up with services like free cooking, cleaning and home health care. Now all of this is done by they claim signing you up for Medicare Hospice care. The FTC says then they can bill Medicare for all kinds of. Services in your name, but the thing that you should know is that hospice care is a specialized service for people with a terminal illness approaching the end of life, and only a doctor can certify that you’re eligible for hospice care, and if you do sign up for hospice care when you’re not actually eligible, then this could affect your Medicare coverage in the future. So this is what what scammers are trying to use against people. And so you need to be aware of, first of all, what hospice care is, what it’s for. And if somebody tries to get you to sign in for these services and asking for your Medicare number, that’s something you need to be very careful about.

    2024 was a big year for Apple product launches

    Kirk McElhearn 20:39
    Okay, so MacRumors had an article today on December 31 about the 25 plus products that Apple launched this year. Now, if you think about it, I haven’t done the research to check previous years, but this is a lot of products, and this doesn’t mean new products, right. There were a couple of new products, like the Apple vision Pro, technically the new Mac mini, because it’s a new form factor, but most of them were updates to existing products, but this gives us a launching pad to talk about the year in Apple products, and maybe products that we’ve bought, products that we’ve liked, products that we’ve been disappointed by. Should we even mention the Apple vision Pro? I mean, you did do a demo to see what it’s like. It’s there and it’s not making a dent in a market that doesn’t exist.

    Josh Long 21:22
    Well, okay, so I would argue that this is actually the most innovative product that Apple has put out this year, not popular by any means, and it’s still rolling out in many countries. And you know what? I’m not surprised that it didn’t sell well, first of all, it was way overpriced. Maybe Apple should have held it off. Held off on this for another year or two to work on figuring out how they could improve the the pricing and also the weight. This is a heavy big old VR AR goggles that you can stick on on your head. You know, it may not have been quite ready for prime time, However, having said that, if you can’t afford the minimum $3,500 to get in the door, this is actually a really impressive device in terms of what it can actually do, particularly if you like immersive experiences, or if you think you might be interested in that kind of immersive experience. It’s it’s audio visual experiences that include now a feature film that is designed specifically for Apple vision Pro to be used in this environment. And a whole bunch of like, say, I think they’re about 30 minute videos that Apple has produced, and they’re continuing to put out more of these where they give you a special experience, like getting to hang out with Alicia Keys, or getting to, you know, hang out with baby rhinoceros in Africa, or whatever it might be. But these are really fun experiences. They sound a little bit crazy and like, why wouldn’t —

    Kirk McElhearn 22:52
    Baby rhinoceros? Does sound a little weird, not on my bucket list.

    Josh Long 22:56
    But, you know, I mean, these are really cool thing you you don’t know how cool it is until you’ve actually experienced the demo. So I recommend, if you do have an Apple store near you, it’s free to go get the demo, and at least you can see what it’s like, and that it’s the last few minutes of the demo where they let you get that fully immersive experience, to get a little taste of that. I do think that Apple sometime in the future, maybe, or maybe, or maybe not in 2025 probably more likely not. But eventually they’re going to come out with Apple vision, not just vision Pro, which is this big, clunky headset, but I think they’re going to come out with a lower price point, and possibly even glasses or something else like that. Or maybe that will be Apple vision air. I don’t know vision air. I kind of like that.

    Kirk McElhearn 23:44
    Okay, so as I’ve said many times, glasses don’t work because if you don’t wear glasses, you don’t want to have to buy glasses for this sort of thing. If you do wear glasses, you’ve got to get prescription lenses for your glasses. No one is going to be satisfied with glasses. If you attach something to glasses, that’s great if you wear glasses already, but if you don’t wear glasses, you still have to get glasses for it. So I don’t see this as being practical, maybe, maybe down the line. But would you wear glasses just to have some sort of AR feature?

    Josh Long 24:12
    Maybe that’s a solid maybe, like, I would have to try it out and really see if I if I felt like it was worth it. I have actually tried on the Ray Ban Meta glasses, yeah, because, again, because I don’t wear prescription lenses, and I don’t, I don’t need to wear glasses all the time. It was a little bit too awkward. It would have been strange to go around with glasses all the time just to communicate with an an AI assistant like, you know, and occasionally record a video, you know, when I can just pull out my phone and do the same things, like, Why do I really need to wear that on my face? Where I think this gets more interesting is where those technologies can potentially merge in the future, where we have AI and augmented reality, and if it’s good enough, I could maybe. See myself wearing something like that on my face, but it’s got to be really, really solid. It’s got to be a really solid product.

    Kirk McElhearn 25:08
    Okay, so the two points that I want to make about this list is USB C. As we mentioned earlier, the EU mandated USB C and Apple updated a number of their devices to include USB C, partly in order to continue to sell them in the European Union, these are devices that don’t need to be upgraded, necessarily. They upgraded the AirPods Max with USB C. There’s no other change to it. I think there might be some new colors. They updated the Magic Mouse, Magic Trackpad, and all the magic keyboards to have USB C. And it’s great with my new my Mac that I can use a USB C cable to connect anything now, to charge my mouse and keyboard, to charge my cameras, which have USB C, my iPhone, etc. The other thing I want to say is that this is the year of the M4 processor. And I think this is quite important. In May, Apple released a new iPad Pro, 11 inch and 13 inch with M4 processors. At the end of the year, they released M4 iMac, M for Mac mini, and M for MacBook Pro. And we’ve talked about the Mac mini, it is in a new form factor, by the way, for the Mac mini MacBook Pro, there is M4 M4 Pro and M for Max processors. But having these M4 processors on so many devices suggest to me that the base processor needed for Apple Intelligence is the M1 today. And it suggests to me that in a few years, the base is going to be the M4 so the M1 processors started rolling out in late 2020, and it took less than two years for Apple to migrate all their Macs to M1 processors. It looks to me like they’re getting as many M4 processors as the minimum for everything in order to plan ahead for future Apple Intelligence AI features, for example, the iMac was updated from an M1 to an M3 a year ago, and then it was updated in November to the M4 they didn’t need to do that, but it does suggest that maybe they had too many extra M4 processors, or maybe they wanted to just make sure that everything that all Macs are available with M4 now it still leaves the MacBook Air, which will probably be updated very soon. The iPad Air was updated to the M2 processor, which is a big leap from previously. They didn’t update the plane iPad for Apple Intelligence, but they updated the iPad Mini to the a 17 Pro, which is about equivalent to the M1 so that can also do Apple Intelligence. And when everything gets to the M4 that could be the time that either Apple releases some really big new Apple Intelligence features or realize that they did all that for nothing and don’t have any really good AI features, and the 16 gigabytes of RAM and the M4 processors really aren’t making that much of a difference. So both Josh and I bought iPhone 16 pros. I kind of feel now that I didn’t really need to upgrade. I had an iPhone 14 Pro, which was excellent, and I don’t use the Apple Intelligence features on the device enough, and that camera control isn’t that great for me. I kind of feel that I got duped into buying the iPhone 16 Pro. What about you?

    Josh Long 27:59
    I think the jury’s still out on that one, because, like, so I feel like…

    Kirk McElhearn 28:08
    Come on, admit it. You didn’t want to upgrade and you felt that you were forced because of Apple Intelligence, right?

    Josh Long 28:13
    Well, yeah, so from that perspective, I don’t feel like these are features that I absolutely need and I’m using on a daily basis, where I’m using them, like in every conversation, or whatever, like I’m using the writing tools, but I’m also doing that on the Mac as well. So I do, I do I need that on the iPhone. I feel like that’s a useful thing to have on the iPhone. Personally, the Genmoji, I’ve literally made, like two of them. First of all, it’s, it’s an annoying process.

    Kirk McElhearn 28:44
    Both Genmoji and image playground, I’ve fiddled with for a while to write an article about it for the Intego Mac security blog. I’ll put a link in the show notes after that, I think I’ve made two to just show people how ridiculous they are.

    Josh Long 28:54
    I will never, ever use image playground again unless they significantly overhaul it and make it way better than it is, because right now, image playground is garbage and and, I mean, I’m sorry, but I’m not.

    Kirk McElhearn 29:08
    Kind of embarrassing to be an adult and to use that. Don’t you think it’s it?

    Josh Long 29:12
    I don’t know who that’s intended for, but image playground is terrible. Genmoji, like Genmoji, is really hit or miss, and because it’s not actually emoji and you can only use it in very specific contexts, like I message, I knew from the beginning that even if it were really good at generating emojis, it’s it’s still not going to be used in every context and so. But how many times have I used it? I’ve literally created like, three Genmojis, and I’ve not really used them again after I’ve created them once. So I don’t really feel like Genmoji is practical at all. I’ve never seen anybody else send me a Genmoji. It’s not happened one time yet.

    Kirk McElhearn 29:58
    Okay, well, that’s enough. I was going to say until next year, but it’s already next year for people listening, but it’s not next year for you and me. So until next year. Josh, stay secure.

    Josh Long 30:07
    All right. Stay secure.

    Voice Over 30:10
    Thanks for listening to the Intego Mac podcast. The voice of Mac security with your hosts, Kirk McElhearn and Josh Long. To get every weekly episode be sure to follow us in Apple podcasts or subscribe in your favorite podcast app, and if you can leave a rating, a like or a review. Links to topics and information mentioned in the podcast can be found in the show notes for the episode at podcast.intego.com. The Intego website is also where to find details on the full line of Intego security and utility software. intego.com.

    About Kirk McElhearn

    Kirk McElhearn writes about Apple products and more on his blog Kirkville. He is co-host of the Intego Mac Podcast, as well as several other podcasts, and is a regular contributor to The Mac Security Blog, TidBITS, and several other websites and publications. Kirk has written more than two dozen books, including Take Control books about Apple's media apps, Scrivener, and LaunchBar. Follow him on Twitter at @mcelhearn. View all posts by Kirk McElhearn →