Intego Mac Security Podcast

Apple Intelligence is Here! (Well, Almost) – Intego Mac Podcast Episode 367

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A few last-minute thoughts before next week’s Apple product announcements. We take a look at Apple Pay marking its 10th year as an Apple financial service. And we’ve got a hands-on with Apple’s writing tools, part of the new suite of Apple Intelligence features.


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Transcript of Intego Mac Podcast episode 367

Voice Over 0:00
This is the Intego Mac Podcast—the voice of Mac security—for Thursday, October 24, 2024. This week’s Intego Mac Podcast headlines include: a few last-minute thoughts before next week’s Apple product announcements. We take a look at Apple Pay marking its 10th year as an Apple financial service. And we’ve got a hands-on with Apple’s Writing Tools, part of the new suite of Apple Intelligence features. 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 0:43
Good morning, Josh. How are you today?

Josh Long 0:44
I’m doing well. How are you, Kirk?

Latest Release Candidates herald new operating system updates

Kirk McElhearn 0:46
I’m doing just fine. We’re recording on Tuesday instead of Wednesday, when we usually do, because I’m going to be in an undisclosed location for a few days. And the reason I’m mentioning this is because Apple has issued the release candidates of their new operating systems, the dot one. So 18.1 in iOS, 15.1 for Mac OS. These are supposed to be available next Monday, on the 28th we were expecting an Apple event on the 28th to prevent new devices, particularly M for Macs. It’s pretty clear that they’re going to be M4 Macs coming out, MacBook Pros and iMacs, at least a new Mac mini. And as of Tuesday, we haven’t heard anything about this. Apple doesn’t really wait that long if they’re inviting people from the press to come for hands on with the devices after, right? So this will be another prerecorded video thing, which I think is for the future of Apple. It’s always going to be like that, but there hasn’t been the invitation to the press yet. So are they just gonna do this by press release, like they did the iPad mini last week. I don’t know.

Josh Long 1:44
Of course, Apple’s designated leaky mark. Gurman has weighed in on this as of yesterday. He was saying that—which is Monday, again, as of when we’re recording this. He was saying that, well, he’s like, I’m not saying that Apple’s definitely going to have an event like they theoretically could do the press release route. Thing we just know for sure, we’re getting some product announcements next week, in addition to the point one releases, one of the other leaks that there were two different sources, Mark Gurman was one, and somebody who looks at internals of Apple betas and things like that, was able to identify that we’re getting some peripherals as well. So that might mean that we’re finally getting USB C on Apple, Magic Mouse, the magic keyboard and Magic Trackpad was the third one, I think.

Kirk McElhearn 2:33
Well, that makes sense if they’re coming out with a new iMac, because these are devices that work with the iMac for the most part. You can use them with other computers, but with the iMac, I’ve got my magic keyboard in front of my iMac wireless using a lightning connector, and I have to have one lightning cable on my desk for when I charge the keyboard. So it’d be great to get that in USB-C, but it would just make sense when Apple releases a new iMac. Also, apparently Apple’s invited a bunch of sort of influencers, or as the new word for YouTubers, is content creators, and they’re going to get some unique hands-on experience in Los Angeles. But this can’t be the only way that Apple’s going to present these devices. I mean, this is too big a deal, because we’re going to talk about Apple Intelligence in a second. That is the big thing in the dot one releases the first steps of Apple Intelligence, coming next week in beta. Remember, but Apple has been pounding this in in their marketing since June, at the worldwide developer conference, and when we saw the iPhone built from the ground up for Apple Intelligence and even the iPad mini last week. You know, ready for Apple Intelligence. So Apple needs to come out with some sort of fireworks, something spectacular to say. Well, we’ve been talking about it for months, and it’s finally here.

Josh Long 3:52
Well, parts of it are finally here. As we mentioned before, it’s rolling out in stages. We’re getting the first release of some features. So we’re getting some Writing Tools, which we’ll talk about, and not a whole lot else. We’ve got the glow on the outer border of if you’ve got the the new AI, enhanced Siri, and really, there’s not a whole lot else besides that, which is kind of disappointing, but we’ll talk more about that later.

Apple Pay introduced ten years ago

Kirk McElhearn 4:21
Okay, Apple celebrated an anniversary. Recently, it was 10 years of Apple Pay. 10 years. It doesn’t seem that long. For some reason, I find it really useful. Sometimes, one of the problems is, if I buy something from a website with Apple Pay, then I haven’t created an account on the website, and it’s there’s no record of the order, and you can’t follow up like that. But on the other hand, if you don’t want to give your credit card information to a website, you just double click, double press, Touch ID, whatever it is to pay with Apple Pay. And it’s extremely practical. It’s easy to use. I trust that the privacy of it. Now, there is one limitation here in the UK. I don’t know how it is in the US, yeah. If you buy something for more than 100 pounds and less than 30,000 pounds, you get an additional protection when you buy with a credit card. Now I know you get protection in the US with a credit card as well. I don’t know how it works. This is because you are entering into a credit agreement with the merchant, right? And so this gives you more protection in case something goes wrong, etc. The problem is, if you pay for something through Apple Pay or another third-party payment system, like World pay or things like that, I think even stripe you don’t get that protection. So I’m very careful to not use Apple pay for anything that’s expensive and that might have a problem, that might need a return or a repair or something like that. I don’t know what the woes are in the States.

Josh Long 5:41
That’s a good tip. The funny thing about this, I think we’ve mentioned before on the show that I hadn’t used Apple Pay. I had never even set up Apple Pay until earlier this year. I guess technically, I’m not even sure if I’ve used it once in public, yet, I did set it up, but I’m so like in the habit of just getting a card out of my wallet and using that at kiosks when checking out that I still haven’t thought to oh, let me try using Apple Pay when I check out this time, it hasn’t happened for me yet.

Kirk McElhearn 6:15
So there’s also been a different uptake in the States. When I moved to the UK in 2013 almost every merchant took contactless credit cards already, and it was just the norm. When you got a new card, it was contactless. Whenever I go to the supermarket, I use my watch or my phone to pay. I don’t even bring a card with me anymore. It’s just it’s a reflex.

Josh Long 6:36
Wow. My wife’s actually been using Apple Pay for quite some time, because she, she normally will just bring her phone with her, right, and she’ll, she’ll have her driver’s license with her in her phone when she, for example, goes to the gym, right? She doesn’t really need to have her whole wallet with her if she needs to stop at the store afterward or something. She’s got Apple Pay on on her phone. So not really any reason to go overboard with carrying a bunch of things around.

Apple Business Connect offers logo verification in email.

Kirk McElhearn 7:02
There was another interesting thing in the UK that for a long time, contactless payments were limited to 30 pounds. The worry was someone steals your credit card, or you leave it at a store and forget it, and people can buy a whole bunch of stuff contactless because there’s no proof you don’t enter a PIN or anything like that. But Apple Pay was limited to 100 pounds because of the security of Apple Pay. Now they’ve changed for contact us. I don’t know what the limit is anymore, but Apple Pay was practical to use, because 30 pounds at a grocery store, that goes pretty quickly, right? And so using the card was not practical. Anyway, Apple has, and I’ve been saying for years, they want to be a bank, and they tried with the Apple card and the Apple savings account, which they still have, but apparently it was Goldman Sachs they partnered with, who didn’t want to continue because they’re not making enough money. I don’t think Apple is ever going to become a bank. I think they’re good as an intermediary payment processor because of the security of Apple devices, and I trust them, but with that limitation that if I buy something that costs a lot of money, I’m not protected, and that’s a quirk of UK law. I don’t know if they’re going to be able to change that. We talked a few months ago that Apple had launched their Apple Pay Later system, and they scrapped it after not very long. And that’s partly because these pay later things, where you buy something, you pay in three or five payments, they’ve come under a lot of regulatory scrutiny that didn’t exist at the beginning. I bet Apple will go back into that after the regulations are resolved in various countries. It’s almost like it’s almost easy for Apple to skim money off the top, like that. It seems like they don’t really have to do much work, you know, they’ve got the back end, but they don’t have to sell anything to people. So why wouldn’t they take advantage of their phones becoming payment devices? Okay, last week, I got an email from Apple, and this was kind of interesting, because I saw something I had never noticed before, and I mentioned it to Jos before the show, and we talked about it. Okay, don’t know what this is. I think later that day or the next day, Apple issued a press release entitled, Apple expands tools to help businesses connect with customers. The thing I saw in my email was, if you’re using Apple Mail, at the top of the email, you have a little circle, which could be the initials of the person sending to you, the first letter of a company name or an avatar if someone’s in your contacts. And what I saw was an Apple logo. It didn’t really make me think much, until just below all the message headers, it said verified logo. A verified logo. I don’t think I’ve ever seen that before. So I clicked it, and I got a dialog that says, your email provider, iCloud, verified that this email is coming from the owner of the logo and domain email.Apple.com, so think about this like the good old days of verification on Twitter right. Having a blue check meant that someone had verified that you are who you are. Apple launched this two years ago, and we’re going to link to. Two support article about BIMI support in Apple Mail. This has something to do with something called D mark, which is Domain Based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance. It’s a spam prevention thing. And I don’t know why Apple all of a sudden started this. By the way, BIMI brand indicators for message identification. I don’t know why Apple all of a sudden started with this suddenly, if they said that he introduced it two years earlier. But it was interesting to see the press release that Apple is starting to communicate about something that it took two years for them to get off the ground. It’s kind of weird.

Josh Long 10:35
Well, Apple’s not emphasizing BIMI. In fact, they don’t even mention that in their press release. They call this Apple Business Connect, and they say businesses of all sizes, regardless of whether they have a physical location. That’s an interesting point, by the way, can create a brand that appears to over 1 billion Apple users. And Mac groomers points out businesses have already been able to claim and manage their location place cards for maps. That’s Apple maps using Business Connect. But now Business Connect is also available to businesses that operate a service or that operate online without a physical location. So that’s one interesting aspect of this. And then the other is that now those business indicators and that verified logo are going to show up in multiple places. So this is a good thing, I think, for smaller businesses especially. But obviously even big businesses can benefit from this as well. Having a verified logo when people are using Apple Mail or some of these other Apple services, wallet, etc, I think that’s a good thing. It’s nice to see that now, at the same time, you do have to be a little bit careful about this. So this is an element within the Apple Mail app that, right below the headers, says verified logo, and there’s a Learn More link, you could potentially get into a situation where somebody’s trying to mimic that, and maybe they stick that at the top of their email body, which is just below that fold, and trick people into thinking that there’s a verified logo when it’s actually a phishing email. So I think Apple could tweak the graphical user interface a little bit, maybe put it in a different location. It’s not perfect. I think what Apple has done, but at the very least, if you know what to look for, and you’re careful about how you go about it, at least you will soon be able to verify that an email legitimately comes from one of these companies in the future.

Kirk McElhearn 12:33
One thing that’s interesting is in Apple’s press release, they show someone’s email inbox on an iPhone, and they show these images to the left of the emails. I don’t see this in mind. Maybe this is a setting in mail that I’ve not turned on. In mail on the Mac, I don’t see them either. I only see them when I’ve selected an email or opened an email up at the very top, next to, you know, the sender and the subject line, etc. I don’t know how Apple has done this in their screenshot. Maybe it’s just setting a mail that I’ve never turned on. It would actually be practical to see that.

Josh Long 13:06
One thing that’s noteworthy here, too is that and maybe that particular logo is in the inbox feature. It’s possible. Maybe that hasn’t rolled out yet, and that’s coming in an update. But one thing that you’ll notice here, if you look closely, is that the brands, those that have a verified logo. It’s kind of square shaped. This is actually pretty similar to you mentioned Twitter, you know, classic Twitter verified. You can actually have a verified business on now called X with a gold badge instead of the blue check. But the company logo is actually square if you’re paying for one of these business accounts on that platform. And that’s very similar to what Apple is doing here. The official business logos are square. Everyone else is like, you know, my face logo, or whatever, that’s in a circle.

Kirk McElhearn 13:54
Okay, let’s take a break. When we come back, we’re going to talk about some more Apple news.

Voice Over 14:00
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Apple will introduce Hearing Health features

Kirk McElhearn 15:16
Okay, another new feature coming in next week’s operating systems released to the iPhone is the new AirPods Pro Hearing Health features. We talked about this a few weeks ago. Apple has gotten approval that AirPods Pro can be used as hearing aids in the US and Canada so far. So this isn’t going to be available anywhere else. You can use AirPods pro with your iPhone to do a hearing test, which will indicate which frequency ranges you have a hearing deficit. The iPhone can build a profile to compensate for those, and you can use your AirPods Pro as a hearing aid. So we have a link to an article on the verge where a journalist was talking about how he used this and tested his hearing and how practical it is now. He said he’s only 40, so he doesn’t have much hearing loss. And I’d like to hear people my age, you know, discuss this, because I know I have hearing loss, particularly in one ear at higher frequencies. I just think this is one of the most interesting features Apple has had this year, because it’s a health feature for people who no longer have to spend 1000s of dollars for hearing aids. May not need hearing aids all the time, but can use them when they need to with a custom hearing profile that’s easy to create.

Josh Long 16:24
I haven’t used this yet, but I do see a lot of people talking about this, and everyone who has tested this so far has had really positive things to say about it. So I think one of the one of the biggest positives is that this actually makes hearing aids affordable. So in for many people, hearing aids are actually really expensive if you don’t have insurance that can cover it and or whatever. And AirPods pro being usable for that makes them makes hearing aid type functionality available to the masses at a much lower price than what a lot of people are having to pay. This is going to be kind of a hit to the hearing aid industry, I feel like, but at the same time, this is a net positive, I think, for all the people who need enhancements to their hearing.

Kirk McElhearn 17:10
So another recent function in Apple’s operating systems is Distraction Control. I like the name they chose for that Distraction Control. So when you go to a website and something distracts you, think a pop up, think an auto play video. You can click a button in the top of Safari, or tap if you’re on an iPhone or an iPad, and you can make that item disappear, and it will be remembered when you go back to the website. We’re going to link in the show notes to my article How to Use Distraction Control in Safari to remove unwanted web page elements. I actually don’t find myself using this a lot because I have an ad blocker, but there are times when there are repeated pop ups on websites that don’t get blocked. And I’ll just go to Safari, if it’s a website I go back too often, and I’ll use this Distraction Control to get rid of it. Sometimes the pop ups still appear, but then disappear immediately. Sometimes autoplay videos don’t always get removed when I go back to a website. So it’s not 100% but it’s really quite good. And particularly if you just want to read an article on a web page, and it constantly assailed with moving items and things and ads in the middle of articles, you can clear them all out and read the article more easily.

Josh Long 18:20
And we bring this up just because a consortium of publishers in France wants Apple to ban this. They don’t like this because, well, you know, they probably don’t like the idea of somebody being able to poof away all of the advertisements and things that they have people paying for, paying them to put in place on their site. Well, good luck with that, because guess what? Ad blockers have been a thing for decades, and I don’t think you’re gonna have too much luck getting Apple to remove this feature.

Example of social engineering used in scams

Kirk McElhearn 18:53
Okay, we spend a lot of time talking about scams here, because we want the listeners of this podcast to be aware of the way to scam so they don’t get scammed. We’ve talked a lot about the porn scam emails, where someone sends you an email and said they’ve taken control of your computer, and they’ve seen all these things, and you have to send bitcoin. I got one of these the other day that had my address and phone number in it. So that means that there are databases that have leaked people’s addresses and phone numbers. And this really makes you think that the scammer knows a lot about you, but of course, it’s just a random you know, something they found in a database where they got an email and an address and a phone number. And there are lots of databases. We always talk about data breaches of usernames and passwords, but there are tons of data breaches for databases with more information like this.

Josh Long 19:38
Exactly. And again, this it’s plausible enough having some bits of information that really are tied to your personal identity, especially the home address. I think that’s the part that’s most concerning of all, right, maybe somebody got my phone number from some database, but they know where I live, right? That’s a little scary. The whole idea behind a lot of scams is they scare you and get you to react based on some irrational fear. And that’s exactly the mind games that scammers like to use, because they can get you to do things that maybe you wouldn’t normally do if you weren’t in that fear, fight or flight kind of mode.

Kirk McElhearn 20:21
Okay, there’s another scam, and you wrote an article on the Intego Mac security blog about it. AI scam bots are trying to recover your Gmail account. We know the scams of trying to get you to give your account information, but this one’s really clever, because you get a warning that someone’s trying to access your Gmail account, and then you get a phone call from someone saying they’re from Google.

Josh Long 20:42
That’s right. And this sounds like a real person. In a blog article (that we link to in the footer of our article on The Mac Security Blog, if you want to read the full experience), this person detailed—in very fine detail—the whole process. But basically what happened is you start getting these alerts indicating that somebody is trying to get access to your Google account, and you can approve or deny it, and then if you are hitting “No, that’s not me,” then pretty soon, you’re going to get a phone call that sounds like it’s a real person. And this is the really key point here. It sounds like it’s a human, and in this case, they had an American accent, the person said. And they had a conversation with the person who they were trying to scam. But it’s not really human. So typically, in the past, these things have been done through call centers. They, you know, find some cheap labor, and they get somebody or team of people really to make phone calls to people to scam them. Now they’ve cut out the middleman. They’re no longer having to use real people. Now they can just use automated systems with realistic sounding voices to have a conversation with you. And when you push back a little and say, Well, how do I know you’re really from Google? Then they say, Oh, I’ll send you an email so you can know that I’m really from Google. And so they have, you can have back and forth conversations with a bot, and it may not be obvious that it’s a bot.

Writing Tools are a practical feature of Apple Intelligence

Kirk McElhearn 22:15
Here’s the thing, none of these companies will ever call you. Your bank will never call you. Remember that your bank will never call you. The fraud department will never call you. Now, I left the bank a few years ago because their fraud department called me. I said, I’m not taking your call. I called the bank’s fraud department number, and I said, Why is the fraud department calling me? Can you put me through? And they said, No, the only way you can talk to them is if they call you. I said, I am closing my account today because banks should not call you. No company, Google’s not going to call you, Apple’s not going to call you. The next thing is going to be that these bots sound like Tim Cook, right? Or they sound like Elon Musk. I’m going to give you a million dollars, right? Something like that. So don’t trust anyone who calls you. Don’t ever trust anyone. All right, we said we’re going to talk about the early Apple Intelligence tools. And Writing Tools is probably the most, I want to say the meatiest item in the first salvo of Apple Intelligence. It’s going to be coming out next week. We have an article on the Intego Mac security blog about how to use Apple Intelligence Writing Tools. And well, as a writer, I find this quite interesting. Now, none of these tools are new. You’ve been able to access these in a whole bunch of online services for quite a while, but they can be really useful for a lot of reasons. So let’s go through what you can do with them. You select some text, and then you’ll get a little Apple. Has this little Apple Intelligence logo, but it’s really small, little blue logo that appears on the left of the page. Otherwise, you can Control click and choose Writing Tools, and you’ll get a pop up that offers the two big buttons are proofread and rewrite. So let’s say you’ve written an article and you want to do more than just basic spelling and grammar checking. You can choose proofread, and it will do a very good job of proofreading the article. The problem is it won’t let you choose to accept or not accept individual changes. You accept everything or not. So that, to me, is totally useless. You need to be able to know what’s being changed and approve it. So if your proofreading is hallucinating, then that’s not very good, right? So the rewrite tool is interesting. Let’s say you’ve written a document and you want it written better. And by better I mean you want it not to sound clumsy. If you’re not a writer and you don’t have writing skills, you want it to sound not so clumsy. Well, the rewrite will do this, and you have three possibilities for rewrite the plain rewrite button keeps the same style. If you choose friendly, professional or concise, you’ll get different types of writing. The friendly is like, well, you know, if you want to do this, and the professional is, should you desire to perform this action? And the concise really makes it concise. And these are all kind of useful for long documents. But again, you don’t get to choose. You’ll. Okay, you should always copy these and paste them in another document. To compare, I used the rewrite tool. I want to say fairly often today I was writing an article. There were three instances in the article where there were sentences that I didn’t like, and often I’ll use a thesaurus to look up a better adjective or a better verb. But now I’m using this tool. I use the rewrite option to see what it offers, and sometimes it rewrites the sentence more than I want, but it has the adjective or verb that is better, so I don’t accept the entire sentence being rewritten, but I use this as a thesaurus. Out of the three sentences I checked today, I used only one of the options that it offered. I thought that the other two were eventually good enough. But this is a really good tool if you are a writer, and even if you’re not a skilled writer and you want to improve what you’re writing instead of using banal verbs and adjectives.

Josh Long 25:52
This sounds really cool. I haven’t actually had a chance to use this very much yet, but

Kirk McElhearn 25:56
Because Josh won’t install the betas on any of his devices.

Josh Long 26:01
Now, hang on, Kirk, I actually did yesterday install the release candidate of iOS 18.1 on my main device, which I never do. I never, ever install betas. But because this is a release candidate, I’m like, Okay, well, technically, this is probably the version that’s coming out next week anyway, so I’ll turn on betas temporarily. And by the way, we’ll have an article on the Mac security blog where I walk you through this process. If you happen to be using lockdown mode, I haven’t seen anybody else write about this, probably because very few people use lockdown mode. But if you happen to be using lockdown mode, you can’t enable betas and opt into the public beta, you have to turn off lockdown mode first anyway. Check out my article if you want the details about how to get Apple Intelligence early. There is technically a wait list, and we’ll have to see next week how long, whether that wait list gets long once everybody is trying to get it all at once.

Kirk McElhearn 26:59
When they first released these features in the developer betas, there was a wait list as well, and I installed this immediately on my iPad Pro, and I clicked join wait list, and about five minutes later, I was approved. So I’m not really sure, are they approving based on the device? You have remember, this is in beta, even at release next week, and maybe they don’t want people with old devices. I don’t know. We’ll find out next week. Maybe they don’t want too many people at once. My theory about this has always been I’m old enough to remember when the Newton came out in what 9293 and handwriting recognition was so bad that people made fun of Apple, even to the point of Doonesbury running a whole bunch of strips about Newton handwriting recognition. And I don’t think Apple wants that to happen again. I think there are enough people in Apple who remember that even this is, you know, pre Steve Jobs returning. They don’t want that sort of embarrassment. Anyway, there are four more Writing Tools that are useful. One is a summary feature, and you’ll see this in the mail app. You’ll see this in messages. You’ll see this in notifications. You can summarize a long article and get a two or three paragraph summary, which is really good if you get a long email. So these tools are available not just when you’re composing things, but when you select any text. You can select a text on a web page and get a summary of it, and that can save you a lot of time if you’re looking for specific information. You can get a bullet list of key points, you can get a list which is like steps. And you can also get a table which is something you’d use if there’s data in an article, and it puts it on a very useful table. The problem with Apple Intelligence is it’s like, Oh, my God, Apple has this great new technology, and yet this is like the most, the blandest AI possible. You know, people hear about AI and all the things it can do, and this is like, boring AI. This is like Tim Cook’s AI, not Steve Jobs AI, but these are really practical tools if you’re writing or if you’re reading. So if you want to try this out, you can do this on Monday, probably when the final versions of these operating systems come out. If you can join the wait list, we’ll know next week how that works. Maybe Josh, by then, will install these on a couple of other devices so you can try them out. Until next week, Josh, stay secure.

Josh Long 29:10
All right, stay secure.

Voice Over 29:13
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 →