Welcome to Top 5 Tech, my weekly show sharing something to watch, listen to, read, download,
and something deep every week.
By the way, you can now watch this in Apple Podcasts Video or Spotify Video or Audio,
or of course you can listen wherever you get your podcasts.
Number one, something to watch.
John Oliver actually did a segment on his show last week tonight all about AI chatbots.
And you may or may not like John Oliver, but some of the stories and reporting that he
does during the segment, I think is pretty interesting.
Again, a lot of language and some inappropriate content.
So maybe don't watch with kids around.
But there's a lot of clips and stories about real people using AI chatbots,
even for things like emotional validation, facts and figures, like
75% of kids have used a chatbot.
And there's also clips of Sam Altman interviews, a clip of Casey
Newton from his platformer show.
It gives a good look of how maybe real people, meaning outside of the tech
bubble, or those of us that listen to tech podcasts all the time, how they're
thinking about AI chatbots and some of the guardrails that we need even now.
And AI is definitely a big theme this week, because the thing you should
listen to is Neelay Patel.
he did an episode of the Decoder show as well.
It's just a solo show, not an interview.
It's called the people do not yearn for automation.
He talks about how the industry is having software brain and the companies are trying
to shove AI and automation down everyone's throats, and a lot of people are actually
resisting it.
But I do have some comments on this, I'm going to save for the deep portion of the episode,
but you can either listen to this or watch it or read his article, I'll put links to
all of that down below.
On something to read, Mac Rumors released this article after we recorded this week's
primary technology, saying Apple has given up on the Vision Pro after the M5 refurbished.
Now, we all know Apple Vision Pro has not sold some crazy amount and is definitely not pervasive or ubiquitous,
but it also seems really early to say it's canceled.
And interestingly, Jon Prosser, the leaker who is currently in the middle of a court case with Apple,
with Apple suing him for the iOS 26 leaks, he just tweeted, "Vision Pro ain't dead fam."
That's what he said verbatim.
So I'm really curious about this story. I would read the MacRumors article,
maybe take it with a grain of salt. We'll have to see what the long-term plan is for Vision Pro.
Because MacRumors also shared this article
saying Apple is reportedly questioning
whether they should drop MagSafe
and this seems like a more bizarre story
especially the 17E just got MagSafe
where the 16E did not
and the MagSafe accessory market
both accessories that Apple makes
and the third party ecosystem
doesn't seem like it's going anywhere anytime soon
so not sure about this but the Vision Pro story
I'm curious about
On what to download, I have a shortcut for you this week
and I think it's pretty fun
I call this my basic gradient wallpaper
several of the pages from Basic App
where he has lots of amazing wallpapers, even for free.
And this shortcut is actually going to randomize
what wallpaper you get from about five different collections.
It has gradients of September and February.
It has the sound wave.
And this is going to just get a random one
and set it as your wallpaper.
And the best part is, it's automatically going to recognize
what device you're running this shortcut on
and get the wallpaper formatted properly for that device.
And now, every time I run this shortcut,
it's going to pull a random wallpaper,
to the device that I'm running the shortcut on.
And it changes that quickly.
If you're on an iPhone or iPad,
you'll have to choose your lock screen,
home screen combination to make sure
it's changing the right one.
But you can even automate this to run every morning
and wake up to a really nice wallpaper
from BasicAppleGuy.
I'm also wearing BasicAppleGuy's
little finder guide merch right now.
All right, and finally, for something deep,
going back to Neelat Patel's Decoder article/episode,
John Gruber at Daring Fireball also linked to it,
but commented on the whole AI software brain thing
that's going on.
And even as we talk about AI on primary technology,
it is clear that so much of it is overhyped,
both what the AI companies and brands are promising
and saying what is capable using their products,
and also just what real world people
are being able to use these things for
in their work and daily lives.
So I wanted to make a video,
and I'll link my video down below.
I use AI every day.
There's a bunch of tools that help speed up my process,
whether I'm making videos.
So there's a little me inception here,
picture in picture of me here and down there.
But I'll link my video on YouTube
because I wanted to share about 15.
using AI that's actually useful for my daily work.
But I'll also fully admit that when you try to push AI beyond its limits,
a lot of times it could be more trouble than it's worth or just take too much
finicky messing around and it would just be faster if you did it yourself,
quote unquote manually. And they also talked about Neely and John Gruber,
the reaction of younger generations to AI, Gen Z especially,
just saying they don't like it.
And while I do think there's that reaction for the frustration of what AI can't
I do think like even my kids, I have Gen Alpha and Gen Z,
that there is just a accepting of AI into just daily life,
using AI to plan a workout, which one of my sons did,
or using AI to ask general knowledge questions,
or even to helping with research,
which you do have to navigate and actually show what is real and making sure
facts are accurate. But while there's a lot of AI hype,
both in the industry and from the brands,
I do think there's still actually useful things you can do with it.
If you take a few moments and actually learn how it can work in your processes.
So you can check out my video. I'll link that below and those are all the things to download watch read listen and more
So thanks for tuning in
remember you can watch or listen in Apple podcast Spotify or listen wherever you get your podcast and
Read this as a newsletter that comes every Friday link to subscribe to the newsletter down in the show notes as well
Thanks for listening or watching. I'll catch you next time