Top Five Tech

Welcome to Top 5 Tech, my weekly show about what to watch, listen to, read, download and

something deep every week.

Also quick shoutout to the 5 star rating from Kiara Sexton in Canada, thank you for that.

On what to watch this week, I've posted I think 5 videos in the last week on all the

new Apple products, and I'm just going to link them all down in the description and

if you subscribe to the newsletter.

The touchscreen ProLed MacBook Pro iPad mini review is out, I put my full iPhone Duo review

out, and I think one of the most interesting videos, if you only watch one, I would take

a look at my iOS 27.3

video because I cover Siri recaps in-depth. I'm gonna be doing another

video only on the audio intelligence and Apple Watch features very soon, but Siri

recaps is the feature that your Apple Watch will be processing conversations

you have either by location, by time, or 24/7 and providing recaps on your iPhone

of everything that was said with bullet points and notes. It is a fascinating

feature. We also talk about it at length on this week's primary technology, but if

If you did not hear about this feature yet or want to learn more.

On what to listen to, I really enjoyed this episode of The Verge cast.

It was Rian Johnson as a guest, the film director who directed The Last Jedi and Knives Out.

He was actually talking to David Amell, who is from the Marques Brownlee team but also does stuff with The Verge.

And they nerded out about cameras and film.

And Rian Johnson, the director, actually made his own camera app to use.

It was just really fun to hear them nerd out about all this technology, cameras, and films.

And I was also a guest on the MacBreak weekly podcast, Jason Snell was the guest host.

I was on it along with Christina Warren and Andy Anotko, we talked about the touchscreen MacBook Pro and a bunch of other stuff.

We'll link that and even a third what to listen to pick. This is only because I am a huge ER fan

I watched the entire TV series back in the day

But Noah Wiley was a guest on the Amy Poehler Good Hang show and if you watched ER back in the day

Or maybe you watch The Pit now

I think you'll enjoy this interview. On what to read, another big feature coming in iOS

27.3 are superpowers for Siri AI and what that means specifically is that app

are going to be able to give Siri AI instructions on how to perform complex tasks within the app and

Mac stories is the article that I'll link in the what to read. They go in-depth explaining these skills

What's going to be new for developers and what's possible with these new skills in Siri AI. A couple examples

If you use Spotify and WhatsApp, two apps that don't typically talk to the voice assistant on iPhone

With these new skills once developers build them in like meta, you'll be able to tell the voice assistant

Hey, send my Spotify

playlist to this person in WhatsApp, and we'll be able to reach across those apps, perform these

actions without you ever having to do anything. And a lot of Apple's built in apps already have

some new features in 27.3. Like I can ask the voice assistant, organize the files in my downloads

folder or on my desktop, and it will just do it create folders organized by type or by content.

It is wild. The Mac stories article explains it even more. I want to download if you're an Apple

pencil user, maybe you just got an iPhone Duo, you got an iPad mini, or any iPad without

Apple Pencil, you have got to try Fineliner. This is a new app from Marco Armit, also the

maker of the Overcast podcast app. But it is a super fun app for handwriting and doing

notes like that. But the onboarding process is especially fun. I don't want to spoil it,

but it is worth trying. It is completely free to download to use unlimited notes and notebooks.

You can buy different paper styles, but you do not need to do it. It's really a free app.

And it's really fun. Also, I want to download this is for all your Apple devices, but they

are for iPhone Duo. This is the portal app escaping to nature. It has soundscapes and

visuals that you can either leave playing on your iPhone Duo or just take a moment and

step back, try to relax. It is a beautifully designed app. The soundscapes and visuals

are really nice. So if you have an iPhone Duo, try it there or on any Apple device,

you can download it for free as well. And on something deep, I'm going to link my co-host

Jason Aiton's article about this. But Google just told schools that if they want access

to Google search for their students' devices.

- that they have to enable and allow Google AI overviews and Google will not separate

them.

That means in schools everywhere, students will not be able to just use Google search

- regular search - without the AI overviews as a part of it.

This seems like a predatory choice and Google enforcing this, especially on schools specifically,

where students ideally should be learning how to research, find credible sources, find

scholarly articles, forcing students to have

to have AI overviews along with Google search.

It feels like a huge misstep.

I'm hoping Google will backtrack this,

and if you do a Google search now,

your mileage may vary, but a lot of times,

the Google AI overview is the entire first page,

or above the fold, when you do a search.

And there's a lot of talk in the tech world

about how Google is killing its best product.

I mean, Google owned search for over a decade,

maybe even two decades,

and this is a complete, unforced error.

With AI overviews, they are hurting search,

hurting traffic to web.

Outside of Google and making the experience worse and now forcing it even in the classroom

I think it's a bad move. You can read Jason Aiton's article talking about it in depth

But again, I hope they walk this back

But that's top 5 tech this week get subscribed and leave a 5 star rating interview in Apple podcast

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I'll catch you next time.