AirPods with cameras leak, Apple Maps ads, & Siri AI on the AppleInsider Podcast

**Wesley Hilliard** (0:08)
Hello, and welcome to the Apple Insider Podcast. I'm your host, Wesley Hilliard speaking, and I am joined once again by William Gallagher. I'd like to thank our sponsor this week, MasterClass, and if you don't want to hear anything about sponsors, you can listen to the Apple Insider Plus version of the show. It is ad-free and has a special bonus segment at the end, where we're going to go into detail this week. About Apple and ads.
We'll have a little bit about this later in the show, but this has obviously been brought on by Apple Maps getting a new ad system. And I just want to talk a little bit about how Apple is approaching this, and maybe why it's not that big a deal. William, how are you doing?

**William Gallagher** (0:50)
Well, frankly, I'm annoyed, actually. Not quite steaming, but I was. And you're looking at me now, I've got to explain. I can't just go, annoyed, how are you?
You know, the Siri AI carplay problems? I believed I had fixed it, and I had for 20 minutes. And if I had, if it had lasted for 21 minutes, I was on the verge of sending in feedback, contrived feedback to Apple about how it was all my fault. But then the fix stopped working, and it's still as bad as ever.
Grumble over. There we go. Otherwise, fine, how are you?

**Wesley Hilliard** (1:27)
Good here. Yes, Apple CarPlay is still kind of broken in the betas. I will switch apps and tap an icon, and then that icon will just start hovering in space, and nothing will happen, and I'll have to reboot the CarPlay system to get it to work again.

**William Gallagher** (1:46)
So there's definitely a CarPlay issue.

**Wesley Hilliard** (1:48)
Yeah, you have problems.

**William Gallagher** (1:50)
I have all sorts of little beta problems, and nobody has quite this... Apart from CarPlay and Siri AI, that's just universal. Why Apple hasn't noticed it yet. But we're on the same betas, testing on the same devices, and yet it's all different for everybody. I've never once had that, but I've had loads of things you haven't. So maybe this is telling us, don't use betas.

**Wesley Hilliard** (2:12)
Oh yeah, there's always going to be some kind of silly problem somewhere, and my Apple Home has been fine, but for some reason, specifically, my level lock just keeps disconnecting from the network and then reconnecting. So that's the whole thing.

**William Gallagher** (2:28)
Sorry, is that your front door lock?

**Wesley Hilliard** (2:31)
That is the front door one. It is now technically matter. They did a matter upgrade a while back, and it's been solid and it's right next to an Apple TV and the main home router. So there's really no excuse. It's just suddenly gone. I don't know if it's a problem with the level lock. Maybe I've damaged it in moving and whatnot. But every now and then it's just like can't be found. 24 hours, 72 hours.
But luckily I have multiple accesses to my home, and we don't really use the front door. We use the back door because that's the way our driveway works.

**William Gallagher** (3:06)
Yet again, this happened last week. I see an opportunity to break in, and yet I am thwarted. Okay, fine.

**Wesley Hilliard** (3:15)
So first, I want to get into, this is probably going to be like half the show.
Apple leaking everything that it has in its product pipeline. This actually happened before with iOS 26
Mid beta cycle last year, Apple released a beta version with a bunch of product identifiers. It happened again, but this time not on a next release beta, but on a release candidate for macOS Tahoe, 26.7. So it's the next version of macOS Tahoe. It's in late grade testing. And here is just a bunch of feature flags that are turned on that should be turned off. Now, just to explain quickly, in all of the software testing, doesn't matter what you're testing at Apple, there are feature flags that they can have switched on or off. And basically, it lets them see whether or not a certain feature is enabled to be tested in that beta. Those feature flags can be turned on whether or not it is a potential release endpoint for that release, basically. So that's why in Tahoe, even though almost none of this is gonna be a Tahoe feature or device or whatever, a bunch of feature flags were turned on that shouldn't be revealing product identifiers and names and code that could be referencing future products.

**William Gallagher** (4:48)
I was wondering why it was in Tahoe and not a developer beta, but I guess we'll never know unless there's a transcript of somebody's very bad HR meeting at Apple Park this week.