Hello and welcome to the cult cast, the best hour-long Apple conversation you're going to hear all week long.

We have an old friend back with this. Welcome back, Lewis.

Hey, it's great to be back. Ah, my brand new, my brand new beautiful office.

It looks really good. It looks wonderful.

Sparkly. A million dollar view. And we have

D. Griffin Jones coming in from Ohio. Welcome Griffin. Good evening here in my brand old,

adequate office. Is it really evening there? I thought it was like three hours ahead. I round up.

Yeah, indeed. All right. Well, this week we're going to talk about Apple's AI comeback. Yeah, they really are. They're coming back. A lot of Apple AI news this week that is putting the company back in the running. We have liquid silicone that we're going to discuss, whatever that is. iOS 26 Beta 5, Griffin's going to give us a tool of all the latest features. And there's actually one very controversial one that I think is well worth discussing.

And then Griffin also has a very exciting hands-arm with a very exciting iPhone case, which

I'm really looking forward to.

What are the odds?

Yeah, it's going to be a big surprise.

Griffin won't tell us anything about it because it's such a huge surprise and it's so exciting. Unbelievable exciting iPhone case. You might be thinking how exciting could a single case be, but you only think that because you don't know how exciting it is yet. That's very true. I've seen some exciting cases on Facebook, you know, the ads. They always look really exciting, and then you click through, and they're like, you know,

then they're actually not that exciting.

And it's an iPhone case.

All right, let's get on with it.

Lewis, let's talk about Apple's AI efforts.

Yeah, this is crazy, you know, rare all-hands meeting.

Tim Cook, I'd say he reassured Apple employees that the company can still win at AI.

Cook says, we've rarely been first. This is typical, right? We've rarely been first. There was a PC before the Mac. There was a smartphone before the phone. There were many tablets before the iPad. There was an MP3 player before iPod. This is how I feel about AI. Okay, well, fair enough. Apple does tend to do that, show up late to the party, and then... I don't want to move around the floor, but Esther's a surprising admission, though, isn't it? Don't you think? I mean, I think this is all about just acknowledging the situation they're in.

I mean, they've been in all the headlines.

Their stock is kind of flat for a long time.

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