Hands-On Apple 250 transcript
Please be advised that this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word-for-word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-free version of the show.
Mikah Sargent [00:00:00]:
Okay, open the wallet you actually carry. You know, the leather one. And count the cards that exist just so somebody can scan a barcode. The gym card, the library card, the grocery store loyalty card with the hole punched in the corner. None of them ever made it into Apple Wallet because the business behind each one never built, well, a digital version. As of iOS 27, You don't have to wait for them. Today we are making our own Wallet Passes. Stay tuned.
Mikah Sargent [00:00:34]:
Podcasts you love. From people you trust. This is TWiT. Hello and welcome to Hands On Apple. I am Micah Sargent, and today we are taking a look at the Wallet Pass creation feature because, well, it turns out that Apple had a way of creating passes for Wallet that up till this point were very specific and required a lot of sort of tooling on the part of the Wallet Pass creators. There have been some apps, some third-party apps that have been able to create passes, but to be able to do it with the first-party app and not sort of struggle with that has been difficult. But not anymore, folks, because with the new feature, Create a Pass, you do have the ability to do so. Create a Pass is a new option in the Wallet app in iOS 27, and it runs on iPhone 11 and later, so not just the newest iPhones, iPhone 11 and later, and it turns a physical card, a paper ticket, a photo, a screenshot into a Wallet Pass.
Mikah Sargent [00:01:52]:
So when we think about what that is, what exactly is sort of the sweet spot, Apple has some guidance there. Membership and loyalty cards that have a barcode or QR code but have no digital pass. So again, a library card or a gym membership. And again, until now, you only would get a pass in Wallet if a business built it and sent it to you through an app or an email or a special Add to Apple Wallet button, or if you did have some sort of service via a third-party app to do it. So a lot of times, like, the corner coffee shop did not have the ability to do so and didn't really care to do so. When you use this feature, it's important to understand what actually carries over. The code itself is the one thing that gets added to your pass because Wallet will read the barcode or the QR code and then redraw it on your pass. So the scanner at the counter will see that same code as the plastic card or the paper card or whatever it is that you have.
Mikah Sargent [00:02:59]:
But there is one limit that you need to understand. Wallet does not check what a code is for. In fact, I'm going to show you that you can create one with literally anything. And if you do have multiple codes in one spot, a barcode and a QR code and another barcode, you do need to make sure that you're just capturing what you're looking for. So how do we do this? Well, Very easy to do. It's not hard to create a pass, so I'm going to show you how to do so by heading over to iOS to take a look. All right, here we are on iOS, and you can see that this phone has an Apple Cash card, and there's a plus button in the top right corner. So you need to open the Wallet app, and you should see in the top right corner a plus button.
Mikah Sargent [00:03:49]:
As well as a box, and then my favorite button, the 3 dots. We want to click the plus button. From there, you will see that there are multiple options here, and the one that we're looking for is Create a Pass. We'll click Create a Pass, and up will pop these different options, and we'll click Continue or tap Continue, and we can choose between 3 options here: Standard, Membership, or Event. If you're on a newer phone, a phone that also has Apple Intelligence, instead of doing it manually, like we're doing here. You can actually create it automatically just by taking a photo of whatever's in front of you. Apple intelligence will go ahead and find the code in the photo and then create a pass for you. In this case, we're going to create it ourselves, so I'm just going to tap on one, and what we want to do here is choose Add Code.
Mikah Sargent [00:04:40]:
So we'll tap Add Code, and I just so happen to have a QR code there. We've scanned it, and check it out. Here it is on our pass. Now, I'm going to leave this alone because we're going to get more into detail. So I'm just going to choose check. And now we've added this pass to our Apple Wallet. If I tap on this, the code will appear. And if you happen to have more information for this pass, you can view it by choosing pass details in the top right corner with the 3 dots.
Mikah Sargent [00:05:14]:
The cool thing is you can also share a pass. So if you create a pass for your loyalty card for your grocery store, you could share that with family members. Let's talk about what all is involved with these passes and what you can do with them. All right, so there are 3 templates that you have access to in the Wallet app. You can create a standard pass, which of course is just going to be anything. The, you know, think of like an order pickup, for example, or a punch card or a parking permit. Those could possibly go in there. There's membership.
Mikah Sargent [00:05:57]:
That's where you have your gym, your library, your workspace access, member number, status, contact info. That information gets added as fields that you can fill in. And event. So this is where I used to use a third-party app to create Wallet passes for the events that I was going to when the event itself did not serve up Apple passes automatically. It's very easy to do. You simply choose one and then fill it in. So let's go back and take a look at the process of actually editing a Wallet Pass. Here we're going to hit the plus button, choose create a pass, and we will follow through.
Mikah Sargent [00:06:45]:
Let's give it a— we'll give it membership. We'll scan that same code, and then we're going to call it— let's call it Cafe Chihuahua. And then in the top left corner, you can actually choose the icon that you want here. So I'll tap on that and I'll look for something that is related to pets. There's a little dog. And then we can choose our member number. Let's see, what's my member number? 102465374. Those weren't even the numbers that I typed in.
Mikah Sargent [00:07:27]:
We'll choose our name here. So of course, It's me. When does this expire? I'm gonna go with 2042. June of 2042. Yeah, uh, June 1st, 2042. What's my current status? Um, subscribed, I guess? Uh, no, I know. Elite. Whoops.
Mikah Sargent [00:08:03]:
How long have I been a member? Well, obviously since the early 2000s. And the name of the membership program, if you have one, would go here. And so we'll call it, um, Of course. Uh, Paul Chino Club. Now, in the bottom left-hand corner, we can change the background color. So we could do something orange, change it to beams, or rays, or glass. We'll choose glass. You can also choose a photo from the library.
Mikah Sargent [00:08:56]:
Festival, arts and culture, music, movies, sports, community, and theater. So maybe this is where I would want to choose community. What a beautiful community pass. And in the bottom right-hand corner, we can add or remove fields. So here we would take out the, if you wanted to, Paul Chino field, but you can also tap anywhere and add things like a date or a number or an email. Or an address, and of course custom fields as well. So in this case, we'll leave it as is, and we will hit the checkbox. Now I have my Cafe Chihuahua, uh, Pochino Club Elite status pass.
Mikah Sargent [00:09:39]:
And if there was more information, we could have it on the other side of the card. That is how you both create and customize your pass on the phone. Now, along with that, you do have the ability, again, with Apple intelligence, if you have a newer phone, uh, if you take a photo or a screenshot that includes the barcode or the QR code anywhere, you can tap Add to Wallet and then follow the onscreen instructions. So an iPhone 15 Pro, 15 Pro Max, any iPhone 16 or later, And screenshots count. QR code buried in an email or on a venue's webpage can easily become a pass without having to print anything out. So you don't need to take a photo that way. And remember, if that sounds familiar to you, good, you're paying attention because in episode 244, I talked about a few of those camera tricks that you can do. Your iPhone reads what's printed in front of it.
Mikah Sargent [00:10:40]:
It's the same idea behind Live Text and Visual Lookup. After the pass is made, You can even tap View Original Photo to see the image that it came from. And then if you change anything later, just tap the pass, tap that More button, then edit the pass. Love that feature too. Again, that paint palette, it gives you 12 background colors, 7 theme designs. You get theater and music, sports and movies. So whatever kind of works for you, especially if you're looking at a crowded wallet app and That is a great way to make sure that you can find the pass that you created. Now, before we get to the next step, talking about actually using these passes, I do need to take a quick break to tell you about our sponsor because this episode of Hands On Apple is brought to you by ThreatLocker.
Mikah Sargent [00:11:33]:
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Mikah Sargent [00:13:17]:
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Mikah Sargent [00:14:22]:
All right, back from the break, and now let's take a look at how we can actually use these passes whenever we're out and about on our iPhone and Apple Watch, because it's very simple to do. Pretty much you just open your Wallet, tap the pass, and hold the code up to the scanner. So what can your pass actually do? Well, quite a bit. Your pass can show a code, so that will allow you to show the barcode or the QR code that's in, you know, anything that you are in front of that actually can scan or view a barcode, which is great. And it works on your Apple Watch as well. So whether you're on your phone or on your Apple Watch, you can use that pass that was created on the iPhone. You simply open the Wallet on the watch. Tap the pass and scroll down until the code is showing.
Mikah Sargent [00:15:12]:
So it's the same thing in both places. And there is one important catch when it comes to doing passes that are NFC-based. That's a no-go when it comes to custom-created passes. There's no tap-to-pay style NFC in it. So holding your iPhone or your watch against a contactless reader is not going to do anything. A gym that uses, you know, those tap-in fobs, that's still going to be a fob gym because it's not going to work for this. There's, there's always been kind of stuff in the works to open up the NFC chip within the iPhone and the Apple Watch to try to give more ability for you to access those tap-to-pay features, but they for the most part have remained tap to pay, not tap to access or tap to, uh, to use a coupon. And lastly, you can't do rotating codes.
Mikah Sargent [00:16:17]:
So if a code refreshes on its own, there are some tickets in certain ticketing apps, there are certain, uh, loyalty cards in certain pharmacy especially apps, those aren't going to work either, of course, because your pass is going to freeze to whatever code it was that you scanned in. So static means static, no automatic updates if an event moves, and nobody on the other end is confirming if that code is still valid. So if you do need to update your pass, well, you gotta update your pass yourself. So let's take a look at the homework for today. I would say try to find one card that you have, one, one membership that you have somewhere in the world that you pull out the most. Your library, your gym, your grocery store, and then turn it into a pass this week. You've surely downloaded the new updates. Use it once at the counter with the plastic card still in your pocket.
Mikah Sargent [00:17:15]:
That's the safe move. It's as a backup. And then I'd love to hear in the Club Twit Discord whether the scanner took it on the first try or the second try, and if anyone gave you weird looks about it. And by the way, This is kind of exciting. Keep an eye on Apple gift cards because according to some spelunking that's been done, code inside of iOS 27 points to redeeming them just by holding the card to the back of your iPhone. Apple hasn't switched it on yet, but hey, when it goes live, that might be something else that you can keep in mind. Thank you so much for tuning into this week's episode of Hands On Apple. It's been my pleasure to bring this show to you, and I will see you again next week.
Mikah Sargent [00:18:01]:
Bye-bye.
