MacBreak Weekly 438 (Transcript)

Leo Laporte: It's time for MacBreak Weekly! We've got all the Mac news and we've got Jason Snell, we've got Andy Ihnatko, Rene Ritchie. A great panel to talk about the latest from Apple. It's next on MacBreak Weekly.

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Leo: This is MacBreak Weekly, episode 438. Recorded Tuesday, January 20^th, 2015.

Give 'Em the Shoes

MacBreak Weekly is brought to you by FreshBooks, the simple cloud accounting solution that helps millions of entrepreneurs and small business owners take time billing and get paid faster. Join over 5 million users running their business with ease, try it free at FreshBooks.com/macbreak. And by SquareSpace. Creating and editing your website is easier than ever, using their redesigned interface, SquareSpace 7. Now with Getty Images, Google Apps integration, 14 new templates and more! Try the new SquareSpace at SquareSpace.com and don't forget to enter the offer code MacBreak at check out to get 10% off. And by Nature Box. Nature Box ships great tasting snacks right to your door. Start snacking smarter with wholesome delicious treats like roasted Peruvian corn kernels! To get your complimentary Nature Box sampler, visit NatureBox.com/twit. That's NatureBox.com/twit. It's time for MacBreak Weekly, the show that covers your latest Macintosh news. Andy Ihnatko from the Chicago Sun Times is here. Looking beautiful, crisp, clear.

Andy Ihnatko: Hi there.

Leo: He's using the vernier filter from Instagram today I think, just dynamite. All you need is a pearl earring and you're set.

Andy: And an engineer had mastered the technique for this by staring into a concave mirror.

Leo: It's amazing.

Andy: I've been told not to move because it really screws up the vibe.

Leo: One of these days we should do an oil painting version of you guys. Rene Ritchie... oh, nice.

Off-screen: Do you like that? This is my on the fly...

Leo: You warmed it up. Looks like he's on the...

Off-screen: I could actually just make it very Instagram here.

Andy: You need 4 of me and then you need to sort of put them in the corners.

Leo: The Warhol, yes. The Warhol filter. Also with us, Rene Ritchie from the very cold, powerless Canadia. iMore.com.

Rene Ritchie: I have 3 UPS's set up Leo, just in case.

Leo: So you have power now.

Rene: Yes. But like I said, I've got 3 of them set up just in case anyone tries to interfere with the podcast. Is it vernier (uses English pronunciation) or vernier (uses French pronunciation) I never know what to change for it.

Leo: Freaking Frenchies. I don't know!

Andy: Advanced, or not?

Rene: Or is it like a Dutch vernier or something?

Leo: Who knows what the Dutch is? I think Van Gogh is Van (makes a coughing noise) so who knows what the Dutch is? Maybe Jason Snell does, he's also here.

Jason Snell: Hello, I'm here.

Leo: Van Hock?

Jason: Van Gogh.

Leo: Van Hock?

Jason: It's Klingon.

Rene: Klingon!

Leo: I'm sorry, go ahead Rene. You said something?

Rene: No, I got yelled at because I said Gouda and someone looked at me and said it's houda. It's houda!

Leo: It's not houda! It's Gouda. Like gooda baby.

Rene: I agree with Jason, it's Klingon.

Andy: I was once giving like a talk in front of like on a panel in front of like 500 people and in the middle of this really complex thing that I was trying to explain mis-attributed a quote about why do you rob banks, it's because that's where the money is. And someone else on the panel decided to interrupt me and correct the quote.

Leo: Oh I'm sorry Andy... actually... that quote is...

Andy: Had to just like... do I yell at this person and call him an idiot or do I just continue with me talking, because that... oh god. I still relive that moment at least once every five months. Thank god you pointed that out!

Leo: It was like pretty boy Floyd or something. Who said it?

Andy: I said it was Dillinger but it's not Dillinger, it's someone else.

Leo: It's not Dillinger. I'm sorry Andy, I believe you're mistaken.

Andy: Because I could see the looks on everybody's faces in the audience because everybody's saying my god, did he just mis-attribute that vague piece of trivia? Thank god you stepped in sir! And yes now I'm.... on the list of things to do when I get a time machine, it's not in the top 100 but it's on the list to go back and just say god you're such an idiot.

Leo: Molly Wood calls it the literal nut. And I think it's very apt.

Andy: A tomato is not a vegetable you know, it's technically part of the fruit family.

Leo: Willy Sutton. Fritz says Willy Sutton which I think is correct.

Rene: We were talking the other day that if you put anything up on Twitter, you'll get maybe one reply to it but you'll get 300 people telling you about every typo or mis-attribution.

Jason: Have you seen that Tweet? There's a great Tweet that said you get more responses from saying something wrong than for asking from help. It's called Godwin's Law.

(laughing)

Jason: It works.

Leo: That's good.

Jason: It's brilliant.

Leo: And just we'll gloss that, it is not Godwin's Law. We know that.

Jason: That's the thing. Zing.

Leo: Wow. Wow. I don't know, this is going to be kind of a slow week I think. I don't know really if there's anything... I mean Apple opening 5 new Chinese retail stores.

Off-screen: I was stretching. I was, yeah.

Leo: Doesn't really kind of like galvanize...

Off-screen: I was like it's either 5 total links in the dock or I just put everything on file.

Leo: How about Apple cuts off developers in Crimea? Is that... no.

Rene: They abandoned them? Did they leave them to float?

Jason: Show's over everyone!

Leo: Thank you for joining us. We're just going to be talking about comic books, we're going to talk about audio.

Andy: What kind of sandwich did you have today, what kind of sandwich do you wish you had? I went to the really good bakery because I'm having a really good pasta dinner tonight and they didn't have the crusty kinds of bread, they had the soft kind of bread. I mean it has a good crumb to it, but I just like that crunch of Italian.

Leo: I have a related story. Chipotle is very interested in Apple Pay.

Off-screen: I thought you might like that.

Leo: Not using it. We're interested.

Jason: You're making me hungry, Leo.

Leo: Thinking about it. It's gotten to the point now where we're doing stories where people are thinking about things they might do. Like that Apple Touch patent.

Jason: I have an Apple related thing. I was watching the football games this weekend, I was amazed at the marketing money that's going into different banks.

Leo: Lots.

Jason: All doing their own ad saying yay we have Apple pay! You know, it's kind of brilliant because I don't know whether Apple is kicking in or if it's just the banks spending their own money but there was a Bank of America ad, there was a Chase ad.

Leo: Oh do you think that's Apple co-op marketing?

Andy: They've done that before.

Jason: My guess is no. My guess is that the banks all want to be seen with Apple. But isn't that amazing that there were at least 3 unique spots and from different banks.

Leo: Including the NFL who's saying oh we take Apple Pay at our stadiums. Yeah.

Jason: Just falling over themselves trying to say it and I know that every time one of those ads runs somebody who has an Android phone that has been doing NFC payments all along is like why are they doing it?? But the banks are very excited to be working with Apple on Apple Pay. I mean and they're spending money marketing it. It's pretty crazy.

Leo: Thank you Jason for trying to bring some relevance to this show.

Jason: Just trying, anything.

Andy: Let's have a poll across the panel. Like talk about the last time you used Apple Pay and either level 2 where the clerk registered surprise that you were using it, or level 1 in which you had to explain to the clerk how Apple Pay works. Last time I used it I was at a Panera and I did have to say oh well it's a phone payment system and the reason why... all you have to do... just press the button at your register and it will accept.

Leo: Wow. That's interesting. Even though they had it. They had never been trained in it or...

Andy: Well I think it's more of a case of people not really using it. It's like I use it all the time at like at certain different stores and chances are at least 2 out of 3 that I will be introducing the concept of these payments to somebody during that transaction.

Leo: That might give light to the fact that lots of people are using Apple Pay.

Jason: I know my Whole Foods they don't even blink any more.

Leo: No, yeah. I've used it at Whole Foods.

Jason: Although the flow there is pretty direct. I mean if I don't slide my card and tap you know it's a payment as registered for them and they just move onto the next step, but I do that all the time.

Rene: I'm still eagerly awaiting the arrival of PayPal... sorry, Apple Pay in my great country to the north here. Hopefully this spring. Fingers crossed for this spring.

Jason: Everything comes late to Canada, that's just how it is. Sorry Canada.

Leo: Someday. Um. Okay...  here's a story. (laughs) About Apple Pay! Apple patents! I don't do patents normally because Apple patents everything. They have an idea. They fart. They patent it. And so a patent does not, contrary to what every tech blog who is equally suffering for a lack of news might indicate, an Apple Patent does not indicate any future plans. It is not a forward looking statement. It's just like well we ought to patent this. However, I'm desperate. US Patent and Trademark Office on Thursday published an Apple Patent application. By the way, application, not they got it. For an iCloud based touch ID syncing fingerprint protected Apple Pay terminal.

Rene: I thought you were going to do the stylus patent, Leo.

Leo: I will do that. That's coming up! It's going to be all patents today. That's coming up, the go pro one. I've got... (indistinguishable). Cause we're basically...

Rene: This week in Apple patents.

Leo: We're stuck.

Jason: We've got some great stuff, come on.

Andy: We'll have a dramatic reading of warranty card information from all our different iOS devices.

Leo: Actually Jason and I did something we may resort to later on which was a dramatic reading of the chatroom.

Jason: Oh yeah. Oh man. That's gold.

Leo: That's fun. That was comedy cold my friends.

Jason: Read the chatroom as a teleprompter. There's gotta be a show in that somewhere.

Leo: It was good. Apple ranks only 11^th in patents according to the chatroom, IBM number 1, Samsung number 2. But Apple's trying to catch up. Remember, IBM's been at this a little bit longer, so you'd expect them to be number 1. Samsung who knows, I don't know why they have so many patents.

Rene: Because they're a conglomerate.

Leo: And scared of Apple.

Rene: Patenting oil rigs and toilet seats and all sorts of things.

Leo: And scared of Apple. So this could do away with the manual Touch ID setup and power the next generation of Apple Pay enabled POS terminals. Or not. It might not. It might not be anything. Finger biometric sensor data synchronization via cloud computing device from related methods. So it collects your fingerprint on a primary device and then is uploaded to iCloud. I think this is the whole thing that everybody was worried about with fingerprint Touch ID is it's going to be uploaded to iCloud. Nobody wants this. So Apple's patenting it. But I think people would be very nervous about the idea that your fingerprint might be stored on the cloud as opposed to just on the device. In fact, the iPhone doesn't even store your fingerprint. It stores metadata that...

Jason: There's some data in that secure enclave, yeah. In the chip.

Andy: This is where we're all supposed to every time you use an ATM that we don't absolutely, even the bank ATMs you're supposed to just give that card skimmer a little bit of a tug to make sure that it looks like it's actually built into the machine.

Leo: Really? Wow.

Andy: You haven't heard of these things? Where people sort of break in and stick fake ones on top of it and so they're just basically... you're just handing over your credit card information and of course the ATM doesn't work and they have your card information.

Leo: Skimmer. They call it a skimmer.

Andy: Yeah, exactly. And I'm not sure if I'd be really comfortable with using my fingerprint to register at an actual point of sale terminal as opposed to this is my phone, I own this phone I know the technology behind the fingerprint scanner here and I know that whatever data constitutes equating this with my identity is not going to leave this device, I'm not sure if I would do that at any other store.

Leo: Have any of you encountered, I've started to hear about this lately, using Apple Pay and then asked to sign?

Rene: Yeah it's their option. They can choose whether they want you to sign or not.

Leo: Kind of takes some of the excitement out of it.

Jason: I think it's going to change over time, my understanding is it's a store policy thing and it's usually a large price. Some of that comes with the idea that if you just tap and NFC a card, you could have stolen the card. And so they want a second factor. They want a second bit of identification, now with Apple Pay there's TouchID so there is a second factor. So theoretically down the road they could say oh well if you're paying with Apple Pay we don't want to sign but a lot of times the scripts are in place and the payment systems that just say look it's over $100 or over $50 we want you to sign anyway. It's done but shouldn't be necessary.

Rene: Our NFC is on a card not on our phones and there's no secondary authentication so most retailers here have an arbitrary amount that they'll no longer allow the tap for. Some it's $30 some it's $50 some $90. The interface doesn't change so you're asked to tap it and then you hit it several times, frustrated, before the clerk says oh no sorry after $50 you have to use the PIN and chip. But everyone has those kind of safeguards.

Leo: Here in the states in October we're going to be chip and sign.

Jason: Optionally, or chip and PIN. You can do either one. But the PIN isn't mandatory.

Leo: Required only that you do sign. Which... (grumbles).

Jason: We're half way there. I have that now at my Whole Foods, I can spend up to I think it's $30 or $40 with a credit card and they won't ask me to sign below that point they're like, they don't care.

Leo: I would like to see this everywhere. I'm just thinking about signing, I often get large dollar figure shipments from UPS and others. And they say... Apple says this, somebody's going to have to sign before we'll leave this Macbook but it would be great if they started, if people like UPS started using Apple Pay that you could just tap it would be real. Oh but wait a minute, there's a problem there. Because it wouldn't be you, it could be anybody. Right? At least they'd know who accepted the shipment.

Andy: Well. I think the biggest problem is that UPS is at the level of efficiency where they know exactly how many seconds it takes to get from the truck to the front door and how quick they can get that.

Leo: It's true.

Andy: So if they know the people, if they ask someone to sign something, it's one question, one answer, it will definitely work. If it's tap and pay and that loses them 8 seconds per transaction that's a deal breaker.

Leo: That's a good point. Although I think it would be faster, it would be the opposite wouldn't it?

Andy: Also how many people walk to the door with their phones to sign for a package?

Leo: How many people put on their pants before they walk to the door, that's my question.

Andy: Well if UPS guy isn't wearing pants either...

Leo: He's wearing shorts.

Andy: Meet us half way.

Leo: I can wear my boxers, it's okay. I just wave at them through the bars when they...

Andy: I just wear my cousin Eddie shorty bath robe.

Leo: (laughing) Oh. Somebody was saying at Walgreen's they require Apple Pay plus PIN. So that must be another option.

Jason: Yeah I think there's this validation step that...

Leo: I think second factor is fine. Although Apple Pay is because it's a fingerprint plus the phone.

Jason: Yeah that's the idea, you'd like at some point it to just be like if it's Apple Pay we know that the second factor was applied.

Leo: Now you're doing 3 factor if you're doing a PIN or a signature.

Andy: To me the big win isn't just the convenience of hey all I've got to do is tap my thumb and it goes through, the real factor for me is that the store never sees my bank or my credit card information, they just get a little magic beam that says give them the shoes. And even if it was a signature and a PIN every single time I would probably still do that just for that alone.

Leo: Yeah. The other thing is signing doesn't seem to be very... significant in terms of identification because well... I learned this from Lisa because I was always signing my name. And she says oh you don't have to sign your name, just go boopity loop. She does that, it works. You could write Mickey Mouse, you could put an X. They're not matching it to anything, they're just saying oh you signed! So that's not really ID. It's a custom.

Rene: And they can look at it later, if you dispute it they can check your signature.

Leo: Right. Well who's X is this? I don't know.

Andy: It's not the mark you make so long as it's a consistent mark.

Leo: Nope.

Andy: Like my signature is just muscle memory at this point.

Leo: Doesn't seem to even have to be consistent.

Jason: Not for credit cards because they're not matching it. I think that's true for things like signing a check maybe or something.

Leo: A legal document or a check I understand but I'm saying at the point of sale terminals you can make any shape you want and nobody checks it and the charge goes through. I draw little fishies.

Andy: What I'm saying is if you dispute a $580 Xbox One purchase on your credit card and they show you a signature that looks absolutely nothing like the 10 signatures before it or after it they're definitely going to give you a problem about it, but if your signature is a happy face and 2 dots and a smile, you're going to have a hard time proving that yeah I know that this time was a flower and the next time was a happy face the time before that was a shoe, but trust me I would definitely definitely not have done a wristwatch as a signature thingy.

Leo: That reminds me of the things the bank do. The picture that you're supposed to... I never really understood how that is in any way more secure. So I have like a picture of a high boy, some piece of furniture.

Jason: Don't give it away! That's your secret code!

Leo: It's not! It's meaningless! It's a piece of furniture and then they say attach a phrase to this and if you don't see the high boy and your phrase and usually my phrase has been stupid effing... picture code.

Andy: It's the other way around. It's not there to verify you, it's there to verify the actual bank.

Leo: Yeah. If I don't see the high boy...

Andy: And also, you log into these things like probably once a day or once every other day just to make sure you're on top of your balances and your activity and the most direct and absolute way to not to get you from yellow alert to red alert, that oh this doesn't look the same way it does every single day.

Leo: I understand that but I just think that... it's an anti-phishing measure, I understand that. But it's a flawed anti phishing measure because first of all if somebody's phishing you they could capture that image and put it there or most likely just not put it there. Are you going to stop because oh thank gosh they don't do the site key, I can skip that today. You're not going to go, oh wait a minute, this couldn't be my bank. Where's my high boy?

Andy: Okay but to that effect you could also just like to make sure you always have money for the tolls and money for lunch you could just have a milk crate outside your door and just keep it filled with money.

Leo: I do. It's in my mattress.

Andy: Just grab a handful every time you go out. With the understanding of that, perhaps other people will be taking your money away from you.

Leo: It's an honor system!

Andy: Most people... most people, yeah exactly. We've lost all the records for the back when we moved, it sounds like a big problem and really it isn't so long as everybody just come right in and tell us you have with us.

Leo: This is the dirty little secret of the banking system. It's an honor system.

Andy: Well it really is. The big failure of security is that they've sort of trained every consumer to not really care that much about the security of their own credit card information because every time you have a dispute it's like okay great we'll take that off your card. Fraud fraud fraud. It's so much less expensive to simply write off $531 against your card than to put in all the infrastructure to make it really really difficult for anybody to do a fraudulent transaction and that's why we're in the situation we're in right now.

Leo: I agree. As long the bank...

Rene: And they make the money back with, I remember I was getting royalty payments from Hong Kong and it cost almost 80% of the royalty payment to get it accepted at my bank and I said don't you just process all this in the same branch in New York anyway? And they said sure but we get to charge you a big fee for doing it here.

Leo: (laughing)

Rene: So I mean they get offset.

Leo: Crazy. You may remember the anti-trust lawsuit that went on for a long time against Apple, Google and a lot of other large Silicon Valley companies, they had made agreements which is illegal with each other not to poach each other’s employees. It's actually protected by anti-trust law and they lost in court, they have now settled. Apple and Google settled for $415 million dollars. That money doesn't go to Apple or Google, it goes to the tech workers who accused the firms of conspiring to avoid poaching each other’s employees. And the smoking gun was pretty hot. The barrel was hot to the touch and they deserved to lose this case and I presume they've stopped doing that. $415 million though for Google and Apple it's like big deal.

Andy: But that's really bad news for these employees because from now on you know that if you're not getting headhunted by the competition it's because you're really not that valuable.

Leo: You suck.

Andy: (laughing)

Leo: You just suck. No one wants you. Alright we're talking about Apple news, it's kind of crumbs. But it's not going to be a crummy show, there's lots. You know, if you have Jason Snell, if you have Rene Ritchie, if you have Andy Ihnatko we could talk about anything and it would be entertaining.

Jason: And we may.

Leo: And I think that's what's coming up next on the program.

Rene: Show about nothing.

Leo: Show about nothing. Our show today brought to you by FreshBooks. This was, you know, I'm thinking probably the first web 2.0 site I ever used back in 2004. I was a suffering freelancer. Never got it together to send out my invoices at the end of the month and subsequently never got paid and when I found out about FreshBooks it was actually Amber MacArthur told me about it, I was going up to Canada once a month and I had to bill them not only for my time and hours but also for my expenses. They had to pay me, and FreshBooks just solved this. I mean it really took the paperwork out of it. It's accounting made for you. The non-accountant. 5 million people now use FreshBooks since I discovered it 10 years ago. It is fantastic. If you're still using word or Excel or Google Docs. People who use Google Docs to use an invoice and then share it with your client, let's not do that. FreshBooks is the best way to to create professional invoices in minutes. They have a big pay button on each invoice by the way which makes it very easy for your clients to pay you. And it turns out, your clients do want to pay you. They're just like you, they're putting it off. Make it easy for them. On average FreshBooks users get paid 5 days faster. That's... I mean, that's fantastic and apparently, I don't know how this correlates, on average FreshBooks customers double their revenue in the first two years. I think it's just because they're smart people. If you're using FreshBooks you're paying attention. FreshBooks integrates with your apps like Google Apps, PayPal, Stripe, Mail Chimp, Fundbox, Zen Payroll. It accepts all the top credit cards and other online payment systems. Your client's happy. It's also built for growing businesses, obviously. And that's because it scales. You can add clients and projects and staff very easily. You'll spend less time on paperwork, you'll get paid faster and you can actually use the FreshBooks app to put time and hours, they have an iPhone and an Android app that put time and hours right into the invoices to take pictures of receipts so you get paid back. I just think this is such a great solution and boy your accountant will love it come tax time. Instant access to complete financial reports so you can make smart decisions for your business and your accountant can do his job or her job. And of course they have great award winning support. 24/7 free forever. Try FreshBooks free with no obligations, start your free... there they are, that's the support team. They look nice and Canadian. You can kind of tell that's a Toronto warehouse can't you? FreshBooks story, if you ever want to know, go to the web page and read about it. It's a really great story. Try FreshBooks free, no obligation, we've got a 30 day free trial for you. Just go to FreshBooks.com/macbreak. And I think that they ask you in the sign up where did you hear about us? If you would put MacBreak Weekly in there, everybody would be very happy including me. FreshBooks.com/macbreak. You don't need to give them a credit card to try a free 30 days, just sign up and it's really great. I really love it. Now I gave you guys some time to think. (laughs)

Andy: (laughing)

Jason: I've got one.

Leo: Thank you Jason Snell!

Jason: It's under development, two interesting things related to making money on the app store.

Leo: I loved this Monument Valley infographic. Is that the one you're talking about?

Jason: Yeah that and Marco Armand disclosed his 2014 overcast sales numbers which is interesting too so it's people saying look this is how much money I made on the app store.

Leo: You know I'm a fan of transparency, we're very transparent about our business. What's nice about that is if you're interested and you're thinking, do I want to be an active developer, what is it going to cost? What is the return likely? Now we have to point out Monument Valley was the game of 2014, we all played it, we all loved it. But for them to say here's the numbers, I think that's fantastic. It's a small team, there's 8 folks in London that do this. They show the sales by country, they show the development cost, which that's one of the things that's kind of unheard of. It cost for the original Monument Valley which doesn't have that many levels, but it took them 52 weeks, 55 weeks I'm sorry. $852 thousand, that's how much it cost. Then they did remember the forgotten shores pack which was more puzzles, that took them another 29 weeks and cost another $549 thousand, so the total cost here about $1.4 million but the revenue, $5.8 million. So it shows, it's not a great business, but it's a good business.

Jason: It's pretty good.

Leo: It's okay, I mean there's a lot of overhead.

Rene: 81% iOS.

Leo: Now that's interesting. This is the payed story here. iOS they sold, the total sales were 2.4 million, they sold 1.7 million, more than half of that to iOS, only about $300 thousand to Android.

Andy: Yeah that's not surprising.

Leo: They had a big day when Amazon gave it away for free, I guess I don't know if that was more than a day.

Rene: A big day, they had a lot of downloads and not a lot of revenue.

Leo: Not a lot of revenue. 407 thousand downloads though. More than the total Android downloads by a significant number. Now they say it's installed, they sold 2.4 million but it's installed in 10 million devices. Now that's not necessarily piracy because... I'm an example of this, I bought it on my iPad but I put it on my iPhone.

Jason: Yep, me too.

Leo: So that doesn't mean... but they do say there's a lot of piracy. They think there was a significant amount of unauthorized download.

Andy: At this point there's two big problems about targeting Android and why so many developers don't mess with it until after they've made nut out of iOS because you're not going to get the same sort of numbers because really you can only really target people running Android 4.0 and probably only 4.2 or 4.3 and that's just a really small wedge of the pie right now because of carriers not updating their phones frequently enough and another bullet point from that piece was how much piracy there is on Android strictly not necessarily because it's not a safe platform but you can just go into settings, flip a switch and say yes run any software from any source whatsoever even this here file that I'm providing to you. Whereas almost nobody these days is going to jailbreak a phone unless they're doing it with intent so to speak.

Leo: 50% of the players who started the game, how many of you here finished Monument Valley?

Jason: I finished the original, I'm still slowly working through the forgotten shores because I don't want it to end.

Rene: I know, right?

Leo: In fact if there's, the only complaint about Monument Valley anybody has is that it's too short.

Jason: Sure. It's not particularly replayable, it's not particularly hard to solve the puzzles.

Rene: But compared to like a movie price or something I'm fine with the amount of time.

Leo: How much is it, $3.99?

Rene: Yeah.

Andy: It really is like listening to a song where you're meant to listen to it and get to the end of it and then enjoy this piece of art that you're experiencing.

Leo: And by the way, the music... it is kind of like listening to a song, because the music is beautiful. It's very soothing, you can put on your headphones and there's no timer, you can take your time.

Jason: And it looks great. The graphics are fantastic.

Andy: Yeah.

Leo: 50% finished it, I'm one of the people who did not, but all the rest of the panel did so... 75% of...

Andy: I did not.

Leo: Oh you did not? So it's 50%.

Andy: It's kind of like what Jason said, I was just enjoying the colors and the sounds and just twirling things around more than okay gotta finish this level.

Leo: I'm not in a hurry, exactly.

Andy: It's so weird in that yes there are specific goals but I've never once been the slightest bit frustrated in trying to get the game to work or oh man I died again, it's like no you're just enjoying, it's like a Rubik's Cube can be a very meditative thing just to hold it in your hands and tumble even if you have never actually solved it.

Jason: I think this is why some of the criticism of the game is kind of crazy, because people do say oh it's not a very hard puzzle and I solved it really fast. But it's like this is not that kind of game, I keep telling people I hate this because it sounds so cliché to say it's an experience but it's an experience.

Rene: It is.

Jason: It's fun to be playing the game and that's sort of the point of it.

Andy: That's like saying too few notes in the song.

Leo: I have to say though, as good as the revenue was, it probably would have been significantly higher would it have been a premium product, right? That seems low compared to even something like Flappy Bird which is advertising only.

Jason: I think that was always one of the debates about Monument Valley is whether they should have done the free to play where they give you a level or two and then you bought the rest of it and they decided not to do that. And it's gone okay for them, I don't think they're kicking themselves but you do wonder.

Rene: Plus there's a thing though, there's different models for the freemium and paying for levels, like paying for moving ads has not been very successful, people will put up with ads and they'll play a couple levels and they'll go to the next free game. It's only when you get into things like in game consumables that you make a lot of money and I don't relish the idea of having to walk around there paying for like crow jumping points or something.

Andy: Yeah, that's what I was going to say. Like what are you going to do for Monument Valley, for $10 you can buy a ladder that you can just bridge things with and climb over things with? Part of it is again that meditative process where you just simply spend some time and spin, flip things around. If at any point it gives you a decision point where do you want to buy something or do you want to keep playing the game, that would have disrupted just this wonderful like mental flow that you're in. I would not be, I've not talked to the developers but I would not be surprised if that was an aesthetic choice as much as anything else.

Leo: And now let's move to Marco. Overcast, which is Marco Arment, Marco Arment doesn't need the money. He was... I'm presuming.

Jason: I don't know about that.

Leo: Well, I shouldn't say that.

Jason: He's very young.

Andy: He's got children.

Leo: But he was one of the original tumblr folks and I'm sure made a little money there, he also created Instapaper which was a great success, he's since sold it. I get the feeling that Overcast which is his podcast app, was a labor of love more than...but I don't know. You know him, I don't know him.

Jason: I think he got some money obviously from the tumblr sale but he's a developer and he wants... I think it gave him the freedom to explore what he wanted to do and work on and work on an app that the audio engine took him probably a year to build and he had the freedom to do that, but still he wants to create, he wants to work on something sustainable, something that brings in enough money that he can support his family ideally on that and what's interesting here is that this a niche right? Just podcasting apps alone, it's a niche, Apple makes one for free and what's interesting is he did a free app with a single in app purchase to unlock all of the kind of premium features. So it is a free to play kind of approach with the unlock, it's a shareware kind of thing. I think that's really cool, what's interesting about the numbers is we all knew there would be a big bump when it was first launched but it looks like it settled down to a reasonable amount of new purchases every week. And that's kind of encouraging as a renewable resource for app development.

Leo: He's currently at $20,000 a month which is a good profit. He says that's before taxes and costs but he does call it profit.

Jason: And don't forget Apple's 30% which I'm amused by. You hear about Apple's 30% then when you see the specific number that Overcast made Apple $70,000 last year. It's like wow 30%, that's kind of a lot.

Leo: He says total revenue is $164,000  for 2014. $164,000 after Apple but before taxes and expenses. The only reason I mention he doesn't need the money is maybe that then it makes sense that it's a free app with a single in app purchase of $5 to unlock everything. Probably I would guess, I don't actually... I don't see.

Jason: He explored a lot of different models, he was initially thinking about doing some very different things with it and decided that you had to be free in the app store to be tried.

Leo: I think this is the ethical way to do it, it's not expensive, it's free to try. The paid tier is not necessary, in fact it looks like only 14.7% of his downloads paid. Which might be a little disheartening. He says 200,000 people that launched the app and created an account out of 318,000 downloads. So you could see you get a lot of downloads, you get fewer people considerably fewer actually setting it up, and then far fewer actually buying it. Only 46,000 people bought it. Although not bad revenue, right? He only pays, this is interesting, $750 a month for his server.

Jason: Servers are so cheap it's crazy.

Leo: That's really important if you want to be an indie app developer. Well what are my ongoing costs? He says it's half my family's health insurance.

Rene: If you listen to his show he talks about how he's learning go now to try and optimize it further.

Leo: Yeah. And go is specifically a multithreaded language from Google that really is about server side right? He wouldn't write the app in go but he would write the server side in go, yeah.

Jason: I think one of the reasons his revenue is going okay now is because you can start as a free user. And use it for a while and then say, oh now I do want to add those features and convert.

Leo: From talking to Phil Lieben over at Evernote that seems to be what Evernote's strategy is. They always have given away Evernote and they have a premium yearly subscription which is a little different than pay once thing but still, similar enough. And I think the conversion rate is similar and he's very happy. Go ahead.

Rene: The amazing thing about Overcast is I was just looking, he gives you some of the stats inside the preferences screen and I only listen to... I work at home so I don't have time to listen to a lot of podcasts, I used to listen to them all the time when I commute but even on my schedule it saved me 7 hours in the lost two months, not by artificially accelerating what people say but giving you a perfectly listenable podcast and just trimming down the excess amounts of blank area.

Leo: Right.

Rene: And that to me is incredibly valuable, that's 7 more shows that I managed to fit in that I wouldn't have otherwise.

Andy: It's also a feature that you don't see on the other podcast apps, which sets it apart. What I loved about these, about the graphics that he was showing was that it's not one of these apps that made a lot of money off of its initial publicity and then started tailing off and is now just sort of a nominal event, it seems to have really become part of the vocabulary of the app store right now, it's a really good choice of an app too because people get tired of a game but once you get like a sort of pantry staple app like a podcast app where this is something that almost everybody is going to want to try and almost everybody is going to see the advantages of, that's the sort of thing where it can continue to sell at a good sustainable rate month after month after month.

Leo: I think a nice, yeah $10,000 a month income I think for a lot of developer would be very happy with that.

Jason: And keep in mind Marco is the only one who works on this, he doesn't have people doing his work for him, he doesn't have other programmers working for him. Really the premise here is can one person build an app and have that income be enough that that's their salary.

Leo: Yeah.

Jason: And now Marco has a podcast so he's got two salaries, so he's half podcaster half developer, but these numbers seem like they would support a single developer pretty well.

Leo: And I like that.

Andy: But the big thing is that I wouldn't jump on the oh Marco doesn't need the money but it really does point to this and of Monument Valley, this isn't really a quit your job and start developing apps sort of job, this is a have a steady source of income that you can live on while you're developing this app in whatever time you have, whatever time you can pay to it because it wasn't... this wasn't something he just batted out in a few weeks, this was something he'd been thinking about for a long time and then developing for what, a year and a half? And if he was... that time the app is not generating any revenue.

Jason: Exactly.

Andy: It's helpful that he... everyone I know who's a successful app developer was able to do that in the essentially by giving up all of their free time for a good solid year to get that first app out the door. There's no gold rush, it really is about working hard, being very very meticulous, having a game plan and having really not just having a creative game plan but having a business plan for how am I going to get this developed and how much time can I afford to put into this before I release it.

Leo: You do have to point out that because of his well-known name, because of his podcast he probably has a little marketing advantage.

Jason: Oh yeah.

Leo: When Overcast came out, everybody, we, everybody reported that here's the new podcast app from Marco Arment. That carries a lot of weight.

Jason: That's part of being an indie developer, is you've got to market yourself. And that's because your audience is going to be the people you can market your products to.

Leo: Marco writes, overall I'm very satisfied with Overcast's finances so far, I'm not... it's not setting the world on fire, but it's making good money. For most people the app store won't be a lottery windfall, but making a decent living is within reach for many. He also points out that after the self-employment penalties in taxes and benefits... that's one way to look at it. It's not exactly a penalty. If you had an employer they'd pay half of it, but... I'm probably coming in under what I could get at a full time job in the city, and that's the point is that a self-employed person, anybody that's been self-employed knows this, certainly in the states anyway, you pay a higher self-employment taxes and you have to buy your own benefits and all of that, he says but I don't have to actually work for someone else and something I don't care about. I work in my nice home office, drink my fussy coffee, take a nap after lunch if I want to and be present for my family as my kid grows up. And actually as a parent, I think that that may be the single most important value for all of this. We're all looking for ways to be the traditional model, the worst thing about working at Apple and developing the iPhone is you don't see your family. For years. And I think we're all looking for a more gentle, sustainable way of living. And so I think that's a good point.

Rene: I had a really good job in product marketing for enterprise and I went to do iMore and I have, I get to work at home, I get to see my friends, I get to see my godchildren and I haven't regretted it a day.

Leo: Yeah.

Andy: One of the many wise things that one of my best friends used to say all the time is that you know, you're going to be working, whatever job you do you're going to be doing that for about 50 years, that's a long time to spend doing something you hate.

Leo: Actually, come to think of it, all four of us are self-employed. Jason most recently in the...

Jason: Newly... yeah, no. What Marco said totally resonated with me.

Leo: I bet it does.

Jason: And I totally see where he's coming from.

Leo: You have young kids.

Jason: I drink tea instead of coffee, otherwise I'm right there with him.

Andy: We're all sitting down some place with two hours in the middle of the afternoon. We're all self-employed.

Leo: Yeah, we're taking naps. Anybody that can take a nap. That's the...

Jason: Yeah, I can't do it. I'm not a napper.

Rene: It is super interesting that...

Leo: But you could if you wanted to.

Jason: I guess, yeah.

Rene: To me the interesting thing is people like Marco, people like Lauren Brickter, the people who can make an app on their own can just utilize this platform to do the entire thing.

Leo: That's what's so remarkable, that's right.

Jason: Well the reason Overcast has been so successful too is because Marco put in a year trying to figure out some pretty radical things with audio. Most podcast apps use the basic audio functions that are available in the system.

Leo: Why did he do that? What's wrong with core audio?

Jason: Because he decided, I mean it's the reasons I think that it's been successful, he decided that he wanted a podcast app where when you make it run a 1.2x or a 1.4x you don't get the little clicking sound that core audio does when you ask for... it sounds smooth, he had this idea for a smart speed where it's analyzing for gaps for silence gaps like what radio stations do to squeeze the silence out. And he wanted that in a podcast app because he wanted to listen to more podcasts and core audio didn't, on its own the audio stuff didn't do it. He needed to go one layer deeper and that, you know, he's scratching his own itch there right? That's part of it, and then he's a programmer, he has the ability to build those tools.

Leo: A skilled programmer, yeah.

Jason: And as a result he's built a tool that's got some features that will be very hard for his competitors to replicate even though now they now what they are. And that, you know, that's one of the reasons it's been successful and that does go back to him spending a lot of time on the technical side of this.

Leo: I have never listened to our shows on Overcast. Anybody do that? What does it sound like? Is it a lot faster?

Rene: And the thing that's nice is the audio boost also will equalize sounds of different podcaster different volumes and sometimes they are audio boost to make sure you can hear them no matter what sort of traffic or...

Leo: And one of the things I did very early on when we started TWiT and I was the guy doing the engineering was make sure we heavily compressed audio so that it would... that's exactly right, very little dynamic range.

Jason: But some podcasts don't do a very good job of that.

Leo: The truth is, the funny thing is that when I gave up that responsibility, we've slowly slipped back to a full dynamic range podcast which I don't like but I can't convince anybody to compress the hell out of it.

Jason: In some scenarios a dynamic podcast can sound really good, but then in other scenarios it doesn't and so Marco's voice boost...

Leo: It's actually smart.

Jason: Just does that yeah.

Leo: I think I'm going to have to recommend people start using Overcast.

Jason: Yeah, what happens though was then somebody talks to you live and they think that you may be drunk. Because why aren't you talking faster? And then they realize halfway through the conversation oh I'm used to listening to you at 2x.

Leo: (laughing)

Rene: Like Andy said, a couple features that really set it apart.

Andy: Yeah. I like Overcast but there are a couple of shows where I kind of like the way that the speaker has a tone of voice where they can like, they will pause judiciously, I can't use Overcast with the Steven Tobelaski files.

Jason: Well you can because it's got a per show setting, so you can just turn those off.

Leo: Ohh. Cool.

Andy: The implication was on the feature not on Overcast. There are other things that I don't, I wouldn't say that I don't like about Overcast, it's just that it's a different... it doesn't, it's not a podcast player for the way that I listen to podcasts.

Jason: Interesting.

Andy: But like the podcast catcher that I use all the time, it has a horrible interface but everything I want to do, it's there in the interface somewhere, so once I set it I can easily... I'm talking about an Android app but. For media I use iOS almost as much as I use my Android phone. But I don't find that as a fault in Overcast. I think that I like the simplicity of it, I like the fact that it really is a let's do these features extremely well and let's make as good an experience as possible. But the whole thing really does point to how the user never gets to see how much work even the simplest things can be. And that, I think is the signature difference between developing for iOS and developing for other mobile operating systems, that I've... we've all spoken to so many different mobile developers and as much griping as there is about Xcode and about how Apple runs developer relations, nobody says that iOS isn't the easiest, least hassle-free thing to develop for. Simple things like making sure that an audio... if one app wants the audio channel that another app has, how difficult is it to make an app that behaves properly in Android versus how easy it is to do in iOS. So I think that every time that you see these screaming complaints, oh this is 99 cents or this is $5 and it should be free, you don't know how hard it is to do even some simple things in so many different apps.

Leo: Well and here's something I didn't know, Marco says the biggest expense in 2014 was a trademark agreement. He had to pay I guess somebody else owned the name Overcast and Marco said my other name sucked so he payed $12,000 for the right to use the name Overcast and to trademark it.

Rene: Yeah, co-existence agreement.

Leo: Yeah. I don't know who else Overcast is. He also has spent some money on trademarking, he trademarked not only overcast but smart speed and voice boost. He says anybody is welcome to copy those features but you can't call them that, which I thought was kind of interesting. I love it, Marco says you may think I'm a jerk for writing this, I don't know who would think he's a jerk for writing this, he says he was inspired by not only Monument Valley but Unread and Dash for Mac where revenue numbers were posted. This is what I love about the internet economy, is the idea that you know it's not going to hurt me to... til the internet, everybody kept all this stuff very hush hush. Unless you were a publicly traded company, and it was one of the real arguments against being a publicly traded company.

Rene: My boss insists on putting our reader number on the bottom of every page and he's like if it goes down it's your fault! So who cares if you put the number up there or not?

Andy: I think it's eminently healthy for any company to be more transparent about how they operate. Because it gives your customers a little bit more understanding and ownership over what you do and also they might hesitate just a little bit before saying that this person just doesn't get it. I can't tell you about the times I've had conversations with developers where in the back of my mind I'm saying gee I can't believe that you don't have a preset for this and I ask him about it and he says well here's why we don't have a preset for that, because here's what we'd have to do in order to make it work. I think that if Apple's been getting a few brick bats in the past couple weeks about how things used to just work and now they just don't work any more. Mostly it's because people forget about the times that Apple things didn't work, but I think it's largely because... Apple will never do we're thinking about doing an eyeglass wearable computer. We're going to make about 10,000 of these and sell them to people who are really eager to try them out, maybe we'll make them into a product maybe we won't, okay a year later we're not going to continue to do this. Apple never does that. They always present the big dog and pony show, we've been working on this for three years and then now it's perfect, now it's wonderful and now you're welcome because here's our latest perfect product. I think that people would have a better opinion of Apple if they understand just how much they work to decide that no, we're not going to have a home button and then something else next to it, it's just going to be the home button on this device and that's it.

Leo: In other related developer news, Apple's Swift is apparently getting some traction, red monk does a language ranking out of stack overflow and each I guess it's been 2 quarters so maybe each half year they tell you which programming languages are most popular on GitHub and stack overflow. 2 of the most used programmer sites, stack overflow is where programmers gather to talk and of course GitHub is where they gather to store their stuff. Here's a fabulous chart which you probably can't see. But swift is...

Rene: Looks like a magic quadrant.

Leo: Huh?

Rene: It looks like a magic quadrant.

Andy: It looks like an XKCD cartoon.

Leo: Holy cow. So the X is popularity on GitHub by number projects, the Y is popularity on stack overflow by a number of tags, and you can see the most popular on both is Java, I'm sad to say. Nimrod seems to be one of the least popular languages. I'm not even familiar with that. But Java, Javascript, C#, PHP, Python, C++, CSS which isn't really a language but we'll leave it in there. Objective-C C and Ruby. But Swift is...

Andy: (laughing)

Leo: What are you laughing about?

Andy: No, I just can't help but look from my favorite language, Apple Script, and then I can see where Fortran is, way way above that on both axes.

Leo: Oh dear. Oh dear oh dear oh dear.

Andy: Fortran, come on!

Leo: Fortran, who's using that any more?

Rene: The banks.

Leo: Swift is right here, kind of high up on the graph right next to Groovy, Clojure, Action Script and Assembly Language. Thank you. And Matlab. Matlab's pretty popular among the Stack Overflow folks. Common Lisp is kind of an outlier there. Popular on GitHub but you know you don't see a lot of people talking about it on Stack Overflow. Don't know why.

Rene: I can't see Logo. Where's Logo?

Leo: Logo? I just got a robot that I can program. It has a pen, it's just kind of like turtle graphics all over again. But you have to do it in C++. It's like what? What? Nevertheless Swift has apparently been coming on strong which is good news. So are Julia and Rust.

Rene: It jumped like 46 places I think, Swift?

Leo: Yeah. I find that fascinating.

Rene: Congrats to Chris Lattner and the compiler team.

Leo: During our last ranking Swift was listed as the language to watch, an obvious choice given the status as the Apple anointed successor to the number 10 language on our list, Objective-C. But yeah. It's 46 spots, it went from 68 to 22 on the list. Now one spot behind Coffee Script and just ahead of LUA. And if you're not a programmer, you must just be laughing right now at the names the programmers choose for those languages. Coffee Script is actually going down which is interesting. It was a Javascript kind of compiler alternative. Created Javascript. And Google's app store, the Google Play Store and developer community has also been growing, in fact in 2014 according to app figures, grew faster than Apple. That's for the....  developer community for Google Play exceeded Apple's for the third year in a row, 388,000 different developers. Now the number of developers, I don't know if that's a meaningful stat but it is a larger raw number. Overall app development is also on the rise with all 3 app stores growing by at least 50% last year. But the 3 are Apple, Google and Amazon.

Rene: Apple Google a...and Amazon.

Leo: Actually you know even Amazon is beating the app store in terms of growth.

Rene: Well growth is an acceleration measure though, if you have a small percentage and you grow then yeah.

Leo: That's right, that's right. If you want it here's the total number of developers by app store, blue is iOS, Green is Google Play, Orange is Amazon. You can see the shift happened in 2012, that's when Google for the first time started beating iOS.

Rene: We used to joke about this, people said there has to be a third ecosystem. It's going to be Windows, it's going to be Blackberry. And the joke was it's going to be other Amazon. And whether you talk about devices and you have like Chinese Android and regular Android or you talk about app stores and you have Google Play and Amazon, it turns out Android really is the third ecosystem.

Leo: Yeah, isn't that interesting?

Andy: It's amazing that Windows is doing such a bad job of getting developers to embrace multitouch. They are still wonderful desktop apps but you get on a Surface 3 and you're like great I'm using all these Windows apps, now let's look at these wonderful multitouch things that I can run and you're like oh... there's a text editor. Okay. It's just... and it's not like this has been a new phenomenon, the modern interface has been around for a couple years now, and you'd have thought there would be some kind of uptake but nothing now.

Leo: I confess it's a little frustrating, you know this... I have a Nokia Lumia 1520 in my hand and it's actually a really... 6” phone, great phone. They're fabulous.

Andy: They're great phones, I love the UI. I think that they know how to... this interface is better suited for handheld use than I think any other UI that's out there in terms of give me... I'm going to wake this thing up, I want to get something done in 5 to 10 seconds and then put it back down again. I don't think that you're going to do better than what they've got there. But the apps just aren't there. And part of it is because... a small part of it is because Google just says we're not going to build anything native for it, but not the whole world is Google native apps. If they can't get developers to really embrace this, it certainly has to do with something maybe the 2-5% market share depending on how you calculate it but man they're just not getting... I would have expected to see, I guess what I'm getting at is... I would expected one of those... here's to the crazy ones sort of developers that this operating system just completely speaks to them and they're going to do something great, they're going to make an Monument Valley sort of thing whether it's a game or a productivity app and even that is so hard to find on Windows Phone.

Rene: There's two things for that though. Like on one hand, Blackberry, they had a very small market share too and instead of fighting for BB10 they just added the Amazon app store now, so there's tiny little amount of that Amazon app store stuff that's probably Blackberry but also I think all those artisanal developers. Like Lauren Brickters and the Marco Arment, they were historically Mac developers and they naturally gravitated towards iOS where the Windows install base was enterprise or people making you know, a lot of different kinds of apps that didn't lend themselves to that sort of artisanal popular support of a new platform from that same company.

Leo: You know we have actually I think two different TWiT apps on here. Dmitri of New Orleans, TWiT and then there's something called TWiT Radio, TWiT Now, actually there's 3, 4... Compulsive Technologies, 5 TWiT View, 6 TWiT.tv so there are quite a few interestingly quite a few TWiT apps on here and I think that's because it isn't hard to develop for, but I think if you're running for the larger market you consider the number of units sold which is very small, the focus Microsoft's made on not growing in the premium end, they haven't... they're not... they haven't... this is the last high end phone they released, it's a year old. Most of the new phones, all the new phones are aimed at the 3^rd world, at developing nations, at markets where there's not a lot of money to be made in app development.

Rene: Their community is amazing Leo, there's that many TWiT apps because of Windows Weekly and people love Windows Weekly, they make TWiT apps. We have a Windows Central app. We have... they can put up a post about a Facebook bug update on Windows Central and 800 people will comment in 5 minutes. I've never seen a community like that, but it is exactly what you said, it's not a community that's being targeted by traditional developers.

Leo: Also Microsoft has, frankly, pissed off developers over time by adding APIs, changing APIs, changing their strategy, it's... I think a number, I won't speak developer but I would guess a number of developers are a little cheesed off at Microsoft and said I want to go somewhere A where I can make money but B I don't have to relearn everything every year.

Jason: I don't know, I think it's the third platform problem which is... costs a lot of money to develop apps, if you're a business that's targeting a broad audience and you're like alright well we're going to on the iPhone first, we're going to go iOS first. Most businesses make that decision, alright. But we've got to do Android. There are lots of Android devices out there so we've got to do that next. And then you get to the point where you say... alright, now what do we spend our money on? Do we go back to iOS, do we maintain iOS and Android or do we go and develop a Windows Phone app, and I think in a lot of those cases they're just saying we would rather put more money into our iOS and Android apps because we have to be there and we've gotten along without Windows Phone for now, it's not that big an audience and it's a tough place to be, to be number 3.

Leo: It's too bad.

Rene: It's Windows 10 event day too which is ironic.

Leo: And that's kind of where I'm segwaying, tomorrow Windows 10, the consumer preview will be announced and there's a full day of stuff, we'll be covering it live starting a little before 9am pacific, 12 noon eastern time and then TNT will probably continue running the coverage because normally Windows Weekly would be at 11am our time but both Paul Thurott and Mary-Jo Foley are in Redmond for that announcement and are going to be getting briefed in the afternoon, a private briefing as there will be a livestream from Microsoft in the morning and we'll come on, we'll do a Windows Weekly right after TNT at about 4:30pm pacific, 7:30pm eastern time, 24:30 UTC tomorrow. So we will be talking about Windows 10 and presumably we'll see but presumably Microsoft will talk about another very important part of their strategy which is to eliminate kind of, or merge Windows RT which was their very strange arm based version of Windows 8.

Jason: That's the version that doesn't run anything.

Andy: Yeah.

Leo: It was just weird and then merge that with Windows Phone and going forward and Dallas said a number of times it will be one Windows. And so I think it's going to be very interesting to see that strategy. It may be that mobile is over for Microsoft, and that would be a big...

Rene: Very different than Apple's strategy.

Leo: Yeah, I know. The opposite, isn't it.

Andy: But Apple doesn't have what Microsoft has. They do have a design language that really is portable across multiple size screens, Google has the same...

Leo: But that's exactly what Microsoft's trying to do, aren't they?

Andy: Yeah but I think maybe they're trying to make a play where they're not going to try to get... I think they're trying to get Windows users to buy Windows Phones. Traditionally we think about phones a totally separate entity from the desktop experience, or even our tablet experience. I think that they're really trying to sell hard the fact that no, you have one device that runs one operating system, why would you not want to have a phone that runs the exact same thing as your desktop does, and if they can do... if they can do one experience that seamlessly transcends every single piece of hardware better than Apple does, maybe Windows users who still are predominantly the most significant users on the planet right now, the next time they want to buy a phone when they're in that AT&T or Verizon store they see wow, this Android phone and this iOS device can't do what this Windows phone can do, this will solve a problem in my life and since I'm not... I just came in with a blank slate wanting to spend $200 on a phone because my old one's broken, maybe that's the way in. If they do it well.

Rene: It's not a car, it's not a truck. It's a minivan!

Leo: But look what a great job, this is... I just think for Apple users who have never seen a Windows Phone, just looking at the front page where there's live tiles which give you a lot of information which is kind of a mix between Apple's static icons and Google's widgets...

Rene: No, they're beautiful.

Leo: They're beautiful. And then if you go to the TWiT app on here, Dmitri has done a great job of making a native Windows Phone app that just does a beautiful job of showing off our stuff. I mean it really is gorgeous. And it would be a shame, I feel the same way about BOS. It's a shame when something and gorgeous...

Andy: Look at that right edge. That's what I love about that interface. The idea that it's just quietly showing you oh by the way there's more content off to the right if you want to flip over that way. So you're never lost in the sense of where have I just been and where do I next go if I'm looking for something. That's why I have so much respect for this operating system.

Leo: It's very thoughtful.

Andy: It's a little bit heartbreaking that it hasn't become even a double digit percentage of user space out there. If the Lumia 1020 had a much better operating system, I'd be... because I like cameras I would be so tempted by it.

Leo: Camera's so great in this. And this is the 1520 but of course the 1020 is even better.

Rene: I still have the 1020. I do understand the criticism for Windows phone. For example, some people don't like when those live tiles move. They like icons being static and you can immediately recognize them and if someone is picture changes in their contact and they can't find them that annoys them and the information density is low and they are used to having lines and lines of text and they would have to page around a lot.

Leo: Sure there is going to be points I understand that.

Rene: It is not for everybody but for people that like that display; and I like the fact that it's different. It really is truly a different take on mobile operating systems.

Leo: Yeah.

Andy: It's interesting that Apple has really put their investment in the right place about making sure everybody's first experience with their new piece of hardware is the best experience possible. You can't get any simpler, you can't get any more idiot proof than here is a grid of icons that represent your apps; keep scrolling you will find the app that you want, tap in order to launch it. I think someone that hasn't used Windows phone before will look at that screen and say oh my God this is such a confusing mess. I want to have that little grid of icons that I'm familiar with.

Leo: You get used to it really quickly.

Andy: But that's the point. Apple makes sure that the demo experience in your first week is going to to be great and an experience like this is, after about a month it’s like I'm getting so much done with just a glance than I could if this was just a grid of icons.

Leo: From my point of view, really what killed Windows phone was Google by their lack of support for it, they have effectively killed it only because I live in the Google world.

Rene: They are the everyone company Leo, they wouldn’t do that.

Leo: Yeah and I have to wonder.

Andy: They killed it.

Leo: Well so by the way, thanks to Microsoft’s improvements I can at least get my Google Calendar in the calendar and Google Contacts in the contacts, but I use Google Voice and Hangouts and SMS because I use multiple phones and it won’t support that, there is no way to support that. So that is extraordinarily frustrating. It means I would use the phone as a daily driver but I can’t.

Andy: Do you use Cortana?

Leo: Cortana is great.

Andy: Yeah that is my favorite voice speach.

Leo: It is like Siri

Andy: My favorite voice interface ever because.

Leo: Yeah.

Andy: Not only is it more powerful than Siri not only can you do more things with it but also they really put a lot more into developing the character than Apple puts into Siri.

Leo: Yeah because she is a Halo character, they started with an actual character right.

Andy: That’s right.

Leo: Siri was made up out of nowhere.

Andy: And its.

Leo: This is not a Windows phone show but we bring it up because the distinction is so interesting and I think it is so telling and it shows how you don’t have to be the best to dominate.

Jason: As an old time Mac user, I listen to you talk about Windows phone and I think these are all the same complaints we heard about the Mac.

Leo: It is like the Mac, exactly.

Jason: Back in the 90s. That I can’t do all these things that my IT people want me to have access to but I can’t.

Leo: Right.

Jason: But I can’t do it on my Mac or I can’t do it really well. Apple has tried to do something to work around it but there are these pieces that aren’t supported and it is so much better than the alternative and yet why is nobody using it.

Leo: It sounds really familiar. It frankly is not Microsoft’s fault in this case.

Rene: It sounds like the old Amigo story.

Leo: Yeah, we’ve all been there haven’t we?

Rene: Yeah.

Leo: Yeah one way or the other.

Jason: You mentioned BOS which was beautiful too but it just didn’t make it.

Leo: We are going to take a break, when we come back lots more. Jason Snell from sixcolors.

Jason: Dot com.

Leo: Dot com.

Jason: I paid the money I got the com.

Leo: You got the com which is a great mix now of a personal blog but aso increasingly journalistic.

Jason: Yeah.

Leo: Coverage of.

Jason: Yeah, it’s my tech site.

Leo: Yeah it’s good.

Jason: Thank you.

Leo: You are doing such a great job and of course there is a bunch of podcast there, I highly recommend you click the podcast tab there because you are doing a network now you’ve got everything.

Jason: I have many podcast.

Leo: And frankly so does Rene Ritchie.

Jason: He does.

Leo: I don’t know why I have these competitors on the show. You must leave now. Andy keep doing the good work. Don’t do any, oh wait he does have a podcast.

Rene: He does have a podcast. You have affected us so much Leo, you have just made us love podcast so much.

Leo: Podcasts are great. Rene from imore.com and of course they have the great debug podcast among others and Andy Ihnatko of the Chicago Sun Times and Andy’s Almanac on the 5 by 5; Dan does a great job with that. We had yesterday, we had one of the Apple founders on Triangulation yesterday. That was so much fun. You remember Ron Wayne? People are going who. Well there was Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs, and Ron Wayne right.

Jason: Yeah.

Leo: Everyone knows that. He, He’s actually great he lives in a double wide in Pahrump, Navada.

Jason: Sure.

Leo: Just down the dirt road from Art Bell and he was adult supervision. Worked with Steve Jobs at Atari, he’s got some stories about Steve at Atari. Jobs and Wozniak created the Apple one and they said they need somebody who can do an inventory control system for instance, who can be adult supervision. Ron you want to participate? Yeah sure what the heck; they formed the Apple computer company and made, he drew that beautiful Newton: Isac Newton’s Apple logo that Apple never used well actually only used for the Apple One.

Jason: Yeah that is the one that is so detailed that you would never make a corporate logo out of it.

Leo: That’s what he said, it would be a terrible choice for a modern you know modern computer company but what I said to Ron yesterday is this reflected the kind of quirky position that the computer industry was in at this time. This was the kind of stuff you would get and I think it is quite beautiful. I think he did a beautiful job with that and with Ron Wayne if you haven’t heard the Triangulation from yesterday. He’s a gentleman, a beautiful mind, he’s in his 80s now, and sold his stake. He got out he said you guys; first of all they didn’t incorporate they formed a company so all 3 members were liable if they got sewed; he said they only one with assets he knew it would all come down on his head if these guys screwed up. So he sold his 10% at Apple back to Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak for $800 and then later another $1500 giving up all claims on Apple; he’d probably have a little bit of money if he hadn’t. But you know he’s a happy guy. He said you make your decisions and I made the best decision I could based on the information he had.

Andy: Hadn’t he been burned once?

Leo: He had.

Andy: He had been before, so this wasn’t an idle fear.

Leo: He has many patents; he was talking about this. He did a slot machine company and got ripped of mightily and he said never again. So he had been burned exactly and you know what that is fine; watch the interview I think you will enjoy it.

Andy: Yeah.

Leo: It was fun, he is a fun guy. Our show today; that is Triangulation and it is available at twit.tv/ tri if you want to get it. Our show today brought to you by Squarespace, we love squarespace.com they just launched version 7. Squarespace 7 completely redesigned interface; so for you as the blogger, the content creator, the photographer, the person using Squarespace you are going to love it because it is so easy to create your own professional looking website or online portfolio. Things like live editing on a single screen so there is no more going back and forth, toggling with the site manager and the preview mode. You can see exactly how your changes are going to look immediately not just on your screen but on tablets and mobile devices. That is one thing that Squarespace does so well, something that is called mobile responsive design every site looks great no matter what size screen. This is the way we have to do it now, no more separate mobile sites; you just got to look good on every size screen. They have added 14 new designs, now you can choose from over 30 including templates designed for specific professions. So they have a musician’s template, they have an artist’s template, architect’s template, restaurants, ecommerce, they’ve got one called Fulton that features long scrolling pages and big background images; that is the new style, I think they call it parallax in general, web designers. Full width galleries and albums; their portfolio if you’re a photographer they’ve got a portfolio app that you use in your iPad that pulls images from your site for client approval; they also have a note app, a metric app that not only measures visits but also social media follows. The blog app which is available for both IOS and Android, it lets you post content, these guys are knocking it out of the park. If you are a developer, you will love the developer platform it is what Squarespace uses itself; the same coding platform that they use internally and that means a lot of agencies use this and they resale Squarespace sites. Access to Getty images $10 each pick from 1,000 of Getty images for your site; ecommerce of course at all plan levels, social media, it’s easy to use and you know it starts at $8 a month, and when you sign up for a year that includes a domain name free. So Squarespace has it all; hosting, software, easy to use, powerful, beautiful, it is kind of like the Apple of website host. Start a free 2 week trial right now; you don’t need to give them a credit card, you don’t even need to give them our name MacBreak they wound ask you just play with it. They won’t ask you for anything but it will give you 2 weeks to really bang on the tires, kick the tires, bang on the doors; you can even import items from your existing site so that you can see what it looks like. All I ask when you sign up please use our name MacBreak and you will get 10% off and they will know that you heard about it on MacBreak Weekly. Squarespace.com free for 2 weeks, no credit card required use the offer code MacBreak when you sign up for 10% off. Squarespace start here go anywhere; squarespace.com. Okay, more patents.

Jason: Alright back to patents.

Leo: Alright.

Rene: Yay.

Leo: Apple was, what was the.

Andy: Are we talking about Timothy Van Patten now

Leo: Yeah.

Rene: Which one?

Andy: His tennis curve is under appreciated.

Leo: Which is the one that hit the GoPro stock? Apple had patented some sort of camera.

Rene: Yeah sports camera.

Leo: A sports camera.

Rene: Right.

Leo: Again I got to point out that doesn’t mean they are going to do it but the stock market went wow.

Rene: But people can make money on the news and rumors Leo.

Leo: That’s right.

Jason: Yeah.

Leo: According for Fortune, Apple’s new video camera patent sends GoPro shares into a tail spin; 13% that’s not a tailspin. Midday training down to 4945 their lowest in 4 months. US PTO published a list of 34 total newly granted patents for Apple including one for a wearable video camera. They could be hooked up to helmets or scuba masks kind of similar to GoPro. You know what, this is the problem; I don’t know if the stock market just woke up but this is the problem with GoPro, anybody can make a GoPro. GoPro succeeds because they have brilliant marketing but their.

Rene: You’re not a product, you’re a feature right.

Leo: Right. They do have a significant revenue, a billion dollar revenue in 2014. Which means, I would imagine, there are other companies looking at getting in the business.

Rene: Tony Fidel runs Dropcam now too.

Leo: He can do it.

Rene: He can stick that on Google Glass; he’s got Google Glass and Dropcam now. How do you like them stock market.

Leo: We talked about how Marco was smart and put some secret sauce in his app Overcast; I don’t think there is any secret sauce in what GoPro is doing. I’ve seen dozens of similar things, it really is all about what a great marketing job they do.

Jason: I do worry that GoPro could end up like the flip; right.

Leo: Right.

Jason: Which was a huge product and it got bought out and died because it was something that was replicable technology.

Leo: This is a, I recommended this last week on a show.

Jason: That is for HTC.

Leo: This is the HTC RE which is basically the flip phone or flip camera.

Jason: Flip camera yeah.

Leo: Reinvented as a periscope; I’m going to review it before you buy it today. Actually it is a little overpriced, it is like $179; it could be used kind of like a GoPro but what is cool about it and they just added this feature, is you can stream live to YouTube. So I could push a button right now, see it on my phone, and literally we would be live on YouTube right now.

Rene: You can stream the stream Leo.

Leo: I can stream the stream; I’ve done that actually. If you go to youtube.com/leolaporte I think that is the name of it; I think that is the name of my personal YouTube channel.

Rene: It is a bit of a creepy looking form factor though.

Leo: Well it kind of says I’m a camera, I’m looking at you.

Jason: Well it kind of looks like an inhaler.

Leo: It could be an inhaler.

Rene: It looks like a periscope to me.

Leo: That is what I think.

Rene: Yeah surreptitious and then it turns around a little bit.

Andy: Or the thing that Indiana Jones hid in the band to win the Nazi.

Leo: Exactly. There it is that is me streaming some other show.

Andy: Good quality video.

Leo: Actually this show last week.

Andy: But it is.

Leo: The audio is good, it is very wide but that makes it easy to aim because there is no view finder.

Rene: Going back to GoPro, it is interesting how much the cache matters; like Beats is just a headphone company.

Leo: Right.

Rene: But it had all the cache of Beats so that’s worth billions of dollars.

Leo: That’s a perfect example yeah because headphones, there is no special technology in any of these things.

Andy: Well there is also the reliability that people are going to associate. If I’m going to be putting this camera in a really, really dangerous situation, we know the track record of this company; I don’t think it is necessarily the same category as flip either because remember that phones took out everything. Kodak was in that space, every single, you can’t even list how many companies were making these flip kind of knock offs and the phones just took out all of them.

Leo: Right.

Jason: Right.

Andy: But there is still the need for, I want a camera that will work and just simply bolt; you’re not going to bolt your phone to the side of a car, you’re not going to let your phone go kayaking with you; you can see that great video of the radio controlled glider that crashes into a reef and before they destroy the entire planne because the camera was running you see the turtles investigating it and then swimming off. And every time that something like that gets posted someone thinks oh wow that was only $50 maybe I should do something like that.

Leo: Yeah.

Andy: I need one of those.

Leo: Such good advertising. Maybe they should have done that with the flip camera; they would have survived. So patent 2, I don’t know if it is a patent, Apple likely to launch a simple stylus. Do they have a patent for it? This would be for the rumored 12.9 inch iPad. This is everything that Steve Jobs said they weren’t going to do. A giant iPad Pro, industry analyst with a strong track record says that there is an Apple patent pending, there will be a stylus for it. This is Ming-Chi Kuo, we’ve talked about Ming-Chi Kuo a lot with KGI securities; said that recent, numerous recent filings filed by Apple and his own research lead him to believe that a stylus will be launch with the iPad Pro. We’ve talked before, we’ve given you the Rene Ritchie disclaimer that the analyst have a different constituency than the actual journalist but this is credible; yes Rene?

Rene: Ming-Chi Kuo has an interesting track record; when it comes to things in the supply chain he has very good information, when it comes to things that are obvious he has incredible good information, when it comes to stuff that is speculative he has hit or miss as everyone else.

Leo: Right.

Rene: But I think that Apple did patent this stuff and there is an argument to be made that people are going to be using stylus, why wouldn’t they use an Apple stylus. And the thing with Steve Jobs, it is important to remember that he is talking as a master marketer he’s not talking.

Leo: Right.

Rene: Not as somebody who is disclosing information and when Apple makes something it is the same way that they don’t have arrow keys on the original Mac. They don’t want people porting CLI apps, command line apps, to the Mac; they want them to re-think it. So when you make a multi touch devise you don’t allow multi-window apps, you don’t allow stylus, you promote the finger and apps that make the finger; I’m sorry the use of the finger. But then at a certain point you make a larger screen device and you want to appeal to artist or people who take hand written notes and you can do that with third party stylus’ but the thing about Apple frame work is that it always works best when it is Apple people who hit the bugs first and Apple people have to ship a product first. So if Apple starts making an Apple pen so to speak that would benefit the stylus community.

Leo: And there are a lot of stylus according to this Apple insider article dozens and I think that is probably accurate of Apple stylus not only of third party stylus this is clearly a market.

Rene: Yeah the science behind it.

Leo: Yeah.

Andy: It is a damn shame that the iPad has not had one. This is the Surface 3 tablet but the Surface 1 was not a fantastic computer but the fact that it had a 1024, weight pressure sensitive, weight comp compatible stylus to it meant how many artists bought their first Windows machine.

Leo: Yeah.

Andy: Because I have this portable drawing unit so that.

Leo: But that is something that iPad has never been which, is pressure sensitive.

Steve: Exactly.

Leo: Do you think that the pro will be?

Rene: I hope so.

Andy: I think that they are missing a trick if they don’t make this a creation tool that people can actually draw with. Also they are starting to run out of ways to make these larger sized iPads emphatically the right choice for a certain group of people because most people are using them in ways where they would much rather have something that is smaller and more compact; the competitors are making tablets that are smaller, more compact, and having a lot more use out of them. And if you want to continue to sell a multi-touch device like that with a larger form factor, they have to say here is why you want to have a 10 inch version or a 13 inch version because there are things that you can do with a pen creatively that you cannot do with your mere fingers. That’s the big advantage of the iPad is always going to be the Apple library; so long as that never changes, there is not a whole lot of rush for Apple to reinvent this thing.

Rene: It’s interesting to me because my background in in art and I used Wacom tablets for years when I worked in design and there is just no equivalent. That is why the Galaxy Note is so good, it is the world’s smallest Wacom tablet and it can fit into your pocket.

Leo: You are actually using Wacom digitizers.

Rene: You are and the digitizers are what makes a difference. 10.1 and Adonit have done a really good job using Bluetooth and Palmit trying to fake it but you can tell it is just not the same. So if Apple, if they are going to do a pen I really hope they are going to do a digitizer or they have some new technology that can achieve the same results of a digitizer because to Andy’s point that really does separate it again. It is not about a big phone or a small tablet, it is about a big canvas, it is about something that I can use a laptop but I’m an artist or I’m someone who takes notes in a board room. Neil Seibert who used to be Sammy the Walrus on Twitter who was a Sell Side analyst; I believe it was Sell Side analyst. He made a comment how useful it would be in enterprise and in education and in the creative industries; I was talking with somebody in the medical industries who said how much they would love to be able to use. Their hospital is just filled with iPads, everyone gets issued an iPad and if they could have a really good stylus with it too would be super useful for marking up all the different medical stuff they are looking at.

Leo: Yeah.

Rene: It seems like there is a lot of use people could get out of that sort of technology.

Jason: And the software is already there, that is the beauty of it right.

Leo: There is so much stuff.

Jason: The apps are already there, we take advantage of it instantaneously, it is just an issue of you don’t want to be drawing on a device; up to now you are drawing on a device that is made for a finger and.

Leo: Right.

Jason: Pens are just acting like fingers and that is not good enough.

Leo: Would Apple have to do some sort of pressure sensitive library, and then these apps would have to be updated.

Rene: I would hope so just because it would make it easier for the developers.

Jason: I would think so.

Andy: All that it really is about is palm rejection and you can draw on a fingertip.

Jason: That’s true.

Andy: The thing is that this is a bit more precise than this other thing and the amount of times that I have sketched on my iPad and it is like the time that it takes to zoom in on this one piece of detail and that is where it takes you off of the go gone by the stream with a little water color pad and it is not the image that you really want to have when you are in that sort of zone. I just think for Apple not to have a pen digitizer, I really think they are leaving money off the table.

Leo: Well maybe they are not ready for the final offer.

Rene: Technologically what is interesting is that multi-touches are not 2 dimensional, multi-touches are a radiant field; and there is some 3 dimensional functionalities to it. Some companies like Nokia or Samsung use it to let you do hover gestures or to use it when there is gloves on because it can tell fingers at a distance. Apple has used it before to determine what finger you are using; it can tell that one finger is touching the screen but the other 3 are folded back behind it, so it is most likely you index finger or your ring finger and they have used it for palm. There is a whole bunch of things that they used it for, algorithmically to make the multi-touch experience better but when you have that sort of, it makes you wonder what else they can do with this if you start combining it with like the force press technology in the watch or there is different things that can do a lot of things if they start to broaden out what multi-touch does.

Leo: I didn’t realize that, so Samsung when it is doing that hover touch thing that is just part of a.

Rene: It’s a choice.

Leo: It is a digitizer.

Rene: Yeah, it is a choice of what you want to interpret and how you want to interpret same with the Nokia and wearing gloves with your touch screen.

Andy: Yeah it would be great to have a context sensitive, context menus, and context helps; that is still one of the, I wouldn’t call it one of the limitations but one of the things that makes phones a little bit more difficult to use because you cannot get the hint on what something does untill you activate this whole layer of help annotations or just press the button and hope that it doesn’t do anything that you’re going to regret.

Leo: Yeah.

Rene: And the hover stuff is weird because Fitz’s law for multi-touch surfaces because if you hit a glass surface, and if you have to hold your finger off it kind of vibrates a little bit and if you are too close or if you are too far; but if the watch again you do a force press, it gives you what is in essence of what is a right mouse click context menu so there is all sorts of ways to implement that, that is interesting.

Leo: We’ve all heard the rumors that Apple might be thinking about going to arm for Macintosh or at least doing some arm based Macintoshes. The CEO of Intel, Brian Krzanich, was interviewed on CNBC on Friday and the host said or asked whether he thought Apple might actually drop Intel chips from the Mac in favor of its own arm based processors. Krzanich said I just hear the same rumors, wow that is unusually outright; our relationship with Apple is strong, the products are great. Apple is always going to choose the supplier who is going to provide them the most innovation for them to build on, for them to innovate. They are a company based on innovation, our job is to continue to deliver parts that give them that; they are better than our competitors and we want to use their parts. So I wake up every morning making sure that across the board, whether it is Apple or Linovo, or Dell, or any of our competitors we have to provide the competitive part. He is not exactly shaking in his boots.

Rene: Well he is one of the few people who knows.

Leo: You think he actually knows? Tim Cook calls him up and says he by the way I just wanted to let you know in 2015 no more Intel.

Rene: You know there is a lot to decompress in this because Apple, again Apple is a company that has prototyped almost anything you can think of.

Leo: Right.

Rene: Everyone on the web is like Apple should do this, Apple has likely done this, had a bunch of people try it out and made an informed opinion of whether it’s a prototype or whether it should be a product. That includes arm Macs, things like MacBook Air running arm, running IOS, running all these different things but designing a chip is one thing; getting these chips produced in mass quantity is another thing. Apple is not a fab, they are a design company and producing millions and millions of chips as we saw; one of the rumors that we saw about the iPad mini 3 with the same specs as the iPad Air 2 because they simply couldn’t make enough Apple AA chips this year to satisfy all those devices and then you start adding Macs into it could they produce enough high end arm chips to supply IOS devices and do they want to become a foundry. How would they handle compatability with Windows apps?

Leo: Right.                                                                                                               

Rene: It is a really huge question but I don’t put it past Apple to say hey Intel how are those Broadwell chips doing? Is it going to be another few of months before they are ready because we have this stuff in the lab and man is it power efficient and boy is it getting powerful. Oh it will be ready next month, thank you.

Leo: Well that is one question that I have because I did just buy the new Broadwell based Dell which is very much like a MacBook Air, it is very light, great battery life etcetera, etcetera, and it is unusual for and we mentioned this last week; it is unusual for somebody besides Apple to have the first chip used  in a notebook used on a new platform. And Apple has not, you told me Rene I bought the Dell just because you told me don’t wait for Apple to do a Broadwell based MacBook Air.

Rene: Well not this month I meant.

Leo: What?

Rene: It will be this year.

Leo: I thought you meant next.

Rene: Real person time, Leo Laporte time, it is going to be forever.

Leo: Next quarter

Rene: Forever.

Leo: Forever, I can’t wait. Well yeah and I do want to review the Broadwell U platform and all of that stuff and this is not a faster chip but a more efficient chip. I do, so you feel like this will be, and what is interesting about this Dell we will do a review as soon as it comes, but what is interesting about the Dell is the retina display basically in a MacBook Air form factor. It is a 13 inch display and the thing is as small as your 11 inch MacBook Air and lighter so the whole thing is quite intriguing.

Jason: And that’s the rumor about that 12 inch MacBook air.

Leo: And it looks very much like that.

Jason: That is the same kind of product.

Leo: That is like the picture of the Mac Book Air and of course the thing that is most interesting about the MacBook Air is that, and we talked about that also on a show this week but I can’t remember; is the new USB port a single port on  a MacBook Air.

Jason: Sure.

Leo: When were we talking about that? Was that this show?

Rene: Last week maybe.

Leo: Well.

Andy: I know that we talked about it last week.

Leo: Somebody talked about the idea that this made sense that we are moving into; I guess it was on TWiT last week with the Ben Thompson of Stratechery, that it made sense for Apple, contrary to our reaction which is: what there is one port for power, for USB, for Thunderbolt, for monitor, one port on the whole thing? There is not even a separate power port one port; and he said no this makes a lot sense because we are moving away from the notion that the computer is a hub.

Jason: Yeah.

Leo: It isn’t a hub anymore, it is one of many devices that you have.

Jason: And Apple is very good at being aggressive at pushing toward to where it is going.

Leo: Yeah they always push it faster.

Jason: Even though it may not being quite there yet.

Leo: Yeah.

Jason: Yeah.

Andy: I don’t know, it’s like maybe the computer isn’t a hub people still need to occasionally put a camera card into something.

Leo: No, not allowed.

Andy: Or I don’t know .

Jason: No more.

Rene: It’s the iPad of computers Andy.

Andy: That is exactly what I was saying was that it makes sense as your light weight accessory; it makes sense if you anticipate that this user is never going to want to attach anything to this what so ever.

Leo: Right.

Andy: That they aren’t even going to be that interested in finding a power source in the middle of the day because whatever the battery life for this is going to be is they are not going to be sitting down to use this for 6 or 7 hours straight and that is why I go back to what I’ve been saying from the beginning which is that as I keep looking at this it holds up in my own mind for $500 it is one hell of a product, at $600 it is an interesting product, at $900 what’s the point.

Rene: It needs a smaller envelope.

Jason: I definitely don’t agree with that. This feels to me, this rumored 12 inch MacBook Air, feels to me like it is $1,000 $1,100 product and I think that.

Leo: Well if it is retina.

Jason: Apple has, yeah and.

Andy: But with the cramped keyboard and all of the other crap that they have put into this.

Leo: You are talking to a guy who is using the 11 inch MacBook.

Jason: Yeah, so this has.

Andy: But, go ahead.

Jason: Well this is a very Apple sort of thing to do I think.

Leo: But the retina screen that goes all the way to the edge, 13 inches in the same form factor. People have said when they’ve held the Dell; it is so light it feels like it is crap. Like there is nothing in it.

Jason: I mean, I guess.

Leo: I’m sorry I didn’t mean to man handle your 11 inch.

Jason: That’s fine you were gentle.

Andy: Show title.

Jason: The argument is that Apple is always going to, with the Air; if you think about the original Air it was pushing it too hard. Right. It was not ready it was too thin. It dropped.

Leo: Was that also an 11 inch.

Jason: It dropped to one USB port. No that was a 13.

Leo: That was a 13.

Jason: it dropped down to one USB port which was painful but I feel like the MacBook Air now, is so fully functional that Apple, if this rumor is true.

Leo: We’ve gone wireless in so many ways.

Jason: Exactly.

Leo: Your iPhone used to have to be connected to iTunes via a USB cable not anymore.

Jason: I don’t disagree with Andy saying perhaps you would want to plug in a USB device or you would want to plug in a card but I can also see Apple just saying you are going to just take pictures with your iPhone.

Leo: Right.

Jason: You don’t need it, it will sync through the cloud and that leads you to an interesting place where that product is a super portable nation where everyone groans about for the first generation but by the second or third generation everybody is like oh actually this is great. That is what that product feels like to me and it does feel like they are going to keep the other Airs around and drop their prices and let this one settle in as the retina device at 1,100 or something.

Andy: I can certainly agree with that also we are forgetting that the first MacBook Air was like $1,800 was it.

Jason: $1,800 and then an extra $1,000 if you wanted the SSD.

Leo: Wow.

Andy: And it was just.

Leo: God I forgot that holly cow.

Jason: It was aspirational.

Andy: It was a painful thing.

Leo: And I’m sure I bought it immediately.

Andy: But the thing is,it is like, people often laugh at Apple’s competitors because they got into; see that is what Apple does so well is they don’t get into the market when the market is not ready for something. They make sure they got this thing right, they won’t get their first but they will get there with the right produt. The MacBook Air is one of those counter examples where no it was a crappy computer. It is not that it took them 2 years to refine it is that they released it 2 years too early. They are selling these things to people who are really, really desperate for something thin in life because it was so painful.

Leo: Right.

Andy: Because when I look at the, and again we are of course in my column about this I refer to it as the hypomac just to make sure that people realize we are talking about a hypothetical device.

Rene: Yes, it is a unicorn.

Andy: And not something that you know. When I look at all those specs I say so I’m going to spend $1,200 on a machine that has a cramped sub-sized keyboard too. And it goes through this list of all these things being described my Marc German and you are saying so not only am I not going to have ports, I can live in a world in which I don’t use those ports but the track pad is not going to have a click response.

Rene: Yeah.

Andy: So it is going to be nothing but touch.

Leo: That’s a little weird isn’t it? That’s a little weird.

Andy: This again, I am not reviewing a product that I haven’t tried.

Leo: It doesn’t exist.

Andy: This is just rumor, rumor, rumor but this sounds like a real piece of crap machine.

Jason: Here is the thing where I think Andy and I actually are in agreement because what I’m saying is I totally see this as a product Apple would make and Andy is saying yeah but it doesn’t sound very good and it will take them 2 years to get it right; and I think that maybe that is all true. I think maybe that is, we are up for another MacBook Air that is super aggressive like we are going to be as thin and light as possible and we are only going to have one port and you are going to like it.

Leo: Yeah.

Andy: You’re welcome.

Jason: The other thing about the MacBook Air originally, although it took 2 years to get there, they weren’t wrong about the decisions they made, they were too early and I feel like this may be that again too which is ports who needs them, the MacBook Pro has ports if you want ports.

Andy: On that same basis Windows phone is also the right decision and the iPhone is wrong; it’s just Microsoft got their early.

Jason: The difference is the MacBook Air became successful.

Andy: At the end of the day, I am recommending real things for people who are going to spend real money to use it. All I’m saying is the hypomac is describing if you are super rich and $1,200 is the same as $500 to you; I’m sure that this as a really super lightweight computer is great for the times when a 13 inch MacBook Air is just too much of a burden. Oh my God the 13 inch, let my people go 13 inch.

Leo: It does sound like not your primary machine but a secondary machine.

Jason: Unless you are somebody who is not particularly.

Leo: But you are using an 11 inch.

Jason: Yeah, there are going to be users for whom it is a perfectly good system. I agree with Andy, it is going to be like that original MacBook Air, it is going to be weird, and there are going to be people who are like this is just not for me.

Leo: Or you are going to get a dock, and the dock is going to connect to the new USB port.

Jason: Or maybe there is a part of the story that we don’t know. I do wonder if there is a whole other shoe to drop here; I wrote a piece about this on sixcolors, and I made up the specs but I could hear somebody at Apple saying oh but we have engineered the most amazing power, I’m doing his accent; the most powerful battery adapter ever, it is also a dock, or for $50.

Leo: Which it could be.

Jason: Which it could be and there could be more to the story.

Rene: So Andy is not necessarily wrong.

Jason: See I like that.

Andy: I’m also in agreeance with you there too, that is the other thing that I talk about in this column which is that you can’t really understand art when you take it out of its context.

Rene: Yeah exactly.

Andy: So it is not until Apple; this would make sense if we were releasing another service to the side of this or if it was here is that the design is so that your iPhone is still your primary device but this is designed because we are putting an IOS 8 and Yosemite so many great features for making this a seamless experience.

Jason: Exactly.

Andy: We don’t need to have as many features so again.

Rene: It’s Polio. It’s Polio reborn.

Jason: Apple tells a story and what Marc German reports, and he is usually right, are he is reporting specs, he is reporting details but Apple is going; when the release a product they are telling a story and there is probably other parts of the story, there is the context you nailed it Andy absolutely.

Rene: One thing that is interesting to me, is that I switched to a; I was using a MacBook Air and I switched to the MacBook Pro because when I traveled I just didn’t have enough video processing power but it was so hard to make a choice because they had become so close together due to the systems. And the idea behind this, again this is just one prototype and Marc was very clear about this; they could go ahead with a different prototype but the thing about this device is that it returns to roots of the MacBook that Steve Jobs pulled out of that envelope. They are trying to get it into a smaller envelope and again much more different than the MacBook Pro has become. There is a great comic that Rich Stevens did for us on imore.com did for us for today; it is on the front page now where he kind of paints that traditional Apple dilemma and I think absolutely this is going to be a product that evolves over the years but if Apple doesn’t do these sort of products, sometimes they move the industry with them and the price is you are an early adopter for a few years, you’re a geek for a few years, and then you get the mainstream for those products. But it is again one of those categories were they can push forward and when you have hand-off, and when you  have extensibility and you have everything that is happening I think this product makes a lot more sense.

Leo: Is this a copout? Because I love your idea to have the power brick have USB ports, have the Ethernet port.

Jason: They could be; they could have a break away, a thunderbolt break away.

Leo: I love the ideal that you have a power brick that will also, because that is how you will connect the power brick is on the c port right.

Jason: Or there is the additional Apple Pro power brick that is available for an additional $79.

Leo: That is a copout but on the other hand you don’t carry it with you necessarily and it gives you, it could have an SD card reader in it.

Jason: And this is the difference between the language that Andy is speaking and I’m speaking. Which is I’m trying to figure out this product and would Apple make it; Andy is saying if they make it I don’t think anybody should get it. Those are not mutually exclusive.

Andy: Yeah, Apple can do all kinds of crazy stuff. Some of the stuff they do is legitimately bonkers. I still think that the MacBook Pro is not one of the best, it certainly is the best MacBook Pro that they are making in 2014 but it is not a particularly, it is a miss labeled mid-range machine.

Jason: Don’t listen to Andy.

Andy: I just don’t know why they are so fixated on making things smaller and thinner as opposed to what if we make this more pleasant to use what if we, what if we. So again my fixation tends to be on okay Apple, you’ve gotten rid of the bezel completely, you’ve shrunk down that keyboard so it doesn’t match the other keyboards this user is going to use, what are you giving the user that is a practical thing? And if you tell me well you know those bags that are just too small to hold a 13 inch or an 11 inch Air well there you go. I don’t own one of those. Well there you go. But I don’t see. Your welcome I said.

Leo: But Andy you can put it in or right side up, it can go either way. Now how much would you pay?

Rene: I forget who said it but someone made a really good point; I was walking around CES all week with a 13 inch MacBook Pro on my back and it doesn’t sound like much but when you are walking for 12 hours of the day. It is the same thing when you went from the iPad to the iPad Air, it doesn’t seem like a big difference but as you hold it up more and as you are reading with it more, the difference becomes palpable and there are a certain class of people or a certain class of use cases. And I’m not suggesting it is like epic at all in any shape or form but when it gets beyond a certain threshold when it will be absolutely, again I forget who said this earlier in the week; it will be absolutely invisible in your bag, it will be absolutely invisible on an airplane. It will feel as though you have, almost like an iPad with a keyboard with you but running OS 10.

Jason: Was it Steven Leve who accidentally recycled his MacBook Air by putting it out with the Sunday New York Times?

Leo: Somebody did that?

Jason: Yeah practically invisible.

Rene: Milton almost threw it over his head the first time he picked up the prototype because he wasn’t expecting it to be that light.

Leo: Right. Actually this new Dell is about 2.6 pounds compared to 2.96 pounds.

Rene: I saw it at CES it looks fantastic.

Leo: Yeah.

Jason: Andy made another point that I think is valuable and that is that Marc German or maybe it was Rene, you guys are both great. Marc German is reporting on what they are working on, it may not even be what they ship that can also change.

Leo: Yeah Marc says this all the time: just because it exists doesn’t mean that it is a product.

Jason: Lots of rumor reports that end up “wrong”.

Leo: Right.

Jason: Were accurate to the point when they were reported and then things changed because things change all the time. It will be fascinating to see, I think Andy will agree with me at this point; it is fascinating to see the bonkers things that Apple does.

Leo: Yeah.

Jason: This is one of those mental exorcises is this is one of the things that is so bonkers that they are not going to do it.

Leo: I want it.

Jason: Or are they going to do it.

Leo: I would buy it so fast, in fact that is why I bought the Dell because I didn’t think Apple was going to do this too soon.

Andy: I think that once they have a really cool vision, I think that one they have a really firm and confident vision of here is what we want to be doing in 2016 and 2017. They don’t lose any time in rolling out the hardware they are going to need to make that happen. If there are some red flag phrases that I sometimes like to argue against and that is, or are more like I am going to swallow my words because I don’t want to start arguments. Not with you people but with other places where it is like I have been talking for 30 minutes and remember how just 20 minutes ago you said Android is crap because they shipped a half-baked product that didn’t really work and it took the 4 revisions to get it to where it really works. But you are defending the other Apple product that also didn’t work before the first 3 revisions and in that case it is because they are futurist no, no they are futurist and everybody was catching up to them. No they were crap that made a bad, bad life for the people that bought it; the poor bastards who spent the money for this early version that caught on fire and insulted their hair and just stuff like that.

Jason: We would be saying, hind sight is part of that; we would be saying that of the MacBook Air now, it turned out to be a successful product but if it had just flopped and that first edition would be what we remembered and that is not what happened.

Andy: Where it is obvious that this couldn’t have worked.

Jason: Exactly.

Andy: That I would have never approved it if I were the head of the company.

Leo: We are going to take a break, when we come back our picks of the week my friends. But first a word, well its snack time.

Andy: Snacks, snacks.

Leo: Snack time, how did you know that Andy? You could tell I was looking at snacks.

Andy: I could hear the snacks.

Leo: You could hear the rattle of the Lone Star Snack Mix from naturebox.com or Andy’s favorite and I have to say mine to the Big Island Pineapple Rings.

Rene: I ate a whole bag this weekend.

Leo: Oh those are so good. Jason you are the only one who is in studio so you get to choose which one we open.

Jason: I’m here.

Leo: Now let me just tell you, here we go that is 2; coffee kettle popcorn with coffee caramelized popcorn, honey mustard flavored pretzel bites, honey Dijon pretzels, or sweet blueberry almonds. Now one thing that all of these things have in common the nutritionist approved there is never any high fructose corn syrup; you already opened it.

Jason: Honey Dijon Pretzels are opened.

Leo: He just opened it, you don’t want to hear the spiel? They have zero artificial colors or sweeteners, zero grams trans fats, you will even find snacks with the bold flavors you crave like which ones?

Jason: Honey Dijon Pretzels, they are so good.

Leo: Honey Dijon Pretzels see you clearly crave the bold flavors.

Jason: When I heard them they made my stomach growl.

Leo: The nice thing is that I’m going to get you a box with 5 snacks in it free all you do is pay $2 shipping. It is your complimentary trial box, of nature box. Once you decide from the 100s that they offer that you want. Sweet, savory, they have vegan snacks, they have gluten free snacks. There really is a great selection of stuff: chocolate banana chips, kung pow pretzels, lemon pucker pistachios; look at that Jason is actually handing out to our studio audience is now receiving their very own Honey Dijon Pretzels.

Jason: Sorry Rene and Andy.

Leo: Oh gosh.

Rene: Throw some at the screen, throw some at the screen.

Leo: By the way reseal able bag so you don’t have to eat the whole thing.

Jason: Yeah they are its nice.

Leo: I’m just a big fan and they are delivered to your door monthly.

Jason: Here Rene.

Leo: Or more if you get crazy about it. Nature Box; yum, yum, yum naturebox.com/twit to get your complimentary sample box. Stay full, stay strong, start snacking smarter naturebox.com. See I can’t do the ad and eat my Honey Dijon Pretzels you can though. Jason is going to be quiet for a little bit. We thank naturebox.com for their support of MacBreak Weekly while Andy Ihnatko gives us his pick of the week.

Andy: I have an audio related pick. Bluetooth headphones have been off of my radar forever pretty much because I tried the first generation that came out and I thought okay that is kind of nice but I don’t really need them. So when I started to get back into realizing that its winter I’ve got a coat, I’ve got a scarf, and I’ve got my iPad or my laptop bag slung over my shoulder and I also maybe have a camera around my neck. Over the past couple of years I’ve been beat down to the idea of course I’m going to have to pull everything off of my head and cut my headphones free from that tangle but I have finally found a pair of Bluetooth headphones that I really, really like. They are from LG they are called the Tone Pro, they make 2 or 3 of them in a line. These are kind of the middle of the line they cost about $69. What I love about them is the design where all of the electronics and the batteries are in this little collar that you just wear around your neck just like that and don’t have to have it above your clothes you can just have it beneath your clothes and when you want to listen you just pop these earbud free, they are held in place by magnets; you can have just one in your ear if you are just listening to something mono if you want to listen to traffic while you walk. You can have both of them in if you want to listen to something stereo. There are also push buttons here is you want to reject or answer a call, next track, volume stuff like this, and when you are not using it these just click into the magnets and you just don’t even know that you are wearing these. I got these last week or the week before, the second day I didn’t realize that I had been wearing them for 13 hours until at the end of the day I was getting ready for bed and I pulled off my sweater and this thing just sort of clacked onto the floor because it is so light that I didn’t even notice I was grabbing them. They sound very, very good these are $70 headphones list price because they are Bluetooth and ear buds, they sound about as good as $30 or $40 dollar wired headphones but that is nothing compared to how well these things work.

Leo: That’s not bad.

Andy: The battery will last, I’m getting a good 8 or 9 hours per charge and it recharges in about an hour or 2 and they really made me into a convert. Another thing that I should mention is I’m wearing a ball cap now and I often wear a hat with a brim and I can’t wear over the head headphones while I’m walking because it doesn’t fit under the hat and I can’t do the other popular designs has a band that goes across the back of the skull and into the front and because I have a big melon, it is perfectly comfortable if I walk like this but as soon as I lift my head up it is cutting into my ears.

Leo: These are great, these would be good for working out too.

Andy: Yeah I just love them. I have to give a couple of warnings though. There is an absolutely perfect Chinese knock off of these headphones and there are a lot of counterfeits on Amazon. As a matter of fact, I first discovered this style by buying a $15 pair of knock offs; it wasn’t even labeled as LG or anything like that. I wasn’t even aware that LG made these, I was like oh somebody imported a bunch of these, they will come in a zip lock baggies. When I recommended them elsewhere somebody was like oh so those are a knock off of the LG Tones. Oh they are, I really want to buy the legitimate ones because they are going to sound a lot better and they absolutely did but it was so confusing because there were a bunch of sellers working through Amazon that they have a rip off of the packaging, they have a rip off of everything else.

Leo: Wow.

Andy: And so you get these, it explains why the review are so across the board. You get the 4 or 5 star reviews that are like the sound is really great, there is a lot of base, there is a lot of treble, the battery lasts a long time; but then 1 star it just sounded like I was under water with these, the battery lasted like 2 hours, and it refused to pair. So I actually found because it was so hard to find a seller that was definitely going to be selling me the legitimate ones; for God sakes I got into the car, for God sakes, Best Buy. I went to a brick and mortar store.

Leo: Unbelievable.

Andy: I paid full retail, I paid sales tax Leo. I paid sales tax that is how far I went. Exactly but I wound up getting what was absolutely full on including the hologram logo that was embossed on the box and everything like that and I couldn’t be happier.

Leo: And they are very light weight I got to say, very nice.

Andy: Exactly it’s like I was just testing these out, or like the original $15 knock off pair that I bought. Again it’s like okay that sounds good, I just pulled these things out of my ears and just went on my way. It truly was not until like 10 hours later, oh I have been wearing these all day long, okay that is a vote in favor. They do stay on, they are nice and contoured so it is like I’m not in danger of these falling off and dropping them on the sidewalk.

Leo: Nice. The LG Tone Pro Bluetooth stereo headset. So we should mention, we noticed before the show there is a little conflict.

Jason: Yes.

Leo: A little conflict.

Jason: Yes we worked it out.

Leo: But you guys have clearly worked it out. So Jason you got custody of the pick.

Jason: Yeah Andy wanted to pick this too, although I’m glad he got his own pick. I had nothing else if I didn’t get this.

Andy: Shall I say that I was the person that claimed it first on the show notes.

Jason: True.

Andy: So by divine providence.

Leo: By domain.

Jason: By playground rules.

Leo: Playground rules.

Andy: Clearly Jason had a lot more experience and expertise about this so I am willfully exceeded. What was rightful mine.

Jason: You stepped aside.

Leo: Jason Snell.

Jason: I appreciate it.

Leo: Your pick of the week.

Jason: Audio Hijack 3 from Rogue Amebia. The last time that Audio Hijack was updated was about 10 years ago. It is an audio utility for the Mac.

Leo: But I’ve used it for years.

Jason: It is the audio utility for the Mac and they have; it looks completely different than ever before Christa Mrgan did a complete redesign of it and it is gorgeous all laid out through flow charts. Anything you can think of basically involving audio you can do with Audio Hijack 3. It is the solution to numerous podcasting problems that I have had over the years in terms of I want to record this from over here, I want to simplify a recording from a multi-track scenario; at my old office we had a multi-track recorder and I wanted to provide everybody in the office the ability to do a podcast recording with just pressing a button. Couldn’t do it, everything had to go through a multi-track recorder, Audio Hijack does it. You can record multiple things, you can mix things, you can send things to different outputs from different inputs, and it is all easy to use because you just drop down these little blocks and say here is an application and record it in this format and send it to this speaker.

Leo: This is a significant improvement in the UI, it was always very hard to figure out.

Jason: It was a weird grid.

Leo: So much easier.

Jason: It was powerful but it has more features, more power, and it is easier to use.

Leo: Yeah.

Jason: You can figure it out just by looking at it and it comes with a whole bunch of filters. It supports audio units so that if you have other plug-ins you can use those and when you play; it’s got this amazing animation, and when you play you can actually see the little links in the flow chart light up as it is recording.

Leo: Oh that is nice, so you know it is working.

Jason: It is actually real VU, so when it makes noise it actually flickers so you know what you are recording.

Leo: That’s nice.

Jason: It solves pretty.

Leo: No more mystery.

Jason: Much everything, I think there is one thing that I need another utility for but essentially this solves all of my needs. So if you are somebody that wants to record something that you found on the internet, or you are somebody who is doing podcasting, or some other audio or video and you need to control what happens on your Mac; the OS 10 base system does not do a good job of routing audio around you can set and input and an output. Some apps will let you do a custom input or output; this will let you do sort of anything you can think of just by laying down these blocks. It is a great interface with great power.

Leo: As I was saying this is; how does this compare to Audacity? This is completely different.

Jason: It is, this is not an editor.

Leo: This works with Audacity.

Jason: Yeah this is a recorder so in the end if you want that microphone to be routed to those headphones but that app to be routed to those speakers and record them together and separately for editing later you can do that just by pressing a button and go. It is pretty amazing.

Leo: A lot of people who use Skype for instance can’t record both ends of a Skype conversation natively.

Jason: Right.

Leo: So you use Audio Hijack Pro and you can mix your voice and your Skype caller’s voice together to your recorder.

Jason: Right infact you could set it up so you’ve got; this is one of the things that I actually have it set up to do. Is it is recording Skype, it is recording my voice, and it is recording an app that I run that plays sound effects and it is routing the sound effect app through with my voice to Skype so that they can hear the sound effects that are playing.

Leo: Right.

Jason: And that I can hear them and believe it or not without a lot of extra software, that was impossible to do.

Leo: Now I have used Soundflower which is kind of a lower level thing.

Jason: Right.

Leo: Which I think, I even think I use Soundflower with the old version.

Jason: And that is the thing, the piece that Audio Hijack doesn’t really do right now; the sort of virtual input.

Leo: Does Soundflower still work with core audio?

Jason: It does and there is also a great utility called Sound Siphon that does basically.

Leo: Okay.

Jason: The same thing and has a nicer interface but you have to pay for that one and Soundflower still sort of works but the interface is terrible. This does pretty much anything else that you can think of in regards to recording things.

Leo: Right.

Jason: On your Mac or even not recording things like taking audio from iTunes and processing it to make it have, or be more compressed or be more bassie or anything like that you can set that up too.

Leo: Awe.

Jason: Or you can send iTunes to one set of speaker and some other app, your web browser, to another set of speakers.

Leo: Oh okay.

Jason: You can do that too.

Leo: That is kind of cool.

Jason: And it does a good job.

Leo: It does do recording, it does flack recording or AAC recording.

Jason: Yeah you’ve got granular levels of detail of what you want to record.

Leo: Right.

Jason: Where those files get saved and what format they are in and then you can throw in an EQ. I mean it really goes on and on and on; it’s pretty amazing and very easy to use.

Leo: A great company.

Andy: What I was.

Leo: Go ahead.

Andy: All I would have added was that I love the fact that you can build a machine from recording a thing from the thing that you record a lot and that is the one time you have to build it and you are done by clicking a button and then this complicated thing that would have been several steps or really complicated are just click, done.

Jason: Each of these flow charts is its own, its own document in the documents window or they call it a settings window or a sessions window. So once you make it is there so all you have to do is press record and you can actually go to the recordings tab and see all of the recordings you have done using that preset. So it is very easy to get access to it.

Leo: Nice.

Jason: It is not for everybody, but if you.

Leo: If you are watching this and go oh I need that, that’s for you $49.

Jason: $49 and if you’ve bought anything called Audio Hijack, any of the previous versions.

Leo: I have.

Jason: It is only $25.

Leo: That is a good deal, that is actually a great deal. Thank you Jason Snell, Rene Ritchie your pick of the week.

Rene: I’m going to echo Jason and Andy just at first. I was in the Mobile Nations chatroom this morning and everyone is going bought, bought, bought, bought. So it is something that a lot of us depend on for everything.

Leo: Great timing, it just came out today.

Rene: I was at CES and I saw Serenity Caldwell using this widget on her notifications center called clips and I was immediately very happy with it because all it does is take the clip-board from your iPhone and add it to the widget space in the notifications center. If you start coping more things, it adds more lines. So often with the iPhone you copy something and you want to use it but you copy something else and you forget about it, you can’t go back, you have to go find it again. This is just you have a history of the stuff that you have copied and for many, many activities it makes it so much easier to get actual work done on IOS devices especially when you are on an iPhone when you are mobile, when you are moving around show floors things like that. So the app is called clips, the app actually does do this kind of stuff but having things in the notification center means that no matter what app I’m in, I’m only ever one swipe away from having access to that data. I don’t have to go looking around for it, hunting for the icon, looking for the app doing a bunch of stuff; I’m in the app I want to use, I pull it down, I get the clip board that I want, I close it, I paste it down, and I’m back to work. That kind of convince and time saving is super invaluable to me.

Leo: I just want to make a note that for those, I think that everybody watching this show knows about LastPass. Many of you probably already use LastPass and Joe Siegrist creator LastPass has made LastPass for the first time ever, put it in the Mac app store. Which I think will make it a lot more accessible for much less sophisticated users. LastPass is, as far as I’m concerned, the password manager. It works across all devices including mobile, it has all of the features you want, a trust no one encryption which means no one can see your passwords not even LastPass just you. You remember one password and it gives you fill ins and logins for every website and many apps. It is a great application and it is available in the app store. You can tell your less sophisticated friends just to get it and they will know. Oh I see it in the app store there. Free to use, there is a premium version which adds unlimited mobile access, and family folders which is very nice, additional multi factor authentication options which is cheap; it is $1 a month $12 a year for the full features. We actually use LastPass enterprise at TWiT for our very, very secret super logins for servers and stuff and it is just great. Well that concludes this episode of MacBreak Weekly. I want to thank Andy Ihnatko for joining us from the Chicago Sun Times. It is kind of an interesting.

Andy: That’s cool.

Leo: Picture it looks like night hawks at the IBM dinner on your monitor behind you.

Andy: You know back in the late 50s early 60s you know little kids at Christmas time would just press your nose against the IBM data server window and just dream that Santa Clause would just bring them an accumulator or tape drive on Christmas morning.

Leo: And all I got was this lousy patent. Thank you Andy; Rene Ritchie from imore.com, the snow is coming down, the lakes are frozen.

Rene: Yes.

Leo: It’s hockey night in Canada.

Rene: It’s hockey night on the streets.

Leo: Street hockey night. Thank you so much for being here we really appreciate it; imore.com and of course they are great debug podcast which is also there and Serenity Caldwell is also there curse you.

Rene: Peter Cowen.

Leo: Peter Cowen you’ve got the best people it is really great.

Rene: Awesome.

Leo: You probably remember Jason Snell when he was editor and chief at MacWorld.

Jason: Remember me?

Leo: Remember him? He is doing his own thing, sixcolors.com and loving it and he’s also got a fairly active podcast network.

Jason: Yeah, visit the incomparablenetwork.com to listen to me geek out about stuff.

Leo: Love the incomparable which Serenity is also on.

Jason: Yeah she is on there, she gets around.

Leo: Yeah, she says the new season is about to begin.

Jason: Yeah we are working on our radio theater.

Leo: Awe man I’m so jealous.

Jason: We are going to do radio role plays, we are starting to do that.

Leo: Where do you get your scripts?

Jason: We have a guy, David Lohr, who is one of our panalyst who is play write. He live in Indiana and he writes not only plays but he writes radio drama for us.

Leo: I would like to extend an invitation to do this, maybe we can do it together; I want to get somebody who is like, I want to get a David Chase. You know the guy who did the Soprano’s. Who has a show that he just can never get anybody to make, who wants to work shop it, we wouldn’t reserve rights, it would just be something you could give to the networks and be just see how great this would be. Remember, Francis Ford Coppola does this with his movies; he does audio pre-vis. I presume they do cartoons or something but he will record the entire script in audio as a play; radio play at first is a way to pre-vis. So David call me, I don’t know what the gesture I should be using is; Skype me man. Alright.

Andy: Have you ever

Leo: You got your Cortana in my Siri, you have your Siri in my Cortana, Siri and Cortana 2 great flavors. We are done here. I want to thank everybody that came in the studio live, you got your own pretzels.

Jason: Front row got pretzels.

Leo: Front row got pretzels.

Andy: Lucky studio audience.

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