MacBreak Weekly 925 Transcript
Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.
0:00:00 - Leo Laporte
It's time for Mac Break Weekly. Alex Lindsay is here, Andy Ihnatko's here, Jason Snell couldn't be here, called away to a secret meeting in Cupertino, but fortunately Mikah Sargent is here. You know what we're going to talk about Yesterday's WWDC in all its glory, the pros, the cons, the pluses, the minuses, apple AI coming up next. On MacBreak Weekly
0:00:28 - VO
Podcasts you love. From people you trust. This. Is TWiT.
0:00:36 - Leo Laporte
This is MacBreak Weekly episode 925, recorded Tuesday, June 11th 2024: Sherlocking AI. It's time for MacBreak Weekly, the big show. After the show Yesterday, we saw Apple's plans for AI. There's nothing artificial about it. Joining us to talk about it. Jason Snell has unaccountably been disappeared. He's appearing somewhere in Cupertino, California, but Andy Ihnatko is here from his prison cell.
0:01:11 - Andy Ihnatko
It looks like that's nice no, it's my protective bunker, the uh, apple intelligence. I already got to Jason and I'm afraid they're going to come after me next. So don't try to trace me, because it'll very, very, very much impact my future. I want want to speak freely and proudly, because artificial intelligence and I had a detente. We don't have any sort of a truce between Apple intelligence, whatever the hell that is, so I'm not taking any chances.
0:01:36 - Leo Laporte
I'm reading a sci-fi book in which there are two artificial intelligences at war with one another, which is interesting. That is adversarial AI networks. Yeah, adversarial intelligence.
0:01:47 - Mikah Sargent
Adversary AI. I like it Adversary.
0:01:49 - Leo Laporte
AI.
0:01:50 - Andy Ihnatko
Only it's more like mean girls in high school than actually building better models.
0:01:54 - Leo Laporte
The fellow over to my left here is Mr Mikah Sargent. Hello. From iOS Today, where he was recently laboring in the minds of iOS Today with Rosemary Orchard and has come back to tell us everything there's to know about iOS 18. Also here from officehours.global, where they sat and watched the show yesterday, mr Alex Lindsay. Hello, alex. Hello, it's good to be here. So what was the feeling of the office hours crew?
0:02:28 - Alex Lindsay
I think, I think that I think a lot of people enjoyed it. I think that there's definitely I think overall there was a little bit of a yeah, they caught up to some degree, you know, with things that were already out there, but also I think that Apple's their approach to it I think is is definitely unique and very uniquely Apple, you know, in the sense that they basically created what we kind of thought of as three layers. You know they have the you're going to ask, you're going to do some things on your device, some things on the cloud, some things into the private cloud, and then for all the other things you still have access to right now chat, gpt and eventually Gemini and other things, gpt and eventually Gemini and other things. But I do think that number one is that I think that Apple always looks at what will 90% of the population, 90% of their users, do 90% of the time, and I think if you look at what is being produced by the device and the private cloud, it's probably between 70, 90% of what the average person wants to do with their phone or with their device. And then they still have this kind of release valve and they can and they have the freedom to keep on expanding, watching, you know, like expanding what people are doing on their devices and on their private cloud, while still never having it not be able to scale up.
I think that the other thing is they're giving most of these tools, or almost all these tools, back to the developers, and so developers are going to be able to add this. You know, I think before they had to kind of figure out what it was going to do and how much it was going to cost, and all those other things, and a lot of those things now are getting tied in to the, you know, being made available to the developers to add to it. So I think that I think we definitely saw a very, you know, a fairly unique way of approaching the problem. That is something only Apple can do. It doesn't necessarily make it better or worse, just makes it an Apple version of AI, and so I think that that's, but I think a lot of folks are pretty excited about it. Andy, what'd you think?
0:04:17 - Andy Ihnatko
I thought it was really, really great. It's great that we're talking about this a day later as opposed to the day of because this is true of pretty much all Apple keynotes, but I think, especially this one after a day when, like your first enthusiasm wears off, that's when you start looking at exactly what was shown off and you realize that, ok, they didn't show off a lot that was really new or really fresh. Was really new or really fresh? A lot of the most interesting stuff, like the intelligence in Siri. They were really vague about exactly how this is going to work and when it's going to be released. So this was all like a lot of hypothetical stuff, but when you compare it to Google IOS AI keynote last month, it's pretty much the same thing. Actually almost lasted exactly the same amount of time. I was surprised it lasted nearly two hours.
But whereas Google was extremely hyped about talking about the basic technology and talking about the core research and talking about the layers that they were putting into this, apple really wanted just to focus on, here are some actual things that. Here are some demos of actual things our intelligence are going to do built into our actual products right now, and it doesn't really matter that they can't really that maybe it's not quite so ambitious as far as what they can announce right now. It gives people a sense of comfort that, yeah, apple does have a strategy. Yeah, it looks like they're not going to make the same mistakes that OpenAI and Google made, which are myriad and legendary, and it looks like they've bought enough time to actually make these things happen, so I'm really really very pleased with it.
0:05:59 - Alex Lindsay
And one of the things is that, while the keynote was very cursatory I definitely encourage people to look at the state of the union was much deeper than what Apple was doing. Yeah, me too. So it was a much deeper, deep dive. It's not like, oh, we just kind of added chat. I think that there was this little bit of like the kind of uninformed press was saying, well, they've incorporated chat, gpt, and it was kind of like, right, exactly, yeah, I mean, it's a little deeper than that. You know, like they're doing an enormous amount of work on the device and enormous amount of work in the private cloud, and then they're basically a release valve, is oh, yeah, and you can have all these other things on the periphery if you want to be able to add them. And, by the way, if you're a developer, you don't have to do anything other than turn. You know, easy to add.
0:06:44 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, I mean, the State of the Union had a lot of. Really, it really did bring home the idea that, no, they didn't just say, okay, well, we entered into a desperation agreement with OpenAI to get basic text summaries and basic rewrites somewhere on our device device. Now, when you look at things like the private cloud compute which I'm sure we'll talk about in more depth later on that's what they're talking about. How not only surprised me that it's going to be running on Apple's own silicon in the cloud, but also that it was only about 10 or 15 minutes of the of the State of the Union. But they're mentioning that.
Well, basically, we started with, like iOS slash X for the operating system that these servers are running, and we removed everything that we don't need, and not just to make it faster, more performative, but saying we even removed from the operating system persistent storage because this is supposed to not actually keep any people's data, so we've removed everything that could actually make that happen. So this is it's great, because if in the next year, some naysayers are saying, oh well, gosh, look at the chat GPT-12. Hey, look at Gemini 81. Look at what it can do, apple really has a long-term plan. They're making a statement, they have a point of view about how they want to go about this and so long as they stay focused on delivering actual appreciative tools that are better or as good as what we can actually see through a third party app on Gemini or OpenAI, they got time. They got time, micah, you're nodding.
0:08:17 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, what was the very clear and thoroughly thought out method by which Apple is introducing Apple intelligence and kind of setting the not just the groundwork for it, but also kind of how its approach looks and how it differs, I think, from other approaches, and the way that it was so clearly explained and we talk about the capabilities that it has, we talk about the architecture and then we talk about the most important aspect for consumers, which is what can you actually do with it, and I just felt it was very considered and I really appreciated that aspect of it.
I kind of felt comfortable because here's the thing there are a lot of people, a lot of my colleagues, who feel a type of way about generative AI and for the most part, I've existed outside of that.
I understand the complaints about generative AI, I understand the worries and the concerns about how it's impacting different folks, but I am also enamored of the things that I have been able to do with it. And so, seeing a more considered approach from a company that I cover quite a bit, being a more considered approach from a company that I cover quite a bit, I liked that. I was happy that there was that consideration that went into it and that it was clear that the company said we're not just going to give you this blank canvas. I think it was either Tim Cook or it was Federighi who, in an interview, talked about not just giving the teenager the keys to the car. That isn't what Apple wanted to do with generative AI, some very specific use cases and, you know, some very specific demos showing how it can be used in day-to-day life. I think that's good.
0:10:19 - Leo Laporte
Let me show some outside opinions. During the event, you and I were watching apple's stock go down, then up, down and up. It was down quite a bit, uh. Well, since then it's gone up quite a bit. It is now 12 up. It was as low as 191 bucks yesterday. It's up to 205 bucks today. Uh, the market says yay, this is a good thing.
Elon Musk says if Apple integrates OpenAI at the OS level, then Apple devices will be banned in my companies. This is an unacceptable security violation and visitors will have to check their Apple devices at the door. Will they be stored in a Faraday cage? He's sounding nuts. I think it's only a matter of time before he starts talking about sharks. It's patently absurd that Apple is not smart enough to make their own AI, yet is somehow capable of ensuring that open AI will protect your security and privacy. Apple has no clue what's actually going on. Once they hand your data over to open AI, they're selling you down the river.
I should point out Elon has been in a feud with open ai. He funded it initially but pulled out when he decided they weren't going in the right direction and they wouldn't let him run the show. Sam allman was at the apple event signaling, uh, at least some support from open ai. And then there's this from charlie warzel at the atlantic the iphone is now anjan horse. Now that's not all bad. He says generative AI has become truly inescapable. I think that my takeaway I mean, look, I kind of like AI. I don't think generative AI you know AI chatbots is all that interesting. I was really glad Apple didn't show that, but there is a lot of things you can do with AI. That's really cool. In fact, it's my opinion, apple Sherlocked AI, because AI now stands for Apple Intelligence not Artificial.
Intelligence and I think, from a marketing point of view alone, apple did exactly the right thing. They said this is AI for, as you guys have said, for the real people, for the masses, doing stuff that real people really want to do.
0:12:29 - Alex Lindsay
And I think that we have to remember that we were talking about this this morning in office hours that most people have not used any AI. So you know we talk about it and it feels like something like everybody's using it all the time. I have chat GPT open all the time. I'm using mid-journey at least once a day, like it seems like it's all around us. But if you look at the average person using their iPhone they're they're not using chat GPT, they're not using any of those things.
So, as you look at all the features that Apple's bringing to the device and to the private cloud by itself, um, that's going to that's going to become ubiquitous with using your computer, you know, and then you are going to very easily be able to jump over and get some, get more, if you want to, from chat GPT. So it really is for the Apple, uh, consumer is going to introduce a lot of people to AI and so, and and a lot of their stuff that they do day to day is going to probably exist on their device or on the private cloud the, the memo, the gen emojismojis, the little images, the fun stuff that they're going to do, filling something in, doing some correction all of that stuff is going to be stuff that is done very seamlessly for them. That's going to be their introduction and again, because it's everywhere for developers, it has kind of commoditized the service in a sense that a lot of people could say they were doing AI. Now most Apple developers could just add it.
0:13:51 - Leo Laporte
I'm sure you're right that most people haven't tried it. Chatgpt had 100 million monthly users at its peak, so somebody is using it. I think certainly the public is very aware of AI. It's been widely reported. I think probably most people have just tried it just to see what would happen. Remember, microsoft has it built into Windows, the biggest operating system in the world, and you know it's kind of hard to get away from it, frankly, in Windows. So I think more people have tried it than you think, alex, but I do think Apple is being fairly judicious. You think, alex, but I do think Apple is being fairly judicious. Tim Cook, in an interview with the Washington Post, admitted that AI is going to hallucinate. Let me see if I can find the quote. What's your confidence?
0:14:36 - Mikah Sargent
That might be where they talk about giving the team the keys.
0:14:39 - Leo Laporte
This is Josh Tarangio, who's an opinion columnist, writes about AI in the Washington Post. He says what's your confidence that Apple intelligence will not hallucinate? Tim Cook says it's not 100%, but I think we've done everything that we know to do, including thinking very deeply about the readiness of the technology and the areas that we're using it in. So I'm confident it will be very high quality, but I'd say in all honesty, that's short of 100%. I would never claim it's 100%. So he's he's hedging a little bit, saying yeah, yeah, you might get something weird. I think the biggest risk for they're smart because they're not just kind of giving AI an open field that everybody can just try you know, try stuff. But they didn't introduce a brand new app, image Playground, which is, you know. You know this is where Google has gotten in trouble Stable Diffusion, mid Journey. Even Microsoft Designer have gotten in trouble because their AI image generators have been used to generate images. You know people say, oh, that's problematic.
0:15:39 - Andy Ihnatko
Apple's got an image generator, well, but you notice that it's not none of the demos that they gave showed it, showing anything that was nearly photorealistic. It's all like just these playful images and only three styles animation, illustration style or sketch. So, yeah, I think right now they're putting such strict guardrails on what this is used for and what they're willing to endorse sending out in the world that was generated by image playgrounds.
0:16:08 - Leo Laporte
that's mostly hey, hey, make a cartoon, make a pixar cartoon version of your mom the riding a horse that solves one of the problems, which is people taking uh ai generated uh deep fakes and passing them off as real because it's not going to be to have it right there, but it doesn't solve the problem google had where people said show me some Supreme Court justices, and they were all black.
or so many some founding fathers, and they were all black. Now I personally don't think that's a problem, but there are plenty of people who did, and Google had to step back and really retreat on its image generation. How long before iOS 18 comes out? And, by the way, this will not come out with iOS 18, right?
0:16:45 - Mikah Sargent
before ios 18 comes out. Now, by the way, this will not come out with ios 18, right? We're not not? It's not out with the betas yet at all. And when it does come out, I think, based on the the words have been used, it seems like it will be in beta even when it's in public even after the iphone comes out, probably I think it's going to be later than much later this year, but how long it'll be?
0:17:02 - Leo Laporte
seconds after it comes out, before somebody types in Show me some Supreme Court justices, right, show me some founding fathers.
0:17:08 - Mikah Sargent
I'm curious to see how they block things out. Yeah, are there words I can't type in? Yeah, how much safety.
0:17:14 - Leo Laporte
And we know that safety does not work because all of these companies, not so much up in AI but certainly Anthropic and Google, have tried to be safe.
0:17:22 - Mikah Sargent
And there's always quote, unquote, jailbreaking.
0:17:24 - Andy Ihnatko
There's jailbreaking yeah, so youbreaking. I'm sure Apple red-teamed the hell out of this before they let it go, and this is one of those things that, if you listen really closely, you would maybe assume that this is coming in iOS 18 when it's first released, but the only time frame they ever gave for a lot of this stuff was sometime in the next year, so they're not even done, probably red teaming.
Yeah, exactly, I mean it's it's a good demo, but they're not. Yeah, there's so much of that Again, the things they learned from Google and open AI is that the more ambitious that you get, the more powerful a thing you tool you want to give to people, the more dangerous it's going to be in the hands of people who don't understand what it is, or people who understand exactly what it is and want to use it to perform acts of extreme mischief. And they're again, they got time, so they're very, very willing to simply say OK, we've got a great image generator. It really is just for making cartoons and illustrations. It's going to be for things like in notes. If you just draw like a rough sketch, you can have our image generator turn into something that's a little bit more refined.
Oh, really, the notes app has so much. I think we should spend some time with the notes. That was really we'll get to it a killer app, my goodness. Yeah, it reminded me of the newton, and in good ways, not an egg freckles way, but in a good way. You. But yeah, this is go ahead. I'm sorry, I'm just not to not to jump what we're going to be talking about, but I think it was pretty amazing how very quietly they slipped in. Oh, and if you want to like, you don't have to just do handwriting to text, you can just do handwriting to handwriting, because we will figure out what your handwriting looks like.
So we'll do spell check and we will correct the spelling in your handwriting. And we will correct the spelling in your handwriting. If you want to use our generative AI to like tighten something up, it will tighten it up in your handwriting because we will build a facsimile of your handwriting. And if this were being done by Gemini, it would be a wonderful tech demo. It would be an amazing white paper. But, oh my God, the Internet would be absolutely choked to death with the congratulations. Now Google knows how to fake your signature everywhere. Apple really set up the stage very, very well by saying that. Here is what they talked about privacy and basically guardrails, before they talked about anything else. And again they're doing very, very simple things. They're showing exactly what this is being used for. Not now you can make a font out of your handwriting. It's no. Here's a way that we can now have your natural handwriting be editable, cut and pasteable and more natural to work with if you like to work with handwriting.
0:19:53 - Leo Laporte
It's really interesting to compare Apple's announcement yesterday with ChatGPT 4.0, the OpenAI announcement or even Google's Google IO. Apple, really, I'm going to say it again they Sherlocked AI, They've made it theirs. You have found. I guess they're giving demos today. That's probably where Jason Snell is.
0:20:17 - Mikah Sargent
You found a tweet talking about this new photographer and video guy. Hey, tyler Stallman had a demo of the new Siri AI system and talked a little bit about that, including the guardrails that we were just talking about, sort of what you're able to do, what you're not able to do and the way that they kind of the way that they put it together where you are working on kind of categories and topics, and so you say I want you to create an image from these four ideas and concepts that it then kind of puts together and it'll show you an image almost immediately and then starts to generate three or four more afterward. So they had I think it was a cat that I can remember, a cat surrounded by tomatoes or something on stage, but yeah, I did.
0:21:02 - Leo Laporte
I did see a number of people say that what Apple demonstrated on stage seemed kind of trivial and dopey, like oh great, it knows that Craig Federighi's kid is at soccer practice and the travel time is this and you've got a meeting. Can you make it from one meeting to the other?
0:21:23 - Mikah Sargent
I don't think it's trivial because we don't have that right now. So what's trivial about something that isn't currently available to me? That's the thing. I think that this is what everybody else and this is going to make me sound like a fanboy, but I don't mean it this way Genuinely. I think this is what everybody else gets wrong when it comes to getting the actual consumer masses, which is that we can't just give this blank canvas and say I mean, you were just talking about that, andy, it wasn't. We'll make a handwriting font for you. It was. This is going to look like your handwriting and you like. It's just. That's just an aside, even though you know there was so much engineering that went into that they don't care about all of the work that went into that.
0:22:09 - Leo Laporte
It's about what?
0:22:09 - Mikah Sargent
can actually happen with it. Not to belabor that. No, we're not belaboring it, and the same thing applies there. It's not about uh, it knows this, it knows this, it knows this, it knows this. It's that I can say to Siri in three queries right there, siri queries I want to meet with my mom and I want to make sure that there's nothing else in the way they showed that kind of step-by-step-by-step process and that made so much more sense than Siri knows this, this, this, this and this about you, and so can you think of the things you can? No, we're not going to make you think of the things that you can do with it. We're going to show you what you can do with it and it's going to matter to the people who use these devices regularly. It doesn't have to be just for us nerdos.
0:22:49 - Andy Ihnatko
I wrote it. I wrote that particular interaction down because I thought it was so impressive, because they were talking about Siri having access to pretty much again being a very personal and contextual to. They had actually a slide with these four words on it about why Apple intelligence, they thought, was such a big deal. Again, it has access to your personal information in a very safe and secure way, but it also understands the context of what you're talking about. So they're in a demonstrate, in a not live demonstration of Siri. They're talking about interaction like Shlomo. When is mom mom's flight landing? That means OK. So Shlomo knows who your mom is. They know that.
Oh well, there was an email in which or, excuse me, there was a message in which her mother mentioned a certain flight number. Now Shlomo is going to actually use a flight tracker app to find out if the flight is delayed and use that to build in a response to that follow up. What's our lunch plans? I didn't have to repeat what is. What are my plans with my mother on X date? Pull out from calendar. How long will it take to get from there to here?
We talked about this for the past couple of weeks about how one of the frustrating things about how slow progress is in computers is that you think that it should understand concepts like that web page about ferrets that I was looking at a couple of weeks ago. And it should understand, like, send that web page ferrets that I was looking at a couple of weeks ago. And it should understand, like, send that web page which you just found I don't have to say that to Sheila and it knows what web page I'm talking about, it knows who Sheila is, it knows that, okay. Well, I don't use Mail as my mail app. I use Outlook as my mail app, so use that app to do that. A lot of really sophisticated things happening to make the most natural, simple, boneheaded thing that we've been expecting and hoping for for the past 20 years actually happen.
0:24:30 - Leo Laporte
Let me quote Big D, david Wright. In our Twit forums, at Twitcommunity, people keep saying that Apple is behind in AI, yet the first 40 minutes as far as I've gotten so far, so you had to write this right away is full of AI being implemented in useful ways. I think this is the big problem. Apple and Google have both integrated lots of AI into their operating systems and apps, yet because they don't show an LLM hallucinating, they've missed the AI boat. I thought it was really smart of Apple not to show, for instance, a chat, a chat bot and a conversational thing, like OpenAI did with their 4.0.
0:25:06 - Mikah Sargent
Exactly. It's not just oh, I can have a conversation about what's around the room, Because those are pretty dopey and I find it cool because I care about this thing. But think about if I were to go to a diner and pull out my phone and say watch, and I start to talk to GPT-4-0 and it says oh, it looks like you're in a diner right now and there's a plate of pancakes in front of you, Thank you. That truck driver doesn't give a flying. You know what? I know that. Yeah, why does he need?
0:25:38 - Leo Laporte
that that's Zooey Deschanel looking out the window saying Siri, is it raining? Right, it's just dopey. Big D goes on to say I've long said LLM is a problem, looking for a problem, and there are lots of areas where AI can make real differences. I'm happy that companies like Apple and Google are putting AI to good use, as opposed to bringing useless chat bots that provide the wrong information most of the time. I think it was smart of Apple to focus on utility, even though, as some have pointed out, the utility was kind of mundane. You know, it wasn't HAL 9000.
0:26:13 - Mikah Sargent
But that's what we do with our devices mundane tasks, More often than anything else.
0:26:17 - Andy Ihnatko
Go ahead Alex, go ahead Alex.
0:26:20 - Alex Lindsay
No, exactly when you think about Apple again going. What does 90% of the people do 90% of the time? No-transcript, with AI and Apple's like, why don't I handle most of your day and make this a?
0:26:55 - Leo Laporte
little smoother, but I got to point out that was a demo. Nobody's really used it yet. We'll see.
0:27:01 - Alex Lindsay
But if it can do what they said.
0:27:02 - Leo Laporte
Remember, though, google, it seems like a decade ago, proposed almost exactly the same utility. Remember the Google note cards. You'd swipe right on your Android screen and you'd have. You're at the airport, here's your ticket, here's your rental car, and Google, by the way, abandoned this, maybe because it wasn't ready yet. I think it wasn't ready, yet I think what came up also was that's creepy. So.
0:27:28 - Alex Lindsay
Apple has to avoid the creepy line, right. I think the distinction is that Apple's selling the privacy cloud on your device. They're aware of it, aren't they? Yeah, they're very aware of it and they've been building this connection, they've been building this marketing process for the last decade of privacy, privacy, privacy, so that they can launch things like this and say hey, I'm going to know everything about you and I'm going to make everything easier for you. If any other company other than Apple said that ever, be like that's super weird and I don't want to do it.
0:27:55 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, you know, I don't want you to know all those things. And look at Microsoft's getting the pushback on recall which is essentially the same idea right we're gonna keep track of everything you do it was not the same.
0:28:07 - Alex Lindsay
It was like we're actually going to keep track of everything you're doing I would say.
0:28:11 - Leo Laporte
I would submit the biggest issue was merely that people don't trust microsoft. If people do trust apple, because it's very similar in functionality, it was on device only.
0:28:20 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, it was locked down, and the trust is not that that Apple's a better company or a good, a more good company than Microsoft. It's that their business model is about privacy, like this is how they make money, and so the thing is is that, from a selfish perspective, they are going to protect the privacy because that's their entire business model and that's how they make money, and so so they have a vested interest in keeping your privacy, as opposed to other companies that are saying, yeah, we want to do it, but it doesn't matter as much. Apple's entire business model is based around privacy, and so so that's the thing that. That that's why people trust them. It's not because they're they have more good in their, in their, their thing. It's just that they have a very, very strong business model that is based around that.
0:28:58 - Andy Ihnatko
Well, just to just to not be devil, not be a jerk, but they have a business model that is not influenced by privacy one way or another, that they can afford to go whole hog on privacy because it won't affect their ability to sell hard.
Yes, it doesn't affect everything, whereas, on the flip side, google doesn't care about lock-in because they make money. The more people who have access to Google, the more money that they make. So it's a six in one, half dozen in the other. But it is interesting how Apple has made, even in this just two hours worth of talks. They've made a very, very consistent point of view about how they want interactions with AI to be. Actually, it's a opinion that seems to be similar to Google, where Russ, openai and other tools and Claude are there to hey, our tools will do your homework for you. Trust us, we'll tell you. We'll give you. Ask us for something, we'll give it to you. Don't worry about it. Apple is very, very much. No, no, no, we don't have a chatbot. You don't talk to us. We're a feature that you can invoke when you feel that it's necessary.
Another really interesting part of the State of the Union was AI features that are in Xcode right now. They introduced, basically, coding assistance tools and it's not. Hey, I need a Swift routine that will do a persistent window that does this. It fills a window with whatever. As you're programming, it kind of figures out that oh, I think that you want to do this kind of routine. I can autocomplete that for you if you want, that for you, if you want. Or Swift Assist, which is more text-based, where you can actually say sort of brainstorm ideas is how they kind of were talking about it.
They did a demo where the demonstrator was creating an app that shows you all the different Macs in history and being able to do things like okay, well, that's in a list I want you. Could you attach, like all the sounds to like the right Macs? Okay, no, actually it's in a list right now. What would that look like as a grid? And doing things like, if you come. Finally, a reward for commenting your code. It can actually get inference from the comments that you've added to your code. Oh, okay, I see what he's trying to do here. So here's I can refine my suggestion as to what block code to go in here. So, once again, not doing your homework for you, not actually being a place that you go to to consult this magical genie that has Scarlett Johansson's voice, but simply a flashing cursor that can paste things in automatically that you were going to probably going to type in yourself.
0:31:39 - Leo Laporte
It's interesting. Apple said Swift only. They don't do it for any other languages. You didn't want to be a jerk, andy. I'll let MG Siegler be the jerk from a spyglass blog, the voice assistant who cried wolf. He starts out my initial take after yesterday. By the way, mg's been around forever. He's a VC now, but he was a Apple-focused journalist for many, many years and, I think, a very smart guy.
My initial take after yesterday's WWDC keynote was that Apple was doing AI their way, including and refusing to call it AI, but rather Apple intelligence. They took the technology, stripped out the hype and distilled it down to their products in ways that seem both tangible and useful. Compared to other AI events, it's all rather cautious, but that's exactly what it needs to be in order to garner mass usage. While the others dance to the promise of technology that gives good demos, apple waltzes in and productizes technology that can be useful today. This level of restraint and practicality engenders trust in their products, and Apple's focus on privacy and security just doubles down on that trust. That has arguably never been more important than it is right now.
Except wait, hold on a minute. I couldn't help but hearing this voice in my head watching the keynote. A voice is a lot like siri, a voice telling me something that's completely useless in response to a simple query, such has been the state of apple's. Ai og, ai sure, but still ai. For over a decade now, siri has broken our trust over and over and over again. That's why I don't use it.
And yeah, by most people don't use it except for alex lindsey, who for some reason still use it, uh he says, all I use it for is timers okay, so that's barely uses it yeah and like I don't, I don't like and play this next song like I don't need it to.
I don't if say let me see what I found on the web about this, then you know I'm talking about Siri. Right, it's a meme. It's a meme. So he is skeptical because he says Siri remains at the heart of what Apple's selling as a new intelligent feature. I don't care how nice her new coat of ui paint looks. If we ask her about our mom's flight and she can't figure it out or spits back bogus information, well we'll. We'll be back to where we are right now, with larry david screaming obscenities at his phone. That was a great I didn't read it.
0:33:59 - Alex Lindsay
Watching the watching, I guess I didn't read that I would be using siri more than I am now, which is for timers and things like that.
0:34:06 - Leo Laporte
I mean, maybe that's fine, but what I'm looking at is all the text injection and all of the so that demo that he did, which was a Siri demo of the airplane, that that wasn't something you thought you'd be using?
0:34:18 - Alex Lindsay
No, I'll tell you what the thing. The thing that for me was the drawing in the calculator where he goes like he started. You know he starts to go. Well, how big is this? Like? The thing is is that most people don't remember how to calculate a hypotenuse. But if I can just draw something and say I know this is this high and this is this this this long, and it just tells you what the distance the hypotenuse is, like that kind of stuff, I was like by the way.
0:34:46 - Leo Laporte
Get to, let's get to calculator and notes in just a second, because that's that is worth an entire segment by itself.
0:34:52 - Alex Lindsay
I think it's definitely things that stop me. The thing about the tickets was like, yeah, that sounds good.
0:34:56 - Leo Laporte
I mean, I don't, I would never do that, but I I thought it was cool, and I don't blame mg for saying and let's see if it does.
0:35:01 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, that's how I feel actually I have not given in all of the updates that have happened with siri over time. I have not. It has not regained my trust enough for me to even give it a shot. So I'm going to give it a shot after this happens, at which point, if it breaks my trust again, then I don't see myself ever using.
0:35:18 - Leo Laporte
He says fool me once. Shame on you. Fool me for 13 straight years.
0:35:22 - Alex Lindsay
Shame on siri but again, I think that I think that the whole thing is is that I think the things are going to be used heavily. Are the gen, mojis, the, the make an image that I can, you know, use in my demo or my, my keynote or whatever? Um, the only thing I was kind of bummed about is like these weird little frames that it puts around it, like I was like what I'm going to want in keynote is over a plain white background, like that's what I want these images to be, and if it doesn't do that, then it won't be useful.
0:35:46 - Leo Laporte
That's interesting, though the frame is a safety feature, right it's announcing this is an AI generated image, yeah.
0:35:52 - Alex Lindsay
But as soon as I saw that, I was like well, I will never use that. You know, like like you know, and so so it was. Or you have to be careful. That Photoshop is like looking at all your is, looking at all your images, evidently, but the but you go in there and you you'll select it and say get rid of that, and then it'll go away, and then you'll be done, you'll move on.
0:36:13 - Leo Laporte
So let's take a break. I do want to talk about notepad and calculator, which turned out to be different facets of the same. We thought oh, isn't that cute, they're adding calculator to iPad, Isn't that cute? Oh, wow, what Holy cow.
0:36:28 - Alex Lindsay
It was a good reveal because it started off as like oh, that's just a calculator Buttons bigger.
0:36:33 - Andy Ihnatko
It's the iPhone, only bigger.
0:36:35 - Alex Lindsay
Now let me open the secret door and show you what's inside.
0:36:37 - Leo Laporte
Oh my God, what's under the hood is mind-boggling. But we'll talk about that in just a bit. You're watching Mac Break Weekly, the post-WWC reaction. We've had a day to think about it. Alex Lindsay is here, so is Mikah Sargent, filling in for Jason Snell and Andy Ihnatko. But first a word from Ecamm and I'm glad you're here because you use Ecamm every week for iOS today.
Ecamm is the leading live streaming and video production studio built for Mac. You do iOS Today from your home, as does Rosemary, but you're able to do all the things. We spent millions of dollars. It's really frustrating. We spent millions of dollars over 20 years building these studios and you can do it all now with a simple software program on your Mac.
Whether you're a beginner or an expert, Ecamm E-C-A-M-M is here to elevate your video production. Ecamm Live includes and that's what you use Mikah, support for multiple cameras and screen sharing. Live camera switcher also allows you to direct your show in real time. You can add logos, titles, lower thirds graphics. Share your screen. Add logos, titles, lower thirds graphics. Share your screen. Drop in video clips, bring on interview guests or use a green screen. And here's the really good news it's not just for podcasting anymore. It's not just for presenting anymore. You can do it on Zoom. Imagine making your Zoom calls a video production. Blow the boss away with this.
Ecamm for Zoom just came out of beta. It launched June 4th and it is fantastic. You can automatically send Ecamm Live's audio and video output into a Zoom meeting or a Zoom webinar or a Zoom event. You can create individual participant audio and video recordings. During a live stream or recording, you can add Zoom chat messages to your meeting broadcast recording as text overlays. Hey, you know, joe in accounting just mentioned this might cost something and he puts it up on the screen. I mean this is so cool. Check it out.
ecamm.com/zoom. So now there's just one more way to use the best live video production tool ever made. Now you can use it in Zoom. Join the thousands of worldwide entrepreneurs, marketing professionals, podcasters, educators yeah, if you're a teacher, bring this into your classroom. Man, you can do a beautiful job Musicians, use it to perform, and all those other great Mac users who rely on Ecamm Live every single day. Get one month free when you subscribe to any of Ecamm's plans. Visit ecamm.com/twit. Use the promo code TWiT at checkout. There's my secret shame If you're not the quote I gave him, which is really true. If you're not willing to build a million-dollar studio, as we have, Ecamm gives you all the benefits without the cost. In fact, if we were going to do TWiT today, we would be. We would be doing it with Ecamm. ecamm.com/twit. Don't forget to use the promo code twit at checkout. We thank Ecamm for such a great job with a beautiful piece of software.
0:39:40 - Alex Lindsay
We had Ecamm on last week. Did you On Office? Did you have Doc Rock on we? We had Ecamm on last week. Did you On Office Hour? Did you have Doc Rock on? We did. Doc Rock was on, and so we talked about the new Zoom integration. So now you can just join a Zoom meeting with Ecamm and then deliver all those videos out and start to cut between. Isn't that wild? Pretty cool.
0:39:57 - Leo Laporte
Unbelievable. So, by the way, I think we got to give points to Mark Gurman. Did he miss anything from that keynote? I think he had it. All John Gruber said on Daring Fireball it sure looks like somebody who had seen the presentation ahead of time sent his notes to Gruber the day before or to Gurman the day before. Gruber said that was pretty impressive and yeah, I don't think he got anything wrong. Did he miss anything?
0:40:24 - Alex Lindsay
That was pretty impressive and, yeah, I don't think he got anything wrong. Did he miss anything? And either there's an Apple, either that was by design, or there's a mole hunt.
0:40:33 - Leo Laporte
Well, that's Gruber pointed out. He said people at Apple are hopping mad. But you might say this was an intentional leak to just kind of pave the way, prepare the way.
0:40:43 - Alex Lindsay
Well, it could be, but who knows? I mean, it's hard to tell whether I mean apple's not usually excited about that, so so I think that I think that there's probably somebody's trying to figure out what what happened. That was a little too, he was a little too accurate, and there's probably only a handful of people that know what's that exactly, but did he really know all?
0:41:01 - Leo Laporte
that I still felt like that was quite a reveal. They to show calculator, which he had said they're going to have calculator for the iPad. Everybody knew that and look big buttons it fits.
0:41:11 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah.
0:41:11 - Leo Laporte
It's a scream. In fact I was, we were mocking it. I was mocking it. I said, oh nice, Big buttons, Good job. And then, as it feels like calculator notes are two different views inside the same app, because you can basically do a lot of the calculator stuff in notes.
The other thing I loved when Apple did which they didn't mention AI for the first hour and a half. They didn't say the words AI at all. They just showed all these cool things you could do, like this apple notes. And then later they said oh yeah, you know, by the way, that was ai in action, apple intelligence in action. So the calculator has and this was the example uh, they used, uh it has a new kind of pen mode.
It's gonna sell a lot of apple pencil pros exactly um, here's a solving a problem on projectile motion and table tennis, and they show the angle monday and boy. They first of all just like a spreadsheet. You could change a value. You could say change the x value and everything else around it changes and not only does it change, it changes in your handwriting.
0:42:19 - Mikah Sargent
In your handwriting, rosemary showed this this morning. She just did a simple x plus y equals and had a value for x of y because she has the beta this is in the beta. This is in the um, I've used it as well. Uh, and when it gave the answer, she hadn't written the number four or another number that was in the answer, but just using what was available, it guessed how she would draw a four in her handwriting puts a four, yeah, uh, it pops up a graph.
0:42:50 - Leo Laporte
If you want to show how x changes over time, you can have a little style and and move back and forth through it. This is about the coolest thing I've ever seen. I mean, this goes. This to me is as big as the demo and the mother of all demos that Douglas Engelbart did way back when. This was the promise of graphical screens and touch. This is going to sell a lot of iPads, I think, not just students either.
0:43:20 - Andy Ihnatko
Ability to play.
I can't wait to see what teachers who happen to have access to iPads in the classroom.
I can't wait to see how they will teach math labs, how they would develop curriculum, develop a unit of like trigonometry based on look, just play with it, just mess around with it, just draw stuff.
Change the shape of this curve, see what happens, change the parameters of this equation, see what happens, see the effects that it has, because that's I mean the changes in math education, where it went from this boring, stultifying idea of tables, tables, tables and handwriting out calculations, and teaching you how to do these mechanical calculations that a wristwatch, calculator or phone app can do in like a fraction of a second. Now you have the ability to simply say well, what does a, what does a cosine want? You know what does. What does what does a, what does a tangent like want to be, what will influence it into, into changing its shape and to changing its, its attitude to the rest of these variables and just mess around with it. Having an understanding of the language of mathematics that was completely alien to every other generation, I'm so this changes how you think of ai, because it's not voice.
0:44:31 - Leo Laporte
Uh here, watch this example. Here they showed us a calculator with a paper tape and all that. Then they went to math notes. And wait a minute, here's the calculations. The orange part is the is the answer calculated by the calculator. 96 times 28 equals it not only reads the text, it gives you the answer in the same format. Now did Rosemary find this was accurate and reliable.
0:44:57 - Mikah Sargent
I have used it as well. It's still got some stuff to work out. It's an ongoing process. It's not out yet, we should point out.
0:45:04 - Alex Lindsay
It's still in beta, I would not out yet. We should point out it won't be out until this fall. It's still in beta.
0:45:06 - Mikah Sargent
I would actually say the math part was pretty good. The handwriting part it still needs some work. So you know how it said it would clean up your handwriting and sort of bring it in line a little bit better.
0:45:18 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, that still needs some work. Kind of funny here. Watch this, it's called.
0:45:21 - Mikah Sargent
Smart Script as you write script as you write.
0:45:23 - Leo Laporte
It's going to you, tap it and oops, he made new cleaner. It didn't. Doesn't change it a lot, no, it still looks like it's handwritten. Does spell check in handwritten notes? That's pretty wild.
0:45:34 - Mikah Sargent
That's cool.
0:45:35 - Leo Laporte
And then you can also sort of move text around Turns into your handwriting.
0:45:39 - Andy Ihnatko
That's pretty damn nice.
0:45:40 - Leo Laporte
Look, she moves the text over to add a word. She's scribbling Now. By the way, that's straight out of the Newton. In fact, the only thing I miss is that Newton explosion. Yeah the poof. I was really hoping they would do that. Maybe they will. It's not too late.
They still own the IP, for God's sake, I know, but it's not too late. This is what the Newton wanted it to be, and if this works, this is AI in a way that we haven't really thought of. Ai right, and I think that's one of the things that's going to be very interesting with Apple intelligence is it's not a stupid thing you talk to or that writes text for you. Yeah, you can do both of those things, but things like this under the hood are really very powerful.
It does feel like your iPad is alive, is smart, is your little buddy, your little friend.
0:46:30 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, and I think that you know, like, even if you look at Swift Assistant I mean, my son started to program in Swift and you know the ability to say, well, I just need this, I need this, I need this. In the past, people went out and searched and cut and pasted other people's code into their app From Stack Exchange, yeah, and now it's something that he can, you know, and again, it's not. It doesn't write it, write the app itself. You're not going to finish an app.
I don't think you're going to finish an app in AI, but being able to add the things that you want to very quickly and not necessarily have seen that before, is pretty powerful, and then you'll still have to figure out how to link it and ask it questions, so on and so forth.
But I think that the speed at which people can develop is going to be interesting and I also think I do think we're going to see some pretty powerful tools somewhere in the future where you're sitting there describing what you want the world to be like around you, with automation and home and everything else. But when I walk into this room, I want this light to turn on. I want this to happen. I want the TV to turn on, I want this to turn off, I want the air conditioner to turn off, whatever it is, and be able to just say that to your computer and have using shortcuts and spotlight and widgets and and intent indents or intents um, all of those things start to tie all these things together all of those things, start to tie all these things together.
0:47:46 - Leo Laporte
You know, we had a guy call on the Ask the Tech Guys Mikah on Sunday who said should I install the beta? And we said, in Unity, no, no. But I have to say I am now extraordinarily tempted.
0:48:00 - Mikah Sargent
Oh boy.
0:48:01 - Leo Laporte
Developer betas are out for iOS 18. Are they out also for? By the way, it's macOS Sequoia. You and I were both wrong on that.
0:48:08 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, you said Tiburon, I said Shasta, interestingly. Tiburon was all over the photos of everything. So on iOS almost all the screenshots showed the location as Tiburon. I thought that was interesting.
0:48:20 - Leo Laporte
Maybe they wanted it to be Tiburon and then somebody said you know, that's shark in Spanish, or something I don't know.
0:48:26 - Mikah Sargent
What was your question? Sorry.
0:48:28 - Alex Lindsay
Do you need the newest iPad to run the calculator?
0:48:32 - Mikah Sargent
That's a good question. In fact, somebody in the chat was saying that that was one thing that wasn't incredibly clear. I have only installed it on the new iPad, so I do have it, but I could try installing it on a different one to see.
0:48:45 - Leo Laporte
We did know that the uh many of the features will not work on the iPhone 14, only on the 15, the most recent iPhone. Uh, I wonder, is that a technical requirement or is that Apple kind of encouraging people to upgrade, which is their lifeblood, frankly?
0:49:04 - Alex Lindsay
so here's uh, from nine to five mac which iPad can run iPadOS.
0:49:09 - Leo Laporte
Well, but see, this doesn't tell you. Yeah, it's just what the functionality will be. Yeah, um, I do note that the oldest iPad that supports it is the 2018 first generation iPad pros, um, so, and you need a 2019 iPad air, third generation or later to support it. So I'm thinking Apple's going to be pretty adamant about having the latest hardware to make this work.
0:49:34 - Andy Ihnatko
Oh, I bet at minimum they're going to change a lot of the branding and packaging to say the new, the new iPhone 16 with Apple intelligence, like, hey user, a great new iPhone four to 15 with Apple intelligence, or iPad M one with Apple intelligence, and if it's not marketed as blah, blah, blah with Apple intelligence, that means that you're not going to get the cool stuff and that will kind of it'll kind of FOMO you into making that upgrade, Maybe a year too early.
0:50:05 - Leo Laporte
I was so captivated by notes that I thought that was the biggest feature notes and calculator. Anything else that you want to talk about. It's a great demo, yeah.
0:50:17 - Andy Ihnatko
And realize that we're reacting not even to demos. We're reacting to presentation materials, so we're not really seeing what this is actually going to do. But Apple has a really good track record for this, so maybe we're not stupid to be optimistic that sometime within the next year we're going to get everything that they promised us today.
0:50:33 - Leo Laporte
What are the odds that what we get, either this fall with a new iPhone and perhaps new iPads, or later after the new hardware comes out, actually do what we saw? You know Google's famous for doing demos that never emerge.
0:50:51 - Alex Lindsay
Apple has done that. They've definitely had things that they announced that never made it out the door, but it is pretty rare.
0:50:57 - Mikah Sargent
I think the odds are high yeah.
0:50:58 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, it's usually hardware. When Apple says the hard, they've had a couple of things where the hardware never appeared.
But it hasn't been I don't says the hard they've had a couple things where the hardware never appeared like so, um, but it hasn't been. Uh, I don't think that there's. I can't remember a time when they said that, other than when people push back. You know some of the stuff disappeared, but but I think that, um, as far as a technology they just couldn't get to, I don't I can't remember the last time apple said that there was going to be a software, uh developed, that didn't come out the other end Unless unless people threw, you know, torch you know it was pitchforks and torches over some of the scanning stuff which you can see.
You can see why Apple may have been trying to do that preemptively, because you start to look at some of the stuff that Apple is doing now, which is hiding apps based on your facial recognition, locking apps based on facial recognition and being able to specifically, as a user, to start to assign that, you know there's obviously a lot of great legitimate reasons to have that.
There's a lot of illegitimate reasons to do that as well. So you know, I think that the privacy part of that process that Apple's continuing to tighten is putting them really close to a third rail, you know, as far as people being able to hide nefarious things on their phone and and be able to, you know, lock them, you know, be able to hand you a phone that's open, that doesn't necessarily have all that information, for instance, if it's hiding, if you're doing all your communication and signal and it's hiding signal, you can hand it, you can unlock it and hand it to somebody and it doesn't matter, right? You know, like that they see everything but signal and they don't know that you're using signal for something and so they don't know to even ask for it. So that's the interesting, you know, piece of that puzzle.
0:52:41 - Leo Laporte
Let's take a little break. We will talk about some of the other things Apple announced, including the ability to kind of color your icons, move them around, it will new features and photos, and I would also like to make a list of all the apps that were Sherlocked yesterday, because I think Apple said a new Sherlocking record at WTC, we will talk about that in just a minute You're watching MacBreak Weekly, our show today brought to you by Melissa.
Melissa has been doing this almost as long as the Mac has been around since 1985. What have they been doing? They make sure that your data is up to date and accurate, especially your address lists. Did you know that Melissa's Global Address Verification and Validation Service verifies addresses for 240 plus countries and territories? I didn't know there were that many. By doing this, Melissa helps your business well in so many ways. Well, I'll give you a few examples. Of course, it improves deliverability, reducing costly errors, mismailed stuff or duplicates. It boosts your address data accuracy, vital right and increases delivery speed. All of this helps to boost your ROI.
Melissa has solutions for every industry In healthcare better data for better patient care and increased revenue. And you may say, well, wait a minute, what about HIPAA? It is HIPAA and high trust compliant. So, yeah, well, wait a minute. What about HIPAA? It is HIPAA and high trust compliant. So yeah, it's great for healthcare E-commerce. You can use it to create better customer experiences and reduce cart abandonment, plus those errors that are introduced either by a customer mistyping their address or phone number or email, or a customer service rep doing that. Eliminating those is huge. With Melissa's APIs, you can build that into your software. In financial services, crm, insurance, real estate Melissa's got a solution for you. And, of course, as I said, you are safe. You are compliant, you are secure with Melissa.
Data privacy and security are their highest priorities. Melissa's solutions and services are GDPR and CCPA compliant. They meet SOC 2 and HIPAA high trust standards for information security management. They have a very nice, a really good way to try this out on your Android and iOS phones. And now they've launched a cool all-in-one lookup that works in both Safari and Chrome. It's a browser extension Highlighted. I love this. I'm going to install this today. Highlight an address, phone, email or company name. Then control click on macOS or right click in Chrome on the text to open the context menu. Select Melissa all-in-one lookup. The all-in-one lookup will open a new tab and verify the highlighted text using Melissa's verification products in the background. You can also try the lookups apps free on iOS and Android. I use those all the time.
0:55:35 - Mikah Sargent
It's really cool. The Lookups app yeah, but now having it in your browser, I love this.
0:55:38 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I love that Yep Get started today with 1,000 records cleaned for free. Melissa M-E-L-I-S-S-A.com/twit. Melissa.com/twit. We thank them so much for being such great supporters of everything we do here at Twit. Thank you, melissa. Safari getting some new features. Speaking of Safari, I have to say this maybe you know I'm still maybe in the afterglow of the reality distortion field, but it felt like everything iOS, iPadOS, even watchOS and tvOS, and certainly macOS got the most improvements that they've had in years.
0:56:20 - Mikah Sargent
This was, I think, definitely huge. There was a lot, there was a lot.
0:56:23 - Alex Lindsay
What were you going to say, Alex? I think we're on the other side of. I think a lot of things slowed down as they got the silicon.
0:56:30 - Leo Laporte
Oh, this is the Apple silicon effect.
0:56:32 - Alex Lindsay
I guess you're right. I think there was a big slowdown as they moved a lot of code and there was a lot of heavy lifting that was required under the and. So now they're kind of I think, largely on the other side of that.
0:57:02 - Mikah Sargent
And now you're going to you know. So it's accelerating the new features they can add, because they've there's a lot of foundational work I think that they had to do to get you know, to get it all working with all you know, all the code working with all of the apps and so on and so forth, and took up a lot of energy. This was yeah, I mean, you put it well the reasoning behind it, and I was comparing it to the redesign of iOS. What was that? Ios 7? In terms of the number of new features that were introduced, but, I think, most importantly, the changes to Springboard. This was one of the reasons why we talked about it not being a great idea for people to get the beta A crashy Springboard is the worst.
Yeah, and now that you can move your app icons all over the screen, that's going to make a difference. I will say one of the new features that comes along with being able to move your app icons wherever you want to on the screen, which again I sub in the Android people Android did it first. Yes, they did it a long time ago, so there's that said, I really like this new option. You have the option. It just says small and large and these are for the app icons and basically the small version has the text the name of the app below it, just as it is now. That's what we all have. The large version just removes the text and just leaves the app by itself and then makes that app icon a little bit bigger, and that's what I changed it to on my iPad. I really like how that looks.
There's not the little text underneath, because I you know what those icons yeah, and I use spotlight to launch apps anyway, right, so it's just kind of nice to have those app icons there.
0:58:22 - Leo Laporte
Um, I will say, android did that a years ago actually. The truth is, because android allows you to have alternate launchers, you know, multiple springboards. You can do pretty much anything whatever you want. Look, look and feel they have the sky's the limit. But for Apple this is a big deal because they don't usually let you. You know, they're so tight on their aesthetics. So Craig has a hound dog picture with a yellow thing around it. He showed how he could make that yellow be the dominant color. All the icons.
0:58:54 - Mikah Sargent
Tinting.
0:58:55 - Leo Laporte
Tint yellow. He showed how, in order to make the hound dog visible on his home screen, he can move icons and leave a gap. Yeah, it seems like the simplest functionality, but Apple's never had that.
0:59:09 - Andy Ihnatko
That's dogma.
0:59:10 - Leo Laporte
No pun intended, that's nice, nice, andy, sorry, it's automatic.
0:59:13 - Andy Ihnatko
No pun intended.
That's nice, nice, andy, sorry, it's automatic. Yeah, I mean the power that people are going to have to be able to arrange the pages of their home screen exactly the way they like it, in groups with. Sometimes you want some gaps, sometimes you don't want some gaps. It really is a simple thing. Even if it's just a simple thing of I want my wallpaper to be my dog or my kid. I just don't want my kid's eyes to be, you know, to be mail and Spotify, I can actually make these things work. I mean, and, believe me, part of this is the power to make your phone look absolutely awful, like tacky, like a 1977 sofa from your aunt's house that should have been thrown out.
0:59:55 - Leo Laporte
10 years ago. I was always, it felt, insulted that Apple thought if we give you this power, you're going to make it look ugly. It's like give me a break.
1:00:05 - Andy Ihnatko
And I'm sure that's exactly how they couch it. We automatically arrange your icons to make it the most beautiful and flowing way. You're welcome, to make it the most beautiful and flowing way, you're welcome. And I mean, for all that, I was surprised at the changes to Control Center, because boy is that an opportunity to make a very simple dock for your most common hardware toggles into just page after page like almost like a second screen, almost like a second phone. I know that's just cluttered with all kinds of stuff. I mean I'm glad that people have the power to now edit that and make different pages for what they want.
1:00:42 - Mikah Sargent
But I thought another place, another place that can be customized and have like more widgets dropped in. That's already kind of messy. Sometimes you're swiping over from the left and it's these, and you swipe, there's a lot. And on the iPad, um, I again I installed it there and I've been playing around with it and it's got, I think, four screens by default. Uh, the first one being kind of the main widgets that it suggests, the second one being secondary widgets that you're used to, so kind of the ones that you would decide to add to control center in the past. They're just there on kind of an overflow screen. Then there's the home app controls and then I think the last one is music and media controls. But yeah, you can go adding as many as you want to.
I will say I was happy to see in control center, finally, the inclusion of a power button, because, right, now people don't necessarily know that they have to do this whole dance to access the power switch or to go into settings and use it, or for whoever does that talk to Siri to do it. Now you can swipe from Control Center and on the top right there's a little power button that you can press. It brings up the slider that you could power it off. I was happy to have that included.
1:01:57 - Andy Ihnatko
The wake sleep button is way too valuable to waste it on something like waking and sleeping and power on and power off, and I thought it was I mean, as with so many other announcements they made today as important as the thing itself was. Oh, and they were making APIs available so developers can enhance this on their own, and so people and now developers have the ability to create their own third-party control center items. I just I haven't seen the documentation on it yet, so I wonder if they put limitations on what it can actually do. Otherwise, it's like okay, I've made this functionality as a little app, I've made this little functionality as a widget now and I'm going to make this app as a functionality as a control panel item.
1:02:43 - Mikah Sargent
It's like, okay, james Thompson will do it, I know Will. Apple users how will they survive all this freedom?
1:02:48 - Leo Laporte
Are they just going to fritz out? I went and got my Pixel phone just to show, because you can use any launcher. I mean my Pixel phone. The way I've set it up is it doesn't have any icons at all on the front page. It has the name of, in my case, eight apps that I use a lot, and if I want another app, I can swipe up and type the first few letters of it. If I want to go to the phone, the camera I just swipe right or left, rather, if I swipe right, it'll go the phone, the camera I just swipe right or left, rather, if I swipe right, it'll go the phone. I mean, all of those are. This isn't something google provided. This is a third-party launcher. So people who use android are just laughing at us at this point, saying well, I mean, it's no, I'm.
1:03:28 - Andy Ihnatko
I'm glad every time that apple, apple, apple users get something that was great on windows or android. I'm happy every time an android user gets something that was great on iPhone. This is what competition is supposed to be all about. I am so happy that people who have iPhones might be finding extra functionality that I discovered years ago, not even with a custom launcher. But when I travel, my front page always has, like the apps that I own, my standard go-to apps for everything. My front page always has, like the apps that I own, my standard go-to apps for everything.
But then, like, I swipe left and here is like a control, essentially a control panel, with nothing but travel stuff. So here is like a calendar. Here are notes that I've typed there of people I'm supposed to see where I'm supposed to go, map directions, things like that. Swipe another direction. There's media stuff and the ability to actually just lay this out the way you want to, as opposed to, oh, I'm supposed to swipe up and type the first letters of an icon or I'm supposed to remember that this app, this app collection, was created automatically by the OS and put in this folder and I've just I couldn't drag it where I wanted to go, but I've managed to stick it someplace where I seem to remember it going. Well, yeah, it seems like a simple thing, but one can a big deal.
1:04:33 - Leo Laporte
One concession Apple made to the outside world, probably thanks to the EU, and you could tell they didn't want to say it, but they had to. Rcs is coming to messages. Finally, and now, what smart Apple did, I thought, was they added all these great features to messages that probably aren't supported in RCS, right?
1:04:52 - Alex Lindsay
So you're still going to want messages.
1:04:54 - Leo Laporte
Yeah.
1:04:56 - Alex Lindsay
And it's still going gonna be blue and green? Yeah, I don't know it's. It's not gonna take away the blue or green, but rcs is at least secure.
1:05:02 - Mikah Sargent
Sms is terrible I wanted it because I do have green bubble friends, and so knowing that my message was delivered, that's literally all I care about. I don't care about any of the other RCS magic that can take place, but just that. Oh crud, I sent a message that was, you know, 600 characters, and I also sent a photo with it. Did those actually get delivered to my Android buddy, or did they show up in six different texts and the photo didn't actually send it all? Just knowing that something's delivered, that's what I care about. That's why I'm happy about RCS coming.
1:05:37 - Leo Laporte
Let's see what else you can. You mentioned these. What do they call them Flu-moji? What is it? Oh, gen-moji. Nobody, by the way except again, Alex Lindsay used Memojis, right, or do you use Memojis?
1:05:49 - Mikah Sargent
I thought you did. Okay. No, that was. That was Rene Rene Ricci, I mean, maybe not us.
1:05:53 - Leo Laporte
Not a huge not a huge, yeah, a little bit you know what when. I want to shock my mom. I turn myself into an elephant.
1:06:01 - Alex Lindsay
That's it, it's not. Oh, you mean the animated ones?
1:06:04 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, or just any animated ones. I think Genmoji are going to be more popular. I think.
1:06:07 - Leo Laporte
Genmoji might be. The idea is, these are Memojis, they're just emojis. They're emojis that are generative.
1:06:14 - Mikah Sargent
So here's the thing that I think is going to make this actually work. First and foremost, apple did something that I've been waiting for them to do for so long. Finally it's happened. People who've used Slack love the fact, and this has come to all sorts of platforms. Discord has it. All sorts of messaging platforms, and then I just named one, discord. Anyway, it is on a lot of them WhatsApp, all sorts of messaging platforms, and then I just named one discord, anyway it is on a lot of them.
Um, where you can, yeah, you can reply by basically tapping on a message and then putting a little emoji after it. It's an emoji reaction love those slack has let you do it with all emoji apple, because they call them, tap backs, and for the longest time you could only do a handful of them and it's very frustrating.
1:06:51 - Leo Laporte
It's frustrating. I don't want to do a heart. I don't want to do thumbs up.
1:06:53 - Mikah Sargent
I don't want exclamation mark I don't have any choices funny, so I don't want to haha.
1:06:57 - Leo Laporte
Right now you can do all emoji but I use them all the time nevertheless, as you know. Yes, I'm always reacting to your messages whatever.
1:07:04 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, because it's just easy and you let the person know that you've seen it and then you're just saying, okay, this is cool, I've wanted to be able to use all emoji. Now you can. But what's great is that Apple said while we're doing that, let's go ahead and make it so that if you use a Genmoji, you can also react with a Genmoji. Because here's the thing. I was just thinking about this the other day.
I was thinking about how being in a public school it oftentimes makes people kind of socially be pressured into defaulting to the mean, and what I mean by that is you have your outliers and they get ridiculed, and in many cases, those kids either default to the mean or they kind of go even more fringe, and many of us just default to the mean To a certain extent. You find your group of people and I think about with messages. People aren't using Memoji as much because other people aren't using Memoji as other people aren't using emoji as much. Oh, maybe that's so many people are doing tap backs, and so I think it was smart for apple to say let's make it so that these genmoji can be used exactly as emoji are used.
1:08:07 - Leo Laporte
That's going to make it so that more people are willing to do so jason's now just uh, dialing in to our discord, says I am in a perfectly normal place. Okay, we have blinking a code, yeah it looks like he's blinking a code.
1:08:22 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, he's jason look down.
1:08:24 - Alex Lindsay
If you're safe, he's clearly in a tree-lined indoor environment that looks familiar oh the cafeteria, yeah it's a little familiar yeah, you know the, the, you know I. I think that the the animojis, I think haven't been very successful, and part of it is because you have to do something stupid every time you want to do them right, so you know you have to, like I always stick out my tongue.
I think that was that was like uh, okay, how many people are going to do that? So I think that I, the memojis, I actually think I see, I mean I don't know people, my family, they use them for their profile pictures, people use them for their you know, they'll send some kind of reaction, but the problem is that they're very limited. Maybe I don't want to do exactly what it's doing there, and so I think that these, I think the Genmojis could be very, I mean, give people a lot of creativity where they're not making funny faces at their phone just to send a message. And I think that I think that that's going to be. I think it'll get used a lot.
1:09:20 - Leo Laporte
Just to make sure, though, that there are Apple messages features that will not translate to an Android device. They've also added the ability to take any text and make it do something weird. So it can be big, it can shake, it can explode, it can bloom something weird. So it can be big, it can shake, it can explode, it can bloom small, nod, ripple, jitter. But you select the text and then it will do that, and, of course, that's not going to translate rosemary and I have been annoying each other with that all day what's your favorite uh thing?
1:09:47 - Mikah Sargent
honestly, I don't like any of them.
1:09:49 - Leo Laporte
I just like that I can bold text underline text yeah I think I will be using that uh cross out thing a lot that's amazing that it took so long to have basically text formatting, text formatting in messages messages uh, unbelievable. Yeah, underlining italics bold cross out, here's and the good news here's this react and you can pick an icon and choose any react.
1:10:13 - Alex Lindsay
Uh, there as well, go ahead alex, the good news for apple users is that the the whole rcs thing has just put a fire under apple's uh thing to do lots of new things and I'm in messages, you know so. So we're getting tons of features and I'm sure they'll keep on rolling features out to to separate them out.
1:10:29 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, and and the and. The basic thing that we've been asking for, like all along, is that at least the green of at least green bubbles will still be green bubbles, but at least they won't break the chat for everybody else who's using iPhone. And that was a completely arbitrary and mean-spirited choice on Apple's part. It wasn't a technical limitation, it was like no, they decided that we think that it works well for us if everybody thinks that anybody who has an Android phone is someone who bothers everybody else and ruins the fun time everybody's having.
1:11:00 - Leo Laporte
When asked to blink if he was okay, Jason Snell responded with this creepy-ass image. He says yeah, sure, I'm okay. Image playground yeah, I want to see him using some of this stuff. I, I do. Uh. What is this that they're demonstrating?
1:11:20 - Mikah Sargent
here hallelujah, hallelujah sorry, uh, for the folks who are listening and not watching you're going. What is he halleluing? Uh, it is the fact that you can finally schedule messages to send later. I am so excited about this because this is something. Look, murders are going to love this.
1:11:38 - Leo Laporte
I know I was texting with my friend during the hours of 3 am. Hi, josh.
1:11:44 - Andy Ihnatko
Well, I'm 300 miles away and my car is broken down, so I just want to let you know.
1:11:48 - Mikah Sargent
it's 1131 pm and I'm here 300 miles away, there is someone near and dear to me.
1:11:54 - Leo Laporte
They call this the alibi feature.
1:11:57 - Mikah Sargent
The alibi feature? Fine. Who refuses to set up a schedule for do not disturb. So this person will get messages at night when they're trying to sleep and then is upset about it. No, no use, do not disturb, they don't. So now I can schedule the messages that I want to send to them, and then they don't have to get mad at me because I've woken them up in the night.
1:12:15 - Alex Lindsay
I'm very excited about schedule.
1:12:16 - Mikah Sargent
I'm also very excited as a person who goes out into the wilderness quite often. I'm very excited about the new satellite feature for messaging.
1:12:24 - Leo Laporte
So explain this how much can I send? In the past satellite's just been SOS.
1:12:28 - Mikah Sargent
Yes.
1:12:28 - Leo Laporte
In fact there was so little bandwidth you had to from a menu of pre-populated items.
1:12:34 - Mikah Sargent
They're now saying you could send text all of a sudden Text, but text alone. Yes, it's not, and it will use it'll be iMessage.
1:12:45 - Leo Laporte
There's emojis in this example, Emoji or text. They are text.
1:12:47 - Alex Lindsay
That's right.
1:12:48 - Leo Laporte
it's Unicode text, so you'll be like I'm in trouble, and then have like a little angry emoji yeah my eyes are not blinking in trouble and then have like a little angry, angry emoji yeah, my eyes are not blinking. Uh, yeah, because you're right, that's unicode, so it is. That's the emojis are and the reacts it looks like are also.
1:13:02 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, I think you can do reacts as well, because that's just sending a little thing to the, to the system, saying make this pop up on that ui. It's not right, you know, actually saying and there's no charge for this right now. Here here's the thing, and I actually talked about this too. You may remember that Apple, when they first introduced the satellite SOS feature emergency SOS via satellite, I think, is the name of the feature they said within one year we're going to start charging for this. Then they extended it. We don't know how much it's going to cost yet. I imagine that that feature is eventually going to cost people, people they're waiting to see how many people use it.
1:13:37 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, I mean, I think I think they may have found that not many people are using it. It doesn't cost them that much money to run in the grand scheme of things, and it's a great feature.
1:13:44 - Leo Laporte
You know, like I think well, it's also a way to keep ahead of now android has the satellite right, so it's a way to kind of keep a step ahead of the other guys of the competition absolutely, and I have to say, if you are not using an iphone and you watch this event, you're going.
I want that. I want that. That's cool. There's very little. You would say, oh, android does it better, or I I'm not going to buy an iphone because I can have text only screens, or I mean there isn't a lot compelling on android and, and what's also interesting is a lot of the features that people say well, android, android, had this first. They're so fractured and so poorly implemented in many cases that it doesn't feel like a seamless capability. It's just something. Yeah, google threw that in too. Let's talk about photos, for instance. A lot of what's new in photos. Yeah, has been in Google Photos for a long time, right.
1:14:33 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, I think this is going to be one of the biggest growing pains for people. I've already anticipated that this is where I'm going to get the most contact from my family when they need help. I've been playing with the new messages and for the most part, it's familiar. But what they've done because I was actually thinking about this too when we think about third party apps you think about Instagram, you think about Snapchat, you think about some of these others they do things in their apps to make it so that you open and use the app as much as possible. They're looking for daily active users, but when you're the first-party platform, you don't have to do that as much, right? However, it made me think about how, with photos, I don't really open that app a whole lot other than as kind of a storage place and I take things out of it and I put them in other places.
1:15:19 - Leo Laporte
You know it's there yeah.
1:15:20 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, they are trying to make it so that it is one of the places that you go. There's a carousel now at the top that it starts out with your standard library that you're used to, but then after you go from that main carousel, you see favorites that pop up and you know the recent days photos and your people and pets. There are all these kind of things that are intelligently shown at the top that kind of encourage you to look at those photos and, you know, celebrate the past, I guess, so to speak. So maybe people will be opening their photos up more than they do now. We'll see.
1:15:55 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, the thing that really blew me away, apart from the reorganization, I think it makes better use of the screen because you know, the less space you can take up with UI and the more space you can you can take up with thumbnails.
But the big deal is again AI being being influenced through all this, being able to say, show me all the pictures of Josh when he was learning how to swim.
And suddenly you're collecting like four years' worth of photos because it understands all these contexts. To begin with, this is some stuff that you can get on other apps and, I think to a limited extent, on Google Photos, but this is the sort of stuff that people value doing the upgrade. But this is the sort of stuff that people value doing the upgrade with the first time when you're you're, you're you're, you're trying to put together an album for you know, for your mom, of moments from the kid's life and you're like, oh man, but this really going to take me like a half hour to scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll and find all of this stuff. And there's another one of those undemonstrated but illustrated features that they talked about was the ability to just describe a video, saying give me a video of Leo learning how to fish, which is not this Leo it was a different Leo again, maybe I have pictures of me learning how to fish.
So if you ever want any, but pulling videos and photos and recommended music from Apple Music to assemble a video together. All that really, really powerful stuff from a very, very simple command. Because a lot of us in this conversation including the people listening to us if I'm supposed to put together pictures of someone's wedding, I will so stupidly overthink this and over obsess about it and make it perfect, whereas no, we just want a collection of photos and videos from the wedding that happened last weekend. Why are we waiting eight months for it, until another year, until the kid's born, when just the ability to say give me, give me stuff from from my, my cousin, cousin Sylvia's wedding, mostly from the point of mostly affecting likelvia's direct family and not the groom's family, and it just knows that it will give you something that is 90 good and good enough to ship as it is and, and I have to admit, even now, before ios 18, on photos.
1:18:05 - Alex Lindsay
I get these. I get about every day. I get five or six new photos that I just went and found, that are I don't even know when I shot those. Like they, just they just show up and you know I don't have many, any collection. I mean they're somewhere in my like 65 000 images that are sitting there, but it just kind of grabs onto them, it's some, it makes a little movie about them, it does, you know, it does all this stuff, and it's that's before ios 18.
So I think that there's a lot of um, the tools I mean the obvious tool that they put in was being able to remove people, you know, and things, uh, from the, from photos, which has, of course, been around for a while and is around. You know, jenner and Phil is something that you know, kind of expected, like they can't go very much longer without Jenner and Phil, and so they solved that, that problem. But I again, I think that for the most part, apple's integration is so strong that they don't have to be the front horse, they just have to be in the front five all the time, like they. Just, they just don't want people to feel like they're looking at the back of a lot of horses, like they, just as long as they're somewhere in the front and they can kind of you know, they, they, they just have to kind of keep up with the Joneses. They don't have to lead the Joneses, and so I think it, and then they slowly implement these things and I think that that's where we're and and the reality is.
With phones, I mean, everyone just buys a camera and does a bunch of other things, like I mean, you know, like so, so it's, it's like if they can get a camera, I mean, like I had to, I had to shoot something with an s24 and you know, recording video on an s24 is not the same as recording on iphone 15, like it's got a great lens and a great sensor, but the recording process is not quite there.
1:19:37 - Leo Laporte
yet what about the one of the things? They absolutely cribbed from Google? They brought Gmail inbox back.
1:19:44 - Mikah Sargent
The categories yeah.
1:19:46 - Leo Laporte
Only it's an Apple mail Wow, receipts. You don't say yeah, I mean, this is literally as far as I could tell exactly what Google's inbox was, the categories in the same the categories you get receipts. Literally as far as I could tell exactly what google's inbox was, the categories in the categories you get receipts. Um, you get, you know, uh, important mail I. I thought this was really surprising and yet I think you know, if I were spark or some of the other email programs on ios that purport to do this kind of organization, I might feel a a little worried, yeah.
1:20:15 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, yeah.
1:20:16 - Andy Ihnatko
It's not going to work on me, but yeah, Especially for a built-in app that people everyone needs mail and what was it? What does it take to bust someone out of the default app that's already built in? And if it's something less, no, I just can't. I can't use this because it doesn't have the simple sorting feature or it can't summarize uh, it can't summarize text. It can't say give me all the email from my boss that was sent last week. That's the sort of stuff that drives people away from the default and into something that's a third-party commercial product and that's that's. They're like four less reasons to not use mail anymore, right?
1:20:49 - Leo Laporte
uh, how about one password bit warden? Last pass they got sherlock pretty darn good. Apple's always had a passwords feature, but it's always kind of hidden away in keychain. Now it's moved out of keychain, out of your system settings and into a passwords app and available on windows via the iCloud for windows.
So it's mac, ios and windows, not what's the oh yeah, that's weird. And Linux, you know, and in some ways, unfortunately, because I do use Android and Linux, I'm a little disappointed. I mean, I'll keep using Bitwarden, our sponsor, but for somebody who lives in the Apple ecosystem, they're settled.
1:21:30 - Mikah Sargent
This is it. They're covered you got to use this.
1:21:39 - Alex Lindsay
I've been trying to I mean, I still have been trying to get out of last pass. I have so much in there, and so I've been slowly moving things the passwords you know within safari and, and, but it's, it's really clunky. You know like it's just a really clunky experience to do that, and this was like oh, that's exactly what I'm looking for I believe I saw that this will import passwords so import passwords it will also.
1:21:53 - Mikah Sargent
There's a new feature just across the system where websites that feature passkey logins, they can automatically upgrade your login by adding a passkey. It'll keep the password and everything, but it'll also do a passkey login as well. So this stores passkeys, it stores passwords.
1:22:25 - Leo Laporte
So this stores pass keys, it stores passwords. It also has that feature in it where if a site is breached and it's heard, you know, people know about it then there's a section of the new passwords app that lets you know. Hey, you probably want to change this. It'll also tell you if your passwords are bad. Yeah. Yeah, which is amazing If you've got really crummy passwords.
1:22:30 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, and it also does verification codes, so it can do OTA. And it also does verification codes, so it can do OTA.
1:22:35 - Leo Laporte
One advantage Apple has with Wi-Fi. If I'm on a Wi-Fi, we get to a hotel and I log into the hotel's Wi-Fi, then when Lisa opens up and says it will get it for me, I think they're going to do that with passwords as well.
1:22:51 - Mikah Sargent
Well, there's also a very interesting way to share passwords A button within the passwords app where, if you go into it and you go to a wi-fi password, it lets you generate a qr code right there on the spot that you can share with people.
1:23:00 - Leo Laporte
isn't that great now this is going to be protected with face id. Many of apple's built-in apps now will be protected with touch id.
1:23:08 - Mikah Sargent
If anybody still has touch id and face id, uh biometrics the new ipad, air has touch I d so oh, oh, yeah, that's right, that's right.
1:23:16 - Leo Laporte
I have touch ID on my Mac too.
1:23:18 - Andy Ihnatko
That's the big question, though. Yeah, I'm sure it'll import. Will it export? So if you do decide to leave the ecosystem at some point, how hard is it going to be to get all of your saved passwords out?
1:23:31 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, passwords. I will have to check that out. I'm going to try that. Um, I know that pass keys are still non-transferable, but I will see if.
1:23:39 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, if passwords are and in. In general, I think that apple is slowly moving towards just having us having passwords become less and less something con that's conscious to the user. You know, and and it's, it's just kind of in the background and you're going to use your face id because this will get to a point where you're not really ever typing a password in. You know, if you go down this path with it, you know it's all going to be. Just you just pick up your phone and look at it and you know I got to say Passkey is like that is so good, catnip. I mean, I just, I just I just I'm.
I'm not at the point yet where I have the expectation that I'm going to see Passkey. Like it's right now. It's in that moment of oh, they have Passkey. You know, like B&H has Passkey or this has Passkey, there's some point in the next year or two that I will get into oh, they don't have Passkey. Like, like, like, kind of like a like I'm not. You know I have a lower opinion of that brand because they don't do that, but it's not there yet. But I think there's a year or two before it does get there, where Apple users will be less likely to use your platform because you're not doing something that they expect to be smooth.
1:24:43 - Leo Laporte
Let me continue. The Sherlocking All trails might be a little bit.
1:24:49 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, the graveyard All trails might be a little threatened by the fact that they are now going to have hikes in Apple Maps Grammarly is going to be threatened by the fact that the grammar checker is going to be built into all text fields. Now I want to say something about the hiking. I bought every app for hiking and I wasn't happy with any of them. Like I just, you know, I I over time, I just didn't find myself using it and so I have to admit that they I just think that no one really got it where. It was super simple and it just worked and it just was part of what I was doing. I walk an hour and a half a day, so it's not like a through the woods.
1:25:19 - Mikah Sargent
Apple gave AllTrails though the App Store award.
1:25:24 - Leo Laporte
They mentioned superhuman email too. Apple's happy to give. They don't want to look like they're monopolistic or anything.
1:25:32 - Mikah Sargent
I'm really excited that it's coming into iOS because, as I said, I thought I don't hike often enough to pay for how expensive AllTrails is, so I was happy that it's going to be in there because I do it just enough and this will be great this is often the case. Alltrails is a little bit better, it's a little more pro.
1:25:50 - Leo Laporte
This is the rewriting capability with the writing tools, and this is going to be, I think, across the board. You can proofread, you can rewrite, you could choose whether you want to be friendly, professional or concise. You can get a summary, you can get key points, you could turn things into a table or a list. I think these are going to be useful. This is something Google offers in Google Docs, microsoft offers in Microsoft Office, but those features right now are happening on the offers in Google Docs.
1:26:16 - Alex Lindsay
Microsoft offers in Microsoft Office the co-pilot, but those features right now are happening on the phone, right? I mean those simplifications are going out of the phone or to the private cloud. I mean I only say that because Google ones are definitely not.
1:26:27 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, no, no, neither co-pilot nor Google is on device yet Right.
1:26:31 - Alex Lindsay
So I believe that all these small corrections that are there, if you want to go out to generate something more, you're going to use ChatGPT, but a lot of these grammar corrections and shortening and everything else is either happening on the phone or on the private cloud, and that's one of the big advantages that Apple has is all these little things are not going anywhere. Then, anytime you want to do more, you go to ChatGPT, but you have to say yes. Time you want to do more, you go to chat gpt and, but you have to say yes, I want to go to chat gpt every single time.
1:26:59 - Andy Ihnatko
You there's well, yeah, well, there's, first of all, to clarify, there are three different kind of kinds of ai that's going to be on these devices. There is uh, there, there is on device ai. There's apple's basically secure cloud ai, and then there's chat gpt or open ai, where, as you say, if it's going to send something out to open AI, it will first say do you want to do that? Here's what's going to happen. Do you really want to do this?
And that was also kind of interesting too, because Tim Cook, at the end, made I think it was Tim, but anyway made it very clear that they're not really married to open AI, that they're open to other LLMs or open to other chat systems and, who knows, they're hopefully kind of working on supplanting OpenAI and supplanting Gemini as well. So it's not as though this was a big, big, huge partnership. It's great for OpenAI, great for Apple for certain things, but no one was I think nobody really expected that. Opening eye was simply like one third of the Trinity and maybe the smallest part of the pie. And just to be clear, though, google's Gemini comes in three different sizes. One size is an on-device model.
1:28:10 - Leo Laporte
And I believe I have to double check those. I just shipped that this month, as the Google Gemini Nano is now available on your Pixels.
1:28:19 - Andy Ihnatko
And also one of the great equalizers here is that I don't think any makers of any language model or any chatbot really want you to push every single request into the cloud or onto their servers, Because now they have to deal with the compute, they have to deal with the electricity to keep these servers running. They would much rather have you burn up a little bit more of your battery and keep it on device and then say, oh no, privacy, privacy, integrity, security, oh no, no, no. We like yeah, please, please, please. We can't afford to keep giving you free. If we can't give you free summaries for the rest of our lives. We need to make some money.
1:28:52 - Leo Laporte
Additional features in iOS 18 game mode. They're really pushing the games and Ubisoft was there saying, yeah, we're going to go day and date with the next Assassin's Creed. That was pretty cool. I thought that was very interesting. It's a very popular AAA game and it will be released on Macintosh and iPad and iPhone at the same time as it's released on Windows. That's interesting. Apple Pay now has the ability to tap phone to phone. Um, I thought the airpods announcements were pretty interesting. Uh, including head shake or head nod. Yes, you can accept a phone call by nodding, you can decline it by shaking. Including, I presume, robo calls. Yeah, I say no, I presume robocalls.
Yeah, I say no no, they're adding voice isolation. The same feature that you have now on your Mac and iPad will also come to the AirPods. They demonstrated it. We'll see if it's as good as they demonstrated it. They demonstrated a very noisy, but I've seen we've seen AI do this very well.
1:29:50 - Alex Lindsay
Google's had this for a while as well.
1:29:53 - Leo Laporte
Journal no journal on iPad for a while as well um journal, no journal on ipad. We do have day one, which is nice, but uh journal is limited to iphone.
1:30:02 - Mikah Sargent
They've added a lot of new features, including a mindfulness it's so wild to me that it's not on ipad, because I I want to use it on ipad if they don't want to cannibalize uh people using notes for doing handwritten notes or something, because if it was me, I would want to journal and write my notes in journal.
1:30:22 - Leo Laporte
Maybe they don't want to put day one out of business, but day one doesn't have the same. On iPhone it does, but on the iPad it does not have the same suggestions feature, which I really like.
1:30:33 - Mikah Sargent
I really like calendar, we calendar is going to show events and tasks from reminders. That's great, that's. That's a real small thing that honestly should have been there yeah, for a long time it should have been there.
1:30:45 - Leo Laporte
The health app has redesigned medical id, which is a very important feature for first responders. If you have not filled out your medical id on your ip, do that right now Live video and emergency SOS.
1:30:58 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, pretty cool. So there are some emergency responders around the country who are able to receive video and photos and you can imagine if you had fallen down a ravine or some other thing you could show what's going on around you to that live responder. They are able to send that to the people who are coming out to you and see uh, so this is this is a special thing, where there are only certain, you know, relays, areas around that have access to this.
1:31:25 - Alex Lindsay
But when they do, you will be able to do that as well one and uh, if you, if you haven't seen, I mean, I'm going to warn everybody, don't watch this if you're squeamish. But if you haven't seen the youtuber who, I'm going to warn everybody don't watch this if you're squeamish. But if you haven't seen the YouTuber who had a paraglider, a pair of a paraglider that he that he crashed uh cause he was filming the whole thing with, with uh things. But you see him, you know, like calling nine, you know telling Siri to call nine, one one. There's a certain level of confusion. This is where you can see these tools starting to become useful. He still would have been there for a long time if some other person hadn't walked by and been able to pick up the phone and talk to them. And so these being able to send more of the telemetry data, send video, send everything else would have, you know, will make a difference for these kinds of things.
1:32:09 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah, it was. They didn't show this, but I thought this was cool. In accessibility, they're adding music haptics.
1:32:19 - Mikah Sargent
I think this is yeah, we talked about this on iOS today, because Apple has now started to announce its new accessibility features ahead of time whenever it's World Accessibility Day. And so in music, haptics, if you have a device that has a taptic engine in it, basically it will do different vibrations and taps to the beat of the music, so someone with low or no hearing is able to kind of enjoy the music in that way. And then also eye tracking is coming to I think it's M1 iPads and later where, just like on Vision OS, where you are using your eyes to look around at things, you'll be able to use your iPad with that front-facing camera and the what is it? The TrueDepth sensor to do eye tracking on the iPad as a means of accessing different parts of the UI. Very, very cool.
1:33:09 - Leo Laporte
Neat. All right, let's take anything any other Sherlocking that we want to. I mean, there was a lot of it. Anything we want to pay attention to.
1:33:18 - Mikah Sargent
I don't have a Sherlocking, I just have a feature. That I. What's the feature? The feature I was very excited about, you may remember, I loudly shouted.
1:33:25 - Leo Laporte
I do remember you hurt my ears, I did hear.
1:33:29 - Mikah Sargent
Yes, I apologize for hurting your ears.
1:33:31 - Leo Laporte
You were so excited.
1:33:32 - Mikah Sargent
There's now iPhone mirroring on the Mac, and I am endlessly excited about this. So, basically, what will happen is you can pull up almost like it's an app on your Mac your iPhone screen and you can do everything you would ever do on your iPhone from your Mac. What's great about this is there are times where I have an app that's on my iPhone and I either don't have access to a version on the Mac or the version that I would have access to. Maybe it's a website or it's an iPad app that they've given. It's not the same.
The iPhone app is unique. It has unique features, but I have a lot of text I want to type out or there's some interaction that I want to do. It'd be so much easier to do on my Mac. Or maybe I'm sitting at my Mac and I just want to be able to quickly interact with something from my phone. Not only can you bring your phone screen up on your Mac and interact with your phone, it keeps the phone locked, so that way, people can't see that you're sort of you know accessing it from remote. If you have it in standby mode, then it will stay in standby mode while you're accessing it from your Mac.
But then what's great too is that they're bringing drag and drop functionality. So if I was working on a project on my Mac and I needed to go and do something and I knew I was going to be away for a while, I could drag the file onto my iPhone and basically have it there, open it up as I needed to and move on. Or if I get something from my iPhone, I can drag it from there to my Mac and be able to access it there. Lastly, the ability to see notifications from your iPhone and interact with those notifications. So if you got, my main use would be like Instacart. I get Instacart notifications and I oftentimes I mean trying to send something back real quick, getting that on my Mac and having it just pop up my little iPhone on my screen. Oh, it's going to be so great. So I am very excited about iPhone mirroring on.
1:35:29 - Leo Laporte
This is I'm going to you know I have to do this. Windows has had this feature for a few years. It's called my Phone. It was originally called Phone Link. It doesn't work with most phones, mostly works with Samsung and it's you know, it's janky. When this works well, this is going to be a great feature in this big ecosystem lock-in. In fact, a lot of what I took away from WWDC was you really just want to live in the Apple world? Because now that everything's on Apple Silicon, there's this cross-platform play that is very strong Remote access, remote phone notifications all of that continuity really makes you want to live in the Apple world.
1:36:12 - Alex Lindsay
That's good for Apple. The integration unless you're Apple-sized makes no sense at all. Live in the apple world and you know that that's good for apple. The the integration unless your apple size makes no sense at all.
1:36:18 - Leo Laporte
Like to be totally closed and have a walled garden is unsustainable or if you're an open platform like windows, because there's so many people right, right, but being able to control everything um allows you to build something that you know again becomes.
1:36:32 - Alex Lindsay
it keeps on becoming more and more impenetrable and it's why, really, apple's only competition at this point is antitrust, because it's just that there's, because they just have, there's an advantage to all of these devices interacting with each other. That is just hard to do if you don't have all those devices and the development platform and you know all of those things together become very, very difficult to compete with.
1:36:56 - Mikah Sargent
Oh, I know what your favorite feature was, leo. What, leo, I could, he wouldn't. Did I scream at this one? He was just celebrating so much and like wouldn't stop vibrating. Yeah, travel mode for Apple Vision Pro.
1:37:09 - Leo Laporte
Oh, thank goodness I could ride a train now.
1:37:11 - Mikah Sargent
Trains and why?
1:37:13 - Leo Laporte
Okay, so, as the sole person who uses a vision pro alex lindsey, why is a train different than a plane?
1:37:21 - Alex Lindsay
a because of its? Well, I think it because it's. It's to the ground, so it doesn't know what you're doing. So the plane and train would be different because of the way, the way it's moving. This is the only way.
1:37:31 - Mikah Sargent
So there's not a unified travel mode because you're not supposed to use it while you're driving a car, so you would never need a travel mode there. But if you're in a train, yeah, you need something to say stop anchoring it to this gps position. I need it to move with the train.
1:37:47 - Leo Laporte
That actually makes sense, okay huh, okay, I'll take your word for it. I'll never know, although dr du in our chat room says I ride a train at least weekly, so it makes a big difference.
1:37:58 - Mikah Sargent
And now you'll ride it with your Vision.
1:37:59 - Leo Laporte
Now you can wear your Vision Pros on your train.
1:38:02 - Andy Ihnatko
The big cheer that people seemed to get for Vision Pro was hey, now my Mac can have an ultra widescreen virtual monitor Like a wraparound yeah.
1:38:11 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, exactly Like the Geordie LaFleur version of the wraparound monitor. Today in the New York Times, kevin Roos, can Apple rescue the Vision Pro? The thirty five hundred dollar spatial computing devices gathered dust on my shelf. Can tweaks and upgrades save it from obsolescence? There wasn't a lot of Vision Pro news, but from developers' point of view, alex Lindsay was there enough to make them say, oh yeah, this platform's really going and growing.
1:38:42 - Alex Lindsay
Well, I mean, I think that there's a lot of opportunity for developers. Right now there's not a lot of. You know, the issue is it sits on the. It sits on the shelf because there's not enough content yet, which is a great opportunity for the developers. You know so that there's not there and you have a lot of people who bought. If you develop I mean, I've talked to a couple developers that have been building Vision Pro or have built Vision Pro apps If you're selling for a lot of money or a big subscription, that has not been that successful.
If you're selling something, if you put out an app that's kind of fun that's under $20, a lot of Apple Vision Pro people spend a lot of money on this headset and they'll buy it. You know. Like you know, they'll buy it. I know that for me, pretty much anything that looks remotely interesting under $5, I'm going to buy, like you know, like I'm just going to like, oh, I'm going to buy this, buy this, buy this, buy this, and try to, you know, because I just want to see what's happening there. I think that you can see glimpses when you look at JigSpace. Jigspace is one of the ones that I just feel like you just see where this could go pretty quickly. I think that Apple's I'm surprised at how poorly Apple's content lands for me. I think that the dinosaur stuff was pretty impressive. I would love to see them take it to the last as a CG person. They've taken it 85%. I'd love to see the last 15 filled out. I know that that's an order of magnitude more expensive, but it's just. It's really good, just not not all the way there.
Um, the, the video stuff. I just I don't know where the thought like the parkour thing I just found to be completely anticlimactic, like I just did not like I watched it and I was kind of like when is this going to end? You know, like you know, and it was just dang, you know, like, like I was just like you know, just like I, I didn't want to not see it, so I went, I was like this is going to get better somewhere and never did um, and it, you know, like I, I just I thought, I thought I was going to get somewhere, you know, and and so I just feel like, and I feel like the MLS stuff was over edited, theited, the parkour stuff's over-edited.
1:40:35 - Leo Laporte
Let's talk about WWDC. They announced a new division, os 2.0.
1:40:41 - Alex Lindsay
All I was going to say is that Apple is doing a very good job of promoting it. I just think that they're not.
1:40:45 - Leo Laporte
So here yesterday was their opportunity. What'd they do? I think that there's more resolution.
1:40:55 - Alex Lindsay
They've made some minor upgrades to the. You know it's good. I mean, you're going to see more resolution in some of the. When you're seeing the screens and you know, as a person that has eight screens on my desktop, the screen thing doesn't mean anything to me, but I can definitely see how people would want to have more, you know, resolution there. But I think that their primary problem again with the headset is that they're doing exactly what they did with books, which is that they built a revolutionary platform and then didn't do anything with it. You know, like you know, and they didn't promote it. They didn't put money into people doing things that get people excited about using the platform.
1:41:31 - Leo Laporte
The new Canon lens. Does that excite you? That's an opportunity to make it even cheaper lens.
1:41:37 - Alex Lindsay
I already have a Canon lens that looks just like that one, I mean the, the, the black magic had us all excited. The black magic camera, that's a, that's an 8k per eye solution. Um, it's got, we believe, four ethernets out the back, which means that theoretically, that camera can stream 8k per eye. Um, you know out, and because that and that's not a, that camera can stream 8K per eye, you know out, and that's not a shot in the dark, because Blackmagic makes switchers and encoders and all those other things. So there's a future, potentially by the end of the year, where you're streaming 8K per eye, 90 frames, a second, two headsets. You know, I don't think that's going to happen, I think that's probably a couple of years away, but there's a possible future of that. The nuke, that camera is the first like true production immersive camera that we've seen.
Uh, uh, come out. That isn't some kind of art project, like I mean, you know it's, you know like it's. You know all the ones that we do up until now, and and, and this is a problem, this is a huge problem. This gets back to what I was just talking about. You don't see a lot of content because it's really hard to shoot that content, because all the tools are all art projects, you know, and so.
So, getting past that and having a real camera that just acts like a camera, that just shoots the content and resolve is going to be able to support that content in spatial. You're going to be able to add graphics to it, you're going to be able to do all the things you need to do to make that happen, and final cut, of course, will do that as well. Um, and so the the uh, this camera potentially, is a big thing, and sure, the camera is going to cost a lot of money. I bet you the camera will cost somewhere between uh 15 and 25 thousand dollars like they say, it's like an ursa without the lens.
1:43:12 - Leo Laporte
It's a bigger thing. Yeah it, it's a bigger thing.
1:43:13 - Alex Lindsay
Well, yeah, so it's going to be in that kind of $15,000 to $25,000 or $30,000. But you rent those. A $30,000 camera rents for a couple grand a day, right, and that becomes a production possibility. And with it all built in and you just push the button and you get the thing out the door. That makes the content. That's going to blow up the content for these headsets, you know, and so, and you know anybody who's seen good 180 stereo, especially anywhere near that resolution. We're talking 8K per eye, 90 frames a second. A camera being able to generate that is going to change the game, is going to be a game changer. And I think the Blackmagic is the right, you know, the right partner for for them, because they're, they can build that kind of flexibility into the camera. So it's.
1:43:58 - Mikah Sargent
I thought that's exciting. I thought keyboard pass through was also very important that they've.
So that's something that's been available on mouse use and keyboard pass through something that's been available with the Oculus Um, because that was one of the big complaints that I had using it If I was going to be using this as a productivity tool this spatial computing device not being able to access or see. Rather, I'm a touch typer, so I don't have to look at my keyboard, but knowing where it is and not sort of fumbling around looking for it, it would be good.
1:44:29 - Leo Laporte
Live captions for accessibility. That's interesting and everything Go ahead.
1:44:34 - Andy Ihnatko
Andy. I mean, I'm more looking forward to like. The thing is like, if I'm hoping that Apple tries to move past the idea of immersive 3D entertainment or edutainment or whatever, because that's something that can be matched really, really easily. That's not something that requires a huge amount of five-year planning and sophistication I'm hoping that they really do deliver on this idea of no, no, no, no, no. This isn't a VR headset. This is a new spatial computer running a new class of apps that you've never been able to imagine before, and I think that's their obligation to really put this platform forward.
There were a couple of things in the platform video about new things. They have this new thing called Tabletop Kit. I don't know if you saw it where it really is an entire set of APIs for just doing tabletop games in VR. It's so fine-grained that the first step is do you want the table to be square or round? You get to decide that, and each person has a chair, and here's all the different things you can put on this tabletop game. And, of course, it's not just doing part cheesy or monopoly, but the idea of creating an entire new set of gameplay powered by by tabletop kit.
Another one that's just very, very simple is the ability to to have two volumetric apps running at the same time, which I think is if you really do want to say that. No, this isn't all about hey, wow, cool, look, there's a dinosaur. Or hey, wow, cool, look, here's the, here's the, the minecraft thing, and I can actually spin it around. Take a look at it. The ability to have a couple of things inside my environment I'm interacting with for two different projects or two different elements of the same data set. I think that's going to be very, very interesting too. It's going to take it's really going to take a couple of years before we see any of this really make for fruition.
1:46:25 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, and the problem is that they needed to get it out. Like they have it sitting in the lab, they needed to get it out. They need a couple hundred thousand people to test it for them and create some kind of market and let people start to play with it, or they're never going to figure out what they need to do for the next version three, because version two is probably already specced at this point. But I think what's interesting is you are seeing them continue to tweak. People talked about it being overbuilt, but now you're seeing increased resolution. They may have built it for 2025 and they're slowly turning up the dials as they go down that path.
I do think that the frame rate makes a difference in the resolution. The 8K per eye and 90 frames a second may seem like a minor thing, but it does change how you look at it, and Meta has had a big. Meta has had a huge time advantage over Apple and hasn't gotten there yet. You know so it's not trivial, especially the here's the problem at 90 frames an eye, at 90 frames a second, at 8K per eye, I don't think that any headset other than Apple vision pro can do it at that resolution, in that frame rate, so they don't have the processing power because they don't charge enough for them. So I think that that's the distinction that Apple's making is we can do these things to these headsets and in a way that I don't, I'm not clear that the meta headsets can do them.
It has the processing power to turn that on and you know, again, there's a lot of stuff that people haven't seen around. These footage, the footage that's possible at that frame rate and that resolution, and when they see it, pretty compelling, you know. And one thing, by the way, I wanted to note, point out, is in the, in the tv os, they talked about bringing out voices again, and I'm kind of. I just want to point out people can't figure out why people aren't going to the movies. I can tell you half my family won't go to the movies because they don't have captions made captions gotta and it's just, and it's like the sound designers that are in hollywood are destroying their own.
They just wipe it out because they can't understand what they're saying. And now Apple TV has to bring up the voice, Even if you have a center channel it's not enough.
1:48:23 - Leo Laporte
You really need to reduce. It's amazing. By the way, probably from a developer point of view, the biggest announcement about Vision Pro was it will now go on sale in Asia China, japan, singapore and the East, opening up a bunch of markets for Vision Pro.
1:48:40 - Alex Lindsay
that just couldn't get it in the past, and remember that they already sold over half of what we thought was the upper limit of what they could sell in one year, just what they could make in a year. So it's not I don't. I think that the press gets a little, you know, gets a little overbuilt around this. I think, apple, this is all a test, test year, does this?
1:48:58 - Leo Laporte
feel a little bit like the apple version of the 1984 commercial to you. Oh dear I just you're not showing it. Let me show it here. It is especially these people, all in their uniform chairs. Obviously those are the press, right? I don't know what two of those people are. Um, I just wait for somebody to run down. Oh, that's in their uniformed chairs. Obviously those are the press, right. I don't know who those people are.
1:49:18 - Alex Lindsay
I just wait for somebody to run down. Oh, that's the backyard outside of the cafe. Yeah, it's the backyard.
1:49:25 - Leo Laporte
People run down the aisle there with a hammer. Anyway, let's take a little break. We're going to come back with more in just a bit. You're watching Mac Break Weekly, brought to you today by Wix Studio. They're giving me 60 seconds to tell you about Wix Studio, the web platform for agencies and enterprises. So here are a few things you can do from start to finish, in a minute or less.
On Studio, you can adapt your designs for every device with responsive AI. You can expand Wix Studio's pre-made solutions with back-end and front-end APIs. You can generate code and troubleshoot bugs with a built-in AI code assistant. You could switch up the styling of hundreds of web pages I'm talking fonts, layouts, colors all in a click. Add no-code animations and gradient backgrounds right there in the editor. Start a design library, package your code and UI in reusable, full-stack, full stack apps. Oh, and one more big one deliver everything your client needs in one smooth handover. All right, my time's up, but the list keeps on going. Step into Wix studio. See for yourself. Go to wix.com/studio or click on the link in our show notes and you can find out more. That's wix.com/studio. I did it. Thank you, Wix, for your support of mac break weekly, all right. What else? What else is going on in the? Did we cover everything of great importance? I think I feel like we did.
1:50:52 - Mikah Sargent
I think we covered it was a good WWDC.
1:50:55 - Leo Laporte
I think they did a very good job. You know, the day before on Twitter on Sunday, I said Apple's got a big challenge here. They're going to look like they're playing catch up and they that that. That's never a good look. That oh yeah, we've got that too is never a good look, although it happens a lot in Apple world. They need they're a product company. They need to show that AI has some real value. I thought this was going to be a bigger challenge. It turns out they aced it. They knew what they needed to do.
They aced it, they made it. Ai is now Apple intelligence, from as far as I can tell.
1:51:28 - Andy Ihnatko
Well, yeah, they still have a lot to actually deliver, but they did. All they had to do was put together a compelling story about. Here is where AI here's the role that AI has in Apple and all of our products moving forward. And the wrong answer would have been hey, look, we've added these two new features to mail. Or hey, wow, we've actually licensed stuff from OpenAI and now you're going to see that their chatbot has a lot more access to OS. That would have been a total failure. Instead, they did again.
They have a lot to still demonstrate, a lot to still prove, but the idea that the iPhone will make you feel left out. A year from now, you'll be looking over your shoulder at a Windows laptop from your MacBook. You'll be looking over your shoulder at an Android phone from your iPhone, saying why can't my phone do that? Why can't my MacBook do that? That fear is now. I think they've managed to dispose of that completely. They're not going to get. They're not going to get completely there within the year, but they're definitely for we have, we've thought about this, we have. We have not just a set of goals we want to make, but we have integrated AI into the future of our products, just like we integrated Apple Silicon into the future of our products. They are inseparable from each other.
1:52:47 - Leo Laporte
I stand corrected. I take that correction. It is a marketing victory yesterday. Well, but we'll see if it actually materializes.
1:52:55 - Alex Lindsay
But they, certainly they certainly position themselves as winners and I think that they can, as andy just said, they can they. They have a track record that's much different than a lot of other folks of throwing things out and then they kind of come out. I think Apple generally is pretty careful about saying what they're going to do and then generally sticking with it for quite some time. So so I think that I think that the chances of what we, what they were delivering or said that they could do there, may not be ready today, but the chances of it not working I mean again, there's been a couple hardware areas that just the group that quietly disappeared, or there's been things where there was a lot of uproar um, I don't think elon musk is going to be enough uproar to take chat gpt out you know in some ways that just that just helped apple.
1:53:39 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, oh, the crazy guy doesn't like it.
1:53:41 - Alex Lindsay
Good, I like it they're like, they're like, thanks, thanks, here's one thing that.
1:53:46 - Leo Laporte
Android users apparently were really wanting I don't know why T9 dialing. Really, that was something you wanted, huh. That is what the ability to dial phone numbers from your address book by typing the first three letters of the name 564 for J-O-H.
1:54:05 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, so you basically could do T9 search as you were typing in a number. So if I was willing, to.
1:54:10 - Leo Laporte
I will never use that.
1:54:11 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, apparently Android users did so. If they made a switch to iPhone, they're like why can't iPhone do this? I didn't even know I could do it.
1:54:19 - Andy Ihnatko
That's lame. I'll give them one thing that Android fanboys can absolutely lord over Apple. One thing that Android fanboys can absolutely lord over Apple In 2012,. At their developer keynote, they sent an actual person skydiving.
1:54:33 - Leo Laporte
Oh, that's a good point, not this fake stuff. I pointed that out right at the beginning. Sergey Brin actually did skydive into Urbobuena Center for Google IO. Craig Fioritti with his hair hat. That was funny, his hair helmet.
1:54:47 - Alex Lindsay
That was simulated. I can tell you from personal experience that was a lot of jumps to get ready for that show, because I worked on that show.
1:54:53 - Leo Laporte
For the Sergey Brin one, they had a lot of rehearsals.
1:54:56 - Alex Lindsay
There was probably 20 jumps, 20 jumps and a rehearsal jump the day before on the Moscone, but there were 20 jumps.
There were a couple in the Southern California, a whole bunch in Ames and then, um, you know as, and these are Red Bull, all the Red Bull jumpers, and it was a figure, it wasn't just jump. The jumping part is easy, it's figuring out how you stream from glass uh down. So they we had to, actually the reason that they had um smoke coming out of their, their ankles, so that the people tracking them because literally there was a dish doing a microwave track to each, each person jumping out and uh, the, the smoke made sure that they could keep knowing who's who when they're jumping out of, out of out of the blimp and um, uh, the you know the. The conversation, of course, was you know, we won't know if we're streaming from the, the headset if their chute doesn't open. It know, we won't know if we're streaming from the headset if their shoot doesn't open. We won't know until they hit the ground, like it'll happen so fast we won't be able to respond, holy moly.
1:55:55 - Leo Laporte
And what would your response be? Get the net.
1:55:59 - Alex Lindsay
Well, no, there was a question of like do you have a record, do you have a thing?
1:56:04 - Mikah Sargent
Like how are we? How?
1:56:05 - Alex Lindsay
there was just a this whole process and that would be like it's just like you know, but but and of course, the damper on the uh, on the keynote it was, it was a, it was. That was an incredibly complicated expensive, uh, and amazing, I mean it all was amazing, yeah it was amazing. It was one of my favorite shows I've ever worked on.
1:56:26 - Leo Laporte
This had a little bit of a reminiscent of the YouTube year ender, where they all jumped out of the battle bus. It felt a little bit like Fortnite, right? I?
1:56:36 - Alex Lindsay
think it was taken almost it was from Deadpool. It's a make out. Oh, it's from Deadpool.
1:56:45 - Leo Laporte
Huh, I haven't done frame for frame the other thing that was weird is phil schiller's driving the plane, uh, and he's got an ipod like a classic ipod uh, in the front there he says I'm getting too old for this.
1:57:00 - Alex Lindsay
That's pretty wild the watch when they opened it. Uh, the little insider thing that the watch is. There's a little circle that he puts the watch up to to open the door. Oh, I missed that. And that those are at the apple, at apple campus, that's oh well, it's apple home key.
1:57:17 - Leo Laporte
In fact, the apple home key will now work from six feet away was one of the announcements that they made. Uh, the other thing I had to ask, uh our video expert uh, you keep showing it, they won't pull us down. The other thing I had to ask our video expert you keep showing it, they won't pull us down. The other thing I had to show and, by the way, I like the rainbow Was that a tip of the hat to pride?
1:57:34 - Andy Ihnatko
I don't know, just quickly. Well, I don't know if it was pride, but it's been a long, long time since we've seen Apple fly the original six colors of the Apple logo so prominently the original six colors of the Apple logo so prominently. They have that bandstand thing in the middle of Apple Park. But never like hey, we're going to put this on every single jumpsuit and also the titles of so many of the slides in the presentation were like a rainbow fade in the six colors.
1:58:02 - Leo Laporte
I don't know if it was June. They're bringing it back. That's great, I'm glad. Now here's the question, though, for you alex lindsey, was tim cook really on the roof?
1:58:11 - Alex Lindsay
I think he was. We talked about it lisa jackson was famously right, yeah I I, I definitely think that that, uh, that he was on the roof and I think that you put your billion dollar ceo he's got magnet shoes.
1:58:25 - Leo Laporte
It's fine.
1:58:26 - Mikah Sargent
I'm sure you got a lot of safety around it that might have been.
1:58:29 - Alex Lindsay
Might've been wrote it out, yeah, but if you look at the interaction and also it functionally, we I really thought through the lens. We talked about this in office hours this morning. That's all we did is talk about this, and but one of the things that, um, uh, that I think, is that a lot of stuff was done in camera because it would be hard to composite if you shot it with an iPhone.
1:58:47 - Leo Laporte
So as I thought that's right. They did say this was shot on an iPhone, edited on a Mac.
1:58:51 - Alex Lindsay
And I think you can see it. I think that there's some issues with the black, there's some issues with contrast, there's some issues I mean, the iPhone is not an Aerie, so there's there are some. Definitely, as a film person, I think I can see things that I feel like didn't, you know, didn't quite make it, but it was still very impressive. But I think that that also drives that a lot of things were done Like I we at first.
1:59:15 - Leo Laporte
I thought here's an example that you probably talked about on the on the office hours, tim finishes talking and now we. Now that's an easy cut right, that's a transition. That's pretty straightforward, yeah.
1:59:29 - Alex Lindsay
You're just that's just that CG in between Right and then and then. But I think that at first I thought that was green screen because I thought his feet weren't very good His feet contact wasn't very good but I actually think that might actually be the real thing. Okay, and and. So I think that, and like when Craig is in the Steve Jobs Theater, at first I was like that's got to be green screen and ADR, because that's it sounded like he was in the theater.
Yeah, no, no, it didn't. It did not sound like he was in that room. That's all glass, that's curved glass.
2:00:00 - Leo Laporte
Oh, it wasn't Okay, so he recorded it later.
2:00:02 - Alex Lindsay
So I think what they did there though we thought about it a little bit more and I think that what they did is he shot it without that screen there, Then the screen is added via CG in there, and then I think they ADR'd it, you know. So I think it was an ADR, so he recorded the dialogue after yeah, how about this?
2:00:18 - Leo Laporte
How about where he emerges from his flight suit? I was really curious how they did this. And then it just cause is that real breakaway?
2:00:27 - Alex Lindsay
It could be breakaway, or it could just be him just grabbing something. They do it with CG, I mean, like that would be. You know you? You can notice it's gone by the way, and later in the shot so it's a cloth SIM.
I mean it could be a class and it could be a breakaway. I felt like it might cloth, uh, cloth sim and not a breakaway, just because it's uh, it was so smooth, like you know. It's smooth, but you could build something where it's just barely attached to you and you walk, take a couple steps and rip it off.
2:00:52 - Andy Ihnatko
But it would take so long and you could do it with cg, you know, because they had all the money so, as long as we're talking about these little details, I don't know where on on social media or some site pointed out like the, all the speakers are standing heroically, as if they've been coached to keep your feet like at least 18 inches apart and they're shooting down.
2:01:15 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, they're shooting and and and a suit.
2:01:18 - Andy Ihnatko
No, just like. They're just like again standing, like they're on the edge of the stage about to declaim things and like as soon as. I pointed out to me I could not, I cannot not notice it off about how awkwardly these people like they're standing against a hurricane or something oh, and here's, by the way, here's the.
2:01:36 - Alex Lindsay
Uh, the shot. Hold on, um, I won't go full screen, that way it'll probably not be a problem for you, but uh, I don't think it's a problem Anyway. So if we no hold on, let me grab the right.
2:01:48 - Leo Laporte
I mean, what do we have to do to get Apple? Let's do this Right.
2:01:55 - Mikah Sargent
Did you mute yourself, Alex?
2:01:57 - Leo Laporte
He muted himself and isn't there.
2:02:02 - Alex Lindsay
Is is. I'll leave my mic open so you can hear it, but this is, this is is, if you look at it here okay, you gotta switch to it.
2:02:10 - Leo Laporte
I can't see it, oh sorry, oh my god, whoa ah, we've lost it.
2:02:17 - Andy Ihnatko
Holy cow intelligence. This is the rapture. I hit the wrong button. Sorry, let me do this. There's. Oh, that's what you were saying this is daredevil yeah, so wait, hold on.
2:02:23 - Leo Laporte
this was uh Sorry, let me do this. Oh, that's what you were saying. This is Daredevil.
2:02:27 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, so wait hold on. This was.
2:02:31 - Leo Laporte
OK, is that Daredevil 2? Because this is. This is, this is.
2:02:35 - Alex Lindsay
Deadpool 2. Deadpool, I mean Daredevil, yeah, but if you, if you look at this here it does look a lot like it, except they were.
2:02:43 - Leo Laporte
There's one difference. Well, they're in a helicopter.
2:02:47 - Alex Lindsay
But a lot like it, except they were in a helicopter. There's one difference Look at the build. I just think if someone said I think that Apple won, they said hey, they said let's do the Deadpool job. It doesn't mean that it's a frame for frame, but it's interesting. Okay, you can see, this is all the yeah, it's very similar, isn't it yeah?
2:03:09 - Andy Ihnatko
How else would you shoot it? Well, that's true. I welcome anybody who comes to that conclusion. I'm just like. I've seen so many of these shots, and they're almost all the same.
2:03:20 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, it just felt. If you watch that whole sequence it is I work on corporate stuff that's what happens all the time you go, hey, let's do this shot, except we'll do this thing here, and then we make, they make it, and it's got a bunch of Apple things. But I think that if you watch that sequence you'll see that they look really close to each other. And the best scene in Deadpool 2, in my opinion. So it was a good thing if you're going to take something there. I think we thought about the. I think that what they did or, by the way, for the people when they jumped out and when Craig jumped out, I think those are actual jumps and I think that they just pasted his face onto it. I looked at it a little closer and they actually did a.
2:04:01 - Leo Laporte
CG, Unless there is a real hair helmet. I hope so, In which case that belongs in the Smithsonian yeah exactly All right, let's take a little break.
Your Picks of the Week coming up as we continue Mac Break Weekly. Going to wrap this up in a moment, but first a plea. I have to beg. This is where I beg. I should just get on my knees, shouldn't I, and just beg. We would love you to join the club. It's an invite to be in the least exclusive but most fun club in the world Club TWiT. $7 a month gets you ad-free versions of all our shows. It supports new shows. It supports us doing video and shows that are audio only, like iOS Today. Hands-on Macintosh Mikah Does those. Hands-on Windows with Paul Theriot. The Untitled Linux Show with Jonathan Bennett and company. It's a good cast. Now, boy, they got a lot of people on that show. You get access to our Club TWiT Discord where, day or night, there are smart people answering questions, talking, having a great time. Also, special events like the book club coming up on the 27th and coming on the third Wednesday of every month. Mikah's Creative Corner Crafting Corner Crafting.
2:05:04 - Mikah Sargent
Corner.
2:05:04 - Leo Laporte
Yay, if you want to build Legos. I think that's what John Ashley's going to do or knit, or crochet or paint or whatever craft you want to bring.
2:05:12 - Mikah Sargent
That's going to be awesome. You can hang out. We're all hanging out together just crafting. There's a thing called body doubling and it's the idea that when you do something with other people, then you're more likely to get it done. Oh, I more likely to get it done. I like it.
2:05:27 - Leo Laporte
I'll just hang out and chat and make our crafts together, and I'd love to see you there. What fun. Join the club. There's just many reasons to do it. Do crafts, not drugs. Do crafts, not drugs.
Rugs, not drugs, rugs, not drugs there you go even better they should go do a rewrite on this show, whatever the hell it was. Um, just go to twit.tv/clubtwit and you could be in the club. In the club, in the club, I don't they've even got Craig Federighi gifts in the club, so I don't know what that's from poor guy that he's really is running. That's a tom cruise shot, that poor guy. I hope he didn't have to do too many takes. I mean, I'm sure he's really is running. That's a tom cruise shot, that poor guy. I hope he didn't have to do too many takes. I mean I'm sure he's in good shape, game for it I'm sure Andy and I go.
Let's get a pick of the week, shall we?
2:06:16 - Andy Ihnatko
well, this is very much in tune with uh, ai and also uh developer keynotes. Last year at google io, google off Notebook LM, which was a tool for a research tool that would it will ingest, like PDFs and things that you give it and then essentially it becomes, it becomes a, an AI that only knows the things you've given it, and so they finally made it public just last week Go to Notebook LM dot Google Still an experiment, but it's available to everybody. I tested it out by giving it. There's a research project I've been on for the past like 10 or 20 years, a history project off and on, and so I have like dozens and dozens, if not hundreds, of PDFs and scans and text files and notes and I just spent like an hour just dragging it from like a hard drive like onto notebook LM and I didn't know what. I don't know what I was expecting, but I was not expecting half of what it did, like just immediately. Like here is a FAQ frequently asked questions file on all of this data and like here is an index to everything that happened here and I can ask a question like oh, when did Frederick Mac Money's do the second version of the sculpture? Like not the version for Paris, but the version that went to Yerkes and we'll say, oh well, that happened. X, y, z date. Here is the document that I got that from and again it doesn't seem to hallucinate because again it's not getting any information from any. Excuse me, it can always hallucinate, but I'm saying it's only getting information from exactly the documents and the files that you gave it. So, as a result, it's very, very well contained. It helps you to navigate these huge, huge projects.
Google tends to present this as if you're a kid. If your kid is studying physics, you can put all of their textbooks and all their lessons, all their coursework, and it can create quizzes for them and they can help them learn a new concept world of wonders. Because I have my this. All this research has largely resisted my attempts to sit down and spend a week just categorizing all of it, producing a timeline of everything, producing a list of. Here are all the people that are involved in this thing.
Here are open questions I don't have the answers to and just immediately just messing around like, oh I, suddenly we're no intention of solving this problem. I have solved this problem and I quickly went from testing out this thing to spending three or four hours like investigating new insights that I would not have had access to if I did not have this tool. So really fun stuff to play with. Unfortunately, it is an experiment, which means that, like I'm sure, that as soon as you become 100% dependent on it, google has a good chance of like canceling it and never showing it ever, ever again. But while we have it, just like you know, we we all going to die someday, just like every Google project has to die someday. So enjoy every day that we have Notebook LM while we have it.
2:09:20 - Leo Laporte
It's free in your Google account. Notebook LM dot. Google dot com. We on this week in Google had one of its creators and advisors on this Week in Google way back in the day, jeff Jarvis. Like four months ago, jeff Jarvis had come to Google and seen a demo of it and they brought in a lot of academics and advisors and so I actually back then I added a bunch of security now show notes into it and played with it a little bit and yeah, it's very impressive. It is, and it's a tool you can play with. Note experimental, so I think that means yeah, probably won't last long, but it's going to try. Notebook LM dot. Google dot com. I was. They showed it quickly. They gave away my secret.
I have a site that is 84-24.org. Do you know what that is? 1984 to 2024? It is the story of the Macintosh, the tale of restoring an 80s timeless classic and, if nothing else, it's a beautifully designed web page. He actually got an old mac. Uh, tells the story of of of it getting it. Uh, of getting it working. Uh, we have john salina has an old it was it 128k mac that you have? Yeah, and we were able to get it working with some additional hardware. Here is his first boot. Aw, that was very much like our first boot, wasn't it? John 04040A yeah, he talks about what that means. The devil's interval. That's the boot sound, the sad Mac. Anyway, lovely little site, beautifully done too, with a lot of nice CSS. 84-24.org here's open heart surgery on desoldering chips and resoldering them, putting in new hard drives Wow, we ended up getting a floppy emulator right to boot up. That I think Jason Snell recommended, as I remember. But this is cool In the 50th what is it? 40th anniversary of the 128K Mac. 84-24.org.
Yeah beautifully done site, by the way.
2:11:37 - Andy Ihnatko
I'm blown away by the community that keeps these things running. It's not always just restoration. Okay, I'm going to recap everything. I'm going to fix the flyback transformer. There's a whole subculture that is wow. This would be so much easier if we gave it a 2024 era power supply instead of this ropey thing from the 1980s. Hey, wow, let's build one. And now you've got one. And boy, it would be nice if we didn't have to, like, get the SCSI drive working again, if we just could use flash RAM. Hey, wow, here's something we can install in place of the floppy drive or in place of the SCSI, and so you don't have to make it exactly the way it was before. You can make it just function the way it did before, only more reliably. I'm so impressed with the community.
2:12:15 - Leo Laporte
Nice job, michele Giorgi, his cousin Luca and his future wife Francesca Reghini, on a beautifully done site 84-24.org. Mikah Sargent, do you have a pick for us?
2:12:27 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, I just wanted to mention the Apple Developer app, which you can get on the Mac. The Apple Developer app is great because it is updated throughout the year, but particularly around WWDC. The sessions are posted there and you get the transcripts, you get an overview of the different talks that take place and then also it has access to the different resources. So if an event has, or if a talk has, a sample code, you can easily download it from there. A lot of this is available via the WWDC website but, which is developerapplecom. But I really like this kind of all-in-one app because it lets you have one window open that's just devoted to looking at the different talks and uh explanation of the new technology and if you don't want your family to bother you while you're looking at, it is an apple vision version that's right, there is an apple vision version.
2:13:20 - Leo Laporte
An apple vision version, I don't know what, the iMessage version. I, I think just stickers. Oh, it's just stickers. Okay, but you know, always nice to have some fun stickers.
2:13:29 - Alex Lindsay
Whoever added in the last couple of years added the playback speed. Thank you, oh yeah.
2:13:35 - Andy Ihnatko
We appreciate you.
2:13:36 - Alex Lindsay
Whoever it was, we appreciate you for doing that, because for a long time the Apple stuff didn't have none of the developer sessions had playback control. Yep, oh, speed of the developer sessions had playback control. Yep, oh, speed, and and and it was just really painful.
2:13:49 - Leo Laporte
You guys just don't like 1.8, you don't like normal speed.
2:13:54 - Alex Lindsay
Well, the funny thing is that now that apple's moved off the stage. Uh, number one is the videos are way better. They sound way better, they're way cleaner, they're sometimes shorter, but they have this very slow pace that all the videos are, so you really feel like you have to watch them a little faster than they were recorded. You'll get used to it at 1.5 pretty quickly and then you go back to 1.0 and you're like wow.
2:14:13 - Mikah Sargent
Yes, how slow is this exactly? Yeah, exactly.
2:14:17 - Alex Lindsay
Alex what's your pick of the week? My pick of the week is Decibel X. I'm going doing more and more concerts and I'm paying more attention to my ears, so Decibel X is a. This is the. It's an app and there is a subscription. I can't remember what the subscription is. I've had this thing for so long, but this is it shows you the Decibel. Of course, your watch has that, but this has a lot more information. So this is showing you know, in a lot of ways, this is showing my. This is the. This is where it is across the spectrum, so I can see where the where that volume is I can swing across and I can see this.
This is a much more uh basic version, much more a different graph here. Here's a spectrogram so I can actually see, see those there and so, and then here are. You know highs and lows here, and so it gives you a lot of uh. There's a lot of different uh, different, different ways to look at the audio where you're at and, um, I, I use this a lot um.
2:15:10 - Leo Laporte
Is it using the iphone?
2:15:12 - Alex Lindsay
mic or do you have to get it is using the iphone. Nope, it's using the iphone mic. I will tell you that, uh, I've tested it against calibrated um systems that you know, 1200 meters that are designed to tell me what, what. How loud it is, cause there's things that I work on that I have to know exactly how loud it is in a certain seat or a certain location. And, um, uh, it's plus or minus a decibel, like it is really remarkably accurate. Um, like I was, you know cause I'm sitting there looking at the two of them together and they're, you know, they're close enough for me to make decisions, you know, on it, um, if I'm going to be accountable for it, I'll still use the expensive meter.
Um, but being able to be in a concert, like I was at a, you know, I, I went to a con, I took my daughter to a concert and I up the app and it was at like 120 decibels where we were standing, I was like, yeah, probably keep them in, yeah, yeah, so, so, um, so, you know, I think that, especially again, as I'm sensitive where my kids are starting to go to concerts, you know being able to illustrate, like anything over this, this decibel, about 85 decibels. You need to. You're doing permanent damage, so so it's worth checking out. Of course, you do have things on your watch that will tell you things like this. It's just that I get a lot more data with this one. So decibel x I think it's great, great app, well, well designed and works well.
2:16:37 - Leo Laporte
I just downloaded it, installed it. One week free trial, thirty dollars a year, which is not bad at all, given that a really good you know doro meter would cost thousands. Uh, this is. This is great. I'm so thrilled. Thank you, decibel x.
2:16:52 - Alex Lindsay
I was surprised I hadn't talked about it before. I've had it for years, I mean I've had it almost since they released it, uh, and I was surprised that I hadn't. I had to search mbw pics to like have I have? I said this before and it was like no, I can't find it.
2:17:04 - Leo Laporte
So well, I'm just happy to say that the level is safe right now. It's yeah, exactly, it does give you little things like dust.
2:17:12 - Alex Lindsay
It'll give you like. This is the you're.
2:17:14 - Mikah Sargent
What you're listening to is the equivalent of a normal conversation.
2:17:18 - Alex Lindsay
Uh, you know, if you know, like, if you look at, if you look at this, this is uh. If I cut to it, you'll see that this is. You know, if I'm uh, oh, what it compares he'll see that this is.
2:17:25 - Mikah Sargent
You know if I'm oh what it compares to.
2:17:26 - Alex Lindsay
It tells you like this is a motorcycle, this is a motorcycle, motorcycle I'm going to you know and inside a car, but you can see power motors and all the other things, yeah, so it's awesome, I'm as loud as a pneumatic riveter.
Yeah, exactly, and there's other ones out there. I just think this one has the most features, you know, and it's the most interesting and I use it, uh, probably weekly, uh, for years, so for different things I'm measuring. It also has a hearing test built in. Oh, I'll try that. It's got all so many features, so it's it's cool.
2:17:58 - Leo Laporte
I, uh, as you know, I have severe tinnitus, a ringing in the ears, yes, uh, this would be. I share would be. I wish I'd had this when I was a young person, and young people pay attention. Actually, the watch gives you the at least a little bit of a warning if it goes over 90 DB. I just started last week the linear tinnitus treatment. It's, I feel, silly. That's you, that's me Not. Yet my audiologist said it takes two weeks before you notice anything and she said you might notice it gets louder or weirder. Don't worry, that's normal. I say, hey, if it changes the level or sound of my tinnitus at all, I will be very impressed.
There is no cure for tinnitus, but this apparently trains your brain to ignore it. It's 12 weeks twice a day for half an hour now. When they first said that, I thought, oh, this is going to be terrible, but actually it's quite relaxing. I enjoy it. Yeah, it plays. Uh, there's a piano going like scales and then there's a flute and a bass. In the background, there's pink noise, there's water rushing, there's drips, the frequencies go up and down. There's a flute and a bass. In the background, there's pink noise, there's water rushing, there's drips, the frequencies go up and down. There's a synthesizer.
2:19:11 - Mikah Sargent
They've tricked Leo into paying a bunch of money to listen to a jam band. It's like a jam band except it never changed.
2:19:16 - Leo Laporte
Well, maybe it does change I have to ask the audiologist but they said it's tuned to my frequency.
2:19:22 - Alex Lindsay
That's cool, and I forgot to ask if it was 9 000 kilohertz, which is what alex says he thinks most of tinnitus is uh, but a bunch of us that have tinnitus have all talked about where it is and we started listening to it and I think all of us seem to be somewhere in the range okay, which means I can still, I still test up to like 13 or 14, okay, um, yeah, so anyway, I'll give you a feedback, uh, you know, over probably in 12 weeks, cause I think I should give it the full thing.
2:19:53 - Leo Laporte
I don't know if it works or not.
2:19:54 - Mikah Sargent
Uh, it's $4,000, but now it's tax deductible Cause you talked about it.
2:19:59 - Leo Laporte
It's worth it because if I, I would pay twice that to get rid of this tinnitus.
2:20:05 - Alex Lindsay
So if, if it, if it works for you, I'll buy it, like I, I, I'll find the money, cause I just it is something I've had for most of my life. I mean, you know, and uh, uh, and I would, I would, I'm used to it.
2:20:17 - Leo Laporte
Like I, I read something where someone committed suicide cause they got it, or whatever, and I was like okay, well, I hear it a lot, so what you do is you have the headphones. It happened really suddenly. It would be really problematic, but it happened for me slowly, so you just get used to it. It just got really loud in the last couple of years and it's starting to annoy me and I'm not going to kill myself, but I'm pissed.
2:20:35 - Alex Lindsay
When it takes out. One ear is the part that I suddenly. Do you ever have that, leo, where suddenly hear this really loud?
2:20:43 - Leo Laporte
yeah, it's uh, and now it's both ears. It started with this ear. I mean always had a ringing got really loud in the right ear and now it's in left ear and it's, it's, it's loud and it's, and the thing is perceptible all the time. And that's when I said I'm going to do something. I didn't mention you listen that, the mixes of tones and music. You also have a little thing you put on your tongue that's zapping your tongue at the same time with. It feels like champagne bubbles. It's not painful, it just tickles your tongue. Uh, and I think the theory is that, using bimodal stimulus, trigeminal nerve and you're hearing there's tricking your brain into eventually ignoring your tinnitus. We'll see. I don't know. It's so interesting. It's fda approved, so it's not. It's not harmful, I guess, is all I can say in fact I feel like I'm meditating twice a day for half an hour.
That's very relaxing. It's great. I feel afterwards. I feel great, I want to do it. All the time I thought, oh, I'm gonna hate this yeah, I would think I would too.
2:21:40 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, twice a day for that do you have to sit in a quiet place or can you sit outside?
2:21:43 - Leo Laporte
they say say you could do it. I sit outside often. They say you could do a crossword puzzle if you want, or knit if you want, but I think my opinion is probably best if and they don't want you to lie down because you might go to sleep.
2:21:56 - Mikah Sargent
They want you to stay awake. You have to be alert enough.
2:21:58 - Leo Laporte
But I like keeping my eyes closed. It's like meditation. I'll sit upright with my eyes closed, just like I'm meditating, and I find it very relaxing. Every once in a while I'll zone out. I thought half an hour I'm going to be like Itching to get on to the next thing and in fact, when it starts to slow down, the end comes oh, I want more. So anyway, there it is. I will let you know if it works. If it does, I will be singing its praises. My suspicion is going to kind of work.
2:22:29 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, they do say soothe a lot yeah.
2:22:32 - Alex Lindsay
Any progress? Soothe tinnitus, yeah, yeah.
2:22:35 - Leo Laporte
Any progress would be good. This is what the little tongue thing looks like. This is from an NPR piece. It's kind of interesting. I think that's really cool. I'll let you try it. I'll wipe it off. They give you alcohol swabs.
2:22:47 - Mikah Sargent
That would be fun, try it.
2:22:49 - Leo Laporte
It's not going to be tuned to your particular hearing loss. That's it for MacBreak Weekly. Thank you, andy, and Nakko GBH in your future.
2:22:59 - Andy Ihnatko
Yes, week from Thursday Go to wgbhnewsorg at about 1 pm Eastern time to listen to it live or later Nice.
2:23:06 - Leo Laporte
Thank you, Andrew. Thanks also to Mikah Sargent filling in for Jason. Jason Snell will be back next week, I think. I think so. Six Colors you can watch his review of his hostage experience. Mikah is, of course, going to be back Thursday for Tech News Weekly, Sunday for Ask the Tech Guys, and every other week on Tuesdays with Rosemary Orchard for IOS.
2:23:28 - Mikah Sargent
Today. That's when we record it, but an episode publishes every single Thursday, along with an episode of Hands on Mac every single Thursday. Thank you very much.
2:23:37 - Leo Laporte
Alex Lindsay, officehours.global. What did you do these days? Obviously, I know what you did this morning you went over the video and critiqued it.
2:23:48 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, I mean, you know we, we had a great session. I said we had ECAM last last Thursday. On Friday we had the associate director of all the broadcasts for Harvard talking about all of their sports broadcasting and I, you know it was fascinating to talk about it because they have all, almost all students doing it not Harvard students, interestingly enough, but but lots of students that are, that are there, that they're training and they're constantly training hundreds of students to shoot all these video and you know they have 40 different teams that they have to cover and they're covering them all, you know, all over campus and he really talked about how they approach that and you know, a lot of this is going to ESPN too, and um, and so it was just a really fascinating, uh, fascinating conversation. Of course, this week has been mostly yesterday. We talked about what we thought would happen today. We talked about what happened, um, so there was a lot of, you know like, we talked about the graphics and and, um, you know what we, what we thought and it's been.
You know we, you know what we, what we thought and it's been. You know we've had some great conversations so far and we covered it. We did do a. We did our second ear experience yesterday, so it's not very useful, I think. I think we might take it down off of YouTube, because I don't know how to watch it now, because we didn't incorporate any of the show into it. You just hear us talking. You know. You're like, like we're just it's designed for you to like watch, the watch, the watch the keynote and then listen to us.
2:25:06 - Leo Laporte
I've been thinking about doing that to avoid takedowns. We just go. Okay, the video is going to begin in three, two, one. You start it and we talk but no video.
2:25:18 - Alex Lindsay
The funny thing is that is that the complicated part was that we wanted to be able to us be able to hear it and talk to each other, but not have it go out to the broadcast. And so, using Zoom, iso and Zoom tiles like all of our things are just Zoom tiles the whole show is just Zoom tiles into MIMO Live, like there wasn't any, no real production, you know, other than that. But we brought in all the ISO so we were able to pull just us out, drop eight of us into tiles and put it out there. So it was. It was a fun, it was a fun experiment and, um, we had a lot of viewers. It was nice, it was a fun thing to do.
2:25:54 - Leo Laporte
And then, of course, the show you do with michael krasny, gray matter dot show. We had stephen brill oh, wow, last week.
2:26:01 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, yes, he was. He's. Uh, it was a really good conversation. You know, you talk about someone who's, like you know, just really talking about trust and around a lot of the things we're talking about internationally and what he does. Is he really there? He's looking at how do you trust news organizations or how do you trust websites, and, and so he's been spending a lot of time on on on trust issues around what you see on the Web Good, and he's supporting's supporting section two, 30.
2:26:27 - Leo Laporte
Does he, does he in favor?
2:26:30 - Alex Lindsay
I don't, I don't think he, I think he just said it's. You know, it was a big, that was a big bill, and this was like a couple of lines and it has become this. You know, I think in as he discussed it. I don't think he's in, I don't think he's in favor. Okay, I think he's, I don't think. I don't think he thinks it should be taken away. I think that there's a lot of. I think what he talked about is accountability. You know, like just there, you know some accountability and and I think that the hard part is is that, with 230 as it all, every time that discussion comes up in gray matter is that you, it's not perfect, but if you unwrap it, you don't know how to, how it comes back, like you know, like it's a it's an imperfect thing that was written almost 30 years ago.
2:27:11 - Leo Laporte
A lot of these guys in three piece suits. Steve is part of the established, the media establishment, even though NewsGuard is not. Think of it as a law. That gets big tech off the hook and I'm always a great pain to say, fine, whatever. But it also keeps little old me able to have a chat room and a forum and a mastermind instance, because if I were on the hook for everything you said in our chat room I would shut it off immediately.
Yeah, no, it protects me, so yeah maybe Google and Facebook and Apple and Microsoft don't deserve that protection, but let me tell you, 99% of the internet needs that protection to survive.
2:27:56 - Alex Lindsay
Absolutely, and I'm I'm an ardent supporter of not touching 230, because it's, it's not that it I just. I know that it's not perfect, but if you, if you, open up that gate, there are so many people that want in and get their little grubby hands into it, that'll never come back in a way that will work.
2:28:13 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, modifying modifying such a 230 is step one of a five-step process on some whiteboard that you don't have access to. So, yeah, that's why you don't let them get to step one. Yep.
2:28:24 - Leo Laporte
Thank you, alex. Thank you, andy, micah, great to see you. I give you my glowing petunias, yes.
2:28:30 - Mikah Sargent
And I wish you luck. I will do my best to recover them.
2:28:34 - Leo Laporte
I almost killed them. As far as I could tell, I might have killed them. One of them smells rotted to all hell. They don't smell good Is that normal.
2:28:41 - Mikah Sargent
It's just one of them that smells terrible. Oh, it's just one, yeah that one's probably going away. It's currently in. The last time I walked into my office I had to walk out because it smells so bad.
2:28:50 - Leo Laporte
Oh, I thought that's just how petunias smelled.
2:28:52 - Mikah Sargent
I think there's something wrong with one of them. It almost smells like you poured rotten milk into it.
2:28:56 - Leo Laporte
I'm pretty sure I didn't.
2:28:59 - Andy Ihnatko
You're tampering with God's domain. Damn it.
2:29:02 - Leo Laporte
But what they did, which is really cool, is they they gene spliced, I think, a firefly with a petunia to get a glow in the dark plant, and they said a firefly with BO.
2:29:14 - Andy Ihnatko
Maybe the firefly had not used its right guard.
2:29:17 - Leo Laporte
It would have been a different story entirely. Thank you everybody. We do Mac Break weekly every Tuesday, 11 am Pacific, 2 p. 2 pm eastern time, 1800 UTC. You can watch the live version of the show, the unexpurgated live version, on YouTube youtube.com/twit, slash live. We turn on the cameras, uh, right at the beginning of the show and turn them off at the end, uh, so if you subscribe and smash the bell, then you'll get a notification when we go live After the fact. Easy to download audio or video or both from twit.tv, our website, twit.tv/mbw, for this show. You can also watch a YouTube channel dedicated to the video, just MacBreak Weekly all the time. Or, best thing, get yourself a podcast client and subscribe. That way you'll get it automatically, the minutes available and you can listen or watch at your leisure.
Thanks for being here, my friends. Thanks especially to our club twit members. We love having you in the club. I really appreciate what you've done for us. Thank you, you've helped a lot. Um, and I have to say, as I have said from day one, it was Alex Lindsey who told me. I have to say this at every show Get back to work, because break time is over. Bye-bye.
