MacBreak Weekly 931 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 MacBreak Weekly. Andy Ihnatko is here, Alex Lindsay is here and filling in for Jason Snell, the one and only Mikah Sargent. Is Apple about to do a foldable iPhone? We'll talk about the rumors and what Apple should and should not do if it does make such a thing. We'll dance around crowing because we didn't get hit by the CrowdStrike bug. None of the Mac people did. We'll explain why and why it's unlikely we ever will. Apple gets 72 Emmy Award nominations a new record and maybe you've seen the ad. Apple's trying to encourage you not to use Chrome but to use Safari. And they've done a takeoff on the birds. It's pretty wild. All that and more coming up next on MacBreak Weekly.

0:00:44 - VO
Podcasts you love From people you trust. This is Twit.

0:00:53 - Leo Laporte
This is MacBreak Weekly episode 931, recorded Tuesday, July 23rd 2024: Piledriving. It's time for MacBreak Weekly, the show where we cover the latest Apple news with a fabulous panel of Apple news experts. Alex Lindsay from officehours.global is in the house. Well, his house. Hello, Alex, how are you? I'm doing well. How about yourself? Very, very well, very, very well.

0:01:22 - Andy Ihnatko
Andy Ihnatko is in the library from WGBH Boston yes, because there's construction crews in my neighborhood and they wouldn't let me play with their pile driver. So I said well, if that's going to be your attitude, I'll just go to the library today.

0:01:37 - Leo Laporte
Thank you very much when you live by the seashore there are there's a lot of pile driving to be done it's, it's a scene, man, it's.

0:01:44 - Andy Ihnatko
You know, I'm running a bigger pile. We're gonna need a bigger pile?

0:01:51 - Leo Laporte
yeah, I presume they're. What they're driving is piles of what we don't know what they're what?

0:01:56 - Andy Ihnatko
what they're doing is that the there is a channel, like in the neighborhood that connects like the harbor, to like a little a little. Uh, one of the retaining walls is 100 years old. It's starting to like crumble a little bit. So what they're doing is, I guess they want to replace and upgrade that wall so it doesn't fall into the sea, but that's going to involve draining it so they can get at the foundations. So they're basically driving in all of it.

If you can imagine, like you know, with a strip of staples before you put it in the stapler, that only like a single sheet of like bent, rusty, like iron, and they've got a pile driver that's just banging it in in a line so they can make this wall, so they can dry things out. I mean, if they left it there it would look like one of them fancy, like who's that sculptor who makes these massive like rusty steel wall sculptures that when a museum buys one they actually have to like have it installed and then build the museum around it. So I'm looking forward to tourists this weekend, if it's still in place, say, oh, you're, so I know you came here to see the Geary wall. Ok, we are. So it costs eleven to eleven point two million dollars. We're not going to have education for the next two years, but I think that the cultural drive that it brings to us is going to be worth it Keith Murdoch in our discord says is it Richard Sarah?

yes, Richard Sarah, that's the name of the. We have a smart, those massive like curved, like sheets of steel, where and and again, where it literally is like every time you, every time you read like a about, like an installation, it literally is like they order a piece and then they have it delivered and then they build around it because there is no way to get it. You think it was hard getting a sectional sofa up two flights of stairs to your apartment. Wait until you get a 40-ton sheet of steel that's supposed to be freestanding and not knock over and kill people. It's really cool.

0:03:45 - Leo Laporte
Also with us. Jason Snell has the day off. Mr. Mikah Sargent made him do double duty. Just finished two, not one, but two ios today's with rosemary orchard. Hi Mikah, hello there. leo hello, you're wearing your barbershop quartet shirt? Or do you want to sing you?

can sing today we shall sing uh, it might. You might need to sing because there isn't a whole lot of news. The top story on tech meme is a rumor, but I'm going with it that the apple will do a photo foldable iPhone not next year, but the year after, and it will be like the galaxy flip. It'll be a top-down foldable, not a, not an open book photo.

0:04:26 - Andy Ihnatko
This is from Digi Times yeah, this is they're quoting a story that was broken by in uh, by The Information this morning, and we've been looking at reviews about a folding iPhone for a long time now, so this is not necessarily new. What's new is that they're reporting that actually. No, now there's like an internal code name for it which suggests that it's not just something they're playing with or working on, it's no, this is a sign they're actually putting it into production, because they need that formal sort of infrastructure to start, like actually putting out bids for screens, putting out bids for components and scheduling manufacturing.

0:04:59 - Leo Laporte
I like this idea, so we could be seeing one in a couple of years it's my favorite folding phone is the Galaxy Flip, not the Fold. In a couple of years, it's my favorite folding phone is the Galaxy Flip, not the Fold, because it flips open and so it's just so. Essentially, what you're going to get is an iPhone folded in half.

0:05:12 - Andy Ihnatko
And you know what? I love the idea of the Galaxy Fold. I love the idea of a phone that folds out into an iPad mini, but that's boy. Apple is all about product design. Okay, and they're all the things that they could do with a folding phone. The idea of a form that is almost like an Apple Watch when it's folded, because it'll have an external screen and external cameras, but when you open it up, it becomes just a standard iPhone. I'm really looking forward to seeing what they could do with that. Motorola has done amazing things with design there. Samsung has done amazing things with design there. Samsung has done amazing things.

Oppo pretty much everyone who's done something with this has found a twist to put on it. So it's super exciting to think about what Apple would do about it. Also, although I would love to have again an iPhone that folds out into an iPad mini, I would much rather have an iPad mini aside from a regular phone. So at least this indicates that maybe that doesn't mean that Apple is not updating the iPad mini because they know they're going to be getting rid of it with this new folding tablet size iPhone. So this because this rumor is saying that, no, it's going to be a really, really teensy, teensy, teensy compact little. I watch, excuse me, apple Watch Maximus that turns into an iPhone, instead of an iPhone that turns into an iPad.

0:06:26 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, let's give The Information credit, because this comes from Wayne Ma and Qianer Lu, who work for The Information as well as Digi Times. I guess they also point out Apple is known to cancel products late in their development, so no guarantee, but apparently they are working on it, they've given it a name and all of that. So our number, you know.

0:06:47 - Alex Lindsay
I still just feel like I mean I think Apple did the right thing by waiting for a little while. I just saw I saw a flip front in front of mine has a flip and and the coolest thing about it was hanging up is snapping it shut.

0:06:59 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah.

0:07:01 - Leo Laporte
You know like you can't be too aggressive, I know, but that looked.

0:07:05 - Alex Lindsay
That was that. I was like, okay, I like that, but the problem is I can immediately see the fold. You know, like, and that would drive me absolutely crazy, Like just to have a fold in this, like have this little lighter point, little part in the middle, I was like, uh, I don't think I can do that. So it'll be interesting to see. I do like the idea that it's closed and it's smaller and everything else, but I already have mine in a case and I have a thing and I just was like I don't know. I mean, you know, like it's the problem, I just haven't seen any of them that that fold doesn't become something you can see all the time.

0:07:35 - Leo Laporte
I have the Flip 5 and I really like it. I had the fold, one of the first folds, because I really wanted to see what these foldable screens would do, and wanted to see what these foldable screens would do, and I agree with you, the crease is noticeable. But more than that, what bugs me more than that is the texture of a foldable screen is. We're used to this nice glass, yeah, and I don't put a screen cover on my phone, so maybe other people are, but, uh, the way samsung does it, it's actually a. There's a protective layer on top which you could peel off. I did on my fold and that was a mistake, so so you leave that on, but it feels a little bit, almost like grabs your fingers almost like it's rubber a little bit.

It's not a pleasant.

0:08:12 - Andy Ihnatko
Well, the newest. I finally got a chance to get my hands on the new Samsung's. They've really come a long way. It really does At least the fold. I didn't get to get my hands on the flip, but does at least the Fold. I didn't get to get my hands on the Flip, but the Fold.

It really feels as though this is the fourth or fifth generation of a new platform.

It feels like a regular phone.

There is a kind of a crease, but now you kind of have to look for it, and I'm convinced that Apple wouldn't put this into production if they didn't feel as though they either A had a way of mitigating that via a better hinge design or, b they're just going to make it so compelling overall that you're going to say, okay, so what if there's like a little crease that I might be able to notice?

I mean, I'm just thinking about the idea of the number of times you take a phone out of your pocket to do one thing and then put it back in. Imagine having a half-sized iPhone where the screen is not just giving you the time and giving you a notification, but it can actually be an active widget where it says oh, the thing that you wanted to do here it is press this button, action this, turn on the lights and then put it back in your pocket. I'm losing my desire for an Apple Watch or a smartwatch, but I'm starting to get into the idea of like an Apple pocket watch Again, something that is like, large enough to give a better experience.

0:09:30 - Leo Laporte
Only Andy Anako would want an Apple pocket watch.

0:09:34 - Mikah Sargent
I have yet to find this at all compelling in any sense other than it exists. Because novelty I really, because here's my problem with it when you fold it in half it's thicker. Now I've got this thing I have to store in a pocket.

0:09:52 - Leo Laporte
It's not as if Recognizes that In fact the Wayne Ma story and The Information says Apple designers have previously mandated a foldable iPhone should be half as thin as the current iPhone model, so it won't be too thick when shut. So they agree with you.

0:10:07 - Mikah Sargent
It has to be, otherwise it just feels like you know, remember when we used to have foldable. Let's do that again. And the way that they've all they've. Either you fold it in half and it looks like a cyborg hot dog, in which case I'm not trying to stick that in my pocket. Let me lend you the flip five show title, would you?

0:10:28 - Alex Lindsay
like to try it for a while. I'll try it because I really here's why I like it uh, it is thicker.

0:10:34 - Leo Laporte
Uh, not as thick as the fold the folds are really thick, but but it's thicker, but it's. Then it's like a pocket square. It could fit. It fits like in your, in your shirt pocket. It's very convenient form factor and I think, think really so. There's. I think there's two markets for foldables One people want an iPad size screen on a phone, but that thing is really big if you play with it. And then the second one is, I think, a larger market we'll see, I don't know, samsung doesn't release figures, but I think a larger market for a pocket square.

People want to put it in their purses or, you know, they just don't want this is kind of a clunky thing to be carrying around and I think it's very elegant. And if you could make it so, apparently, according to The Information, the next generation iPhone, the 16, which will not be foldable, well, it will be, but only once. Ha ha, uh, is going to be so thin. In fact, they say the iPhone 16 models will also use a larger graphite sheet inside the chassis to address overheating issues. Uh, and they're going to make it extremely thin as a step toward the folding phone, which will be, you know, thin when you unfold it, the folding phone, which will be, you know, thin when you unfold it. So I think I don't. I think there's a market for it. I want you to try it, just to see, because if you tell you carry it around for a while, yeah, I can't know until, yeah, I just form factors.

0:12:00 - Mikah Sargent
Good, I still agree with you the screen and the crease and all that. Yeah, I just think that the only way to gain access to what I really want to do seems to be a fold away. So why even put the fold?

0:12:11 - Leo Laporte
It's not. Oh, this is the other thing. There's a screen on the outside of it.

0:12:16 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, yeah, but can I do everything on there that I can do when it's unfolded?

0:12:19 - Andy Ihnatko
But you can do a lot of things, yeah, but I can think about the thing. You take the phone. You take a phone to do this one thing like to check, hey, how far away is my uber right now.

0:12:28 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, and I can do that right now with this watch notification or with this phone.

0:12:32 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, look at my but look, but look how big it is. Like, even I love I love my phone, but I got to. One of the things I got on on prime day was a new pair of shorts and I didn't know when I bought it, but it has actually a side pocket. That's exactly the right size for a phone and it's great, it's perfect, it's like such the natural place to put it. But the fact that there is such a need for trying to figure out what the hell to do with this big sheet of glass that we carry around everywhere, that they are manufacturing pants with phone cargo built into it, that indicates that maybe there is a way to. There is at least an opportunity for an option where let's have one that actually disappears in your pocket when you're not using it, when you're not needing it.

And then, and we haven't even talked about the, I'm so dazzled by the idea of a transforming object, the idea that when it wants, when you want it to be a phone with a big screen device, want it to be a phone with a big screen device, it can be a phone with a big screen device, when you want it to be something that is like a little like easel, a little like a camera that's on your on your desk, that has a camera and you're doing like a quick, quick chat with somebody. It is the simple gadget on your desk. When it really is just something you want to stand on your desk to just tell you what time it is or keep an eye on your desk. When it really is just something you want to stand on your desk to just tell you what time it is or keep an eye on your schedule.

0:13:48 - Leo Laporte
It's that the look at this, Mikah. Look at this it comes in green. How did now?

0:13:53 - Alex Lindsay
now, what do you say? Get it now. What do you say so see this screen on here. I mean there really is, and this is.

0:13:59 - Leo Laporte
There's one other thing you can do watch, does that? No, no, no, there's one other thing you're gonna like that you can do do.

0:14:03 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, but you've got to wear an Apple watch. This is really cool. Wear like a really cool Casio like this, isn't this?

0:14:11 - Leo Laporte
fun. No, this screen like this you can use to do your TikToks.

0:14:18 - Mikah Sargent
Oh, but I can prop up my iPhone and do that.

0:14:20 - Leo Laporte
No, but you don't need to prop it up, see, it stands up all by itself.

0:14:26 - Andy Ihnatko
Ugh. No, but you don't need to prop it up, see, it stands up all by itself. Ugh, I don't know why I'm trying to sell it to you.

0:14:29 - Mikah Sargent
I think this is for people who have fun with the Transformers toys growing up. This is for people who don't have an Apple Watch, which is fine. I'm just I'm not convinced that it's anything more than some sort of nostalgia novelty play.

0:14:41 - Alex Lindsay
I think I'm with Andy that I see all these things that I could do with it. And novelty play. I I think I'm I'm I'm with andy that I see all these things that I could do with it. And when I saw the, the flip, I thought, oh, that looks really cool. But as soon as I see that crease, my mind went no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Like I can't like, it'll bother every time I open it, like I can't even deal with scratches, like so you know, I just it's so every time I open it it would be like oh, two things stand in the way, according to wayne again, The Information of the foldable phone.

0:15:05 - Leo Laporte
Apple's engineers have struggled for years to overcome the technical challenges of building such a device, such as eliminating the crease that forms in the middle of the display after repeated folds. The company may have resolved the issue. We'll see.

0:15:20 - Alex Lindsay
We'll see. It's just hard, like even for Apple. I just find like my mind cannot see how they will get rid of the crease to the level that I'm happy with it, like I just can't, I can't get, I can't get my head around that that process, you know.

0:15:35 - Andy Ihnatko
Oh, I see that I I don't think that this is going to. I years now. If the public was going to be transformed into oh, we want this to be the default form factor for phones, it definitely would have happened and Apple would have been on this like years earlier. But I think there's room for it within the portfolio of shapes and forms that computers exist in. I respect your opinion absolutely, but I don't think it's nostalgia, I don't think it's a trick phone. I think it is a form factor that has a lot of merit, that once we get a couple million out there, once we get an Apple Apple fans who are buying it because they like Apple design and they start to embrace it, then we'll start to see exactly how good this thing can be.

I got to say that I'm, at this point, I'm way more optimistic about the future of a foldable iPhone than I am about the Vision Pro. This point I'm way more optimistic about the future of a foldable iPhone than I am about the Vision Pro. The Vision Pro to me, at least at this stage, seems like okay, you built a 3D video viewer and virtual screen maker for $3,500 that runs iPad apps. Well done. I don't think that anybody has a real need for that, unless you really like to be Gadget, joe. But I'm glad that you made it. I'm glad that the people who have them enjoy it. So I think that we're on the opposite sides of that kind of argument. I like the idea of foldables.

0:16:55 - Alex Lindsay
I think the one thing that would drive it is if you suddenly see a lot of teenagers using flip phones. I think Apple's quite happy with its market share there and it would probably keep on adjusting to maintain that market share. Sure.

0:17:10 - Mikah Sargent
It certainly showed that you had the latest Mine forms. Yours doesn't? I've got the latest, yeah.

0:17:16 - Alex Lindsay
I mean again, there's parts I like almost everything about the flip phone except for the crease. Like everything about it, the idea of being able to flip it, the putting up. I mean I've had again. I've only seen two in person in the wild and both times I was like, oh, this is really cool. And then I opened it and saw the crease. I was like, oh, I'm crazy.

0:17:32 - Leo Laporte
But I think if you didn't care about the crease, I think that there are many, many features about that that are great I really just love the idea of fitting the little thing into my pocket, the the problem is I'm an iPhone guy and I, as every time I try Samsung or any Android, I go yeah, but I want to stick with my iPhone. So that's why I think there's some interest in whether Apple can can do this, even if they don't make it better. And if they do, I think Apple, I think, I think the market's there for it and and think, uh, I think the market's there for it.

0:18:04 - Andy Ihnatko
Yes, and, and apple, apple does have a good track record where they're not going to do something unless they feel as though they can add something to the table.

0:18:11 - Leo Laporte
It's not that, uh, so yeah because otherwise people just say well, samsung had, that's four years ago, five years ago and again there's not.

0:18:19 - Andy Ihnatko
it's not.

It's not as though iPhone customers have been demanding hey apple, when you're going to get off, get off your butt and give us a folding phone.

You know they haven't been doing that, so if they were to put it out I would be convinced that they've got. Either they've got some ideas on how to solve the problems that the things that they themselves don't like about existing flip phone and foldable phone designs, or they figured out a way that we can do, use our manufacturing to get it so that it's not a double, it's not 100 percent premium over a standard phone, it's maybe a 20% premium. It wouldn't cost you more than the difference between an iPhone and an iPhone Pro, which would in itself be kind of amazing. The Motorola we are seeing some inexpensive ones, but they work nicely, but they are kind of inexpensive looking phones. Again, it's easy to be misinterpreted when you say that a lot of the value that Apple brings is just simply their design philosophy and their commitment to having a really lovely object in your hand that you're going to be accessing several, several, several times a day. But that's a bona fide feature.

0:19:21 - Leo Laporte
One data point Apple has, of course, is the failure of the mini. Right, the mini did the. I still hear people say, oh I'm, I really want my miss, my mini, want my mini. But apple discontinued it presumably because of poor sales, you know or not again, or poor profit options, maybe I don't know.

0:19:39 - Andy Ihnatko
yeah, it's the difference between asking somebody in a poll saying, hey, if apple made a more compact phone that had nearly all the features of a pro, would you buy it? Oh, I'd be all over that. But then great, here it is. I'm like, oh, actually, I kind of I'm glad you made it. I'm going to recommend it to my friends. But yeah, I mean the people. The thing is, people who are not being served get heard the most, because the people who are happy have no reason to talk Right most. Because the people who are happy have no reason to talk Right. That's it, which is which is perfectly reasonable and rational. I'm the person who's complaining about something that the iPhone doesn't do, because I'm not happy with it. People who are happy with the way that an iPhone works generally are probably outnumber me on that particular issue by a thousand to one. However, they're not as vocal as I am, because I'm I've got something to talk about, so maybe they've decided in their market research.

0:20:33 - Leo Laporte
People liked a tiny phone, but didn't want less screen, real estate. So this way you get the best of both worlds right. You get a phone that folds in half, so it is small, but you can get a bigger screen on it.

0:20:44 - Andy Ihnatko
Think of it this way. One of the things I like about the Pros is that you can get the larger and the smaller one, and they're largely the same phone with very few differences. What if Apple were to absolutely commit and say that we're going to make this feel as though it's just another flavor of iPhone? You're not getting a lesser version of anything, because that might have been one of the things that threw people off that an iPhone mini, the mini version of something I can give you. I can give you a cupcake, or I can give you a mini cupcake. Which one do you want in your lunchbox? So it's it. There's not a positive connotation with it, but I think that it just proved that, at least in the Apple market space, there just aren't enough people who are so excited about a mini that they would be giving up the extra real estate, they'd be giving up the features that they could get if they went into an iPhone pro. Uh, it's complicated.

0:21:40 - Leo Laporte
And our YouTube says once you go big, it's hard to go back to a small screen Again. Our YouTube says once you go big, it's hard to go back to a small screen. Yeah, and that's again. That's the market for a foldable. If you could solve my problem with it feeling like a rubber screen and you could solve Mikah's problem, or, no, Alex's problem with a crease. I don't know what your problem is, Mikah, but anyway.

0:22:01 - Mikah Sargent
Skepticism is my problem.

0:22:02 - Leo Laporte
Skepticism If you could solve all that you might. That might be this, this, the sweep. Anyway, I think it's reasonable for apple to try. Does apple do market research now? Remember steve jobs famously said oh, we don't do market research no, they, they do market.

0:22:16 - Andy Ihnatko
They do they must. Our company it's too big. They know. They know exactly well. Also, they have the access to some of the most powerful market research in the world. They have access. They have the access to some of the most powerful market research in the world. They have intimate access to knowledge about the people who buy the most expensive and fashionable and feature rich premium phones in the world, which are their customers. So they know what happens when we give them more storage options versus fewer options. What happens when we give them a lot? What happens when we keep more phones on the price list that are two or three years old to give people a less expensive option? Do they go for them? Or is that something that we should only keep manufacturing because for other countries outside the United States? They do research, they know what they're doing. They don't go into the reason why they cancel. The Apple car was largely like OK, we, we can't sell these, we'll take some deposits. We, we can't sell these, we'll take some deposits, but we can't sell these.

0:23:09 - Leo Laporte
I've been using iPhone 18 the public beta and my daughter, who is a samsung user, uh, texted me congratulations on your new android and I had to tell her no, I'm just using RCS now.

0:23:25 - Andy Ihnatko
I've just stopped shunning you.

0:23:27 - Leo Laporte
Yes, so am I a green bubble. Now, what's going on that she thinks I'm on Android?

0:23:33 - Mikah Sargent
What are you yeah?

0:23:37 - Andy Ihnatko
You're appearing as an RCS chat, and so Google Messages or Samsung Messages is going to identify you as just another R, as as just another rcs user so I'm read and delivered did you get an android?

0:23:50 - Leo Laporte
congratulations? No, it's rcs, honey. Sorry, she's the one hold out in the family and she hates apple. She hates apple. Uh, probably get a job with the FTC in a few years. Hates Apple for what they did to her papa yeah, turned him into a mindless drooling zombie, a sheeple.

0:24:15 - Andy Ihnatko
Shamed him and sent him to a pariah, and he was never the same when he was sent off the Apple campus for the last time, you know what she might have something to do with it.

0:24:23 - Leo Laporte
Oh, that's kind of sweet. I could see she's that way. She's very loyal. How dare you kick my papa out of your events? I will never buy.

0:24:33 - Andy Ihnatko
It's like every really good John Ford Western saying Callahan's ran my family off their ranch. What they call progress, we call 30 days of suffering. Now it's time to pay him back.

0:24:47 - Leo Laporte
Let's take a little break here for the callahans, the hatfields and the McCoy's to shake hands and make things up. It's great to have Mikah Sargent in the uh in the panel. You should be here more often sitting in for Jason smell. Thank you for doing this. We appreciate it. You're probably exhausted, uh, but I'm doing all right. Yeah, this is your third show of the day. I don't know how you do it.

0:25:08 - Mikah Sargent
Hanging in there, just lots of water.

0:25:10 - Leo Laporte
You young people, I tell you Youth, yes, yes, yes. Andy Notko, our gentleman scholar and, of course, my personal consultant when it comes to building a home studio. Mr Alex Lindsay, are you going to mock me? Because I didn't get a sound devices mixer for my home studio? I might miss that noise feature.

0:25:34 - Alex Lindsay
I don't know, it's very, if you have a very quiet room, it's not a problem, but if you don't have a quiet room, then it's well, I do, except I'm over there.

0:25:41 - Leo Laporte
You know, it's in the attic and it's over the garage, and when the garage door opens it sounds like thunder.

0:25:50 - Alex Lindsay
It doesn't really fix that. It fixes things like fans and light. Yeah, you have an air conditioning running right now.

0:25:58 - Leo Laporte
You can't hear it. So which sound devices? I have the old USB pre mix, pre it's the MixPre 3.2.

0:26:07 - Alex Lindsay
The new one it's a slightly newer one With 32-bit float it does, although I rarely use the 32-bit float, but now I have the Scorpio as well, which I highly recommend.

0:26:19 - Leo Laporte
What's the Scorpio? Oh you never should have asked him.

0:26:26 - Alex Lindsay
I'm not using it for the show. I use it for shows.

0:26:28 - Leo Laporte
Is it for sound devices?

0:26:30 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, it's the one on the bottom there on the stack, the big one.

0:26:34 - Leo Laporte
The big sound. Yeah, it's a really nice. It's a really nice Mix pre 10.

0:26:39 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, so the mix pre three is all you need. So for doing anything at home, all you need is a MixPre-3.

0:26:46 - Mikah Sargent
That's what I have on my desk. Knowing Leo, he doesn't need something.

0:26:49 - Alex Lindsay
I know, it's a big mistake.

0:26:50 - Leo Laporte
Mikah knows me very well.

0:26:52 - Alex Lindsay
The 10 is nice because it's got some analog outs and it's got a lot more IO, and the 6 is nice because that's where you can start doing ambisonic. But the 3 is what we have.

0:27:01 - Leo Laporte
I mean, I only need two microphones, so the. So the three is the smallest one. It has three. You could do three microphones, I presume that's. Oh. No, it's two. Oh yeah, there's a third. Yeah, I see a third on the other side what I? Don't like is the little mixing thing I just so what I'm getting is the road.

0:27:18 - Alex Lindsay
Well, you can, you can uh with that, mixing uh with that. You can hook a usb controller with little faders onto the MixPre3, and then you have little faders to go up and down. Oh, you can do that.

0:27:30 - Leo Laporte
What is that?

0:27:31 - Alex Lindsay
What do I need? Oh, there's lots of them, Like a Korg oh people make faders.

0:27:36 - Leo Laporte
You can get these little faders, see, because that's why I bought this, because it's pretty colors and lights. Wow, that is pretty. You can get ones with f. I like the pretty colors in lights.

0:27:53 - Andy Ihnatko
Actually this has decent mic preamps, which is probably the most. It's a busy box for older people.

0:27:55 - Leo Laporte
It is it's a busy box for old podcasters Beep boop, slater, slater, view, view, view. It also has a button called Big Bottom.

0:28:06 - Mikah Sargent
Oh, the Big Bottom. I want a Big Bottom, remember a big bottom about that.

0:28:10 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, big bottom, but it doesn't have. Well, maybe it does, I don't know.

0:28:15 - Alex Lindsay
I mean it's, it has a processor and the pretty insane on the sound places I mean, there's a lot of other people that are trying, but none of them have gotten quite to that level yet I know everybody.

0:28:26 - Leo Laporte
You go to a tv or movie sound stage. They're all using sound devices to record they're pretty hefty.

0:28:34 - Mikah Sargent
What are you doing, leo? Wrong answer wrong answer.

0:28:39 - Leo Laporte
Well, let me just check the price on this sucker you should talk to me before you buy one.

That's all, okay, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not. Okay, I'm stopping right now. I'm stopping. Ladies and gentlemen, you're watching Mac break weekly.

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This is one for you, Alex Lindsay. I like this magazine Reason. I read it from time to time. It's kind of a libertarian journal. I like to get the point of view from that side. Not a big fan of Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, but I thought his piece in Reason this week was very interesting. The DOJ's assault on Apple, he writes, will harm consumers.

0:32:11 - Alex Lindsay
I don't know where you've ever heard that before. I would never say anything like that.

0:32:16 - Leo Laporte
He says, and you know what. He's got a clear grasp actually of what makes Apple special. He says what makes Apple products so unique is their ease of use and consistency over time. Apple's goal is to goals, deliver a seamless integrated experience that users can rely on time after time, without giving it a second thought. How does apple do this? By carefully exercising the very control the department of justice is trying to publish, punish, trying to punish, punish did I say Sorry, my brain's not working as economist Alex Tabarrok I'm again reading from Paul's piece explains in Marginal Revolution. I guess that's a book, I don't know about it. He says quote Apple's promise to iPhone users is that it will be a gatekeeper. Gatekeeping is what allows Apple to promise greater security, privacy, usability and reliability. Gatekeeping is Apple's brand promise. Gatekeeping is what the consumers are buying isn't that why crowd strikes?

0:33:16 - Mikah Sargent
nonsense didn't part of reason why it didn't work against me, oh yeah we can.

0:33:20 - Leo Laporte
Uh, let's do a little victory dance. We didn't use no blue screen death here.

0:33:24 - Alex Lindsay
CrowdStrike problems here. We didn't get struck by the CrowdStrike as.

0:33:28 - Leo Laporte
I said on Ask the Tech Guys with you, Mikah, on Sunday. Don't be too hasty. Just because you Linux and Apple people didn't get bit by this doesn't mean you will never get bit by something. Crowdstrike was only on what's weird 8.5 million Windows PCs, but it just happened to be the PCs that were used by oh I don't know, delta airlines, a lot of large organizations.

0:33:53 - Alex Lindsay
um, yeah, someone in our group, uh, they one of the largest or the largest uh mortgage company in the united states and they had on thursday they had lost, uh, I think thursday evening they had lost 15 000000 personal computers and 7,000 servers and by 10 am the next day they were up.

0:34:11 - Leo Laporte
But somebody had to go to each of those 15,000 PCs and fix them.

0:34:15 - Alex Lindsay
They put everybody into action, trained them on how to do it, sent everybody from computer to computer. They had SVPs and wandering around.

0:34:23 - Leo Laporte
Well, it wasn't a very hard fix. You had to reboot into safe mode, you had to remove a file from a driver's CrowdStrike folder or file of files.

0:34:31 - Alex Lindsay
It's the kind of thing that would be hard to do on a Mac, but did you see that specific one would be hard to do on a Mac just because of the permission Do we even have?

0:34:36 - Leo Laporte
a safe mode on the Mac? I don't even know.

0:34:38 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, there's well, yeah, there was a, a 9to5Mac, a couple of conferences this week basically explaining why this kind of thing would not happen, because Apple used to be vulnerable to this sort of overall problem, but they basically closed the door on. The reason why, a few years ago, you could no longer like use kecks to kernel extensions is because they deprecated the entire thing and essentially said that the only thing that will ever have access to the kernel is our own internal software thing that we'll ever have access to the kernel is our own internal software. Um, when what they also explain from the mac point of view uh, why? Uh, at least they explain microsoft's argument to the wall street journal that it's not their fault, so to speak, or it's not windows fault. It's that they had to have. They had.

They were approached by the european commission in 2009 saying that, ok, you make a lot of money off of security and antivirus products for enterprise, but you will not allow competing products to have access to the kernel, which is required to create really, really good tools or options. How do you want to solve this? I don't think there was an actual lawsuit or anything like that. This was pre a lot of the EU laws that would make this kind of a more hostile sort of thing. They said, okay, fine, fine, fine, we will allow. We will basically structure Windows in such a way that competing services can have access to the kernel.

And it's because a deployment of a buggy update to a security product was able to bork the kernel, which is the most the last thing you ever want to bork. So they're using this as an argument that, hey, it's not our fault, blame the European Commission. I think that you blame the company that is not supposed to put out a bad patch that borks basically every single Windows computer that requires an enterprise scale of antivirus and anti-hacking tools. However, that is a fair point. That is a problem that is not really possible, at least from this vector on Apple, and if the EU were to require Apple to say you introduced a bit of security that makes all Macs safe all across the globe, we are going to require you to weaken that. That would be a bad thing.

0:36:48 - Leo Laporte
yes, we will be talking about this, of course, later today. On Security Now in greater detail, steve will explain what happened. Paul Theron had a piece echoing what you just said in the Wall Street Journal. Crowdstrike outage has roots in Microsoft's antitrust problems. It is true that you can. You not, though, install a kernel extension. If you are willing to jump through hoops on a Mac, I believe you can.

0:37:14 - Mikah Sargent
In some ways, but when it comes to the security? So Apple introduced a number of low-level APIs that give developers the ability, like CrowdStrike, to access low-level parts of the system, but not to the extent that you can on a Windows machine. And so, yes, you can install certain kernel extensions, but not within the security portion of things at that low of a level.

0:37:45 - Leo Laporte
Apple does have a kernel panic.

0:37:47 - Alex Lindsay
I haven't seen one, though you're right, in quite a while um, and, and I think the the issue is that when you do anything at that kernel level, there are a couple things like ace is a audio thing that you have to go kind of go into to install it, but you can't make any changes, you can't update, it doesn't update automatically. So there you go. Yeah, they can't, you know you have to ask for, you have to go back into that that mode to update it again. So it's not, it is, and so you can't just automatically update millions of computers at one time.

And you know, of course, the problem that Windows has in general is that it's designed to be administered by a central. You know an administrator that sends everything out, and Apple is much more around the individual, you know saying whether they want that or not. And while there are tools for you know Jamf and others that will help you administer these things across you know fleets. It's not nearly as seamless as Windows and the advantage of that is that you can support a very, very large fleet in Windows with administrators.

0:38:44 - Leo Laporte
Maybe one of the reasons you don't see a lot of Apples in Enterprise is that you see a lot of Windows machines in Enterprise.

0:38:50 - Alex Lindsay
I think the reason you see a lot of Windows is because it's seen as cheaper, but without calculating the cost of ownership which Delta should calculate into their Delta lost a lot.

0:38:59 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it cost Delta a lot to be using Windows, maybe use Linux, I don't know. I mean, I'm sure Linux has a similar issue. To be honest with you, yeah, there's, there's.

0:39:25 - Andy Ihnatko
If we're sifting through the ashes for good news from all this, a lot of people are a lot more aware of what keeps machines running and how, how close we all are to a tsunami, an Armageddon of technology. If one of these services does something that that goes non-linear, go ahead. And I was just going to say, and also, by, by extension, the power of a company like cloud for cloud flare, which a lot of people have never heard of, no crowd strike oh, you're talking about cloud flare, okay, yeah I'm sorry.

like a company, they they don't realize that cloud flare is essentially the, the inner, the uh, middle, middle person, the middle technology that keeps websites and services running. And if Cloudflare, for instance, were bought by a crazy billionaire who decided that we are going to decide that we are not going to provide Cloudflare services to content and services we don't like, that is an immense amount of power for a billionaire to have. So that's it, I'm confused.

0:40:11 - Leo Laporte
How did you get from CrowdStrike to Cloudflare? I don't understand what you're saying.

0:40:14 - Andy Ihnatko
No, I'm sorry, I'm saying that a lot of the stuff that our society now absolutely depends on in order to keep things running literally to keep trains running is based on individual corporations that have an immense amount of power to screw everything up. Okay, and I don't think that's what we're seeing here.

0:40:33 - Leo Laporte
That's not what you're seeing here. This is not, I mean, as, as microsoft pointed out, it's eight, eight and a half million computers. It's not, it's just it's unfortunate. That crowd strike was a very popular, is a very well, maybe was a very popular security tool in in big enterprise. They were an advertiser here.

I know exactly, uh, how they work. I've I've spent time with the cto. Um, the problem is they ran as as out of sync said in our discord, they're running an interpreter in ring zero, which is just, and I'm sure this is what steve will talk about today. This is just a recipe for disaster. It's almost always interpreters that cause the problems. That's why Apple had problems with messages, because it has an interpreter that interprets images and videos and so forth and to render them. And an interpreter is essentially a little code engine and it can run code and if it's fed the wrong code, it can cause big problems, and if it happens to be running in ring zero, in protected memory, it can cause a crash. So it's a complicated situation. I don't think that it's a dominant company in the sense that they had more than eight and a half million customers.

0:41:45 - Andy Ihnatko
I'm sorry. I'll just quickly try to re restate what I'm saying. That wasn't the point I was trying to make. I'm saying that there's. If there's no way to shut down the highway, so there's no way for a problem to shut down the entire united states highway system or to cause all cars, or cause so many cars, to suddenly stop working. Yeah, monocult.

0:42:02 - Leo Laporte
You don't like the monocultures.

0:42:03 - Andy Ihnatko
I'm saying no, I'm.

I'm saying that people should understand that so much of we're so used to like a power grid where just you flip a switch and the lights simply turn on and off.

They expect computers and digital infrastructure to work the same way when there are so many things, that there's so many, there's so many important pieces of infrastructure that, as the saying goes, is relying on some independent open source coder from South Dakota continuing to update an open source Linux component that they are the only person who's actually updating it for the past 20 years. And if this one component, which is responsible for moving files from point A to point B anywhere on the internet, were to become compromised or to stop working, that would be a very, very bad day. I just want people to understand that the fragility of infrastructure is a very, very real thing and that you should expect and hold the companies and individuals and organizations to task for actually keeping it working, but understand that the default state is chaos and there's no way of proving that Well, and I think that the single point of failure is our problem at every level.

0:43:11 - Alex Lindsay
I mean, you know, the United States has dropped unexploded nukes out of planes by accident. Someone dropped a wrench in Arkansas, I think, and almost took out half the state, you know, and there was one relay switch that went bad and browned out New York pretty quickly.

0:43:27 - Leo Laporte
I thought it was a kid that hit the telephone pole with a stick. I thought that's what? Which one in New York? So yeah, in the 1965 blackout, which I remember because I'm that old, the lights went on exactly when a poor kid hit the telephone pole with a stick and for a long time he thought he caused the entire Northeast to go out. You're right, it was a transformer that blew, but probably squirrels.

0:43:52 - Andy Ihnatko
Don't cover up for the squirrels. Don't apologize for the squirrels.

0:43:54 - Alex Lindsay
They're responsible for a lot of this but I, but I, I I do think that, uh, the the nature of the way that apple builds up a lot of the products is is something that makes it harder for that to happen systematically across many different groups.

0:44:08 - Leo Laporte
I don't know if I give Apple credit or it's just that they're not in the same boat as Windows.

0:44:13 - Alex Lindsay
Maybe it's just that you know there's just very little that happens and part of it is there's this annoying thing that every time you want to install or change something, apple's asking you for a password, password, password, password, password. I need a password. No-transcript is the DOJ is trying to do something that people don't, aren't, are not interested in, like you know the, you know 70% of the voters that didn't want the act that the DOJ is trying to push forward. So they're going to try to do it some other way and they'll most likely lose because the legal challenges to the legal challenge, you know, still in the United States and European Union can do whatever it wants, but in the United States you really have to prove that it's truly a monopoly and then you have to prove that it changed its behavior when it became a monopoly.

And Apple hasn't really changed its behavior since it started or for the last 15 years. They do what they do and you're allowed to keep doing what you're doing, even if you become, even if you get to a certain status. It's it's using it or changing your behavior that becomes complicated and that's a really hard and the FTC has been mostly failing, you know. So it's not like and they're going to continue to fail while they continue to fund inadvertently fund massive Republican campaigns.

0:45:51 - Andy Ihnatko
I am glad that at least we're taking a look at that policy of what constitutes antitrust, what constitutes control of a market. And again, I'm not insisting that Apple needs to be nailed against the wall. I'm not saying that that Apple needs to be nailed against the wall, and I'm not saying that. I'm saying that the world is so different in 2024 than it was when this overall policy of what constitutes antitrust Did consumers have to pay more for a service or a product because of this behavior?

There are a lot of very simple litmus tests, both internationally and in the United States. It's at least appropriate for at least there to be a forum to discuss. Is that a limited point of view? Should we be concerned that again, the technology world is filled with $2 trillion operators that can really absolutely control what happens and what doesn't happen on a platform? And is it appropriate it might not be for the government to say, for a government to say, no, you can't buy more than the, you can't buy out this, this, this portion of things. I think it's fine, you can't deny opportunities other people and at least has a conversation that that maybe we should make an adjustment, and the answer might be no, things are working great.

0:47:02 - Alex Lindsay
we should not change anything at all but the conversation needs to be a law, like you know, like it's not discuss policy then make the law, yeah yeah, I mean and and so in in years to come, maybe, and and I do think that that that apple, if you again, we keep on going back to teenagers if the trajectory continues to what apple's done in the teenage, you know the up to they will have a monopoly like this.

You know, in this decade they will be. They will be a monopoly because the um, you know, you can see it every year you're seeing the Android sales dropping and when you see 87% of kids under 18 using an iPhone, the chances of them leaving that iPhone is low, you know, and so so it's not happening yet, but you're seeing a. There's this bubble that's coming. So I I'm what I'm saying is, when Apple becomes a, when they have 80% of the market or 90% of the of the phone market, all of the, everything I've set up until now, changes Like it is a. It is a completely different math. I'm just saying that they're not there yet.

0:48:14 - Andy Ihnatko
It might. It might be a weight because I don't have it in front of me, but there was some sort of a market research study about, uh, about switching, and they were. They basically came to conclusion that, um, apple's, the iPhone's growth and its perpetuity is reliant upon iPhone users replacing their iPhones with iPhones. That switching from Android is not a particularly powerful growth area for the iPhone. Obviously, if some, obviously, if someone's going to switch, what are they going to switch from?

0:48:39 - Leo Laporte
You could also argue that companies should not be allowed to do things like lock in that kind of create a monopoly, right? I mean, yeah, apple could build a monopoly by giving you a strong incentive never to switch. Oh, wait a minute, maybe they did. And then so when? At what point do you intervene, you know, just because people don't? You know they love their iPhones. That's kind of the mark of a monopoly, until the monopoly becomes predacious and then the government has to step in. I mean, companies become monopolies because people love what they're doing.

So saying somebody loves their iPhone or whatever is meaningless when it comes to antitrust regulation.

0:49:23 - Alex Lindsay
You have to keep a company from being predatory.

0:49:24 - Leo Laporte
That's the point.

0:49:25 - Alex Lindsay
What has to do with antitrust, though. You really have to have control of the market, and apple doesn't it only?

0:49:30 - Leo Laporte
has. Yeah, no, I think that that's fine. You can make that argument and and if they do, in court we'll see what happens.

0:49:35 - Andy Ihnatko
I mean, and they're not going to do. Rather than that, globally, it's always we're talking about the us market, where andrew's gonna have a hard, hard, hard time getting up above that level yeah, but I do think that that there is a.

0:49:45 - Alex Lindsay
I mean, people are buying an iPhone because of the way that the walled garden works, you know, and they're making that choice, and if they don't like that, then they buy an Android. And so the thing is, and I think, that the people who buy an iPhone and then expect it to operate like an Android a very small percentage of the users of iPhones. I mean, they just want it to work, they like the fact that it works with everything around them. They want all the devices to talk to each other, and that's very hard to do securely if you don't own all the pieces, you know, and so I think that that's the, the, the, the process there, and I do think. I do think, though, that Apple is going towards that, not because people are switching. It's because, if 87% of kids under 18 don't switch ever and just stay with what they have, eventually they're going to be upgrading, and that's what you're going to see is that's the future percentage. You know, like you know, and so I'm not thinking that anybody's going to come from Android to an iPhone.

0:50:39 - Leo Laporte
I'm just saying that you know that if everyone, just every, if every child were given an iPhone at birth, by 2053 will all be iPhone users.

0:50:50 - Alex Lindsay
But I'm saying that they're right now they're choosing that, so they're, you know, like so and but I think that a lot of the features when you see the features that are added that I just think are absurd, that are all in messages and all these other things, I mean those are added because they're definitely have figured out how to cater to that market effectively. You know, we don't see it that much. You see it when you watch Apple TV plus. Look at all the concerts that they're doing. I barely know who any of them are Like. You know, like those are total. All of Apple TV pluses music stuff is all focused on that age group. You know, there it's definitely calculated.

0:51:24 - Andy Ihnatko
And that's fine, but there's there's certain, there's certain areas that are very, very sketchy, I think, for Apple, and I think that messages is absolutely like the case study to look at. I mean, we have internal communications inside of Apple that was revealed in discovery and lawsuits about how they were discussing hey, should we do something about iMessages for Android or making Android messaging a little bit more compatible? And you have the top executives who are still running the company right now explicitly saying we feel as though we'll only give people reasons to let their kids have an Android phone instead of an iPhone. Why would we give that up?

And to the detriment of the experience on for iPhone, users are having to have the least secure method of communications possible, a standard that is decades old, having to send somebody, being able to send a friend a phone, a photo from their gorgeous iPhoto iPhoto library, and it looks like garbage on the other side. And they could have simply. They could have simply used the rcs a long time ago and they only did it when they were kind of forced to. Uh, rumor has it by by china basically saying that no, if you don't support rcs, you can't operate in our country. This is why regulations sometimes again the, the.

0:52:44 - Alex Lindsay
I'm gonna say if you can pass the law, then then then more power to you. But they're not going to be able to because it's not a popular thing. Well, china did I mean? No, I'm saying in the United States it's going to be hard, but the issue is that I don't really. I mean, I have friends that are on Android. I don't feel the pain, I just can't send it, I know.

0:53:05 - Andy Ihnatko
I just want to acknowledge that I love your friendship. I didn just want to say I just want to acknowledge that I love your friendship. I didn't want to call you out, or anything.

0:53:09 - Leo Laporte
But you know, Andy and I go back and forth, but I always have to remember that.

0:53:11 - Alex Lindsay
I have to go to my phone to talk to. Andy, because I'm like, oh yeah, I got to do. I have to use the phone for that one, not all the other computers, and so the Well, they use. They'll put RCS in the Sequoia right?

Oh, I'm just saying that I don't think I don't know if, if consumers really, you know, I just don't know if Apple users really care that much the vast majority of them, you know that, and and I and I don't think that they sit there and go. Oh, I wish, I really wish there weren't any green bubbles. I think they mostly just go there. There's mostly a lot of pressure on. You know, my mom is the only one People didn't want seatbelt laws either.

I mean, it's not always the consumers always don't know but, don't always know what's right, but again you still have to get to a point where it's monopoly. You know like, for instance, live nation is a monopoly and I understand your argument and we will see in court.

0:53:53 - Leo Laporte
If the judge says it's not a monopoly, then you're right. They'll throw it out.

0:53:58 - Andy Ihnatko
But let's wait and see because I don't know if that's an argument.

0:54:01 - Leo Laporte
We would say everybody loves something nobody loves live nation like like.

0:54:06 - Alex Lindsay
The thing is is that like, so live nation is. This is a perfect example of a monopoly, where the venue doesn't like, the venues don't like live nation, the artists don't like live nation.

0:54:15 - Leo Laporte
The um, the definitely consumers don't understand. The fundamental question really is monopoly or not? If apple's doing what its customers want it to do, should they be prosecuted for antitrust if they're making their customers happy? Isn't that the fundamental? Isn't that what Rand Paul's asking? Customers love Apple because Apple's doing what they want, and that's what the FTC doesn't want. And is that the question? Should customers' happiness override antitrust regulation? Remember antitrust is to protect consumers, but also to protect innovation by making sure other companies can compete, et cetera.

0:54:56 - Mikah Sargent
Letter of the law versus spirit of the law.

0:54:59 - Andy Ihnatko
I'm going to dip the most careful little toe into politics because I think it is relevant.

0:55:05 - Leo Laporte
That's kind of the same argument. Watch out, because your toe can get bit off. I'm just telling you from personal experience.

0:55:13 - Andy Ihnatko
If you ask a Democrat if Democratic policies make them happy, do they want a Democratic leader to change to other policies? They're going to say no, we think everything's great. We're very, very happy with our choice. We wish the entire world worked that way. And you have the same sort of reaction when you talk to someone of the Republican side. That doesn't necessarily mean that's best for the ecosystem in general, that's right.

That's my point. And Rand Paul. I will say that this is just to make sure we're smoothing things over. He's not one of my favorite politicians. He's one of only two people in Congress who voted against medical compensation for 9-11 first responders. However, I do agree that he makes a very, very rational and cogent argument in this piece, which is why I put it in the show doc. That's why the magazine's called Reason Exactly. I don't agree with it, but I respect the argument and it's very, very well constructed. I just think that there are bits and pieces where companies are going to absolutely want to do the right thing for the company, which makes sense. They're going to secondarily do what they think is the right thing for their customers. But if, outside of that ecosystem, their decisions are causing some damage or causing other people to have a suboptimal or even bad experience, that's when at least a government regulation should at least think about is it appropriate for us to step in? That's all I'm saying.

0:56:43 - Leo Laporte
Let's take a little break. You are watching Mac Break Weekly with Andy Anako, Alex Lindsay and a very special guest, Mikah Sargent, host of Tech News Weekly, ios Today, and Ask the Tech Guys who is filling in for Jason Snell Nice to have you. Thank you for doing this, hey, what's up? Good to be here. Don't look now, but you have a giant scary bunny over your left shoulder. Yeah, Is that a jackalope? Oh that?

0:57:07 - Mikah Sargent
Wait, hold on. Yeah, that thing with the big ears, that is Mothra.

0:57:10 - Leo Laporte
Ah okay, nothing to be scared of, it's just Mothra. It's just Mothra.

0:57:15 - Andy Ihnatko
No, no, it is Gamera that is friend to all children.

0:57:19 - Leo Laporte
We actually I probably shouldn't say this out loud, but we use all of those monsters as our Wi-Fi names, so our current Wi-Fi network is called Mothra. Actually, thanks for watching. We appreciate you're here. We hope you will continue to watch the show as we transition away from the studio. We're making some changes at Twit, trying, frankly, to be part of the 21st century. When Twit was started early in the 21st century, when it was started early in the 21st century, we really built a TV station. Right, but that's kind of an expensive proposition. We've slowly been modifying this and soon we're going to all be coming out of our homes or libraries, as the case may be, as Mike is doing, as Alex is doing.

Alex really is my inspiration for all this. What you do with office hours is remarkable and I realized that's probably more what we should be doing. I'm beginning to think the idea of shows. You need to have shows for advertisers, because advertisers won't buy. Oh yeah, we just go turn on the microphone three hours a day. They won't buy that and then let the magic happen. They won't buy that.

So we'll probably continue to do shows, discrete blobs of content, but increasingly I'm thinking I love what you're doing, because what you're doing, Alex, is about community. It's not about a show per se or a topic. It's about community. You have topics and you but, but, and we have such a wonderful community. That's what I want to foster. So we're looking at this. Please bear with us. We're under construction, things are happening. We think our last show in the studio will be August 8th and everybody will be working from home after that. Alex, you're going to come in here and do the last twit in the studio, which is August 4th for Vision Pro, which is so cool. Thank you, yeah, we're excited.

0:59:09 - Alex Lindsay
You're still thinking about that. No, I'm planning to come up this Sunday just to test things, just to try it out when the camera should be and we can talk about a couple things there, and then I'll come up the next Sunday.

0:59:18 - Leo Laporte
And we're putting together a live panel for August 4th so that you have people to see in 3D.

0:59:24 - Alex Lindsay
It's cool. I mean I just we just did a test recently on a Q&A that I was working on and it looks really cool yeah.

0:59:32 - Leo Laporte
So we're going to have some fun. I'm pretty excited about this whole process. You help us out when you join Club Twit Now. Right now, about less than 2% of our audience is a member. I would love to get that to. That doesn't have to be a hundred percent five. 10%. It means, of course, if you can't afford $7 a month or you live outside the U? S and it's too complicated or whatever, that's fine. But but if you can and if you listen to the shows and you like the shows and you want to keep it going and you're interested by what we're about to do, we would love to have you in the club. It's a great community. You can hang out in the Discord with other Club Twit members.

Because of the Club, we are now using Restream to stream live versions of this show and all the shows we do to every platform. Thank you, club members. That's including YouTube, but also Twitch, hi, twitch.tv watchers, x.com, LinkedIn, Facebook, Kick. So anywhere you're watching, you can watch us live and if you are watching live, join the Club. twit.tv/clubtwit All the shows ad-free. After the fact, we haven't figured out a way to do ad-free shows in the live stream. We would just have to play the girl from Ipanema for a minute, and that doesn't, it seems to me. You'd probably rather have us do the live at. Anyway, thank you to our Club Twit members for making this possible, this transition possible, for supporting us as we transition Because, as I mentioned, advertisers say to me they go well, but yeah, but what's the show?

What's the show? But there's no show. It's just we're going to hang out, yeah, but what's the show? What am I buying? I don't know. MacBreak Weekly continues. So I was driving up, I visited my dad down in Redwood City, I was driving up Highway 101, and I saw four or five of these billboards. Safari, a browser that's actually private, and I thought why is Apple buying billboards to promote their built-in browser? I was very puzzled by this Article in Forbes says Apple warns millions of iPhone users stop using Google Chrome.

This is Zach Duffman writing for Forbes. This kind of surprises me. This is apparently an ad campaign going on worldwide. Remember that Google pays Apple many billions of dollars, maybe upwards of $20 billion a year, to be the default search on Safari, to be the default search on Safari. So what he's writing is the arrangement could be curtailed by monopoly investigations in both the US and Europe. So Google is promoting plan B. They have a 30% installed base across iPhone users. They'd like to get that to 50%. That's another 300 million users. Apple says get that to 50. That's another 300 million users. Apple says no, we want you to keep using safari. It was a local campaign in the bay area around here, but it is now global. They don't mention chrome, but they don't need to, because it's really safari or chrome and that's. It says zach, what do you think andy?

1:02:47 - Andy Ihnatko
yeah, there's there's been a lot of this over the past, like month, month and a half, or Chrome and that's it, says Zach.

What do you think, andy?

Yeah, there's been a lot of this over the past month, month and a half, two months.

There was a story about how, as you suggested, that if the Apple-Google deal gets broken up by the antitrust proceedings, then Google's going to have a big, big problem on its hands where they're not going to be getting as much data as they need to from iPhone users, and so the way to solve that is to get people to switch over to Google Chrome on mobile and on desktop, which is one of the reasons why they've been doing a lot of promotion in the recent months about all the AI tools that are now baked into Chrome to make it more of an attractive platform, whereas really, the only thing that keeps Apple, I think, from absolutely letting loose the dogs of war against Google on privacy is basically saying, just as you say, they've got $23 billion a year that comes in from their relationship with Google.

If that relationship were severed now, they're kind of free to go. There was a famously in 2013, 2014,. There was actually an internal slide deck in which Apple was basically for internal communications, queued into Tim Cook, eddie Q, everybody here is how we can basically leverage the marketability of our commitment to privacy compared to Google and slide, deck, slide after slide after slide, just timelines of immense transgressions that Google has made up to 2013, not including, like the last 11 years, to basically invade people's privacy.

1:04:22 - Leo Laporte
You will see at some point on the TV and an Apple ad that doesn't mention Google and Chrome. That is a takeoff on Hitchcock's the Birds, where security cameras turn into birds that fly up and start watching you and the implied threat. In fact, microsoft did this too. Remember Google man, gmail man? They did a whole thing about it and I've seen other companies do this. Google's looking at your email and stuff like that. But isn't Google forced to use WebKit? Why is Chrome less secure or less private than Safari? Is it?

1:05:00 - Mikah Sargent
It's just a logged in. I don't think that it's less private in the sense that you can log in with your Google account and then you're using it that way. You can log in with your Google account and then you're using it that way. But you're right that, as it stands in the United States, it is WebKit on the back end. That, of course, is different outside of the US.

1:05:16 - Leo Laporte
Well, specifically in the EU, where they are allowed to use their own browser engines, and in that case, if you're logged in with your Google account which it's funny, that's the only way they could do it, though, right, I mean, yeah, apple's products ATT protects you from Chrome doing anything else, but if you're logged in as a Google user, then what then? Does Chrome see everything you're browsing on?

1:05:41 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, your activity, yeah, your searches and and yeah, everything at that point yeah.

1:05:47 - Andy Ihnatko
They get a lot more data. That was one of the arguments that Apple was making in that internal slide deck about how Google requires you to be logged into your Google account to use each one of its individual services, versus the other side of the table on Apple. Oh, no, no, no. You don't have to be logged in in order to use Apple Maps. You don't have to be logged in. You can have different Apple ID accounts for different Apple services. So, yeah, there is a lot of data to be collected from there.

1:06:13 - Leo Laporte
A couple of days ago, apple released a page on its WebKitorg site. I mean it's theoretically open, but we know it's Apple right. Private Browsing 2.0. When we invented private browsing back in 2005 and tracking protection Chrome, incidentally, this today announced that they are going to not abandon third party cookies. They've been trying to do this and partly because of the EU and regulation their new technology that they were hoping to use that Steve Gibson looked at and said this is far better privacy protection to use. That Steve Gibson looked at and said this is far better privacy protection. The EU is not based on cohorts. Yeah, uh, it actually was your. The spy is your own browser in this Google technology that tracks your interests. And then there's a browser auction going on in your browser. It never hits the server in your browser to auction off ads. It's a really interesting technology that, steve says, is very privacy forward. But Google's not going to abandon third-party cookies. They're going. They're stepping back. But honestly, when you're using Safari, you're always logged into Apple. Doesn't Apple do the same thing?

1:07:24 - Andy Ihnatko
Kind of. This is why this becomes not a collection of random events, but definitely a campaign inside apple, if it's not a coincidence that that ad is going up. At the same time they're doing this post a web kit, private browsing 2.0, triumphing about how we invented private browsing, and we're making it even better with a new, with the newest updates to web kit and making this really really funny, really, really really well-produced ad on YouTube. The bird's head is wild yeah.

It means that they really, really, really do want to hammer this as a key Apple advantage. And when you read through the Private Browsing 2.0 article excuse me, blog post, a lot of it is explaining the basic technologies of how its existing private browsing features work, why they're better than what you would find on unnamed other browsing browsers and things that it's doing to make now to make the next edition of WebKit quote even stronger. Unquote. But even here it's kind of weird. Like they were mentioning in this blog post, one of the new like they're uh, they were mentioning in this blog post one of the new features they're adding to webkit is they have this thing called the ad attribution kit, which is a way of allowing tracking in a way that doesn't they, as they, as they admit in the blog post, they can't be 100 iron curtain protecting the privacy of safari users against trackers because websites simply will break.

1:08:51 - Leo Laporte
Okay, it will, they people, there's a whole section on how do we keep websites from breaking because of what we're doing right.

1:08:58 - Andy Ihnatko
So so they have this thing called add attribution kit that allows a website to do some tracking, but under certain controls, like uh, uh, uh. Anyway, I don't have enough notes here, but the but you also noticed that, uh, one of the things that Apple was complaining about Google for, and as well as the department of justice, is how, wow, google says that they've got private browsing, but they're still tracking all the way through it. And again we're this. We have the sword and shield against our user, and part of this blog post explains that.

Web Ad Attribution Kit also works in Safari's private browsing. It's a little stronger, but it's not as though a website can't continue to track you through private browsing as opposed to saying, okay, we don't care if the website breaks in private browsing mode. The whole point is that we are. That's the whole reason why we've made this a separate mode. If you really want that kind of privacy that you don't mind if things don't work, we will give you this mode. They didn't necessarily hide it. It's there for you to read. But it's another example of how God, if you want to do business with Taboola, if you want to have your own ads business, if you want to be able to recommend things on the Apple Store app, on iTunes, on the App Store. You got to track people, and so there's. It's a little befuddling when they decide to be this aggressive about it, because then they open themselves up to a lot of discussion about how much tracking that they're doing and whether they could be doing a better job.

1:10:32 - Leo Laporte
As Ed Puckett says in our YouTube chat. In other words, apple really wants to use Safari so they get the data Right. You know, if you really want to be private, you don't use either Chrome or Safari. You use something like Firefox and you block Origin and you can. You can protect yourself that way. Or next DNS and protect yourself that way.

1:10:52 - Andy Ihnatko
Firefox is getting a lot of heat over the past couple of weeks too, because they they also have announced that they have if I'm not mistaken that they do that they are adopting a procedure that's a little bit like ad attribution kits, so that you can be tracked, but under better control.

1:11:05 - Leo Laporte
That's why you run the third party extensions that block all that crap. I mean, look, this is really inside baseball. I'm kind of surprised Apple's doing this so publicly. But I guess really, if what, apple? If all the message is oh, it's scary out there, everybody's spying you, but we're protecting your privacy. That's good for Apple overall. Um, I'm not gonna. Are you who uses safari? Do you safari, Alex?

1:11:32 - Alex Lindsay
yeah, okay, yeah, um, I was actually surprised on the phone that they said 30 of the people use chrome, because I know very few people use chrome on their phone, you know, and safari is the reason I use arc on my phone and on the on the desk I use. I probably have just chrome open more than anything else. But what I will say is that I'm slowly moving towards Safari and it has to do with my password management, which is that Well, if you're going to use Apple's password manager.

It's the easiest choice, because what I have trouble with is that the linkage of managing passwords inside of apps, both on the Mac and on the iOS, is clunky. With third parties tools it's just clunky, you know. Like you can't, like you get it all saved and it's not somewhere else and everything else. With Apple it's just everywhere, like you can just now get into what you need to get into and that's a lot simpler. So what?

1:12:25 - Leo Laporte
do you use? Are you a Safari? I mean, you're our iOS guy and that's a lot simpler. So that's why I'm using Safari. I mean, you're our iOS guy, are you a Safari guy?

1:12:30 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, I'm a Safari. I've been a Safari user for so I even use Safari on my Mac. I have Firefox and Chrome for the few things that I end up. If something is wonky on Safari for some reason, I'll go to Firefox and go to the site there, and then it'll typically work. And then, for I pretty much only open chrome when we have our editorial meeting each week.

1:12:52 - Alex Lindsay
That's the only time, because we use google because of google me.

1:12:54 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, and it's. It just doesn't work the same in safari. Uh, so I will open chrome for that.

1:13:00 - Leo Laporte
Everything else I do in safari on my ipad iPhone I think if apple really cared though, they wouldn't have blocked ad blockers. You you can't really use. The ad blockers on iOS are not good. I disagree. You think they're.

1:13:14 - Mikah Sargent
OK, so this is the thing that's different.

1:13:17 - Leo Laporte
Which one?

1:13:18 - Mikah Sargent
do you use? I use one blocker. And Apple when it introduced because, I agree, originally the extensions that were ad blockers were not great, but Apple introduced what they were. Ad blockers were not great, but Apple introduced what they called content blockers. And upon introducing that technology, I've been very, very happy with it, because a lot of the extensions that do ad blocking, they end up just hiding the elements that are on the page. Yeah, there's a little white square with it. Yeah, and content blocking actually, as the page is loading, says you cannot load. You cannot load. It doesn't just hide it, it makes it so that it can't even show up in the first place. And so OneBlocker, the content blocker, is quite good at making pages load a lot faster because it doesn't just hide what's there and let it continue to load. So I'm quite happy with the one blocker system, but I do, on Firefox, when I have that open, or Chrome, uh, one block or or what is it you blocker? What is the one that you always recommend? We all I?

1:14:18 - Leo Laporte
mean we, as in Steve Gibson and I only recommend you block origin. It's a very aggressive ad blocker that will not run on Safari.

1:14:27 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, I use that in Firefox and Chrome, but on Safari it's one blocker.

1:14:33 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, it's tough. I use Chrome on all my Apple products, but only because I am a multi-platform person. If Safari existed in a really good form on Android and on Windows and on every other platform, I would consider it, and on Windows and on every other platform I would consider it. But the thing is, so much of my work every single day is adding to and withdrawing from a centralized bookmarks list and I haven't found a third party outside bookmarks manager that is as good and as reliable for cross-device syncing as Google Chrome is across devices. But the difference between using uBlock Origin and not using it it transforms your experience online. Whenever I'm using a device that does not have good ad blocking, there's so much garbage and it's so slow to load. The performance is terrible. There's so much garbage on the page that makes the page hard to access, hard to use, hard to read. Garbage on the page that makes the page hard to access, hard to use, hard to read.

And as important as it is for ad networks to exist and to thrive for the purpose of providing revenue for publishers on the web, it is becoming more and more important for individuals to have the ability to be as close to off the grid as possible. The FTC today announced that they are starting to become really, really concerned about what's called surveillance pricing, where the fact that if you hit a website or even like are shopping in a supermarket, the fact that you're being tracked as here's who you are Andy is really interested in buying a car and he is, so he's really really close to it, so he's probably not likely to turn down a high offer because at this point he's he's. We feel as though, through our tracking, he's getting kind of desperate. That's the sort of information that pricing gets set against you, both in low areas and high areas, and that's where they're getting that information from your, your online habits, your web browsing and the ftc they're. They are starting to study the the matter by having eight of the other companies that provide this kind of data uh for uh so-called surveillance for surveillance pricing to add give them some data to work with and to look at. So it becomes an absolute matter of self-defense that if you want a fair playing field in the real world, not just on the web, you have to control and lock down as much as possible.

I did originally set up a pie hole on my home network that occasionally goes up and down. I kind of forget it exists, and when something goes wrong I don't fix it immediately. But my goodness, it has so increased my priority to keep my pie hole up and working. That's a Raspberry Pi you put on the network with a special software, an OS that doesn't just simply like. It's not just an ad blocker. It literally prevents your network from reaching out to any of the sites that record data. So basically, nothing comes in, nothing goes out. That sort of stuff is going to become more and more important, because I don't want to even imagine how this is going to affect my ability to get a job, to live where I want to live, to get a car, to do anything, if that's, if that data that I'm simply by hanging out on Reddit and then doing some desultory window shopping on Amazon is going to mean that I get to pay $38,000 for a car instead of $34,000 for a car. That's terrible and that's a reason for open warfare.

1:17:56 - Leo Laporte
Let's see what else is going on. We're going to take a little break. You're watching Mac Break Weekly with Alex, andy and today, Mikah Nice to have you, mr Sergeant, good to be here. Mikah nice to have you, mr Sergeant, good to be here. Good news, I guess, for Apple in India. After China, india is the next biggest cell phone market.

India has cut the import tax on smartphones, which was, as I remember, the tariffs were huge. They were well, okay, they're still pretty huge. They were 20%. Now they're 15%. Well, okay, they're still pretty huge. They were 20%, now they're 15%. But Apple still imports most of its phones into India, even though they are trying to manufacture more of them there. 10% to 12% of the iPhones imported each year into India 10%, almost. I'm reading from Reuters almost 10% to 12% of the Apple iPhones are imported into India. Well, that's interesting. That means 80 or 90% are made in India. A 5% reduction on the tax will result in a 30 to 50 billion million annual benefit to Apple. Well, that's nothing. Yeah, that's nothing. Okay, nevermind, forget, I started this story.

1:19:09 - Andy Ihnatko
Well, but it, but it does. It does put out more than India is like, like, like, if. If it's true that they're Apple, the thing is Apple's done such a great job to make sure that in their future they're not 100% reliant on the iPhone. But, however, the next earnings call is in two weeks' time. We'll find out, maybe, what the new numbers are. But right now, about half of their money comes from iPhone sales, and so, unless they've got some place to make 20% of that money off of something else, they're going to continue to have to find new people to buy iPhones, and India is one of the billion and a half people that haven't really wanted. The middle class is now starting to get to a point where, according to analysts that I've read, basically what's happening in India is what happened economically in China, like 10 or 15 years ago, where there's a lot more money in play and the idea of selling iPhones in India might have been untenable 10 or 15 years ago.

1:20:08 - Leo Laporte
Now it's a huge, huge opportunity that they're not going to miss out on, but price is still going to be a big issue iPhones were twice as expensive in Brazil, where they had 100% tariff on imported phones, which is one of the reasons Apple built a factory in Brazil.

1:20:24 - Alex Lindsay
It's not just phones, it's everything electronic in Brazil. It's an insane setup.

1:20:29 - Leo Laporte
Well, it's working because they're now assembling. There is a Foxconn facility in Sao Paulo and they assemble the phone there to avoid the tariffs. It's still pretty expensive. The retail price of an iPhone 15 in Brazil is $1,460 for the 128-gig model, according to MacRumors.

1:20:50 - Alex Lindsay
Every project I've done in Brazil. If I took my electronics, everybody in the crew that's Brazilian wants to buy the electronics from me. And I'm like I still need these. They're like you just go buy them again. We'll pay you full retail price for your, your retail price for used equipment, so that you can just go replace it.

1:21:05 - Leo Laporte
And I'm like back when, the back when the Soviet union was in power. I remember we visited Czechoslovakia when they were still under the Russian iron fist and Levi's were in great demand. Couldn't get Levi's and we were told bring Levi's if you can.

1:21:23 - Andy Ihnatko
Blue jeans and Beatles records.

1:21:25 - Leo Laporte
Yeah and uh, when we visited I remember visiting, uh, uh, where was it? Um, I guess it was China and they said don't give them money, but do give them ballpoint pens, if you have some they said don't give them money, but do give them ballpoint pens.

1:21:44 - Alex Lindsay
If you have some, they're. They're highly prized when I was, yeah, what there were. There have been countries where kids, you know, just need a ballpoint pen to write with yeah for school, and I used to have bags of them, oh, so you used to do that too in zimbabwe and out yeah, in zimbabwe and other places.

And and also uh, shirts with with prints on them. You know, any shirt that had american print on it. They would take that over money, like I would. I'd have money to pay and they would trade me like sculpture mostly, so I'd go down with clothes and come back with rocks.

1:22:05 - Leo Laporte
As you know, when you watch the Superbowl, right at the end of the game, somehow, magically, the winners have t-shirts and hats that say Superbowl Victor and all of that. Well, they make both, and half of them are sold in africa, uh, where there is a, even though it you know, the niners did not win the super bowl this year, but somewhere you can get a t-shirt that says super bowl winners san francisco, visit the alternative reality, where the, where the, where the red sox won the 86 series.

1:22:36 - Alex Lindsay
Yes, wouldn't you like that t-shirt and I would wear it everywhere, but when you go, to yeah, if you go to japan and some of the places where you can buy stuff, they just use our words as decoration. It's random, you know, like, and so it's just like it's.

1:22:47 - Leo Laporte
I've seen a few japanese and chinese tattoos that are, uh, similarly formed. Random words speaking, speaking of random Photoshop now can generate images like Dali or Midjourney. They've added Firefly into Photoshop. It's an.

1:23:07 - Mikah Sargent
LLM. It's been around for a while, it's not as good as Midjourney.

1:23:10 - Alex Lindsay
I mean, I've been playing with it. I mean, the generative fill is something I use every day.

1:23:15 - Leo Laporte
That's where you have an image and then you expand out the edges and it does.

1:23:19 - Alex Lindsay
It's amazing yeah, I mean just amazing. Uh, it's janitor phil from scratch is good, but definitely not mid journey, you know, like it's definitely not at that level, but it, but it is uh, does mid journey?

1:23:31 - Leo Laporte
does outpainting too right? You can?

1:23:34 - Alex Lindsay
it does, but you have like with photoshop, it's so easy like you can have the image already.

1:23:38 - Leo Laporte
there in Photoshop you have the image.

1:23:40 - Alex Lindsay
The most common thing that you do is you want to ref. I had, I had something where I had the folks that were in a. They were in a field with a big storm behind them and they were in full frame, right, and now I need to, I make, I need to make them smaller and over to one side and create a whole bunch of sky and grass, and all I do is scale it over here and hit, return, return and then boom, it just fills it in and it was perfect. You know and and that's the and, and it just happens so quickly and it's so effective. When you give it something to, when you give it a reference point and you just say make more of that, it does it incredibly well. You know and, and but it. But the start from scratch is still it's in beta and it still feels like it's in beta.

1:24:18 - Leo Laporte
Adobe also introduced an enhanced detail feature in the generative fill in Photoshop. For Illustrator, it introduced generative shape fill to add detailed vectors in a designer's unique style. That's interesting. So it generates in the style of a particular artist.

1:24:37 - Mikah Sargent
That's kind of cool in the style of a particular artist. That's kind of cool. Yeah, the enhanced detail is actually really important because essentially what it would do is when you would generate something for a photograph, say you, you know, this is actually something I did the other day. Someone has taken the photo for me and their finger was slightly on the lens Always Every picture I take.

I have a big thumb in my yeah, so I highlighted that and used generative fill to get rid of it. But the problem was the photo was such high detail that the generated portion was kind of lower quality. So afterward you kind of hit that button and it upscales it, so it brings it to the same level of detail. It doesn't look as noisy and it looks like it actually belongs there.

1:25:19 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, honestly, a lot of people are stable diffusion, all the other tools. They're amazing, but they require a lot of knowledge to use them effectively. Now that these tools, now that Firefly is being mainstreamed off of the betas and into the, into the main apps and then into the mobile apps, access to these tools directly just as a matter of course, just as simple as pushing sliders for brightness and contrast and color. That is a total game changer. The number of times that I have just, on my phone, been able to keep a photo that I would have rejected earlier because, ah, dang it, there's just not enough room on the left side. Okay, we'll just generate, give me some extra headroom above this person. I zoomed in too close and we'll just simply give me extra headroom for that one person.

Or I need an illustration of something, and I've got a. I've got a picture that I took a while ago of a hockey player a hockey player holding a hockey stick that, ooh, I really want this, to want them to be holding a field hockey stick or a golf club. The desktop version of Photoshop. You can do a generative replacement where you basically say this thing, I want it to look like this thing, and I'll give you an example photo, and it doesn't always work, but it gives. It takes a job that would have taken maybe an hour and a certain amount of skill into something that almost anybody can achieve in 10 or 15 minutes. This is where Adobe earns the 10 bucks a month for me.

1:26:45 - Alex Lindsay
The funny ones are the ones you don't even notice what it's doing. And so there was this one where I had a lot of times when people send me images that I need to use for thumbnails or I need to use them for something. They're always square or sometimes vertical and I need them to be 16 by 9. So I just add stuff to them using Genative fill and, um, the funny thing is is it kept on with one person. We had it kept on adding a woman next to them and I was like like you just put a woman next every. Every time it did it and I couldn't figure out. I was like, why is that? There was a piece of a hand in the lower corner of the image that I didn't even see, and so when I said extend this, it just said oh, there's a hand, and I guess it decided it was a woman's hand, put a whole woman there, and I was like and I also realized I wonder what they cut out there.

1:27:27 - Leo Laporte
Anyway, so um, but but the uh, but give them a hand, they'll generate a whole woman. Yeah.

1:27:32 - Alex Lindsay
But. But it was a funny thing that. And then as soon as I cut it out, I just put, I put a background behind it like it was. It was, but it was all leveraging off of that.

1:27:39 - Andy Ihnatko
Like I mean, it was a tiny little corner part of a hand that I made a decision about let me bring Star Wars into this, for for for reasons, I wanted to take the, the classic image of in the first Star Wars movie of Leia, like hiding the at the end of the courier, crouching and hiding the, the plans and the message, like inside R2D2, and I wanted to replace R2D2 with something else, and the hey, take this thing and replace it with something else feature wasn't working. So I thought, okay, well, I mean, it's not going to work for everything. This is still a beta. Just remove R2D2, remove this thing, expecting that it would say, okay, well, here's a content, as had happened in so many other examples. Okay, so I'll just continue the hallway, make a generative AI of the background.

It was impossible for me to get Firefly and Adobe to not replace R2 with something that it thinks that Leia should have been interacting with. It was like three out of every five were like suddenly like some kid in a playground and it looks like Leia is like wiping something off their chin. Because they've seen so many pictures like that and like I could not figure out how to say don't replace it with any object, make it look like this thing was not in the shot at all and it's just reminding me that one of the exciting and unexpected challenges of AI is not simply is simply understanding how to use English, how they understand and process what you say to them, like the how. I know that it has the ability to remove R2 and leave nothing behind it, but I couldn't. I take the outlined object, replace it with empty hallway floor, a wall behind it and some lights, and there must've been some English text that would have gotten it done, but I could not figure it out.

1:29:42 - Leo Laporte
That's the future of the skills, of the future generations will be prompt.

1:29:50 - Andy Ihnatko
The sequel to 2001, had it exactly right. One of my favorite scenes from any sci-fi movie where Bob Laban, who's playing Dr Chandra I think the person who built and programmed the original Hal and now he's at the University of Chicago, urbana they're preparing to go to the discovery that's been derelict and figure out if they can restart Hal and figure out what went wrong. So he has the Sal computer, which is an exact duplicate, and you see him programming Sal to solve the problem together of trying to figure out how to restart Hal. And it's not oh, this is Unix. I know this. It's his genius as a, because he's a high-level computer scientist. He knows how to speak like a psychologist and walk he's trying to walk Sal towards the idea of I want to turn you off and then turn you on again. And you remember what happened to Hal, like oh yeah, I want you to create a new project file. I want you to call it Phoenix. Do you know why I'm calling it Phoenix? Phoenix was the tutor to Achilles.

1:31:00 - Alex Lindsay
I didn't know that but what else is?

1:31:02 - Andy Ihnatko
what else is a phoenix? Oh, a great bird that arises from, like the death of ashes. Yes, so I I'm trying to figure this out. Like it's and he has. He can't just simply do it, he has to basically talk her into it or basically be empathic with this computer. And the last thing she does will, I, dream Like, oh well, of course you'll dream, all intelligent creatures dream and basically Sal decides that, okay, I know that there's a chance that I won't wake up again, but this is what I'm going to do, this is my orders and this is the program I'm going to function. I think that this is where we're all leading, for If we're inadvertently creating a generation of people who have to patiently explain what you expect from something and then, when it does something wrong, you don't fly off the handle, you try to identify where the lapse in communication was and encourage them to give a different answer that will solve the problem. That would be a wonderful side effect of artificial intelligence. Before the robots harvest our organs, of course.

1:32:01 - Alex Lindsay
The funny thing is is that anybody who's who's who's had a large organization knows. The delegation oftentimes is that way. You ask for something and you get something completely different, and and that's the key to to partnering with great people for you is that they you have to have prompt engineering for humans.

Yes, I, I very much, and I very much look at when I am trying to get something done and I ask someone to do it and they do it another way, sometimes better, but sometimes worse I go well, how was I not effective there? How was I not like I was not effective at giving that instruction in a way that that that achieved the results?

1:32:34 - Andy Ihnatko
So yeah, here is the goal we're trying to achieve. Here is the plan that I'm proposing. Do you see any faults with this plan? Yeah, even though you're saying no, I've come up with a plan, it's going to work, just do it. If it doesn't work, we'll try it again. Like, do you see any faults with this plan? Can you contribute to this?

1:32:50 - Alex Lindsay
I got to tell you that. It is amazing, though, when you open up an AI, whatever it is, and ask it things like um, what are all the products in this field, in this vertical, like you know, you'll ask, like to give me all, and it'll break all of them down. What are the advantages and disadvantages of each one? What you know, and and it's, it's pretty, it can be pretty amazing, but but then when you but you get down to these silly things, where it goes, I just want you to put the foot over here. No, I will not put a foot there nor will I open the pod bay door.

1:33:16 - Andy Ihnatko
I'm just saying you know, I know I got some dorado ball and I won't continue it further, but I'm just amazed by, with like with Claude, for instance how great the results are when I start off by treating it like a human, saying, hi, I understand that you can help me with this problem. I'm really looking forward to working with you because I've been told that you're really really good at this task I wanted to do and then, for some reason if I include that, I think possibly because I am basically defining broadly what I wanted to do I'm telling it what a good result would consist of how to look at it and I'm I don't know, and I don't know, I don't understand. That's the real problem with AI. I don't know, I don't know and I don't know, I don't understand.

1:34:00 - Leo Laporte
That's the real problem with AI. I don't know. I don't know, we don't know, I don't know.

1:34:03 - Andy Ihnatko
I don't, I don't, I don't care. If I don't care, if I can, I can abuse you for for good results by treating you nicely, or if I can get results from you from abusing you, period, I just want the results. If I have to Nice, damn it.

1:34:14 - Alex Lindsay
And this is but this is how you also get into superstitions is that I did a bunch of things and then something else came out better, when you know, like when you're prompt engineering, you're like you want to tell it where it's point of origin, it's target, what you want in between those two things and what structure you want, and that's all it's looking for.

1:34:31 - Leo Laporte
And also the role.

1:34:32 - Andy Ihnatko
That's my superstition.

1:34:40 - Alex Lindsay
You also have to. Origin is its role. Like you are this Explain this to a because, like, if you say, explain this to a journalist, it's like, let's say, a medical thing, explain this to a doctor, to a journalist, to a fifth grader, to a 12th grader, it'll all be different. You know, and say, but this is the subject matter that I want, and then I want it in a structure, I want it in a spreadsheet, I want it in a spreadsheet, I want it in, I want to be concise, or I want it to be, you know, like it, or or I want it to be conversational and all of those things. All of those things. But those four elements seem to be what it's looking for most of the time. Yeah, and and, but we can say all kinds and it's useful to say.

1:35:16 - Andy Ihnatko
I know that this prompt is going to give the wrong result, but the wrong result will allow me to refine, help us to understand what I'm looking for, so I'm just going to be patient and not scold it for giving a wrong result. That's great. Can you give me a version of this code that doesn't have any dependencies on an external JavaScript framework?

1:35:38 - Alex Lindsay
You know, Leo, you need Prompt Weekly.

1:35:40 - Andy Ihnatko
I think so.

1:35:41 - Alex Lindsay
I think so. Prompt Weekly, andy and I will be on that show with you. Prompt Weekly here's the prompt that I created.

1:35:47 - Leo Laporte
Well, I People, we're very polite. I do want to warn all of you Mike already knows this I think one of the things we're going to do with a new twit is, uh, just impromptu conversations, and I might just text you and say, hey, you want to get together tomorrow at two and let's talk about prompt engineering. You and andy sounds great, wouldn't that be fun? Yeah, it'd be fun, that would be super. Again, you're the inspiration it's office hours is really inspiring me to think about more, about what, a, what community building. And then we do it, uh, in the discord stage and we have people participate. It'd be really fun, but we don't have to build a show around prompt engineering, thank god I I just I do um.

1:36:26 - Alex Lindsay
That's what, like my firesides, that I've done in the past exactly like.

1:36:29 - Leo Laporte
I don't want to have a certain schedule. It's not worthy of a show interview, or maybe it is worthy of a show, but I don't want to do a show, I just I don't want to have.

1:36:35 - Alex Lindsay
I don't want to have to do and I don't want to do something again next thursday exactly. I don't want to commit that far but you're famous for that.

1:36:41 - Leo Laporte
You've started more podcasts than I have I can't stop.

1:36:45 - Alex Lindsay
We were talking about last night. They were like you know, let's do a cooking podcast where we don't cook we talk about cooking and and I was like oh, it sounds like, but we don't make it.

1:36:55 - Leo Laporte
So this is the new thing don't make a podcast podcast. So this is the new thing Don't make a podcast. This is my whole new idea is we all have studios now in our homes, basically Right, and we can arrange to hey, let's talk tomorrow about your favorite way to make spaghetti sauce.

1:37:10 - Alex Lindsay
You, do that already. We do labs like that. We do labs like that where we just go, hey, we're all going to. Like Oliver Breidenbach, I said, hey, let's just meet on Friday. We'll talk about Memo Live, like there's a bunch of things I don't understand and then, I just go up to Discord and I say hey, we're doing this thing, and like 30 people show up, exactly.

1:37:24 - Leo Laporte
Yesterday we were building the studio up in the attic. Russell and Anthony and I were up there and Anthony, who's smart about this, said turn on the stage to watch us kind of go. Well, I don't know, maybe if you did this, but it just really is inspiring to think we have this wonderful community and how can we just get together on an ad hoc. We don't have to make it a show, but on an ad hoc basis Because there's so much stuff to talk about. And even on this show and other shows that we do, it's the digressions that are the most interesting part, you know, and we are really good at those.

1:38:03 - Andy Ihnatko
Yes, kind of a little too good it's our brand.

1:38:07 - Leo Laporte
Hey, longest headline I've ever seen in apple's newsroom. Apple, yes, isn't it? It goes off the page. Apple scores record 72 emmy award nominations and sweeps across top categories, including first ever outstanding limited series for lessons in chemistry, outstanding drama series for the Morning Show and Slow Horses and outstanding comedy series for Palme Royale 72 Emmy I think somebody needs to go to an SEO.

1:38:31 - Andy Ihnatko
I know I was like what SEO conversation was that?

1:38:34 - Alex Lindsay
Like? What conversation created that? Wow?

1:38:37 - Leo Laporte
Well, they wanted to get them all in and it's hard to get them all in because they got. You know, there was a bunch of meetings about that Can you imagine.

if they put 72 in the headlight, well, they practically did, because the next paragraph goes on oh my word, loot, hijack the Steve Martin documentary, which was excellent. Girls state, the reluctant traveler with Eugene Levy, not so excellent. Masters of the air I haven't seen it on my list. Silo wow, that was great. Physical, which was okay. Hannah Waddingham Home for Christmas, which, if the only thing it had to recommend it was, it was better than Mariah Carey. Yes, yeah right, you agree?

1:39:13 - Mikah Sargent
right, yeah, oh, 100%, 100%. She was lovely, I enjoyed 100%, but I'm a famed boy, I carry a hater.

1:39:17 - Leo Laporte
so I don't know. And Hannah Waddingham's great, A little cheesy.

1:39:23 - Andy Ihnatko
It was a good, old-fashioned Christmas special.

1:39:25 - Alex Lindsay
It wasn't sarcastic.

1:39:30 - Leo Laporte
The new look, which I love, which is the story of Christian Dior and Coco Chanel during World War II and after Sugar, which was the weirdest noir cop series ever. It was good and weird, I know, but it was good it was very good.

1:39:45 - Mikah Sargent
Wow, I I'm. I didn't realize everybody was watching all this stuff. I have not.

1:39:48 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, we have uh, we have a lot of free time. Uh, Mikah, you have to do a lot more than I do. Um, jennifer aniston uh. Wreaths witherspoon, uh executive producers uh. Morning show lands. First ever nomination for best drama. I'm told I tried to watch it, maybe because I worked in tv for so long. I just hated it. Um, but apparently the newest season is remarkably better, so we'll see best drama first time. Most performance nominations for a drama. First time Most performance nominations for a drama series, including best actor in a drama. For stars and executive producers Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon. Girls, state and Steve multiple nominations, including outstanding documentary or nonfiction special there are Reese and Jennifer shaking hands on the Morning Show. Has anybody watched that recently? Is it better? Is it better? Documentary, a nonfiction special there are Reese and Jennifer shaking hands on the morning show. Has anybody watched that recently? Is it better? Is it better? I haven't.

1:40:46 - Andy Ihnatko
I completely read it.

1:40:46 - Leo Laporte
You know what was great Slow Horses God, I love that show. That's a good one.

1:40:50 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, gary Oldman Keeping up his streak is as good as everything.

1:40:54 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, as an aging gassy spy, it's very good. So you know what this is. This is five years old Apple TV plus. It was a little slow start, but I think with 72 nominations, you could say that they've done very, very well. Yes.

1:41:17 - Alex Lindsay
I actually think that the direction that they're going now makes more sense than a lot of other ones, which is they're starting to buy more content that already exists from other vendors.

1:41:25 - Leo Laporte
Yes, that's the story. Another story, which is they want to deepen their catalog, which has not been deep, so they deepen the catalog there.

1:41:33 - Alex Lindsay
But I think that I think the one thing that there's another article that we were looking at, which is that they're talking about wanting to spend less money on the.

You know they're wanting to control costs and I think that's a mistake, because I think that you know the big thing is is that I know a lot of people and when you get people in the industry that just dream of working on an Apple you know an Apple product you know when they get to work on one of these movies my brother worked on one last year and it's just like.

You know everything works and you're not used to that in Hollywood. Hollywood's generally ruined by somebody who says we can't spend more money on the M&Ms and being able to work into a production. Have the production just run the way it's supposed to. You have all these people aspiring whether it's actors or directors or the below the line aspiring to work on an Apple product. I think just make less and keep doing that and then just buy up the stuff that you want to fill in. You don't have to stick with that kind of. We are the ones you hope that someday you'll work for. I think that there's an aspirational thing that's really to Apple's advantage of attracting just the best talent.

1:42:35 - Leo Laporte
But there is the problem because Netflix seems to have unlimited money and is spending massive amounts.

1:42:40 - Alex Lindsay
They have a lot more subscribers yeah, but they also spread it out among a lot of things. I mean there's not that many Netflix things that most of us want to watch. I mean there are some. I mean there's.

1:42:50 - Andy Ihnatko
But the thing is, there's something that everybody Something for everyone.

They've got something. Bloomberg had a couple of pieces about this. One of them was citing a bunch of sources about, like Eddie Cube specifically personally having meetings with production heads saying that you, we really got to keep costs down. Now the checkbook is not open, is not open on limitlessly. They also had some numbers from like two or three aggregated, some numbers from two or three different sets of analysts that Apple TV represents 0.2% of TV viewing Growth of new subscribers is very weak and that they're very they're on the high. They said the quote, higher end of rates of cancellation, unquote. And if they're putting $20 billion into it, it's a good time for them to ask can we get more? Can we get more people and you have them to continue to subscribe to our channel more cheaply if they're looking for like more of an HBO Max experience. But Max is.

I went from being like a light user of I can't, I really can't call it Max HBO Max. I hate that name change. I can't tell you how much I hate that name change. But after finding, after doing, doing like a deep dive, it used to be like I would look at like the front page. Oh, that's an interesting movie. Oh, wonka, I kind of want to see that. That's great, doing a deep dive and finding out just how many shows that I enjoy are on that thing. Like I'm probably going to be canceling Netflix sometime in the next month as soon as I finish binging the Crown. But Max is, max is here to stay and it's because of that diversity of content um, it's great to have all that. Great like premium, high class, high, high quality sort of stuff.

1:44:24 - Leo Laporte
You're just happy, dr pimple popper has found a home, aren't you? You just no, I haven't I think, I think is that is.

1:44:29 - Alex Lindsay
That is that I think that you can have that diversity by just buying it, like I don't think apple has to pay for all of that. So I think that I think Apple, what I think is Apple keeps making really, really high end, because I have to admit I give a lot of shows a benefit of the doubt when I see an Apple when it's in Apple TV Plus, because I know that well, at least it's going to be made, well Like at least.

1:44:50 - Leo Laporte
I'm not going to be bothered. What's that new one? Presumed Innocent. I started watching that and it's highly desaturated. This drives me crazy. There's some sort of weird trend now to shoot stuff.

1:45:04 - Alex Lindsay
It's not shooting, it's the color correction. My brother actually was the A camera for that.

1:45:08 - Leo Laporte
Well, would you explain why Am I wrong that it looks very desaturated.

1:45:13 - Alex Lindsay
It's a weird look, but that's a choice made by the director and the colorist later.

1:45:19 - Leo Laporte
No, it's not your brother's fault. I'm not blaming him, no, no, no, I'm just saying, but they don't make that decision on it.

1:45:23 - Alex Lindsay
It's a film. Look, it's the idea. It looks like film.

1:45:26 - Leo Laporte
I'm watching it on OLED TV.

1:45:29 - Alex Lindsay
I want deep black. Yeah, no, no, there's a lot of Samson. Look, we were Amazon has in Culver City. Amazon has five theaters that are LED walls, so one's 8K and a bunch of 4K ones, and we were down there looking at footage on these LED walls. And when they turn it on like when they this guy, this guy's in a cave, he comes out of the cave and he's out on this open desert and when it went bright, it hurts your eyes.

1:45:54 - Andy Ihnatko
No, no, you could feel the heat, feel the feeling like it was so bright it wasn't.

1:45:59 - Alex Lindsay
It wasn't. You weren't really feeling heat from the wall, but you could feel it. You know, like and and then, of course, film guys got up immediately and said, well, but that's the film, look is desaturated, it's low contrast, that's 24 frames. And there was a bunch of us, there's a bunch of us, that were like, does it have to be?

like yeah, no, like who says it has to be, you know and so I think that I think that there is, I mean, but I think that that's a obviously a creative choice there, but I, but I I'd agree with you that I prefer luscious color and yeah, and you know, taking full advantage, I actually stopped watching I watched five minutes of it and I said it looks bad, I don't like it it's it's pretty, I mean I'll keep watching.

I'm not used to I don't watch a lot of stuff that makes me uncomfortable all the time, and this one makes me uncomfortable all the time. It's just a really really good.

1:46:43 - Leo Laporte
Your brother shot it. I'll watch it.

By the way, diversity is the word in the Emmy Awards. They spread around a lot of Emmys. Netflix got the most nominations, but Disney had three shows with the most nominations. Fx earned the most nominations in the network's history and Hulu had the three most nominated shows. So they spread them around. I guess the Emmys have a lot of categories or a lot of nominees in each FX. Shogun got 25 nominations, which it deserved. That was a great show. The Bear love the Bear Second place, with 23 nominations only murders in the building.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, there should be like and the winner and most nominated. So look at Steve Martin, who's in his seventies, has a nominated documentary about his life and he also is starring in one of the top shows. 21 nominations for only murders in the building, On two different channels, on two different networks HBO, part of Warner Brothers, discovery and Netflix, perennial leaders in the Emmys, each captured. I'm confused. Oh, I see they need a writer on Bloomberg. Hbo, which is part of Warner Brothers, discovery, comma and Netflix comma perennial leaders in the Emmys, each captured nominations in the best drama category and will compete for awards in the best anthology.

1:48:12 - Andy Ihnatko
And how much does that affect? I kind of want your opinion on this, Alex. I kind of want your opinion on this, Alex, like there's a difference. On the one level, apple, I guess, has the reputation of if you're working on an Apple, if your movie or your series has landed on Apple, you're going to have if I understand you're saying correctly is going to have a better time of production than it would on any other streamer. But, like, if they are not delivering the sort of audience that allows them to translate that amazing series that is super high quality to actual Emmys for, like your rec room, like, is that also a factor in what would bring people to Apple TV?

1:48:50 - Alex Lindsay
Well, I think a lot of people still feel like I mean, the Emmys come, whether you get a viewership or not, you know like. So those Emmys that come to a show that voters have to say they don't have to.

Not, you know, like, so those emmys that that come to a show that the voters have to say, yeah, they don't have to the but the maybe the voters have to see it. But I mean, the point is, is that the, the emmys, are usually not connected necessarily to the, the audience cube, right, so it's, it's what they think is a great you know. So, getting the money and the resources to produce your best show, um, you know, because that's going to be your calling card To a company like Apple.

1:49:18 - Leo Laporte
they're not looking for audience numbers, or are they?

1:49:22 - Alex Lindsay
I think eventually they want to, but I think part of it is also prestige might be more important to them right.

Yeah, and I think it's part of an ecosystem that you know. I think that Apple's part of a larger ecosystem for both Apple and Amazon is. You know, you don't want to externalize all the content away from where you're going and Apple's still figuring it out, but what they have figured out is how to do something at a really high level, and I think that they've actually. I mean again, you have a bunch of users. Can you get them to pay a little bit more for an overall package that includes music and movies and news and everything else? So it's not as direct that they don't need that money in the same way that Netflix does, like Netflix and Max and Disney are. You know they have to live on what they can. You know what they can hunt. You know Apple and Amazon have a bunch of ancillary business around this that matters, that creates stickiness, that is different, and so they don't need to make the same. They don't need to be explicit like that.

1:50:24 - Andy Ihnatko
Investors don't care about necessarily audience Excuse me right At this stage in streaming. They don't care about audience, they don't care about awards, they don't care about prestige, they care about profitability, Whereas before it was like how come we have to have a streaming content out there, we have to have exclusive content. Whereas before it was like we have to have a streaming content out there, we have to have exclusive content. Now it's like if we develop content that we can then basically let Netflix have or Apple have for six months, that's okay if it's increasing our bottom line.

But one of the things that kind of at this stage in Apple TV+, it's starting to occur to me if it's not vulnerable to the same thing that happened to the Apple Watch, where Apple launched it thinking that this is the new wearable computer that is an extension of your iPhone. If you want to open and shut your garage door with your home automation system, you don't have to take out your phone. Look, you can actually see it opening and closing on your magical watch. Your phone, look, you can actually see it opening and closing on your magical watch. And then, after seeing how it was selling and who was buying it, decided that no, this is a fitness watch and it has some cool iPhone connectivity, but it's a fitness watch.

What if Apple TV Plus decided that we launched it thinking that we're not going to get Netflix numbers, so we're not even going to try? We're going to be a prestige home for Martin Scorsese, for Spielberg, for Tom Hanks, for all these really wonderful things. What if they're, after a few years, they're saying that was a great idea. I'm glad we tried it. We're going to still do stuff like that, but the purpose of Apple TV Plus in our portfolio is live sports, live events, things that we can stream through our boxes.

1:51:58 - Alex Lindsay
That's coming up for everybody. I mean everybody's trying to figure out how to get into live. You know what I mean, like you know, but Apple's Apple.

1:52:03 - Andy Ihnatko
TV plus can't do everything. No, unless, unless they're, unless Apple's happy to oh no, absolutely. But I'm wondering, if Apple is happy having something, that's they that, if they think it's underperforming, to say, well, we need to fix, we need to adjust our plan so that this is performing very, very well and it's it's achieving the goals that we want? Or is the goal simply, as you say and as we've said when we were discussing Apple's packages, if it just simply makes the 40, $35, $40 a month package of Apple services feel better, that's worthwhile to us. That is worth $20 billion to us.

1:52:39 - Alex Lindsay
It also has halo effects related to, for instance. I mean, even if you look at, I mean, what we haven't seen Apple do yet is take advantage of a lot of the network effects that are possible between a lot of the different things, and no one's really doing this right now. Netflix is talking about doing it. So Netflix is the first company that's probably thinking as hard as they probably could. I mean, you'd think that Disney would be really the leader in this area, because they've thought about selling goods connected to their movies since forever, you know. But the um, netflix is looking at building games that are related to their, their, their core products.

You know Apple has arcade, they have the, they have the vision pro, they have um. You know phones they have. You know they have content and they're not really yet tying those things together. You know where you're having bigger experiences. I think you're going to see more of that and, again, I think you'll. Only, I have no information about this, but I just feel like, logically, eventually you're going to see scenes or behind the scenes or something in the Vision Pro in 180 degree stereo from the TV shows that you are watching on Apple TV, you know, and that's it feels like an obvious thing. And there's also, you know, with all the Apple TV stuff, there's lots of Apple products that are getting product placement.

There's lots of you know there's you know, like so a lot of them you know, and you don't even know who's good or bad anymore, because everybody's got an iPhone, so you know so.

1:54:04 - Andy Ihnatko
so anyway, it's, it's a world where everybody you know they definitely have a monopoly on on inside of apple tv. So can I say I'm still salty about like that, that trick spoiling one of the best new mysteries movies of the past 10 years. As soon as I was aware oh, it was this guy, damn it exactly, it's like, it's like.

1:54:18 - Alex Lindsay
I saw there was one that I wasn't supposed to know that? There was one recently that I saw that and I saw someone with an Android and I saw the other guy with an iPhone. I remember what it was and I immediately knew the end of the movie. Like it was like the first two minutes of the movie. I was like, oh Wait a minute.

1:54:29 - Leo Laporte
You're saying that the murderer iPhones for bad people.

1:54:32 - Alex Lindsay
They won't give you product placement. You have to buy it yourself.

1:54:39 - Andy Ihnatko
I won't spoil it. But there is a really good movie in which, again, it's a mystery and, for reasons of the scene, somebody has to hand somebody an iPad. Okay, but because that person could not be seen holding an iPad, they do the scene by. The person receiving the iPad is sitting on the sofa, An iPad is tossed in from out of frame and then the camera moves to reveal the person who tossed it so that they could hand the iPad off without that person being seen. A bad guy being seen.

1:55:16 - Leo Laporte
What would happen? Would Apple sue them? Oh, they give them the iPadsads, and so that's the deal. Sometimes, I mean come on, you got a billion dollar budget and you're worried about getting free ipads.

1:55:30 - Alex Lindsay
Oh man, this is stop it like knock it off anytime. You see a laptop open and you see a sticker in the center where the apple logo is yeah, whoa, someone, someone's, somebody asked out, doesn't out, doesn't you're? Also?

1:55:40 - Andy Ihnatko
concerned about your, your movie being held up because someone said oh, I don't appreciate that. I I love the product placement of our little jiffy master gopher, uh, garden implement. We're not happy that it was used to beat someone to death over the head with it? Uh, we are not. Unless you obscure our logo and our product in every single frame, we are going to sue and we're going to prevent distribution of your film, right, yeah?

1:56:04 - Leo Laporte
two of the nominees of the 72 nominations for apple were for commercials. Album cover, which is an ad for the iPhone 15 I don't remember it, and fuzzy feelings, which is an ad for that was great. Which, so tell me, describe these? I can't play them or Apple will take them back.

1:56:22 - Andy Ihnatko
Fuzzy Feelings was the holiday was the stop motion. Oh, I love that one. A combination of video and stop motion. Yeah, a holiday where somebody has a kind of like a what seems to be a mean boss, or at least an incompetent boss, and so. But she's a felt artist and so. But she's a felt artist and so she makes these felt dolls and makes animations with her, of course, with her snappy iPhone and her ways of getting of, getting of basically resetting her, saying Freud is basically having a stop motion doll of her boss and basically having awful things happen to it. But then she comes to realize that, oh, I'm judging him too harshly. I think I'll have nice things happen to this doll.

1:56:58 - Leo Laporte
It was a very fun holiday thing. Uh, alpo ad spot focuses on portrait mode via an album cover skit. Ah, so album cover was where they did the portrait shots and then they fought over who was in focus. Remember that one. Anyway, they got a nomination for that as well.

1:57:16 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah it was again the, the video they dropped today, the diss track that they dropped today against Google Chrome. That was funny. The effects were great, it was perfect and it was like oh man, I hope Google uses its resources to do something half as funny in response.

1:57:35 - Leo Laporte
You're watching MacBreak Weekly with Mikah Sar Sargent, who's trying to get a word in edgewise. But you're very polite, don't be. Don't be so polite, Mikah.

1:57:43 - Andy Ihnatko
You've got to learn to yell and he's saving his voice for his other three shows.

1:57:49 - Leo Laporte
It's great to have you, Mikah. Thank you for filling in for jason snell, andy and ako's also here, and Alex lindsey. Time now for our picks of the week. I'll tell you what we'll give. What we'll give Pride a place to Mikah today. What is your, unless you don't have a pick?

1:58:05 - Mikah Sargent
Oh Lord, is it already time for picks of the week? You don't have a pick. You know what? I do have a pick, and too bad that it is sold out right now.

1:58:15 - Leo Laporte
No, that's good. Nobody stop.

1:58:16 - Mikah Sargent
That doesn't stop anybody, it's okay um, so what I'm going to give everyone and I'm I'm vamping for a second so I can give john the link is this big old box I have right here. Is that where your hair dryer is stored? What's that? Yeah, exactly. So this big white box is the phillips hue um uvc disinfecting box.

1:58:40 - Leo Laporte
Oh, you put anything in that. It's as big as anything you want inside.

1:58:44 - Mikah Sargent
It has two uvc bulbs up at the top and this huge space and it has this little kind of um wire rack that you can put things in. It was created in the first place for baby bottles. However, I've used it for tech, I've used it for medical implements, I've used it for my phone Basically anything you want to make sure that's clean and ready to go you can put inside of it. It's got stainless steel inside it's like a dishwasher.

It's like a dishwasher and what's great about it is that it actually has a built in fan and filter so that if you wash something, you can put it inside and you do a drying cycle that ends with a UV blast. Now the reason I got this is because you've got to keep that thing clean.

1:59:44 - Alex Lindsay
It's a CPAP cleaner Sure.

1:59:47 - Mikah Sargent
And so that's what I primarily use it for. But I'll also, if I go out with my phone to different places, I do a little session with that. I put all sorts of stuff in and, honestly, at this point it's kind of fun. But yeah, it's great, for you know your keys, your electronics, whatever you can.

2:00:06 - Leo Laporte
You really are an old man in a young man's body. You have sleep apnea, right, you're too young for that. That's bizarre. Unfortunately, the Philips Hue UV light sanitizer box is currently unavailable.

2:00:21 - Mikah Sargent
Yes, it has come back in stock a couple of times, and so I think they can only make so many of them at a time. People are buying them. As I mentioned, they seem to be primarily for use for new parents, but great for other stuff as well. It's a great idea.

2:00:37 - Leo Laporte
I love your pick, thank you. I'm looking to see if anywhere else we can find it online. You?

2:00:45 - Mikah Sargent
can often find them from sleep apnea stores. I've seen them from sleep apnea suppliers. They will have those for sale.

2:00:52 - Leo Laporte
It's out of stock at Walmart also. Oh wow, yeah, $145, so not cheap.

2:00:58 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, not cheap.

2:01:00 - Leo Laporte
But big enough to put your head in which I would not recommend.

2:01:05 - Alex Lindsay
Very bad.

2:01:07 - Mikah Sargent
I actually used it the other day when I was doing Mikah's Crafting Corner to quickly cure some glue. Oh, did that work? Yeah, oh, that's cool Because think about they use them at nail salons. Sure, quickly cure the nails.

2:01:19 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, so I have a recommendation. We uh, as you know, we're building a studio in my attic and, uh, one of the biggest challenges was what are we going to do? We're going to hang lights from the ceiling and cameras, or how are we going to do that? That's how we do it here we have, but we have a very tall ceiling and we have lots of room and we have very big lighting rigs and stuff. What do you call that Truss? We have a truss, which is not the same thing as the guy gets with a hernia. That's a different kind of truss, although you should probably look into that. It could go very well with your CPAP machine.

2:01:58 - Mikah Sargent
Mike no, this truss. My abdominal wall is great, you don't need no truss.

2:02:03 - Leo Laporte
I don't need no stinking truss. I don't need no stinking truss. So then and I have to give credit to Anthony Nielsen, who has the setup of a Twitch streamer but doesn't actually stream, he's got like anyway. He said get this from uh corsair, as you remember corsair, which was famous for making gaming, pcs and motherboards and stuff for years. Uh, as you know memory, they acquired elgato and they've become now a creator thing. So we bought this is crazy the platform six creator edition, which is just a big desk but it has all this stuff you can hang stuff on and, uh, you know, it's 1796, 1799. It was expensive, but it was a lot cheaper than the desk I'm sitting at right now, which we had to have custom made, and this has all the stuff. Uh, that works with El Cato and and the lights and everything. So I'm pretty happy with this so far.

It came in five boxes that weighed a total of 300 pounds. I had to ferry, piece by piece, every little piece, up to the attic, one by one, and then finally got to the table and, thank goodness, Burke came over and we hefted it up into the attic and now it's there and it's never, ever leaving from corsaircom. You should come over, john. You can see it. Yeah, john is our. John is our retiring studio manager, who will be with us for a few more weeks and he's been with us for 15 years and I'm going to miss the hell out of you, john. Uh, but I've got this table to make up for it, andy and I go you're picking.

2:03:43 - Mikah Sargent
He lifted all of that before I'm actually naming the table john jammer b.

2:03:48 - Leo Laporte
Okay, just in your name.

2:03:49 - Andy Ihnatko
I'm gonna have a little plaque made, andy and I go your pick of the week um, I have semi retired my apple watch se because, at least for this, at least for summer, I found something I like a lot more, which is this cheap $20 Casio watch Bright red, yeah, bright red. This is the F108WH. It costs all of like $25.

2:04:12 - Alex Lindsay
It's an illuminator.

2:04:13 - Andy Ihnatko
It's available in like five colors Wow yeah. Like five colors, wow yeah. And I got it because I just wanted a fun, bright red watch that if I wore to the beach and it's actually water resistant but if I lost it or it got bunged in the water or by the sand I wouldn't care about it and I wound up wearing it like every single day because it really going cold turkey against smartwatches. I have a Pixel watch and an Apple watch. I see cold turkey against smartwatches. I have a Pixel watch and an Apple watch SE.

I didn't realize how sick and tired I am of having to recharge a watch every single day and how little I use like the actual smartwatch features of it. I do like the fitness tracking. I do like getting data about how much I moved, and but the thing is I'm getting that data from my phone anyway because I'm not doing the sort of sports where I can't have a phone in my pocket. So it wasn't getting me that and the idea that this is a $25 watch with a battery that's going to last like two or three years. And I've also realized how much I miss having just a box of watches and deciding which watch I want to wear that day, having just a box of watches and deciding which watch I want to wear that day. And these again, the Casio. They're not necessarily like retro watches, they just like never stopped making them.

2:05:28 - Leo Laporte
They just look that way, yes, no, it's.

2:05:30 - Andy Ihnatko
if you, I, I, I put in a link to like if you go to Amazon, search for Casio watches and set like the uh, set the price scale from like 15 to $30, you will see watches you've recognized since every nerd.

Yeah, and and they now, and they now look kind of classic as opposed to like hey, I bet you look, so that police bracelets, hey look, we're going to see ongoing boy and go boy and go at the red Like. No, it's like just a cool watch. And even if you do like I do have like a couple of nice watches Having something like this in the rotation.

2:06:02 - Leo Laporte
It just makes me happy and it makes me, it gives me a certain sense of joy and they still sell the, the databank watch $21, with the calculator on the front.

2:06:12 - Andy Ihnatko
It's the other great thing. So if you want to get like the watch that Mr Bean wore in most of his shows, that's the casio dbc 611. That's 49. If you want to watch, if you want dwight shrews watch from the office, that's the casio dbc 30. You can now. You can now get the dbc 32, which looks the same. That's a whopping 75.

But I'm I'm pretty much I'm now like I'm 90 sure now that I'm going to get like an actual g-shock, like at the of the summer. If it still seems like a good cause, that's, that's a 110, $120. But the, the idea of having a watch that the, the, the, the one that I'm looking at, it's a G shock, which means that it is designed to go through hell and still work. And this model is solar, so that you solar, and it sets its time by radio. So the idea is that if they can bury me with this watch in 30 years, if they dig me up and take my watch and leave it in the sun for overnight, it will still work. I'm not sure that any of that is true of any smartwatch that costs like 10 times as much as that's going to be. And finally, once I start getting kind of excited by by this, because these models have been around for years and years and years.

There is like an ongoing like uh, uh. Shared knowledge bank of how to modify these watches, like if you, if you don't want so much, if you don't want, like the, it had a couple of like I don't want to flaunt that, this is water resistant and it has an illuminator on it. So it says oh, actually, if you use just rubbing alcohol, you can take those things off. If you go to AliExpress, you can replace the case with a titanium case, replace the bezel of it with something a little bit more flashy or less flashy. It's just really, really super interesting. So I'm not saying that it's better than an Apple watch or a fitness watch or anything like that. I'm saying that maybe for 25 to 30 bucks, that will deliver a certain amount of joy on your nightstand that a few times a month, you will want to avail yourself of.

2:08:11 - Leo Laporte
Andy's retro watch, ladies and gentlemen. And how often do you have to charge that Andy? Never. And how often do you have to charge that Andy?

2:08:19 - Andy Ihnatko
Never. The thing is like yeah.

2:08:21 - Alex Lindsay
Add a battery once a year.

2:08:22 - Andy Ihnatko
For a $25 watch. It's a seven-year battery.

2:08:26 - Leo Laporte
It's a seven-year battery and you can replace the battery Seven years, every seven years, whether you want to or not, in relationship with your consumers right.

2:08:35 - Alex Lindsay
A C3025 or whatever. Yeah, it's just a standard. Mr Alex Lindsay, your pick of the week, sir. So I went to see one of my favorite bands last last uh over the weekend at hop monk. I love here in novato. It's good isn't it?

2:08:50 - Andy Ihnatko
it's great space outside for these concerts.

2:08:52 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, so toad the wet sprocket played um. Jason and I both really enjoy watching.

2:08:56 - Leo Laporte
By the way, you weren't here last week, we did make your. You had left early and we still made your pick to the West Sprocket. So just so you know Jason loves me. I was so excited.

2:09:05 - Alex Lindsay
I was so excited to go, I went. I went. I took my kids to see the sea toad and and as always, it's a great if if you haven't heard of to the West Sprocket, you should. You should find out when they're playing, you should go see them. There's so much fun and almost everybody in the audience knows almost every word of every song, so it's a fun sing fest that we all have with it. That's cute, but, um, but the opening act was someone I'd never heard of. I didn't even know if there was going to be an opening act for the concert. I figured out someone's going to be there and glenn, one of glenn's friends, a lead singer for toad. What's brock is glenn, and uh and uh, his friend is Matt, matt the electrician. I don't know Matt's last name.

2:09:39 - Leo Laporte
What a great name for a band Matt the electrician.

2:09:42 - Alex Lindsay
It's just Matt the electrician and he said. He said he was like I used to be an electrician and so and so anyway, so Matt the electrician and, and, if you like, kind of blue grassy kind of singer, songwriter with a guitar, kind of kind of sound, oh, he was really good, he was just so much fun to listen to and and you don't get. You don't get the opportunity to hear great artists that are not well known. You know every all the time where he's one of those artists that when you open up his song in apple music, it doesn't. The lyrics are all just one page.

You know like you don't get to you know it's, it's rare, you know, you know, and, and it's um, um, anybody's so good and um, the first, I guess. Uh, the best song on the set that I heard and what I've been listening to a lot is the bear, which is one of his songs from a couple of years ago. But he's got a new album out and I don't know, I don't know, I don't know him, I don't know anything about him other than I saw him play and I that Matt the electrician is worth. If you like that kind of music, if you like the luminaires and the no-icons I do, that's my favorite style. Yeah, if that's your jam, that's my jam, man, then Matt will fit right into that mix. So anyway, it's easily good.

2:10:50 - Leo Laporte
And he can fix your electricity too.

2:10:52 - Alex Lindsay
So it's good. It's so much fun too If Come over and add a plug. If you get to see him live, he's just got a great stage personality. He's kind of quirky and fun and just doesn't take himself too seriously and just has a really good time up there. And he does a cover of no Myth by Michael Penn which is competitive with the original, so it's good. Anyway, there you go.

2:11:14 - Leo Laporte
Matt the Electrician. He's on YouTube. You can buy his album. And thank you on YouTube you can buy his album. Yeah, and thank you, Alex Lindsay. You're on office hours that global every damn morning, my inspiration is in some evenings.

2:11:28 - Alex Lindsay
We now have extra hours, which is Monday nights, where we all sit around and just kind of talk.

2:11:32 - Leo Laporte
See, this is my inspiration, though this is kind of what I want to do with club to it. So who is cascader?

2:11:37 - Alex Lindsay
He was on today. It is a character animation tool. So today we were talking about character animation, yesterday we were talking about Claude 3.5. Tomorrow we're talking about micing instruments and drones, on Thursday and all kinds of stuff. So it's always every day it's different. We have an NDI super panel on Friday, which is, if you have questions about NDI. We have, like many of the world experts coming on to talk about NDIs. Wow, that's awesome.

Very geeky, I will go back and watch the ATEM show from last Thursday, since that's what I'm doing. We're doing those relatively often because there's so many of us that have ATEMs and they're popular shows and there's so much to them. These little switchers are really powerful, so we cover them pretty often.

2:12:19 - Leo Laporte
I got the mini extreme and there's so many buttons I don't know what to do with it.

2:12:23 - Alex Lindsay
You don't need most of them. I'll tell you right now that most of those buttons I've never yeah, I've never touched. I mean, like I would say, 80%, 80% of the buttons.

2:12:32 - Leo Laporte
But you know me.

2:12:33 - Alex Lindsay
I'm going to push them all. Yeah, the them all. Yeah, the macro buttons are important. The key buttons are important. The macros you can, you know, do stuff with. Now have you already? And I I know I've already done a pic, but once you have an extreme, you need a mix effect pro. We've talked about in the past, but that's this ipad software. Uh, that makes everything you mentioned that before. Yes, it's like once you buy it. Once you buy it, wait, if you have an atem mini, you may not need it, but once you get an ATEM Extreme, it's kind of like the $50 thing that comes with it. Oh no, I will definitely get it On your iPad.

2:13:03 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's great and we bought which somebody recommended, a really cute little 3D printed stand for it, which I'll make my pick one of these days. It's the PK-1 Extreme and it's really it holds it. Aaron Parecki, Aaron Parecki does those, yeah, and it's got shoes. So I'm going to mount a little monitor on it so I can see what I'm doing.

2:13:26 - Alex Lindsay
Yep, Aaron has been doing that. He's been doing those builds now almost since they came out.

2:13:33 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I can tell it's 3D printed because, well, you can see, but it's very solid, very well done. Yeah, yeah, yeah, um, thank you very much, Alex Lindsey. And uh, of course, don't forget gray matter dot show, which is the uh, Michael Krasny interview show that Alex produces. You got lots of good people on that as well. So, uh, master, yeah, Krasny's great, yeah, Andy Ihnatko is GBH in your future.

2:14:01 - Andy Ihnatko
Yes, a week from Thursday 1.10 in the afternoon, go to wgbhnews.org to listen to it live or later.

2:14:09 - Leo Laporte
Very nice. Thank you ever so. Thank you for giving me a place to be Hang out of a Tuesday morning.

2:14:18 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, exactly, to get rid of, like the big steel sheets being hammered into the into the ground by pile drivers.

2:14:25 - Leo Laporte
That's and Mikah thank you so much. Really appreciate your your third show of the day. Very nice to have you hosts of iOS today at twit.tv/ios with Rosemary Orchard and, of course, joins me every Saturday for Ask the Tech Guys and Tech News Weekly, on Thursdays, indeed, and he's always a very welcome presence. Thank you, and we're going to see a lot more of you, Mikah, because you're the one I'm going to be calling at 3 in the morning saying hey, I'm up. You want to do a stream? Man, let's do a stream.

2:14:58 - Mikah Sargent
CrowdStrike number two has happened. It's happening.

2:15:00 - Leo Laporte
We got to all get on. We got to all get on and talk about it. Thank you everybody for joining us. We do MacBreak Weekly Tuesdays, 11 am Pacific, 2 pm Eastern. You can, as I mentioned, now watch us live everywhere youtube.com/twit/live. Twitch.tv/twit. LinkedIn, Facebook x.com. Uh, kick, I have I left? I probably have there's it's like everywhere, and that's one of the new things we're doing. Thanks to our Club Twit members, twit.tv/clubtwit. If you're not yet a member, we're also, of course, in the discord and we'll be doing lots more uh ad hoc streams in there in the days and weeks to come. So join the club.

We'd love to have you, after the fact, on-demand versions of the show, with ads or without, available at twit.tv/mbw. There's video on YouTube that has all the ads and more, and there's also, of course, the subscription route, which I would recommend. It's free, despite the name Sounds like you have to pay for it, but you don't Just follow us in your favorite podcast client. You'll get it automatically every Tuesday right after we finish the show, so you can listen at your leisure. Thanks everybody for being here Now, I'm sad to say, as I have been saying for nearly 20 years you've got to get back to work because break time is over. See you next week. Bye-bye.