MacBreak Weekly 942 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's here, Alex is here, Jason's here, the whole gang's here. We will talk about revelations about Apple's next event. We think we know when it's going to be. We also think we know what they're going to release, and maybe you saw some pictures from a Russian YouTuber that purport to be the new MacBook. Is that real? We'll discuss it. Next on MacBreak Weekly.

This is MacBreak Weekly, episode 942, recorded Tuesday, October 8th 2024. Amazing if somewhat flatulent. It's time for MacBreak Weekly, the show we get together Talk about the latest news from Apple. Joining me, as always, around the virtual table Alex Lindsay from office hours dot. Global. Hi, Alex, hello, hello. Good to see you, good to be here.

0:01:07 - Jason Snell
Jason Snell, six colors dot com. It's good to be seen by you, leo. What salute is that? I don't know before we started, uh, there were some Shakespearean uh renditions going on and now I feel like I need to be like acting brilliant. He's a fast spade. We are not usually that dramatic here at MacBright.

0:01:28 - Leo Laporte
No, and finally, but not last but not least, as they say, andy and not go from GBH in Boston, back in the gut, they got him out of the jail, so he's back in the library.

0:01:39 - Andy Ihnatko
No, I again. I complied. I was very, very helpful. I'm looking forward to probably a lot of text messages from some friends of mine in the next three to 60 days, but you know I'm a citizen, I have responsibilities.

0:01:53 - Leo Laporte
Time off for good behavior is never to be shunned. So I really have been watching this all week. This crazy Russian leak of what is supposedly a M4 MacBook Pro, way ahead of the release yeah, and I'm thinking. Russia deep fake.

0:02:18 - Andy Ihnatko
I'm thinking it's a fake. Yeah, 100% Like when it started off. Hey, here's a picture of the box and I'm like look, I know you think you're getting clever and trying to get hits, but Apple never lets like a boxed thing actually. Yes, I mean it's not like it's a prototype sample that someone left in a bar or something like that. I mean I'm going to be responsible and not talk about this.

0:02:40 - Leo Laporte
They said they bought it in a private Facebook group, yep.

0:02:49 - Jason Snell
So I think it's real and I got a few reasons for it. One is I think you've got warehouses in China. Something walked away. They probably this is the M4, the base model, which means that that chip is probably they made that in advance right, it's not the one with the M4 Pro. So those they've been probably stockpiling for a while, a few of them walk away. How did they get to Russia? Apple isn't shipping products to Russia anyway. Well, china to Russia is a pathway that exists. That is pretty reasonable and actually the number one reason that I think it's real is because it's boring, because it's literally a laptop. We've seen before a chip. We've seen before specs that are widely reported. It is for a leak of new Apple hardware before it even gets announced. It's not that interesting. If you were going to fake it, you'd make it more interesting. You'd have a fake Mac mini or you'd have a fake M4 Pro benchmark or something, and we don't have any of that.

0:03:43 - Andy Ihnatko
It's just dull. Also, now we're seeing multiple videos from like multiple places. It's pretty big and also maybe I'm just sort of like trying to back fill the logic, but it kind of makes sense because name one country where apple is now like not existing, and so it's not.

0:04:02 - Leo Laporte
If ever there were a black market, it'd be in russia well existing, and so it's not.

0:04:07 - Andy Ihnatko
If ever there were a black market, it'd be in russia. Well, a that's a, that's true, and b apple can't punish anybody in russia for anything especially romance v768 because apparently there are.

0:04:16 - Leo Laporte
According to tom's hardware, the latest is there are as many as 200 units up for sale. So this isn't this. This sounds like a pallet got. Yeah, it sounds like something like a master case.

0:04:27 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, and it could be one of those things. This is where the danger of trying to ship really close to when you announce comes out, you know is because you're packing all these pallets, you're trying to make sure you're ready to go, you're trying to make sure that they're all at the stores, everything else. There's a whole bunch of logistics there. So if Apple was trying to make sure that these are ready the day of the announcement, or the uh, the day before, you know the, the three days after the announcement, they would have to be about this time. They'd have to be putting these on pallets and putting them on planes and getting them, you know, into the United States. So the timing is about right for the leak Cause. It's it's early, but it sounds like it's about two weeks early, which is about when you'd have to be sending them from china. So so it you know it wouldn't either, on the most likely on the chinese side.

0:05:10 - Leo Laporte
It does sound like a palette just went the wrong way, apple according to mac, rumor is potentially facing worst leak since iphone 4 was left in a bar and they told us everything that we expected it to do, like there's. No, I don't think there's the only Jason said I don't.

0:05:26 - Jason Snell
The only interesting thing is this it's black right, that's new right, which was it's not new, but it would be new on the low-end config. The low-end config previously didn't. They didn't do the space black low-end only on the higher end ones. So even that is like oh yeah that is stirring at a space black.

0:05:42 - Leo Laporte
What am I thinking? The ip thinking?

0:05:44 - Jason Snell
The iPhone 4, you know, we didn't know anything about it and it was a huge change in how it looked and that was a big story. So not that I'm saying that a headline on the Internet might be over-hyping things a little bit, I just think there was a lot of creativity missed here, because they could have had something like it pushes out air underneath it.

0:06:03 - Alex Lindsay
It makes it basically levitate a millimeter above the above the desk like something to get just believable enough that you could that you believe it like that It'd be some crazy Apple thing. That would have been, you know, more fun.

0:06:16 - Andy Ihnatko
I'm just, I'm just curious to see, like, when the so German thinks that there's going to be event like near the end of October, like there was for the iPhone four thing, steve Jobs, like did a curt, like self deprec of October. Like there was for the iPhone 4 thing, steve Jobs, like did a curt, like self-deprecating, quiet, quiet nod. Well, some of you might have been have seen this before, but here's the whatever. I'm wondering, like if they're going to acknowledge this at all, like, if, like, if they do something cool, like Tim Cook like is icing his knuckles with fresh, like fresh bruises on his knuckles. Like don't, don't worry, we've, we've traced the source of the leak.

0:06:50 - Jason Snell
But I mean, in reality they probably shot the video for it like last month. Yeah, so really Right, I mean, how long does it take to do all the all the prep work on those things Last month?

0:07:01 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, I mean I would have been shooting in. I would have probably been shooting right after the iPhone one or even before that. You have the segments of the stuff that is that you know you're going to talk about, and then you have the things that are going to be specific, that you're not sure exactly what you're going to say, but the stuff you know about. They probably would have been doing in August or September. Isn't it hard to match, though? I mean, tim might lose weight.

0:07:32 - Jason Snell
Those are all big, he seems to be pretty constant, but the um, the turns out.

0:07:33 - Alex Lindsay
If you worked out two, hours a day you know, stay the same. So the um, uh, the uh. But I think that usually what happens if you look at this, those are whole big segments. You know everyone. They go underground, they go to some mountaintop, they go to something. You can shoot all those segments completely separately, yeah, and you'd pick the ones that you absolutely know what you're going to say, and there'd be a handful of them. But I would not want to go into a release at the end of October without all the footage in the can two or three weeks before. For us, right now, video is probably sitting there being is done. They're probably doing playout tests from the encoders to make sure that it's all working, I mean, but that's you know. They're probably in the two weeks out, they're probably in playout tests. They're probably not even in.

0:08:12 - Leo Laporte
They're probably not doing any so have we learned anything from this? So now I'm going to accept that it is a genuine leak. I was very skeptical, but but I'm going to accept that. Have we learned anything from it? It?

0:08:24 - Andy Ihnatko
Not really. There have been some Geekbench scores allegedly that have performed maybe as well.

0:08:30 - Leo Laporte
How do they get it running? Can you get it running without an Apple account? Yeah, sure.

0:08:35 - Jason Snell
You can download Geekbench directly from Primate Labs if you want to, but I mean how do you get the computer?

0:08:40 - Leo Laporte
You can get the computer. Couldn't Apple have locked?

0:08:43 - Jason Snell
these have to activate it off the truck deactivated but they, maybe they didn't know. They just didn't know that this palette was out there. So they they. Okay, that's.

0:08:50 - Andy Ihnatko
My guess is that they were able to activate it I would be suspicious of anybody like as as weird as it would be to buy one of these two alleged 200 max.

0:08:58 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, apple's going to know exactly those serial numbers yeah, only if you're a youtuber and you can get the video out before they well, and with those serial numbers and the way things are tracked, I I do feel a little bad for whoever thought that this was a good idea in china, because this is going to go oh they'll find that factory is.

0:09:15 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, they're going to, they're going to.

0:09:17 - Alex Lindsay
They're going to, they don't. They don't play nicely over there, so it'll be pretty, pretty rough, you know. But I think that the Geekbench is. The only real surprise is that it looks like the M4 was 25% faster than the M3, which is that would be a big, that's a big jump.

0:09:33 - Jason Snell
It's good, but like we have iPad M4 benchmarks already, so it's not as if we didn't see what the M4 speed was. It's just seeing it in the context and comparing it to M3, which didn't exist on the ipad, but like, even so, even that is muted, it is, I mean, I feel bad. It's like you finally got apple hardware three weeks before it came out, but there's not really. It's not that interesting.

0:09:57 - Leo Laporte
Well, wait a minute. If this is the base model and it's 16 gigs, could you infer that this might be the base ram as well?

0:10:05 - Jason Snell
yeah, that's a possibility that's been rumored. That is, uh, yeah, no, I think you've you hit on it. I think that, and the fact that the space black config is apparently going to be in the base model. Uh, if this is the base model, are the two pieces of yes, so going up to 16, which was rumored?

0:10:20 - Leo Laporte
um well, we know that the, the iphone has more ram for apple intelligence. I presume that they they put more RAM in their machines for that as well, right, I assume so.

0:10:30 - Andy Ihnatko
I wonder if that is the base model or whether that's just a palette of 16 gigabyte ones. They got a lot of heat in the past about having to when Apple has to go back and say here's why it's not important to have you have to go look beyond the specs of an Apple piece of hardware. It's not important to have more than eight gigabytes of system ram. Don't know if that's the base model now or whether it's just now.

0:10:52 - Leo Laporte
It's, it's still just available 10 core cpu, 10 core gpu. This is from the label which was one of the leaks 14 inch screen, three thunderbolt, four ports. Is that new hdmi port?

0:11:03 - Jason Snell
one more one more.

0:11:05 - Leo Laporte
Well, there were two thunderbolt fours and then one I can't remember. I'm looking at mine. It has three type c ports, but I don't know if they're all you know.

0:11:13 - Jason Snell
Thunderbolt four that depends on the chip, right on the chip okay, mag save three headphone jack.

0:11:19 - Leo Laporte
So yeah, this looks pretty pretty. Uh, standard, that's well, you know what we're going to find out when. When are we going to find out? German says they'll be shipping them early november.

0:11:29 - Jason Snell
Shipping november 1st I think it's all gonna pop off the week of the 28th. The german says so. Mark german at bloomberg says apple intelligence releases is uh, which is 18.1 is targeted for the 28th. I would be surprised.

0:11:45 - Alex Lindsay
That's a Monday, it's going to ship on the first.

0:11:47 - Jason Snell
I would be surprised, honestly, if it was not the 28th that they announced these things, Because if you're going to ship Apple Intelligence on the 28th, then you probably want to use, if you're going to do a press event or a video or whatever use that day as your big day to say Apple intelligence is here. It you know. New Macs are here, A new iPad is here, Everything supports it. I suppose you could do it the next day. I don't think it really matters because I think this is just a video event and there'll be some ancillary sort of like press briefings, but that most people they'll just be, you know, on the 21st or 22nd they'll say join us for a video on monday or tuesday of next week, I mean, and that gives you the opportunity to be scary good, they don't want to do that again.

This is that event time, uh, although no, Alex, that's the funny thing. What else is happening that week? Well, scary rich, because the uh annual or the quarterly results will come out on Halloween night basically 5 pm. Eastern Halloween.

0:12:49 - Leo Laporte
And this is the first quarter with the new iPhone in it, so it will be.

0:12:53 - Jason Snell
Yes, although only a little bit right, only a few weeks a couple weeks, but still I think they're going to want to address that.

0:13:00 - Andy Ihnatko
The financial news outlets have been talking a lot about expectations for the iPhone 16, both referring back to things like comments that Ming-Chi Kuo made and also doing a follow-up of what happened to the stock price after Ming-Chi Kuo's speculation. So they're not going to have great numbers, but I think they're going to want to at least give shareholders and analysts some sort of as they say, some color on the iPhone 16 sales and what proportions are the pros and what proportions are the 16.

0:13:30 - Jason Snell
Yeah, they like to do that because they'll be able to say, well, the results are only two weeks of sales, but we've now had six weeks of sales and we can tell you this. Right, that's the kind of thing that they'll do if they want to try to spin, sort of like, how iPhone sales are going, which they probably do.

0:13:46 - Leo Laporte
So the 28th is a Monday and then Friday is the first, so they would announce Monday with availability the following Friday. Does that sound right? Would you be able to order it Monday for pickup on Friday?

0:13:58 - Jason Snell
I would imagine that, yeah, you'd be able to order it that day or maybe the next day, something like that. The only question is about availability. Will there be some quirks to the availability? They don't want to do that, but that's a possibility. Is that the availability will be limited for the new chips right For M4 Pro? That may be that availability.

0:14:21 - Leo Laporte
Does it get those breathing inside of relief that the long Sherman didn't go on strike? Well, that's East Coast. I think West Coast would have been.

0:14:32 - Jason Snell
I think they all come in the western ports coming into west, and they still fly a lot of them too. The only other thing I would throw out there is that it's possible they could do this on the 21st, and I only say that because that would allow them a longer runway for the orders, and sometimes that is valuable. It's like they'll ship the end of next week instead, but I'm not sure for the Mac and the iPad mini.

0:14:52 - Leo Laporte
it matters they announce early in the week for order, at the end of the week for delivery the following week.

0:14:57 - Jason Snell
So it could be the 21st or 22nd as well if they wanted to do that way and get it out of Halloween week, which would be fine, but I don't know. They very frequently make product announcements right before they do their quarterly earnings and that would put it smack dab in the week of the 28th.

0:15:12 - Leo Laporte
So german is not saying when the announcement is. He's not carefully staying away from that. He's just saying november 1st is when deliveries.

0:15:20 - Jason Snell
Yeah and and that's. I think that speaks also to the fact that this is not, uh, just like last year. It's not a traditional event. Last year, if you remember, they played a video. It was late in the day, eastern Time. They had like a thing for like influencers in New York City that day. Oh yeah, but they did, you know, but that's all it was. There was no big public event. They did some media briefings earlier in the day under an embargo, and that was it. So it will probably be that playbook. And if you're not setting up an actual event, the people involved in planning it are different. And if you're Mark Gurman and you've got sources inside, like your event planning group or even the people who are making the video, none of them may know that date because they don't need to.

0:16:05 - Leo Laporte
Right, it's compartmentalized.

0:16:08 - Jason Snell
That's right, they like it that way. Double secret.

0:16:12 - Leo Laporte
Is this where you might announce a new HomePod or a new Apple TV or anything like that?

0:16:18 - Jason Snell
I mean I might, but that's not what Mark Herman says. It sounds like this is very much going to be. It's actually a lot if you think about the Mac, because it's going to be MacBook Pro with an M4 and an M4 Pro chip. It's going to be Mac Mini with an M4 and an M4 Pro chip, and that's going to be the redesigned Mac Mini. That's much smaller and that's going to be cool. They're going to update the iMac to M4, because, remember, they're trying to get M3 out of the product line as quickly as they can. And then iPad Mini is the other thing that's probably on the agenda here, and that's really interesting because I don't know what chip they're going to put in it. I imagine it'll be an A-series chip, but I do think it will probably support Apple intelligence. I don't think they want to ship anything that doesn't, so it might even be like the same chip that's in the iPhone 16. 16 wouldn't surprise me.

0:17:02 - Leo Laporte
That's the chip that's in there. Yeah, I love my mini. I mean, this is just a nice form factor. This is from 2021, that's the last release date, so it's got covid all over it, but other than that.

0:17:16 - Andy Ihnatko
I can't tell you how much I want a new mac mini. I love this thing and I mean what?

0:17:20 - Leo Laporte
I don't know how much you could improve it. It doesn't have a home button. It has a fingerprint reader on. I hope they don't take how much you could improve it. It doesn't have a home button, it has a fingerprint reader on, I hope they don't take that off? No, I don't think so. On the on-off button. I love that. The bezels are huge, but I guess they could be a little smaller.

0:17:32 - Jason Snell
Yeah, I think they'll update it. Actually, andy makes a good point. Maybe it supports the Pencil 2 or the Pen is. Even that old mini is still pretty good, and so getting it. That's the thing.

0:17:52 - Leo Laporte
I can't justify buying a new one. There's nothing. I would say. Oh, it's slow, there's nothing wrong with it, yeah.

0:17:57 - Andy Ihnatko
I did. I did learn something kind of recently about the, the iPad Mini. That A made me feel confident they're going to keep it around for the indefinite future, but also making me wonder if they don't necessarily have a motive to make it super powerful or super current compared to standard iPads. Apparently, we all know that the regular iPad has sort of displaced aviation documentation. Pil pilots have to carry checklists, manuals, everything, charts, everything. Now they do it. That's all been standardized on the iPad. They strap them to their thighs in some cases. Well, but yeah, but I'm talking about like from commercial pilots Maybe that's for flying jets?

0:18:36 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, exactly.

0:18:37 - Andy Ihnatko
I'm talking about, like the people who are flying yet to Dallas and the and everything else. Apparently, the iPad mini is super popular for that Again, given that the software infrastructure is all there for private pilots, like people who are in a small cockpit who don't have necessarily space for a big one. So, number one, that makes me feel good because it doesn't mean that, OK, this is this fringe product that maybe Apple wants to get rid of, but also maybe they're not necessarily interested or motivated to make it like an iPad Mini Pro or anything kind of close to that. I'm sure they'll keep it current. I'm sure that Jason is right that anything that Apple ships has to be anything that Apple ships has to be compatible with Apple intelligence. So that's going to be like basic stakes from now on.

0:19:18 - Leo Laporte
Mini Pro.

0:19:19 - Jason Snell
you complete me, so imagine like yeah, because they could put an M series in it. But my guess is it's more like an a18 right where they can just that'll be, because we know a18 will run apple intelligence and you put enough ram in there and I think that's the check like every, every device that they're going to do is going to be. Does it do apple intelligence?

0:19:40 - Leo Laporte
yes, ah that makes sense, right? Yeah, and that gets you to buy a new one because your old mini won't do Apple intelligence.

0:19:47 - Jason Snell
If you want it, yeah.

0:19:48 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, well, that's the job that's going forward for Apple is to make you want Apple intelligence. Yeah.

0:19:55 - Andy Ihnatko
Because I mean speaking back to the analyst meeting. That's another thing that, again, financial reporters are kind of harping on. That is, how long is it going to take before Apple intelligence is real enough that it's going to be a factor in sales of iPhones? There was an analyst who was saying that just a few days ago that he doesn't think that it's going to be prominent until like late 2015,. 2025 at the earliest, but he was really banking on 2026. I don't know if I agree with that, but it does mean that that's probably another thing that they're going to want to talk a lot about during the earnings call, because this is something that they're kind of concerned about or, sorry, not concerned about, but as they're mapping out the expectations for Apple hardware, a lot of it is going to be how fast are they going to come up with real AI features, particularly because, with Google, for instance, they're not just putting it into phones, they're also really putting it into their entire business and also they're starting to ship things.

We're talking about Notebook LM. They've probably got their first unqualified hit on their hands with, instead of all the coverage of Notebook LM's audio synopsis features being oh my god, now, now google is trying to fake podcasts and trying to trick us into thinking these, no, it's all about. Oh my god, this is so cool. Oh my god, this is so useful. Oh my god, I was using this all week long and it's so helpful.

0:21:18 - Alex Lindsay
I had that reaction. I was like I was like, really, we're gonna like try to make podcasts out of this, but what I find now is that I saw this long pdf on the dangers of uh tvs you know with, you know smart tvs and I was like I don't want to read that, so I just threw it and I threw it into notebook. Do you have it?

0:21:33 - Leo Laporte
available. You could play a little bit of it for us. Yeah, yeah, yeah, oh, I'd like to. Every time I hear it, it sounds, it sounds so canned.

0:21:39 - Andy Ihnatko
And you know, can I say, while you're looking for that can I say, say I made the mistake of I've got Audio Hijack automatically generates transcripts of like every episode of the material podcast while we record it. And I made the mistake of okay, why don't you like, why don't I have these two people talk about, like Florence, ion and myself and this Google podcast we do? And it's like I was really like okay, even though it wasn't really people. I'm nervous. What do they think? Did they get the right impression? Am I talking too much? What do the robots think?

0:22:13 - Leo Laporte
I still want to impress the robots, particularly because they're going to take over soon. To me, it's just another example of AI doing kind of mediocre. Maybe it's because I'm butthurt because I'm a podcaster and it like how dare they?

0:22:28 - Andy Ihnatko
But it just sounds like another example of, you know, mediocre kind of I wouldn't. I don't agree especially if they deliver, especially if they deliver the stuff that they showed off during the Google IO keynote the ability to like start again. Imagine being a student. Not only does it, will it take your course materials, but now, with the latest update, you can put in audio files. So your lectures that you've recorded you can also put in YouTube videos. So if you're using, be great for a student.

You're right, exactly so if you're using, like MIT CourseWare or Kang Academy, all this sort of stuff, and it's not just have them talk and listen. You can interrupt and say wait a minute, go back, like what was that all about? I don't understand what you're talking about. About spin on this particle Like oh well, of course, and it'll break off and go into something you're actually talking about. This could be something pretty serious. And again, it demos well, and a lot of people it's. The things that I'm always really, really impressed by are when not only is it an impressive tech demo, but I immediately start thinking, oh, this can solve so many problems for me. Or I can think of so many hours of my week that would be so much easier to work through with this tool in hand, using it responsibly, not having it do my homework for me, but helping me to say, oh okay, I guess I need to check on this section of this 300-page document specifically.

0:23:40 - Jason Snell
This is the number one thing I think of AI that I really do believe has potential and it's knowledge in very specific domains. Yes, and so, like Apple is hanging all of their Apple intelligence stuff on, the idea of a database, this personal context database that is on your device, that knows about all your email and it knows about your apps and it knows about your calendar items and all of those things, and they've advertised that. But I know that I've heard about the idea, like a friend of mine who is a novelist who's put all of his novels that are in this particular series in a notebook. And you know it's no matter what it is. It's a repository of knowledge that your brain contains but doesn't necessarily contain with perfect accuracy, and you can't really necessarily follow the thread all the way. And so for uh, for this novelist, he was able to say he's got like six books on this subject, um, and he was able to say, like where was this?

When was the last time? His example was when was the last time this character fired a gun? Yes, and he wrote all those words. He can't remember that, but the AI that was trained on all of his novels can actually answer that very specific question accurately. So it's those like within a domain, it's like I know this little ball of stuff, all the articles that I've written, whatever it is. What did I say about this? And you can do like a Google search and try to get there, or a full text search, but having the model be able to do it because it knows everything in there in a way that your brain just can't.

0:25:15 - Andy Ihnatko
So, so, so. Jason basically notebook LM in this case is like that incredible hyper nerd who asks the author questions at a comic-con panel, saying and in book eight I noticed that like he said that he couldn't under, he couldn't, he can operate the star for the starship himself unless there was a gunner. But exactly in book twelve, exactly like that.

0:25:36 - Jason Snell
Well, that fan who then gets hired to be the writers assistant invest in a lot of three by five cards or notion databases or whatever they're using these days and they're like dad happened to George RR Martin, right, one of the guys who wrote the expanse books that was his previous job was keeping track of the lore for george rr martin for game of thrones.

0:25:53 - Alex Lindsay
That was literally that so that's a great story.

0:25:56 - Leo Laporte
You can use.

0:25:57 - Jason Snell
Yeah, which makes sense, right, because it's like hundreds of characters and all these details and all of that, and as a writer, even if you're the creator of that world, you don't necessarily remember that particular detail. And so the idea that you've got an assistant, which is this AI database that has read it like yeah, I mean I threw like a not quite at Alex's level, but I threw like a six-part series from the Athletic about the changes in pitching over the last 15 years. That like changes in pitching over the last 15 years. I threw that in a notebook and generated a 10 minute long podcast and like I can roll my eyes at the kind of fake back and forth between the two fictional hosts, but in terms of them consuming thousands of words into a little 10 minute podcast about the main points, it nailed it.

0:26:40 - Alex Lindsay
It really did. It was shocking. That's the whole thing, and it just kind of sits in the background and I was listening to that thing about cctv. I'll try to play it here. I don't my. This computer is not built for this, so I'm going to try it anyway, but let me know if you can hear it. That's going to the wrong place. Hold on, let me uh. It sounded like it was in the wrong place, it was. Hold on, let me uh. There are. Yeah, I got to be able to do sound better, faster. Let's try it. Let's see if this, can you hear this Third deep dive?

0:27:10 - Jason Snell
You know it's funny. I was just thinking about how we used to think getting rid of policy. We all scroll past and click agree to.

0:27:18 - Leo Laporte
You think so, right. But that brings us to the third key trend, and this is a big one Consent.

0:27:26 - Jason Snell
It's more complicated and deceptive than you think okay, I'm listening, so let me ask. So you're right, he editorialized this is a big one.

0:27:31 - Leo Laporte
Is that a genuinely valuable thing or is that just a made up? This is a big one because I hear that a lot in these podcasts. Yeah, notebook lm podcast. Oh, this one's a big, but it sounds to me like it's fake editorializing it's.

0:27:46 - Alex Lindsay
It is uh uh, it's editorializing, but it's taking into account that it's. This is a paper written by people, so this is a really big deal like, so so it does say in the paper they say this is a big deal I don't know if they say this is a big one. Well, that's my question.

0:28:00 - Leo Laporte
That's a big deal difference. Yeah, it doesn't say that in the paper, but the lm is saying it I have to say that I'm not looking at this as a journalistic tool.

0:28:08 - Alex Lindsay
I think what I'm looking at it is is that I want to listen to that. I want to listen to that thing, get the gist of it. If I want to go back and read it some more, I can, um, the it's a big one, or anything else doesn't really matter to me okay I don't really care, I mean because I can read through that.

0:28:21 - Leo Laporte
I mean I listen to all kinds of news, so this technique, by the way, has been around since ChatGPT 4, which it's called Retrieval, augmented Generation or RAG, and I've been singing its praises since over a year because remember I made those LLMs on ChatGPT by providing them with Emacs documentation or Lisp documentation and they were very useful tools. They didn't turn it into a podcast, but that wouldn't be. The search part would be as much more useful than the to me than the podcast stuff.

0:28:53 - Alex Lindsay
It's notebook lm has given it a very consumer facing well and it's just, it's very comfortable to listen to and I can imagine again. I can imagine my kids listening to this about um, you know american history, or about whatever, and you and being able to worry about your kids going.

0:29:06 - Leo Laporte
Oh, the most important thing was Abe Lincoln was a log splitter, because that's what the LM added gratuitously to the conversation.

0:29:16 - Alex Lindsay
I haven't seen that yet. I mean I, I and of all the time I just just got into it and I've been throwing things at it, listening to them, and what I don't hear is it throwing in a lot of spurless, you know like just just kind of like random stuff.

0:29:31 - Leo Laporte
It has these little hallucinate at all. It should only repeat the stuff that it's got.

0:29:32 - Alex Lindsay
That's what I found is that I found that it really is contained, you know, and I, and I do think that, um, it's contained to that document. It's not just hallucinating, because, looking at the whole internet, right, and, and I think that it is, I wouldn't say that it is perfect. I mean, there's definitely some stuff about it that are there. But I will say that the ability to aggregate because, like I did one, I was researching something and so I had 200 pages that I do not want to read. I actually listened to it in dream reader or whatever, um, a long time ago, and it was just really dry.

It's a bunch of researchers talking about the sun, right, you know, and and so, and it's just super dry. And I threw that into um, into notepad lm, and it came out with, you know, about 15, 10, 10 minutes of the most interesting part of all of the whole thing, like, and it really seemed to condense that down and I was like, oh, now I want to go back and read parts of it. But the point is, is that it it was so, it distilled it so well that, you know, but without, I didn't, I didn't detect any hallucin. You know, serious hallucinations yeah it's.

0:30:34 - Andy Ihnatko
It's not going to get every, it's not going to give you everything that's in that document in 10 minutes time, but it's going to give you a good overview. That is one of the actually joking aside, that's one of the reasons why I decided to give it all the transcripts from 100, like years worth of transcripts from my podcast, because I know what I said, I know what Florence Ion has said, I know the stuff that we've covered and everything that it put into those 10 minutes was 100% just things that we've said. It managed to summarize our opinions on things it gave us. It was really kind of a review of the podcast, so to speak, and we're saying here's the things that Flo and Andy think are very, very important and okay, that was spot on.

The only thing that was odd was that in the transcripts, both of what we say is labeled. So Flo's lines are labeled, my lines are labeled. It's pulled out more stuff about what I said than what Flo said. It might be because I talk more, I don't know. But this is where, instead of just and shouldn't be necessarily just harping on just this audio thing, just the ability to ask it questions, the ability to say work with an AI where your entire base of knowledge is only what I give you.

You don't know anything except for these documents I've put into this notebook and I really have been using it for the past few weeks. Sometimes I'm coming up with a show lineup saying, oh, did we already talk about that? And I can just open up that notebook and say when was the last time that we talked about X? And it will not only say it doesn't, just like come up with text to say oh, yes, you did. No, you didn't. It will also give you a footnote saying here is where, like I found this Well, that's to me.

0:32:16 - Leo Laporte
That's the most. I mean what I'm assuming it's Dan Warren, but I don't know what. Your novelist friend.

0:32:25 - Jason Snell
It's actually not john birmingham although dan did apply to all of that too john birmingham who wrote this series called world war three and world war 3.1, uh, but, and he's like there's so many characters in that and he's just like when did it's? Actually? I think prince harry is the character, because it's there's a long story. Prince harry gets sent back in time with a battle group while he's serving in the military, anyway, it's. They're great books, but it's like when did he fire a gun? I was like when did that happen? Last? When was the last time he was in a firefight?

0:32:50 - Leo Laporte
It's a perfect use for it.

0:32:51 - Jason Snell
It's just like think how long you'd have to search through your manuscripts to find, like you can't search for the name you can't search for the gun. You need to have them be in conceptual proximity.

0:33:01 - Alex Lindsay
Fake human banter, but you know everybody's got a different way of reading it.

0:33:05 - Leo Laporte
The other thing, though. That's really interesting and I wonder, andy, you might not have to get transcripts anymore. It's now multimodal, so you might. It sounds like you could just feed it the audio of the podcast or pictures or whatever, because it's fully multimodal now. Yeah, I would say so. That would be a saving, that would be good.

0:33:23 - Andy Ihnatko
But Audio Hijack does it well because I can label the input so that we know it knows that this audio channel is named Flow, this audio channel is named Andy and it's good to have that rolling for a whole bunch of things. But, yeah, the ability for it to at least detect different speakers, at least say speaker A, speaker B this is background noise. It's just going to get better, especially with a model like Gemini, which is built for the modern models, not just Gemini are built from the ground up to be multimodal. That's why a lot of companies in AI did a complete reset two or three years ago after speaking a whole bunch about oh here's this model that we're doing. Okay, we're actually throwing that out. We're building this new model because they realize that no, you can't just add speech detection, you can't just add image detection. That has to be part of what it's built to know to begin with, and we're just seeing more and more and more opportunities for this to pay off.

0:34:20 - Alex Lindsay
Well, and I think that the other thing is is when you this is going to be an equalizer in some, in some places like legal legal counsel, because one of the big things is that you know what prosecution likes to do is drop hundreds of boxes onto the defense and the defense doesn't have the resources to read all those boxes.

Now you're sitting there talking about you scan them all, you put them all in there and go when did he and where was he here and when was he here and when was he here and when was he here? Now you're still going to have to go back and look at, look for the evidence and look for the data there, but being able to tie those things together you know, taking thousands of pages or hundreds of thousands of pages of documents and being able to tie the, at least have it, find the patterns that you're looking for and then be able to show you where to look for those, is going to be really powerful in many levels. Whether you're an investigative journalist, whether you're a lawyer, whether you're, you know a lot. A lot of these things are going to let you interrogate incredible or just a scholar about. You know a certain, whether you're a scholar about the Bible or the many things, or whatever it is. The ability to interrogate a piece of a document is pretty amazing.

0:35:27 - Andy Ihnatko
I won't keep going on and on about this, but because that art research project had been on for a long, long time. It has seen the differences between the digital resources we have both, as Google's search algorithms have gotten better and better on top of everything else. And now there is like, honestly, I've got hundreds and hundreds of French newspapers. I'm at the point where to answer a certain question. I'm so desperate. That's okay, I'm just going to have to read daily and weekly newspapers to see if there's a mention of this person or some kind of hint as to what was going on.

And I didn't take. I was smart enough to take Latin as my foreign language in high school Latin and Spanish, but Latin, I didn't take French. And I've been trying to pick up. At least here's what the words I'm kind of looking for are shaped like in French. And now I can simply take those PDFs and simply say search for this inside these documents. They're just scans of old newspapers in a language I don't understand and present the information back to me in a language I do understand.

There's so much information that's locked up because it's never been indexed, maybe, and maybe because it's in an inaccessible language, or even that it's a handwritten note that is so cumbersome to try to parse. One of the artists that is part of the story had horrendous handwriting and it really is. Even though it's in English, I have to parse it letter by letter and the idea of an AI being able to at least give me a good idea of is this five-page letter going to be worth the time? Or because the AI thinks it has this text I'm sort of looking for Again, there's going to be worth the time. Or because, if the ai thinks it has this text I'm sort of looking for again, we're going to find there there's going to be so many breakthroughs in so many areas because, like this wall that was impenetrable, now we have the laser that can cut through it, and now we're in this whole new chamber of the of the pyramid and we're learning things we weren't able to access before all right, let's take a little break.

0:37:26 - Leo Laporte
When we come back, we have more from Gurman. We have rings, we have things. I notice, andy, you're wearing a ring. Is that one of the Aura rings or one of the smart rings, or just?

0:37:37 - Andy Ihnatko
a wedding band.

0:37:40 - Leo Laporte
That's just a silicon band. It's not doing anything, okay.

0:37:43 - Andy Ihnatko
It's making me look stylish. Is it engaging you to a partner? No, okay, it's not, then it's not doing anything. No, no, no, I just remind, daily reminder that I'm not a killer.

0:37:55 - Leo Laporte
Uh, we will have more in just a little bit andy and I co, uh, Alex lindsay and Jason snell definitely not a killer. He's not a killer definitely not, definitely not a killer. We know that much. Anyway, we're pretty sure he's not a killer definitely definitely I don't even think about it don't even think about it anymore. Couldn't really possibly.

0:38:15 - Jason Snell
I'm embarrassed all of your questions about my status as a killer are answered by my t-shirt. This is definitely not a killer, you guys.

0:38:24 - Leo Laporte
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0:40:37 - Leo Laporte
Back to the show we go. I guess we should wrap up the Mark Gurman predictions. We haven't even. Every Sunday he comes out with his newsletter. It's like a data bomb.

0:40:48 - Jason Snell
When he's got data to bomb, it is.

0:40:51 - Leo Laporte
He says I expect Apple to kick off 2025 with several other new devices in the first half of the year 13 and 15 inch MacBook Air models with M4. We'd expect that he's even got the model numbers. I love that Revamped iPhone SE se. That's an interesting product because that's one that iphone does not put out every year right, right, it sounds like this is the end of the home button.

0:41:14 - Jason Snell
This is going to be a the last home button, a face id which, when you think about it's been seven years, since the iphone 10, so maybe it's time for the last iPhone to get face ID finally, seven years later, and a USB-C right? Yep, presumably, presumably, and I would assume, apple intelligence actually, I would assume again that it will. I think they got to again. I think maybe that's why they have that A18 non-pro chip that's in the iPhone 16 is to put it in all of the like base designs that still need Apple intelligence support. But we'll see. I just I even the SE. I can't have a hard time imagining them making a new iPhone today that doesn't support Apple intelligence.

0:42:01 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, probably makes sense. They'd have AI, so to speak, everywhere. Speaking of USB-C, there will probably be new Magic keyboards with USB-C.

0:42:11 - Jason Snell
The dream and the dream. One of these days it's got to be true.

0:42:14 - Leo Laporte
Keep lightning alive. Lisa has an iO one of the other 21-inch iMacs and it's so frustrating to charge the keyboard and mouse because I need lightning Lightning. It's like I need lightning Lightning. It's like I even upgraded the AirPods. By the way, Amazon Prime right now because of Prime Days, I think has AirPod 2s the AirPod Pro 2s for $169, which is a pretty good price if you want to get Type-C. I actually paid for a whole new pair of AirPods Nothing wrong with my old ones just to get type C charging. He also says refreshed 11 inch and 13 inch iPad Air models. That sounds about right, and we've been waiting for this upgraded AirTag for more than a year. We kept hearing these rumors. He says that's coming first half of next year as well. Also, new versions of the mac studio and mac pro with m4 chips in development, but they may take longer to arrive. He says he expects a mac studio launch closer to the middle of the year.

Mac maybe, uh, wwdc that sounds like yeah, with the mac pro going on sale sometime in the second half of 2025. That is really a non-product now for apple. Isn't that the mac pro? It's like? Yeah, who cares?

0:43:26 - Jason Snell
there's no logic to it. It exists because I think they already designed the case and because there is some small group inside apple that says, oh, our clients still want it. But like I cannot believe there are enough clients to make it really worth building a whole separate product for other than the fact that they already have the pieces, so they might as well keep just iterating on it unless they've got a future plan there is, I mean, there's a.

0:43:50 - Alex Lindsay
The problem really is that there are a group of people, especially creative, that would stop using Apple if they you know that are making decisions about things that. And the issue is that, like, for instance, for me, I have a studio. The next, other than maybe getting another Mac mini if there's a new one or a couple of them the next big computer I'm going to get is the Pro because I need more IO. Like I need the IO. All it is is a studio with IO. You know, and there's definitely it's probably not a very large group of people, but there's definitely people there that a lot of us have decided that.

I mean, I I really thought that there was certain projects I just couldn't take on anymore because I didn't have the IO for it. Um, so I think that the you know, having a lot more lanes in the USBC is not not a trivial thing for folks. So I think that it does provide that upper scale that I think Apple you know it's it doesn't. I don't think they have to sell a lot of them, but I don't know if it's a waste of a product, but I'm really glad it exists Cause for for those of us who are running running those kinds of things. We desperately need that and I'm bidding on an event right now. If I get it, I have to buy for you.

0:44:55 - Leo Laporte
Do you get to keep those afterwards, Alex, and just like put them in your library? Yeah, they just keep rentals. You charge them to the customer or no? Oh, you ran them to the customer.

0:45:06 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, oftentimes you do I mean you you rent them to the customer and sometimes it doesn't it. It usually doesn't cost as much as the computer did, but it definitely reduces the cost of, yeah, of buying it. So probably if you do it a couple of times, it pays for it. Yeah, it doesn't take very long for them to pay off.

0:45:20 - Leo Laporte
Yeah uh, so the? So let's talk about, uh, ios 18.1, because german says that's coming monday, October 28th, that will be the beginning of apple intelligence. Uh, he says I'm told apple's taking its time with the rollout to ensure that major bugs are eliminated and it can support all the new traffic on its ai cloud servers. You know, on sunday I was were talking maybe it was last Sunday, a week ago Sunday, or maybe it was Wednesday, I don't know. We were talking about Apple AI and there was kind of the general insistence oh no, they're going to use ChatGPT or they're going to use Gemini. No, apple's got its own AI right and they're going to run them on their own servers.

0:46:08 - Jason Snell
And they're not trying to train their LLM at least not yet on the idea of we've eaten the whole internet, and so if you ask us a question about a fact from history, we'll give you an answer. Apple doesn't want to be in that game, at least not yet, and they think that that's a great place where these other LLMs have been trained, and so that's the idea of ChatGPT or others will be where Siri kicks you to. When you need an answer, it can answer.

0:46:34 - Leo Laporte
And so German says you might be a little disappointed that the first version of Apple Intelligence you get in 18.1 will have things like notification summaries.

0:46:44 - Jason Snell
Yeah, notification summaries yeah, notification summaries writing tools. Um, I mean, it's not a, it's not a lot, it is. It is the first creeping in of features and there are a few notification summaries is nice. The new focus mode, that sort of like, uses ml to determine if a message is worth bothering you about, is actually a great idea. We'll see how it works in practice.

0:47:09 - Leo Laporte
Does it work is the question.

0:47:10 - Jason Snell
It's a really smart idea to say you don't need 90 notifications, but this one seems important.

0:47:16 - Leo Laporte
I don't trust AI to know what I think is important.

0:47:19 - Jason Snell
If I really need something, I'm not going to have that feature turned on, but what I'm doing with it is doing it instead of Do Not Disturb for when I'm working on stuff and I'm sort of like all right, what do you got?

0:47:30 - Leo Laporte
Like show me what breaks through.

0:47:32 - Jason Snell
I would really like to know what you think is important.

0:47:35 - Andy Ihnatko
I forget who it was. I think someone at the Washington Post wrote about the beta of this, saying that it was very easily bamboozled by like spam emails that say oh, my God. Definitely. It was very easily bamboozled by like spam emails and say oh my God, definitely yeah, and so that was bumming him out.

It isn't, but every rumors that we've heard, and also what's in the public beta, we're in public beta two. I think it's interesting that almost all this stuff sounds like stuff that can, would and should be run on device, which would imply that they are still a ways away from being able to get that server stuff up and running or at least able to handle what they figure is going to be an immense influence of millions and millions and millions of iPhones.

0:48:15 - Leo Laporte
Jason, you're using the beta. Do you feel like what you're seeing in the beta is what we'll see in 18.1?

0:48:21 - Jason Snell
Yeah, I do, and I think Andy's right. I think this is the stuff that's on device that they're capable of executing right now. It's like the writing tools are very much like Grammarly. It's that idea. It's a language model that's on the device.

Obviously, summarization is something that an LLM does fairly well and they're plowing it all through there and then, yeah, over time it gets more complex and some of that stuff gets farmed out to the private compute cloud stuff and they're going to want time there where that goes into beta and they see what the demand is like in the beta. And so you know, do they have the resources to serve that? There will be some stuff that's gated by the availability of servers. Right, they'll be like, probably features that they can't put in beta until they know that their servers can handle the volume of a beta, let alone a shipping version. So this is I mean Gurman sketched it out, I think, last week there's already a plan this is release one, there's going to be a release two 18.2, that'll be more like December. That adds another little set, and then there'll be a sort of later in the winter, 18.3, and a spring 18.4.

0:49:25 - Leo Laporte
And they're just going to kind of tick in the boxes there. He says that the chat GPT integration won't come till 18.2.

0:49:30 - Jason Snell
Right, so December.

0:49:31 - Leo Laporte
December, and support for the Genmoji custom emoji, which might be the single feature most people are waiting for. I don't know.

0:49:39 - Alex Lindsay
I'm pretty excited. That looks fun.

0:49:41 - Leo Laporte
I'm pretty excited about the Genmoji. It'll be fun, it's fun, looks fun, looks fun, looks fun, I you know. The thing is, I think apple can dribble this out, because I don't think there's massive demand.

0:49:48 - Alex Lindsay
well, it's a lot, it's a little weird that apple's advertising apple intelligence features on its its national ads I I feel like that's a stock price analyst thing, you know to some degree that that you're um, and and I and I and I will say that the apple intelligence is probably one of the biggest cells of the new phone, because the new phone didn't was an incremental upgrade in my opinion.

I mean, there's, you know, slightly better camera, slightly better everything. The only thing that was really that really stood out was, oh, it can actually do an Apple intelligence, but I think that it is. But keeping the stock, you know, keeping analysts thinking that this is important, I think, is important for Apple, um, but I think that because I think that, again, I think Apple has to move towards, um, ai. I don't think that they're in nearly the same rush as software-based. You know folks like Google and Microsoft and everyone else. You know they. I'm already using all the Google tools and the chat, gpt tools and mid journey and meshy and all these other things on my Mac. So so I'm not like I don't feel, like I don't, I don't feel like I'm missing out because it's uh, it's not there. So I think that is Apple positioning.

0:50:54 - Jason Snell
It's intelligence as AI for the people Like that's personal AI, I think, is a big part of it and that goes back to that idea of the semantic index, the fact that they're willing to just punt world knowledge to ChatGPT or whoever shows you that they're not worried about that right now. Maybe they will ultimately. But the semantic index, I think, is a really interesting idea and they do have an ad that shows it, which is great, because it doesn't exist and nobody can use it yet, but they're advertising it anyway.

But it's the idea that they can mine all of your personal data that's on device and, like we were saying before, this is the equivalent of a novelist putting their books in a pile. It's I'm going to put all my email and calendar and everything else that's in iCloud all my notes, all of that data and then the on-device LLM is going to be able to answer questions about it for me and that's very personal and I feel like that not only is that constrained enough that it's something that Apple can build, which is important, but also it's like that's your most personal part of using a device, whereas searching the entire, you know sphere of world knowledge you know it's fine if you go to check GPT or Google, or whatever else you want to do, it's fine.

0:52:03 - Alex Lindsay
Whatever, and it's arguably something that only Apple can do. Like it's very, very hard for something like are you going to really trust other folks to do this? Like am I going to let Google, like, have that level of information about me? Probably not.

0:52:16 - Jason Snell
If you're an Android user, you'll have Gmail and all your docs there, I know.

0:52:28 - Alex Lindsay
But on an iPhone maybe less likely. Are you really up on that path? As soon as you start seeing ads that look like what you just asked about or what you were thinking about, it gets weird, and I think that that's the challenge. Is that I don't feel like. I think that that's the challenge for everyone else. It's not that Google might be able to do it as well, but again, I think that because Google's using your information as part of their business model, it makes it more complicated.

0:52:47 - Andy Ihnatko
Well, that's. That's a valid point, and I think there are a lot of people for whom that is a deciding a deciding factor. But nonetheless, the most popular mapping service is Google Maps. The most popular email service is Google, Google Gmail. Most popular search engine is Google Search. People are not afraid to use Google if they're giving, if Google is giving them a product that is relatable to them, that's relevant and they perceive is the best solution for what they've got. I don't think that's going to be as big a problem. It's a bigger problem for a company like Facebook, which can't. If you're all in with Facebook, you're kind of screwed. If you're all in with Google, you've just made a deal and you feel as though you're getting as much out of it or more than what you're giving up.

Apple's imperative right here is that they do have to put this in the ads, because when people who don't necessarily care what phone they have go back to the Verizon store, go back to the AT&T store in the United States or go to whatever phone store they're going to worldwide, They've just OK, I broke my screen, or this one is like three or four or five years old. I need a new one. They need to. Apple needs to at least have that as part of the conversation, because they're going to be shown a lot of really cool stuff like Circle to Search on Android is really really good. Google Lens but they're putting it there is really really good. The photo editing features really really good, and so they have to make sure that they have that beachhead moving forward or else they could be perceived as not being able to, not be able to give a good, a good experience, like half a half a year or a year down the road. And the last thing is that, um, um, I mean you, you, you said it, you kind of said it yourself, and it's something that I'm kind of navigating, where we don't know whether it's a good thing for a company like Google or OpenAI or whatever, or a bad thing the fact that they are an app on the phone or a feature that's inside a webpage, as opposed to something that's hardwired and across all the entire experience.

Google will fail if, as soon as if, at the time when Apple identifies the 80% of people, the AI features that 80% of the users really, really want. Once they get that integrated, they're going to have to make sure they do better than just the basic addition, multiplication, division and subtraction. Apple's risk is that they'll lose all those people who are OK, great, you've got Apple intelligence, but it's really, really conservative, it doesn't do a whole lot. I'll just stick with my ChatGPT app. I'll just stick with my Claude app, I'll just stick with my Gemini app and maybe I'll dip into it, Just like for a lot of people, yes, it's nice that there's Apple Maps, but they still tap on that Google Maps icon every time they need directions.

So they need to make sure that they're not just simply hanging back and saying, oh, we'll let you assume that we're working on this. Apple never talks about unreleased products, but you can be assured that the rumors of us working on AI are true. They have to get in the game. They have to suit up, even if they're not going to win the gold medal. Even if they're not going to win the gold medal, they have to, even if they're not going to win a spot on the platform until 2026, they have to suit up and they have to take the field.

0:55:55 - Alex Lindsay
Well, and I think that there is again. They have a lot of time, I guess, is what I would say, because you know the Apple users aren't moving at any great pace to choose some other platform. They might be choosing other apps, but I think that they're not. I think so. I think that's the challenge there, and I think for others, and I think, as Apple starts to backfill, you know doing that, I do agree that having access to all the information across all your devices that is only yours, and being able to interrogate that may be one of the most powerful things that we. You know that we have you know on a daily basis. So just tell me, when I talked to Andy about this, you know, in the last 10 years, there was some point where Andy and I were talking about this, this and this. Where is that and what were we? What were we talking about? Like, I don't even have to see the email.

0:56:44 - Leo Laporte
You tell me what?

0:56:44 - Alex Lindsay
we were what we were talking about.

0:56:45 - Leo Laporte
There is some urgency for Apple on this, because I think most people think of apple intelligence as siri and that's intelligence don't go together we do that, it won't be till 18-4, which german says won't be till the spring, that they're going to upgrade siri at all you know, I don't.

0:57:04 - Alex Lindsay
I don't know if most people I mean other than apple running ads about apple intelligence. When we say most people, I don't think most people are thinking about it at all like I think that they're no.

0:57:14 - Leo Laporte
But if you ask them if apple has uh intelligence, they'd say well, there's a siri, but it's not very good.

0:57:19 - Alex Lindsay
I would say that's the general reaction I just, I think most people just aren't really interacting that much, they're not worried about it. I mean they're uh, I am surprised. My entire family people are aware of ai.

0:57:29 - Leo Laporte
Don't. Don't be confused about that. That's in the news. They are very aware of it. Whether they want it is another matter. I think 90% of people who are aware of it say I don't need that. What is it? It's stupid. But people do know Siri and they do use Siri and they do swear at Siri pretty much universally.

0:57:52 - Alex Lindsay
Or they limit their. I mean again, I think sometimes you limit your expectations of what I mean. Siri, for in my household is mostly a tool to I understand, but you're way more sophisticated.

0:57:58 - Leo Laporte
If you talk to a normal person and say Apple's got a AI now and they say, yeah, siri, and it's stupid, I think that's the universal reaction and it's it's incumbent on Apple to say I think it's there's a certain amount of urgency to make Siri be not stupid and and for Apple to say, yeah, we have an AI play here. But I mean, I, I think we're that's. The problem is we don't. We're in a bubble, we don't really see what.

0:58:27 - Alex Lindsay
I mean, I think that I think, would. I mean, I think that I think that they're talking about all of apple intelligence. If they had put out a better camera on the 16, they would have done just as well as far as all people yeah yeah, I mean it would.

if they, if they had not said a thing about intelligence and just had a really, really you know, gone to 8k video or or did you know something dramatic with the camera, they probably would have had the same same result as far far as sales go, because I think that's still the most important thing that they make.

0:58:55 - Leo Laporte
You're watching MacBreak Weekly, andy, and not co Alex Lindsay, Jason Snell, what about? So let's move on to the ring situation. German says Apple is not developing a smart ring, but then CNBC says a smart rings coming in 2026. Yeah, they're.

0:59:20 - Andy Ihnatko
They're quoting an analyst that was on a podcast, a CNBC podcast, who says that they have the capability of doing that within around 2026. I'm not sure if, and this was according to a report. He's a senior analyst at a, as I think it was Mac Rumors, so aptly put it, that they're comparing. This morning they published about like Gurman's report versus the CNBC report, saying we're asked this analyst. You had to Google his name, didn't you?

0:59:45 - Leo Laporte
Ben Wood, chief analyst for CCS Insight, says but they are legit.

0:59:50 - Andy Ihnatko
But I don't know if he had access to like Gurman's report from the Sunday newsletter. He's saying that he has sources inside Apple that say it's dead. I don't know if I understand the reasons. He's saying that the reason why it's dead is because Apple doesn't want to cannibalize smartwatch sales that they want to make sure that everybody I think that's not mistaken.

1:00:12 - Leo Laporte
I have an Aura Ring and I have an Apple Watch and I've chosen the Apple Watch. I think that that is probably the market decision right?

1:00:19 - Andy Ihnatko
Well, no, I mean, I think it's complimentary. I don't think it's something that you would buy a ring instead of the watch, and a ring is still a $300, $400 price point. It's not as though someone who can't afford a $250 Apple Watch is going to be buying a ring instead.

1:00:34 - Leo Laporte
Well, that's the point. Why cannibalize the Apple Watch sales?

1:00:38 - Jason Snell
So the Aura is coming out with its Ring 4.

1:00:41 - Leo Laporte
Samsung has a ring. Those are the two big. For people who don't know, these are health rings. They monitor your heartbeat, your temperature, sleep, and they're easy to wear. You wear them on your finger. I have to say they're not as accurate as the watch in my experience. Maybe Apple would make a more accurate ring. I don't know. I prefer the watch for all three of those uses.

1:01:01 - Andy Ihnatko
I like the idea of the ring, particularly because, I mean, I'm not claiming to be like the vanguard of taste, but like I kind of even my. I have a Pixel watch, I have an Apple watch and this summer I switched to a $20 Casio because, simply because, for whatever reason, like it wasn't, the watches weren't giving me the sort of advantages of just a simple watch that tells me the time directly, that will give me a stopwatch when I need it and doesn't need to be recharged every single day and is fun red plastic. But if I had and I've been thinking about, if I'm committed to, if I seem to have made this lifestyle change maybe I should pick up like just a simple fitness band, just for fitness tracking. And so for people who don't necessarily want to wear an Apple watch as their watch every single day, that they have a few watches that they like one that they inherited from their father, one that their spouse gave them as an anniversary gift they want to wear that instead.

A ring doesn't occupy one of those wrists.

My only problem with rings is that A they're super expensive A $400 device that doesn't do as much as a $250 watch does, or a $150 fitness band. But the biggest thing that kind of gets me about it is that, whereas even on a watch it's possible to keep it going by replacing the battery if you know somebody who is really, really adept at doing something like that A ring, through no fault of the manufacturer it has to become e-waste in two, three years. However long it takes for that tiny little battery to no longer hold a useful charge and that kind of rankles that you have a $300, $400 device that is designed to be thrown away in three or four years, that seems like too much money for something that you can't hand down to somebody else or give to someone when you uh, when you uh upgrade and expect it to still have a useful life after and I don't, and there's no way to solve that, I know, and that's just why it kind of wrinkles me a little bit. Yeah, I don't.

1:03:04 - Alex Lindsay
I there's very I mean usually with apple products. I look at it, oh, that'd be really great with the ring. I'm I'm kind of like you know, like I don't know if you know, and maybe if you, I guess I feel like you'd not have a watch and then the Ring would make sense. Like I don't know why I would want unless the Ring improves some kind of like gestures or something else If it was doing something like that.

1:03:27 - Andy Ihnatko
It might make sense. That would be a big deal for. Apple, I think, to be able to have input gestures on an iPhone by doing a tap the Samsung Ring does that where you can use it as a trigger for a whole bunch of stuff. I think that would be really interesting if Apple did that.

1:03:39 - Jason Snell
Yeah, I think there's also just fundamentally a part of the audience that is not going to wear an Apple Watch, right, that's true. And if the health app matters to you and having a health thing we've talked about, like could they make a fitness band, that seems to be much more likely to cannibalize an Apple Watch. But if they could make a ring they've talked about putting sensors in AirPods as well I feel like if there are other devices Apple could make that would reach a segment of the audience that they can't find, they can't reach those people because they're just never going to wear an Apple Watch. If those people exist and they would have to do the market research, having a ring would maybe let you reach them because it's just way lower profile and they're still going to be able to do health data and you can wear it at night, presumably, and they can maybe do some of the same sleep apnea detection and all of that other stuff. That's there. And, yes, I think also there's an additive potential quality there, where there's only so much sensor space on the back of the Apple Watch, so having the ability to maybe have it be an extra data point, I think there's something.

I think this is one of those products that Apple absolutely could do, and I think that it's an interesting question about why they haven't done it. And is it because they just want to be all focused on Apple Watch? Is it because, as a company, they know that they can really only make 15 products, 20 products, and this is too many? Because I was? I feel this way about the. The meta ray-bans, too, is like that sounds like a next generation, uh, companion to or alternative to airpods. But they would have to go down that path and you know it's a lot of time and people and money and all those things. And they may look at it and say, well, I'd rather just do airpods and apple watch and leave those on the table because, while they're interesting, they're not. They don't meet the whatever threshold apple has set, which is very easy.

1:05:24 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, exactly also. Yeah, I mean app, uh, uh, I don't think. Yeah, I think you're right, I don't think it would be cannibalizing. Also, when we were talking about AI just a moment ago, they have to do AI. They have to, whatever they felt about it before. The events of the past three or four years have said that they have to do this. They're going to remain competitive. But, russ, there's no market for fitness rings right now. That says that they have to enter this market. However, I do think that it's a really wonderful fit for them, apple.

Culturally, I'm sure they regard the Apple Watch again as a tech product, as a product line, as a source of income, but I think everybody will agree with me that every time you hear Apple talk about health, they really talk about it like it's a holy calling, and if they figure out a way to have a new health device in the market in their lineup that would allow people who are, as you said, Jason, not into buying a watch to get on the Apple Health wagon, I think they would do that. Also. I'm just excited to see what Apple would do just as a physical design object, as something that presents itself strictly as a piece of jewelry. There's no display, there's no LED, there's no nothing. The packaging of this, of what would an Apple ring look like? And that really gets me interested.

1:06:45 - Leo Laporte
Solid gold for $20,000. That's how they're going to do it.

1:06:52 - Jason Snell
Rings are cheaper than gold watches for $20,000. That's how they're going to do it. Well, rings are cheaper than gold watches Okay, okay, $5,000 then. If Johnny Ive were there, he'd be like now. Let's talk about how many diamonds will be on the edition version of this ring.

1:07:07 - Leo Laporte
So New York Times did Apple. This is Kevin Roos writing just kill social apps, some app makers. He found one Worry, I found one. One tech bro says yes, A subtle change to iPhone's contact sharing permissions could make it hard for them to get the fast growth they need to compete. What was the change first?

1:07:35 - Alex Lindsay
of all, you can now select if you choose to share your contacts, which I haven't done for I don't know six or seven years.

1:07:44 - Leo Laporte
When you share your contacts, you're doxing your friends.

1:07:47 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, like I do not. It's true, I do not do that. As soon as I get to the app and it says would you like to share contacts, I'm like no no, I do not want to do.

1:07:53 - Andy Ihnatko
Is there a hell of a version of the spot?

1:07:55 - Leo Laporte
yeah, yeah, exactly, will not stop asking me, tiktok will not stop asking me. I know why they want. Now it's not a binary thing anymore.

1:08:01 - Jason Snell
This is what's being complained about in this very time. It's actually really good you can yeah, it's not binary you can actually say well, okay, this is. This app is for X and therefore it should know about these four people and I'll let it know about them and that's it. And before you had to say yes or no completely.

1:08:18 - Alex Lindsay
It's iOS 18. Now it's less gross, you know, like it's just less.

1:08:23 - Leo Laporte
It's super gross and Nikita Beer, a startup founder and advisor who has created and sold several viral apps aimed at young people called the ios changes. This is the new york times again quote the end of the world and said they could render a new new friend bait social apps dead on arrival. Yeah, we've decided.

1:08:45 - Alex Lindsay
Whoever you are, nikita, we've decided we've decided that social apps are so good for everybody, you know so why?

1:08:49 - Leo Laporte
you know how am I supposed to steal your contact information?

1:08:54 - Jason Snell
That's. The funny thing is that Kevin Roos seems to take him a little more. I mean, he says it's a little hyperbolic, but he's like here's an example of this thing that's going on and the guy himself, I think, has got a pretty good attitude. He's like oh, they closed the door on this grift so I'll go on to the next one, right?

1:09:14 - Andy Ihnatko
it's basically like he knows that.

1:09:16 - Jason Snell
He knows it's like oh, this was a hole that apple left there way too long and we we can make money on it, and now they've closed it up, so we'll move on to the next one. He says that in the article. He's like I guess I'll go start something else. I think that the I think that the point of that article that's interesting that more than this hyperbolic like Apple has murdered social media by giving users the ability to not share their entire contact list with apps.

1:09:40 - Leo Laporte
We should point out that probably Kevin Roos did not write the headline.

1:09:44 - Jason Snell
No, but I think the article is maybe worse than the headline, honestly, because he's so credulous to this one dude. But the bigger point, which I think is a fair one, is Apple is so big and so powerful, especially when it comes to the iPhone, that any policy decision it makes any feature decision it makes will change, the world will change markets, will break businesses and potentially make new businesses, and so this is a great example where, on one level, it's just logical, right.

It's literally like we did this for photos, we did this for files. It's a new security measure where we're removing the data sharing from the app itself and instead it calls a different process. This is how it works technically, and then in that process the user can choose what they want to pass on to the app, where before the app would just ask the system and get a permission yes or no. It's a better system. It's more flexible. It means that some apps that would have been told no will now get some data that they didn't get before, but it also means that some apps that used to get all your data are not going to get all that data now. Anyway, a perfectly reasonable, consistent, privacy-focused, user empowerment-focused feature that's in line with what features they've been rolling out the last few years doesn't change the fact that there is a class of business that will be probably wrecked by this, and that's just. I mean you can't on Six Colors.

I to a criticism of the new york times story by nick here, who writes the great pixel nb blog and basically what I said is apple so big, it's like godzilla. Godzilla doesn't always want to destroy tokyo, right, sometimes godzilla just is out for a walk, he's out for a stroll, he wants to get some fresh air. He's got big feet, but his feet are so big that things are going to get crushed your car, your shop, it's going to get the glass broken out of the windows because he like straight his foot a little bit. That's Apple Like Apple. This is the reality. It's not the Apple that we all kind of grew up knowing about. Like, every decision Apple makes, good or bad or indifferent, has huge potential to affect other people's lives 100%.

1:11:57 - Andy Ihnatko
That's why I mean remember that Apple got into a huge controversy last year when they were indicating that, hey, we're putting this great new feature into Safari that our customers really, really want and been asking for, and so basically it means that, people, we're going to make sure that you don't see ads that you don't want to see, that you're not going to be tracked in any way, that you don't want to be tracked, and a lot of hands had to be raised by saying that maybe they want that, but that's how a lot of that content that they want gets paid for, and so please don't make it harder for us to publish. I mean, they had a point, but if the most popular mobile platform in the United States is suddenly not going to be monetizable through the web, that creates a problem and that should be part of Apple's decision matrix.

1:12:42 - Leo Laporte
I'll tell you what the end of the world is A newspaper that purports to be the nation's news record.

1:12:49 - Andy Ihnatko
International newspaper of record.

1:12:51 - Leo Laporte
yes, the nation's news record, international newspaper of record yes, yes, sub, you know, becomes the link bait headline like that. And then, frankly, they've been doing it more and more. It's just sad. I guess it's the state of the world that they need money. But uh, welcome to the welcome to the world. I remember telling my mom don't use those uh greeting card apps, because you have to give your all your addresses to them and then they just sell them on.

1:13:14 - Jason Snell
That's the most offensive thing about that whole story and the headline is really. It shows a deeply misplaced focus. That, I think, is their job is is to serve the startups and the economy of technology and not the users of technology.

1:13:42 - Leo Laporte
As long as I've been doing tech journalism, there have been people doing that.

1:13:46 - Jason Snell
Right, the hype, the hype squad and it happens. It happens and maybe it's because I came up through the kind of consumer magazine side instead of the b2b or something like tech crunch. But like I think it's deeply disturbing when an article says I am, you know, this is dangerous because this dude can't get funding for his latest app because apple is trying to protect your privacy and the content of your contacts.

1:14:15 - Leo Laporte
It's so bizarre. Did a little research, went to linkedin and found nikita beer's first app, which was the app for teenagers. That wouldn't even let you use it until you gave your entire address book to the app maker. Yeah, that, that tells you something that's called and that's worse than a growth hack.

1:14:33 - Alex Lindsay
That's disgusting and again it's apple, continuing like they're just going to keep on turning the dial yeah, every update is like hey, a little bit, a little bit, a little bit more closed, because if they did it all at one time then we'd have sec or ftc or whatever. But if you just keep on, just because, because and when Apple takes something on, a lot of times it's stuff that's pretty obvious like this, this is a very obvious that, that it's gross and we would love to and and it is. I thought it was weird that it asked for all or nothing for a long time.

1:15:05 - Leo Laporte
By the way, android still does. Yeah, android does not have the granular weird choice, granular, not having granular choice.

1:15:12 - Alex Lindsay
And again, I I don't share it with anyone. I'm like, I'm just using the app, like I don't. If someone finds me, that's fine, but I'm using the app.

1:15:19 - Leo Laporte
I'm not trying to like share it with my friends typically yeah, facebook got in trouble for ingesting people's contact lists, you know, without telling them. It's clearly a privacy violation. And I bet you just like me have some names in your address book of people who rightly want to preserve their privacy and don't want their personal email and phone number given out. So I never, ever, say yes to that ever.

1:15:45 - Andy Ihnatko
And that's. Jason made a great point that, like I'm now sort of programmed at this point to not even like I don't even look at that notice, point to not even like I don't even look at that notice, I just tap the no, you don't have access to my contacts Whereas there could be a subset of people that I would give them access to if it were to help me out, if it were to help them out, and so if it makes me even consider giving some contact access to an app, that's a win for the app and it's I mean, it's, it's their responsibility, the makers of these apps, to change with the weather. Okay, it's not, you can't, you can't, you can't tell the earth to stop raining, you have to figure out how to waterproof your stuff, and so, yeah, I mean it's, it's, it's worth talking about that. Apple makes decisions that sometimes has an effect that are hard for some people to handle, but when it's an industry, and particularly when they're doing stuff that's really, really nasty, it's really hard to feel sympathy.

1:16:40 - Leo Laporte
What was that? Remember that contactless solution that would ask if their friends moved. It would automatically update the contact. It was Plugue or something, something with a P, yeah, but it famously spammed. If you gave it your address list, it would then send an email to every single person saying hey, leo just joined plug. Wouldn't you like to join plug? This has been going on forever. I'm surprised apple took so long to do this. So what does it look like? I haven't. Is it an 18 one?

1:17:13 - Jason Snell
yeah, it's, it's very much it's an 18.

It's very much what you saw with something like photo sharing before yeah the idea that there there is an out of process thing that comes up, so the app should be updated to to use this new api that says, uh, give me the contact picker. And then the contact picker appears, the. The app can't see it. And then you've got some choices. You can choose, like show it everything, you can still do that, show it nothing. Or you can actually say here are the ones I want to share, and then you put them in the pile and then the app sees what you've chosen to share Instead of all or nothing. You have granular control over that and because it's happening in an outside process, the app itself doesn't see anything. So it's just the same as saying I would like to see your whole photo library and you're like, oh hell, no, because they could take all your photos if they wanted to. At that point Any app could do that. What you say is no, here's the photo you want, and you hand it one photo and it takes that photo.

1:18:11 - Leo Laporte
So same for contacts, same thing I mean, I guess Kevin Roos and Nikita Beer's objection is oh, there's a lot of work to go through all contacts and figure out who's okay.

1:18:22 - Jason Snell
Yeah, we actually have to build a real service Most people probably just say no, yeah, right, right, and I do think that part of what is motivating Kevin Roos with this article is the idea that Apple can make decisions that affect everybody, like we've been saying. But I think, yeah, behind the scenes, what's happening here is two things. One is it's a gotcha. It's like aha, see all the EU stuff and the US Justice Department saying that Apple is out there doing stuff that's sneaky. Here's another sneaky thing they're doing, and I think the problem is sometimes apple does things that are self-serving. Uh, sometimes they do things that are truly about user choice and privacy.

1:19:01 - Leo Laporte
A lot of times it's a little bit of both and you'd think that government regulators would be on your side. But remember the eu uh told google that they couldn't do their privacy-preserving browser changes because it would disadvantage advertisers.

Sometimes they're looking out for the advertisers too, I agree with you I think that's a really important thing for people to keep in the back of their mind, Jason, that some tech journalists are representing the tech industry and some tech journalists are representing consumers. And we have always and I know everybody on this panel and everybody on all of our shows have said we work for consumers, we don't work for the tech industry. And sometimes that bugs people. People come to this show and say hey, you said something bad about Apple, what's wrong with you? And I say it's not a fan boy show, we're trying to do some journalism here.

1:19:51 - Jason Snell
There's this idea that we're on the team, and you see this sometimes in the disconnect that happens between executives and journalists where they're like.

1:19:56 - Alex Lindsay
I thought we were on the same team, the technology team.

1:19:59 - Jason Snell
And it's like no, no, no, no, no. I'm on the team with my audience, which is people who use your technology. We represent consumers, not you. And again, something like TechCrunch crunch it is sort of about that and that's a business publication. But the new york times, like I, I just I'm really disappointed in that story because it shows that the loyalty there seems to be uh to these kind of in this case, gross uh set of apps and companies that are start startups and oh, no, startups who will speak for the tech bros, and it's like no, no, they're gross, they're doing bad stuff. Apple, close the door. This should be. I'm not saying, hey, new York Times, write nice things about Apple. I'm saying, if you're going to write about this, you should be responsible and say this is a disgusting thing. That is a door that has been closed by Apple and it has fallout, it has ramifications, but like, let us not have a drop of sympathy for this guy.

1:20:52 - Andy Ihnatko
When do you? When do they write about, when does anybody write about the groups that you should have sympathy for, like when Apple suddenly makes an makes an app store rule that says, oh, you can't update your app, any of your apps, until you support this API that we're rolling out. And when the makers of a 12 year old successful app says, but this API has no relevance to what we do and we're a two-person shop and it's going to take us two months of not enhancing our app for users. Like that's the sort of stuff. When Apple makes a unilateral decision that they're moving with big feet. That's the sort of stuff you should be.

1:21:25 - Leo Laporte
We talked last week about Halide not being able to get the app store because they wanted camera permissions. Why do you want those? You better explain that. So look, I think we're very fair both to Apple, but we don't represent Apple here. We represent users who love Apple, who love Apple products Except for you, andy. You hate Apple products, but everybody else loves Apple products.

1:21:48 - Andy Ihnatko
Except for you, Leo. The only Apple product I hate is the solid gold Apple watch.

1:21:52 - Jason Snell
Other than that, I have criticisms and I'm willing to let them live, Of course I mean this is what I always said when they'd be like oh, you're the editor of Macworld, you must, you have to do all this and it's like you know what my audience are people who love Apple stuff in general and have devoted their lives to buying Apple stuff and I care about them and I want them to buy like the right stuff and use the right stuff. But my job is to defend them and to look out for their interests and say this is a good thing Apple did, this is a bad thing Apple did. Through that lens, my job is not to prop up Apple's stock price or make Apple executives feel good Like it's to fight for the. I fight for the user.

1:22:35 - Andy Ihnatko
I'm basically Tron is what I'm saying. Yeah, can I? Can? I just say that, after after a particularly egregiously bad conversation with a briefing with a company I actually like made a sign that I had on my bulletin board, my office, for a good couple of weeks, which is it is not my job to be useful to a really really, really high valued corporation.

1:22:50 - Leo Laporte
Exactly, I remember that sign, andy. I didn't not remember that. I alluded to that in the conversation, but it's like, yeah, I remember that sign well. So props to apple. They did the right thing with the contact list. I wish they'd done it 10 years ago, but they did the right thing. And, uh, and you need and remember folks, when you're giving over your contacts to a third party, you're doxing your friends' contacts, so stop it. Apple, of course, has to pay Ireland $13 billion in tax. The EU said no, no, that was an unfair tax break. So they lost that one, but they did win one in Cupertino. So you know, you win a few. I don't think it was $13 billion tax break in Cupertino, but in Cupertino, let me see, I have the story here they get to keep some of the money they've already done.

1:23:38 - Jason Snell
But the state of California basically said not all the tax money, the sales tax money collected in California goes to the city of Cupertino.

1:23:45 - Leo Laporte
There's going to be a new cash regime, which seems, frankly, to be fair. I mean, I like Cupertino, but why should they get all the tax? Yeah, exactly?

1:23:53 - Jason Snell
Well, the answer is they've used Apple money to balance their budget for a long time and they're like, geez, we're going to be in trouble here. So they're going to keep some of the money that was in an escrow account, but they are going to have to recalibrate their expectations, and it sounds like they had a sweetheart deal with Apple, too, where they were going to kick some percentage of the of the revenue that they got from Apple.

1:24:14 - Leo Laporte
So here's the. This is kind of I mean, this is almost shocking. So any sale in California was attributed to Cupertino. All the other counties and jurisdictions lost out on the sales tax. There is an advantage because Cupertino's state sales tax was only seven and a quarter percent, which is lower than, say, san Francisco, which is over 8%. And there's an advantage to Apple because 1% of it is kicked back. No, 1% goes to Cupertino and then Cupertino passes a third of that back to Apple. How was that ever legal, I don't know. The state finally investigated it and, uh, the ruling is cupertino can keep the tax income it got from apple from the point when the state's investigation began. But starting next year, the state's gonna implement a new system. So if you buy your mac in san francisco, you'll pay the sales tax to san francisco, not cupertino, which kind of makes sense, am I right? Is that it's sales tax you're talking about?

1:25:17 - Jason Snell
yeah, it's crazy.

1:25:19 - Leo Laporte
Yes, but that's kind of what's going on in ireland, right. Every sale, global sale, uh, or every eu sale, I guess. Uh, apple made went to the entity in ireland and ireland had Well, you know, we're going to, we want you in Ireland, so we won't tax you. And the EU said wait a minute. We should point out none of these shenanigans are illegal, so Apple's not breaking the law. But maybe legislators might want to consider closing some of those little posts.

1:25:50 - Andy Ihnatko
I'm just saying yeah, okay, I mean, I mean, mean, you know, I guess you can't blame apple for taking every advantage of the tax laws, as they say there's a couple of famous, like boilerplate lines from from google, from from apple, one of which is that apple, apple, complies with the local rules, local laws of every country that it operates in, and the other one is Apple pays all the taxes that it is required to pay.

1:26:18 - Jason Snell
Yes, my tax attorney, apple's, one of the biggest taxpayers in the world is another one they use because they pay a lot of money. They pay a lot of money, yeah.

1:26:27 - Alex Lindsay
Once you start making money, you have a tendency to want to hire someone to find all the legal means that you can have. Sure, that advise you. Maybe you should give some money away or buy something at the end of the year, or all those things. Yeah, we all do that. This is just at scale.

1:26:42 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's a big scale, you will remember.

Jason Snell. The KNBR ads for Stephen Moskowitz, a tax attorney. That's right. For many years I had Steven as my tax attorney and he would always say Leo, don't pay a penny more than you have to or a penny less than you're legally required to, and then he'd pull all the strings he could. The problem is, if you're a normal working stiff, none of these breaks are available to you. I can't go to the city of Cupertino and say I would like you to be my locus for all my sales tax in the state of California, unless you're big enough to have Leo. Have you tried? Have you asked? I actually haven't, so maybe I need to go there.

1:27:30 - Andy Ihnatko
Stop by town hall and just ask. Hey, I actually haven't, so maybe I need to go there. Stop by Town Hall and just ask hey, who do I see?

1:27:37 - Leo Laporte
about who do I see? And, by the way, can I get a third of that back, would you?

1:27:40 - Andy Ihnatko
mind. I got an idea I'd like to float by, but we have to turn that camera off.

1:27:47 - Leo Laporte
Let me put it this way you keep two thirds.

1:27:54 - Alex Lindsay
All right, I'm sorry, it's just hard, hard. It's hard to believe that this, I mean there's. The thing is, this isn't I mean this is. It's similar to things like if you shoot in georgia or you shoot in new mexico, there's a huge right tax incentives on every film you see.

1:28:05 - Leo Laporte
So you know the georgia beach state.

1:28:09 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, yeah, exactly all of that stuff is all part of this is right. This is a the same as that, just done for a corporation and not a film studio.

1:28:16 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I mean really they shot wolves in toronto, vancouver and atlanta. Yeah, by the way, that's a pretty good. Wolves is a good movie. Apple, I think, really took a bath on it. I'm not sure I know. Napoleon cost him a bunch of money and supposedly apple is now backing off on the big budget. Uh, films you know. But the brad pitt george clooney vehicle was was I enjoyed it.

1:28:41 - Alex Lindsay
I finally got through the first 30 minutes. I just just started.

1:28:43 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, me too this is what's changed. You used to go to a movie theater and you'd watch the whole movie, right, exactly, you watch it in chapters.

1:28:52 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, like I go. Well, my wife wanted to see it last night and I was like I can watch the first 30 minutes. Like it's too late. It's too late, like I'm too late.

1:29:01 - Leo Laporte
I'm the same way. It's past 930. I can't.

1:29:03 - Alex Lindsay
Am I bedtime? I have a show. Well, the thing is is we're trained now because of all these series, like if, right, if I see, when I see feature films, I have to say it's very hard. Like I go, oh, that's a commitment, that's a, that's a two-hour, like I'll watch, but but. But over the weekend I watched three. My son and my wife and I watched three of the slow horses together because we were a little behind on season four and we just couldn't stop.

1:29:34 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, we're saving it so we can binge it. Yeah, we're saving it until it's over and then we'll binge it. It's so good. Gary Oldman is amazing, even if he is somewhat flatulent so good.

1:29:47 - Jason Snell
As scripted.

1:29:48 - Andy Ihnatko
As scripted. Is there a special?

1:29:51 - Jason Snell
category for that Not reflecting on the craft services table.

1:29:56 - Alex Lindsay
The insults are just so good.

1:29:58 - Jason Snell
Oh he's so funny.

1:30:01 - Leo Laporte
Oh my God, he's brilliant. You're watching the media critics at MacBreak Weekly. We don't work for the movie industry, we work for you, the movie consumer. That's right exactly. Jason snell from sixcolorscom, Alex lindsey from office hoursglobal and, of course, from gbh.

1:30:23 - Andy Ihnatko
You notice I dropped the w.

1:30:23 - Leo Laporte
There's gbh in boston they did too, mr andy and ako. When I worked in radio at wybc, it always pissed me off that the first letter was three syllables, yeah, and then the next three letters were three one each it's like w there's a lot to say even in text.

1:30:40 - Andy Ihnatko
That's a 25 reduction in bandwidth necessary to communicate the call letters of the station yeah, very forward.

1:30:46 - Leo Laporte
And we know it's w, because everybody's w west of the east of the mississippi. We just know it, so you don't have to, it's superfluous yep, and what's it?

1:30:56 - Andy Ihnatko
you remind me of the old joke about you know urls. That www is the only, as it is the is the only acronym that is much, much, much longer to pronounce than words.

1:31:06 - Leo Laporte
That's replacing whose idea was that actually? Tim berners-lee said very famously that he never expected anybody to type in urls those are for machines and he just assumed that, uh, the computer would avoid all that http colon slash, slash, crapola. I remember long fights, long battles at tech tv. First I got him to stop saying http colon slash, slash. Then I, then I was successful enough, I got him to stop saying www. That was not dot, don't forget the dot. Uh, we were mentioning the se4. This, according to rumors, will be the first iphone with apple's own 5G modem. Is that good or bad?

1:31:53 - Jason Snell
We don't know, so it's untested, so it may or may not be good. It is rumored to have much better effects on battery life, that it's a typical Apple Silicon kind of like really efficient modem that is going to be, you know, using their chip efficiency, their power efficiency. But the issue is always that Qualcomm has had experience all over the world in all sorts of different cellular network situations and Apple, although they've been at it, and then before that Intel was at it for many years has not been out in the field where it gets really ugly. So who knows how it's going to behave in those situations?

1:32:33 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, in addition, like the, there are two advantages to it that you didn't point out that I was going to mention, one of them being it'll, it'll, it'll honk off Qualcomm, which will please Apple, because they've been in lawsuits about how much Apple owes Qualcomm for licensing. But also it'll help them out, in addition to addition to power, if they can integrate that elsewhere into, maybe even to another package that they've got on the iPhone, that will help them in design for a whole bunch of stuff. In other words, put it on the SoC for the chip or something like that. Yeah, exactly, they could create an iPhone on a chip if they wanted to do Right, having it on their least expensive phone and perhaps not their greatest selling phone and their latest phone. That's probably a big advantage because, as Jason said, there's going to be a lot of this. There's. I think that, like for for a modem, getting it 99 working takes one percent of the engineering time. Getting it fully working takes 99% of the time you're working on it.

1:33:40 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, apple historically had trouble with its modems. In fact, they bought the Intel modem division in 2019 because their relationship with Qualcomm is somewhat tetchy. This is from 9to5Mac. In fact, qualcomm sued them over patents and so forth. So 9to5Mac sources say that the v59, that's, the se4, is equipped with a wireless modem designed by apple, codenamed centauri, will handle wi-fi, bluetooth, gps and 5g, which is a lot uh, and will have much better battery life you can see why apple wants to do this right. Sure.

1:34:21 - Jason Snell
Those are a lot of that stuff. Those networking, those are all from third parties right now and that if they can build their own, and they pay license fees as well.

1:34:28 - Leo Laporte
Right.

1:34:29 - Jason Snell
Yeah, and even if you are paying Qualcomm some patent fees and things like that the fact that they could do this, and then in the long run, I imagine that this is just going to be something they want to put in their chips and it allows them to miniaturize even further, because now you don't have to have a separate Bluetooth component. That's in the package but it's not from you, and you can see why they want to do this. It's not all just about getting out from under Qualcomm. It's about having the control and the ability to integrate and not have to have, like I think they have now. It's like bluetooth and wi-fi are from broadcom and 5g is from qualcomm, and then apple's got its own stuff and like wouldn't it be nicer if they just had it all under?

1:35:08 - Alex Lindsay
you know one package that was from apple and you feel like apple, like at some point, just goes, wouldn't be nice. You just open it up and it's one big chip. It just does all the things, it ties all the components. And it's one big chip. It just does all the things, it ties all the components and there's not any little bits and pieces left.

1:35:21 - Leo Laporte
This has always been Apple's goal right To source, make everything.

1:35:26 - Alex Lindsay
Well, not only that, though. Everything it needs to.

1:35:28 - Leo Laporte
Everything it needs to.

1:35:29 - Alex Lindsay
And everything you know. Like any company, apple, you know, wants to commoditize anything that doesn't make them, that costs them money, and control anything that makes them money. Like that's what every company wants to do is commoditize anything that doesn't make them that cost the money and control anything that makes the money. Like that's what every company wants to do is commoditize what does what costs you money and and control what makes you money. And so apple's going to keep on looking at things that cost the money, that don't make the money, and figure out how to, you know, stick them into something it took apple a long time.

1:35:50 - Leo Laporte
I'm sitting in front of the 20, I'm sorry, the 1984 iMac which, by the way, is running load runner. In case you're curious, what a great game that was actually what. As soon as I started playing it on the Mac, I went I wonder if I could still. And yes, there's an iPhone load running, although it's got a lot of in-app purchase crap around it one.

1:36:10 - Andy Ihnatko
One thing, though, about if Apple.

1:36:11 - Leo Laporte
I was just gonna let me finish, I'm sorry, which is that inside this is a mosfet 80 what is it? 8205 chip 52, 8 what is it? But now I use forgotten designation. But they didn't make the chip. It took them a long time, going through a bunch of companies including power, pc and then intel, to finally be making their own chips. But here we are, 40, 50 years later and they are finally making their own chips, right, yeah, yeah, it's always been a goal, I think.

1:36:40 - Andy Ihnatko
And the other thing I wanted to point out is that we keep thinking, of course, about how this would affect iPhones, but I hope that this is part of a process that finally puts Macs, gives Macs a built-in wireless broadband so they can integrate that in. Yeah, I mean, it's like it's kind of I wouldn't call it instant there must be either institutional, cultural, idea problems or engineering problems that I can't guess at, because the idea of the Mac being the only device that Apple, the only computer that Apple makes, that cannot connect, connect to mobile broadband, especially when it's such an overwhelmingly popular option in the window side.

1:37:17 - Leo Laporte
Is it, though, because microsoft used to do it and they took it out of all of their machines, um, and I think that they thought you know people just gonna hot spot to their phone. By the way, errata portion this is not a 6502, obviously it's a motorola 68 000 and I'm an idiot and it's. Did I call it an imac? Really, it's not an imac, it's a mac, it's the original mac.

1:37:40 - Andy Ihnatko
Sorry, really, it's not an iMac, it's a Mac. It's the original Mac. That's why I thought you were moving to a different story. I'm a moron. I don't know what I'm, it's okay.

1:37:49 - Jason Snell
It's all. It all happens in there. I'm having a senior moment. Yeah, I don't know. I will say I get when people always say, but you can just tether, you can just use a hotspot, and it's like, okay, tethering is fussy, it's not as reliable, it drains the battery on two devices at once. There are lots of reasons why I would love the option of just connecting directly from my Mac and leaving my poor iPhone alone. And I don't know.

Like Andy said, I suspect it's a confluence of things. I suspect it's that they don't want to build a cellular chip in, have a separate set of cellular SKUs for every Mac laptop they sell, make another deal with Qualcomm, make another deal with Qualcomm. They have OS issues that they've been slowly working on but, like macOS was never built to analyze every packet, every data request and see where it was going, whereas iOS, from day one, you could control what went over wifi and what went over cellular, macos has never had that innately built in. They have been slowly kind of adding controls to do all of that stuff, and so right now you're potentially even now dangerous, where you could have your, your mac, being like, oh, I'm gonna back up to backblaze right now and you're like no, you're on the cellular network, don't do it. But the mac? You know that the software might not know and they, they might be ignorant of that. So there are lots. I think it's all of those reasons plus some cultural reasons.

The max never had it. So why should we start now? You, there are alternatives. But that said, you know the ipad had it from day one. Yeah, and it's good and it's not for everybody, but it's an for 130 extra, like I, I once I went to the cellular, I was skeptical. Once I got a cellular ipad for the first time, it's like forget it.

1:39:36 - Leo Laporte
I'm never going back. I'm never going back. It's expensive because it's $10 each or whatever each time I add it. But every one of my iPads has cellular. By the way, I want to correct myself because Microsoft, which for a while did not put a 5G chip in, has put it in the Surface Pro 9. So Lenovo has it, the HP, Dragonfly has it. There's quite a few, as you said, Andy, quite a few Windows laptops with 5G built in. Yeah, and yeah, I would love to see it in a Mac. I guess Anybody who I don't leave the house anymore, but anybody who does leave the house that would be a nice feature.

1:40:11 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, I mean it sounds so simple, particularly because Apple's done so much wonderful work in making it trivially easy to share a broadband connection from an iPhone but A. What if you don't have an iPhone but B? That's not as easy as just. This is something that my MacBook knows how to do. It can do on its own and it just plain happens. So nice.

1:40:32 - Leo Laporte
You're watching MacBreak Weekly Andy Anako. Good looking, andy Anako with his red socks. Are the red socks in the playoffs? No, very much not.

1:40:41 - Andy Ihnatko
Are the Red Sox in the playoffs? No.

1:40:42 - Leo Laporte
Very much not. Are the White Sox in the playoffs?

1:40:43 - Andy Ihnatko
Definitely no A kind of playoff that they don't want to be in.

1:40:48 - Leo Laporte
How low can you go? Jason Snell, who is a real baseball fan. I have not watched a single postseason game this year it's been good.

1:40:54 - Jason Snell
This year it's actually been a really fun set of games. Yeah, absolutely so where?

1:40:58 - Leo Laporte
do we stand now?

1:41:00 - Jason Snell
I think everybody's tied with everybody else more or less Good.

1:41:04 - Leo Laporte
That's good. That's what you want. Sixcolorscom, which has precious little baseball content but is a lot of good Mac stuff in there. Really good, yes, and of course officehoursglobal's Alex Lindsay. What's going on in Office Hours today?

1:41:21 - Alex Lindsay
Yesterday we were talking about AI generation of actual geometry so you can actually type in what you want. This is a program called Meshiai, our website called Meshiai, and I was able to take something from like a little gnome from mid-journey and take them into. You know, render that out, take it in there and say build a 3D model. And it builds a geometry, export that as USDZ and bring it into Keynote. You know so. You know so. You're really starting to see the next generation of AI.

1:41:53 - Leo Laporte
This is what I want to ask you about Is this Depth Pro, the new Apple AI model?

1:41:57 - Alex Lindsay
No, no, no, this isn't Depth, depth Pro. That Apple's doing is really looking at a 2D image and calculating the 3D information that's in that image. Oh, that's wild, yeah, and so, and you know, google's been doing this for a while, so Google's going to be like uh wait a minute, you know. So Google's been doing this for a long time. People have done different versions of this. This is probably the most advanced one that has been made, I believe, open source. So Apple's put this out and given it to everybody. That's.

1:42:25 - Leo Laporte
the big difference is that Apple just said yeah, and look at this Link Beatty headline Depth Pro Sharp Monocular Metric Depth in Less Than a Second. Come on, guys, that might be the title of the show, though I like it.

1:42:40 - Alex Lindsay
So they they take a 2d picture and project it into a 3d space well, they're calculating, they're using that, the imagery in that, in that um, in the, in the image, they are figuring out what, what is where, how far away is something.

So the depth of what you're seeing are those maps of what's in front of what, um, what is clearly way in front. And so, being able to, if you're converting this, for instance, for AR, if you're converting it for a headset, if you're converting it, or if you want to calculate blur, so depth blur is one of those things that you might want to do. Or if you want to calculate compositing, so you want to figure out what so like if you think about you open up any photo on in photos and you see your friend and you just push on it on on your phone and it'll immediately make it a sticker. It's calculating what's in front of the other. It's it's not only calculating the edge, but it's calculating what's in front. Now, sometimes that's being helped because Apple had a depth map, you know they, they, they have the camera but it will do it even on images that don't have that depth map.

It's figuring out and some of that's edge detection, but what they're showing here is it can also be depth perception. You're calculating the depth of what's going on.

1:43:47 - Jason Snell
I imagine this is what they're using in Vision OS 2. Because this is a feature in Vision OS 2 where you can take literally any photo and press the button and it turns it into a 3D photo and the results are shockingly good. They're not perfect and I think that if you've got two cameras or if you've got LiDAR or something like that so that you get more data, it's probably better for certain weird cases, but honestly, I'd say nine times out of 10, what you get is perfect. Like to the point where I'm surprised that they said you can take spatial photos in ios 16 or on ios 18, on iphone 16, because I thought why like? Why, why even try? Like you don't need to take a spatial photo because apple will, and I appreciate, like it's real, based on real data, but like it's funny that we've gotten to the point where the fake spatial photo is so good. I don't know if you really even need the real one. Honestly, it's amazing.

1:44:41 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, I mean, I do think that there are. There are definitely things, things when things are moving, when things are. There's a bunch of idiosyncrasies on the phone be able to grab things that it does a lot better if it has, if it has two individual images. But you're right that it for, I think, for the average um photo.

1:44:57 - Jason Snell
I think a lot of this stuff is is pretty straightforward but yeah, it's, it's um, it's, it's come a long way I took a scan doing this work for a long time yeah I took a scan from a photo from the 70s right and press the button on it and like, okay, it's a 3d photo of my wife when she was like six with her grandfather, who was, like you know, in his 80s, and well, the interesting they're right there.

1:45:19 - Alex Lindsay
It's amazing. I don't know if you've watched any of these things that are happening now with the, where they're taking AI and they're going back and you know, getting Mary of Scots or the you know different pictures and they're making them like, look like they're looking around and talking.

1:45:35 - Jason Snell
Right, that's creepy as hell. Some of that old archival stuff is cool, though, because a lot of those old films the frame rates were non-standard and sometimes they were hand cranked so they fix it.

1:45:44 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, but you're, you're taking you're taking actual like photos of people.

1:45:47 - Jason Snell
Mona lisa, they're taking the mona lisa and yeah, that's a little bit creepy, but I do really like the uh the uh, the ai scaling of, like old film that is the wrong frame rate or an inconsistent frame rate, and and and it's a little like what peter jackson did with uh, they shall not grow old. Right the world one documentary where you make it feel, once you take it out of that, like it's everybody's moving a little too fast and everything's a little too weird.

And you, you use your ai processing to slow it down so it feels like it's a standard 24 frames per second. And you clean it up and you maybe you have the auto kind of auto color go to it and suddenly that thing that seemed like it was a cartoon from uh, impossibly old time now feels like it's it gets.

1:46:29 - Andy Ihnatko
It gets you emotionally engaged because there's something, there's a switch that kind of puts a barrier on recognizing the people in this old film clip as real people, because again they're jerking around and they're herky-jerky, movement and there's black and white, there's all this dust and grain. But every now and then when you see one of those early movies, a test movie from 1892 of just a snowball fight like behind, like the inventor's house, and all of a sudden it's high definition, so it's like and also you can see people's expressions more. It's in some appreciable form of color. It's like these are real human beings and when the real human beings are in in a dire situation, they're in war. It's like there's this. It engages your empathy in a way that a historical news're in war. It's like there's this.

1:47:19 - Leo Laporte
It engages your empathy in a way that a historical newsreel just absolutely can't I would show you a clip right now, but I don't want kaiser wilhelm to sue me on youtube. I can't take the he is taking.

1:47:28 - Jason Snell
I got really litigious. When he's not out shipping birds, he's uh the kaiser, is uh suing on you.

1:47:35 - Andy Ihnatko
You should check tech. Check tech meme.

1:47:36 - Leo Laporte
One of the top stories from 18 18 yeah, you know those, and actually just I just wanted to let you know, Jason, for those of us who did live in the 70s, it was in fact in 2d, so you really weren't missing.

1:47:49 - Jason Snell
It's not true. I I also lived in the 70s, it was.

1:47:51 - Andy Ihnatko
It was very much in 3d and also it was very color very smelly, very smelly and stinky truly everywhere, Jason I just lacked the patchouli everywhere, Jason, and I just like the fourth dimension of chemical enhancement that a lot of you, some of these people, have.

1:48:04 - Leo Laporte
Smell-O-Vision Too young. Hey, let's do a Vision Pro segment. I got a piece, I got one story. What do you see? What do you know? What do you see? It's now, it's time for Vision pro it's time to talk to vision pro we got there, I woke john ashley. Sorry, john, next time I'll. I'll poke you before I do that. Uh, apple has released a trailer. If you've ever wondered what it's like to drown in a submarine, you will find out on thursday.

Now you can experience Submerged the first Apple immersive video short film for Vision Pro.

1:48:44 - Andy Ihnatko
And if you're asking, are there a ooga sounds? There are a ooga sounds all through this trailer.

1:48:49 - Leo Laporte
A ooga, but are there? Sad trombone sounds.

1:48:55 - Alex Lindsay
This really plays to the 3D element, so I think that this makes a lot of sense. It's cramped. There's a lot of geometry that's going to be going into vanishing points. There's a lot of sounds that can be all around you. Yeah, there's a lot.

1:49:06 - Jason Snell
So the thing is we looked until we could find a cramped place to shoot our next immersive I mean, they maybe took immersive a little bit you'll be immersed all right, literally so immersed, you're submerged, yeah, so this is the director of uh, all quiet on the western front. German director.

1:49:26 - Alex Lindsay
That was a great movie that was a best picture nominee.

1:49:28 - Jason Snell
It's a great movie, right and uh, and so he's the director and and he's in uh, you know, german directors in submarines can't be bad uh, lots of, lots of great ones, and the idea that it's yeah, it's this submarine crew, so it's claustrophobic, which, Alex, is absolutely right. Like there's so many things that play for this. I think I saw somewhere that's 18 minutes long, which is great, like I. I heard short film and I was like so four, four minutes again, is it going to be another four minutes? It's going to be longer than that.

Good, and I and I can't wait to see this because I, as we've talked about here in the past, I think the immersive video has a lot of positive things, but the language, the grammar of cinema in a 2D or even 3D frame at 16 by nine ish or something like that, like we've learned that an ESPN sports centerenter highlight, cut of highlights, doesn't work in immersive. It doesn't work. There's a new grammar that you need to have, and so I'm wondering what, in a scripted, directed piece of immersive video, what this particular director decided to do, and Apple and I'm both excited and concerned to do, and Apple and I'm both excited and concerned, you know.

1:50:43 - Alex Lindsay
So the reason for that is that I have worked with lots of directors that have done immersive stuff for Oculus and everything else, and their batting average is zero. So, like like, literally nobody has pulled this off because the directors come from this old way of thinking.

1:50:56 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, you have to rethink everything.

1:50:59 - Alex Lindsay
You have to control what the person is looking at and you have to do this and you have to, and we have to cut and we have to guide the thing and it's like it's a different show.

1:51:06 - Leo Laporte
the different show. Are there people out there now who understand this, or is this just so brand new there are? They just ignore us.

1:51:12 - Alex Lindsay
So, so they, you know, like you know it is and it's been this way. I mean, I, I have friends that work on a lot of these things, and not on this one, but but on a lot of the ones in the past, and I've worked on a bunch of them and you know, we, uh, it doesn't, you're not letting they, don't let people just absorb, absorb what's happening. So it'll be interesting to see, and there were a couple of shots in the behind the scenes that I already went, that I already went.

1:51:35 - Leo Laporte
Ooh, yeah, you don't get to say if you hire Alex Lentz you don't get to say the acclaimed director of All Quiet on the Restaurant Front directed it, and I think Apple foolishly thinks that's important.

1:51:46 - Alex Lindsay
Well, and next week we'll talk about whether it worked or not. I think that the format is extremely exciting and I think people are going to really enjoy it when it gets, when it when they mature the trailer's the making of right.

It's as much how they did it. I mean, yeah, I mean the trailer's really making it, but the like the only. There's only been a handful of really compelling things that I've seen on the Apple Vision Pro from a video perspective. All of us talk about the Rhino shot. There's a Rhino shot where the Rhino comes right up to you and everybody backs up, you know, and um and so it is.

There are certain shots where it really proves it and I think when you look at the newest immersive trailer that apple put together, I think that they extended some more of the footage from the super bowl and they've got some other stuff there, the super bowl one. What it proved is what we all already know, which is under 20 feet. It's amazing and like elevated is a good example of over 20 feet. It's boring. This isn't worth doing. So elevated is I don't know how much they spent on that, but all of it was just pouring into the ground.

As far as I'm concerned, there's weird shots in the Super Bowl I where they're jostling it in between and I know that they're experimenting, but I would have experimented, looked at that and realized that that didn't work. Yeah, have experimented, looked at that and realized that that didn't work. So I'm kind of they have the opportunity to look at the footage before they put it in. It's not like it's live and I just feel like I I do.

I am concerned that Apple is not a producing enough content for the vision pro and B I mean, cause I think that there's a very valid I mean there's a, there's a valid market there, and B they, when they publish stuff, I don't, it just doesn't feel like they get it. And usually what that means is that you're talking to a bunch of people from Hollywood who have a bunch of opinions about the way we tell stories and and and they. You know, and I I only say this as someone who's been on those sets with them, with with cameras like this, and it's just, it's always like all of us are sitting there, just kind of like okay, yeah, but it's a great conversation.

1:53:42 - Andy Ihnatko
I mean, Jason brings up really the key point that what is the purpose, what is the function of these immersive movies? What kind of effect do you want to have on the viewer? Because free roam games is its own form of art, like I'm not going to see something like in Red Dead Redemption, I'm not going to see the widow, the ghost of this woman, unless I'm in the right place, unless I'm looking for it, and then when I hear something I have to turn to face it. So I am like engaged as the driver of that storyline, whereas but that's not been the concept of movie making it's all about giving my attention and giving, allowing myself to be emotionally manipulated and directed by a film and by a movie maker. So it's not so much.

So there's a reason why a set, a shot, has been set up in a certain way it's because they want you. They want you to engage with exactly this part of the frame. There's lots of stuff that's happening, but this is the thing they want you to engage with. So what does it become? If it's, by the way, there is, you have to. There's, there's going to be a moment between these two characters. That happens because you notice that there's a glance or there's a little bit of a touch that they don't want anybody else in that scene to see, but it's important for you as the viewer to see it. How in that kind of storytelling will they make sure that you're not looking oh, wow, look at these dials. Wow, can I, can I look at the behind the style, like, oh, wow.

1:55:10 - Alex Lindsay
Well, I mean, and it's a little less, it's a little bit more automatic. 180 degrees is a lot less than 360. And what I mean by that is that there's things, not everything's happening in front of you. It's a wide field of view. The real challenge we had is in 3D, we would or not 3D? But in 360, you had to go. Well, how do I get people to look behind us?

And one of the things that we've talked about was the fact that you may just not watch it once. You may watch it a narrative, the way you think of it in the past, but more of an experience. What we found so far, and why Apple has put out a lot of non-fictional stuff, is that experiences work really well in these environments and narratives more challenging, but there's also just being somewhere you know, like you're in the room, like one of the things that we did some tests on were on a stage play. So you have a stage play, except all I'm doing is I'm taking you and you're sitting in the perfect place. When they're sitting in the kitchen on the stage, you're sitting there with them while they're talking and you're just watching them talk back and forth and it's obvious who you're going to look at, because that's what they're doing there. The hard part is that when you start wanting to tell the story by moving the camera, by cutting fast, by doing those kinds of things, those are the things that don't tend to work very well in an immersive environment. And it will work okay at this frame rate too. As the resolution and the frame rate increases, the audience's appetite for cuts and movement goes down Like they just it's. You lose more and more of the audience because they, they can't. They get sick. You know anyone who has a sensitive inner ear will start to get really uncomfortable, and so so the thing is is that? But it's, it's, it's not, it's just a different experience. Like it may not be movie making the way we think it is. You know it may not. You know you may want to have a 16 by nine experience where you tell that story and maybe that's the like.

I look at 24 frames, a second at 16 by nine, or two, three, five or whatever is great for narrative films. It is not good for live. Like, live wants to be as many frames as I can push down that pipe at the highest resolution I can give you so that it just looks like glass, like that's what I want live to be. Um and and um and. But if I'm doing a film, 24 tells you, you know you can. You can absorb the heavy camera movement, you can absorb the jib shots, you can absorb all those things in a way that you can't as much when you start getting into higher frame rates and higher resolution, and so so it just really I think that you um. So I'm doing a concert. I may want to have it be 120 frames a second at 8K per eye. If I'm doing a film, I may want to go back to the older frame rates.

1:57:45 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, I mean, actually you make a good point. That hadn't really occurred to me before that it could be that the natural language of this kind of presentation is is more like a live theatrical presentation. Um, like when I? I mean I haven't talked about opera in a while, but when I go to a production at the Met I always have my binoculars with me and sometimes I'm following what's happening upstage between the two leads. Sometimes I'm looking at what the chorus is doing or what the actors are doing behind there, because I have the power to focus on what I want to focus on. And if the director of this production doesn't want me to see what these five people are doing at the bar at the back of this room, they would not put that bar there or they would direct those actors that, hey, just sit, drink your drinks, don't actually do any business.

1:58:37 - Leo Laporte
So I think there's a lot to learn. That's one of the things I hated about the Hamilton movie. Having seen the play was that they forced you to look at certain things A Vision Pro version of that, or any theatrical experience would be so much better.

1:58:52 - Alex Lindsay
And imagine having the camera five feet or ten feet from the front of the stage. Great seats, better seats than you're like. Great seats, yeah, better seats than you can buy, right, you know. So imagine it being above, where the pit sits, you know, or right at the back of the pit, and then an elevated you need to see the whole stage obviously, so as far back as you need for that but, but it would be a chair that would get in everybody's way.

If you were there Right, you were there right and having that thing and that would be. And again, it doesn't work at lower resolution. So when it starts to work is when you start getting into these 8k per eye, 12k per eye and if it had a klaxon, all the better, and it would really be exactly, exactly one more vision pro story.

1:59:33 - Leo Laporte
It's not kind of I don't know. It happened last week and I saw it on our mastodon and I wasn't sure what to say about it. Christian Selig's unofficial YouTube app for Vision Pro, which people really liked, juno pulled from the app store because Google complained saying it violated the API trademark policies, which it doesn't.

1:59:53 - Jason Snell
But I think Christian Selig has decided having fought it with Reddit all that time over his Reddit client, which was excellent that he decided it was a fun project for him to learn Vision Pro and he doesn't need the drama because I think he's right.

I think that YouTube is wrong and that it doesn't violate anything that YouTube says it does, and I think that he doesn't want to fight it anymore. And I think that he doesn't want to fight it anymore. And the fact is that if Apple is inclined to just do what YouTube wants here which I think it probably is there's a limit to what he can do to fight it. But it is a shame because that is an exemplary app for Vision OS and there aren't that many of them, and it's one of them For vision OS and there aren't that many of them and it's one of them. My Conspiracy theory is gonna be that Apple has been talking to YouTube about developing a vision Pro YouTube and that this is part of that right, which is not necessarily, not necessarily a quid pro quo, but like it's less look if, if Google told the Apple to pound sand.

I think maybe Apple would be more receptive to Christian Selig and saying we want to keep this in the Vision Pro app store. But if they have already been working out the deal with Google to get a YouTube app for Vision Pro on Vision Pro sometime soon, that it's in their best interest to just be like all right, they don't want this thing on here, we're going to kick it off, and so that's what I think maybe happened.

2:01:21 - Andy Ihnatko
Remember, the iPhone used to have a YouTube app that was pre-installed in it before.

2:01:26 - Jason Snell
Yeah, that Apple wrote and then Google built their own instead. So, and this is, you know, google's apps are kind of laggards on iOS, they're always sort of behind the times. But I do think that this is one of those examples where there's 3D content and spatial content on YouTube, and it would be, and that's why Juno was so good, because it gave you access to some of that, and it is a great video watching environment. So it makes a lot of sense for the YouTube app to be there and again, environment, so it makes a lot of sense for the youtube app to be there and again. That's my hope, anyway is that one of the reasons this happened is because there is hope that there's a real youtube app coming. Because all christian wasn't doing ad blocking, he wasn't trying to uh override the youtube, uh branding, he like it was really just a bunch of sort of browser extensions to make it make sense on vision pro. That's all it was, and they still they didn't want to listen, they just wanted it dead and that's our vision.

Pro segment now, you see, now you know, we're done talking the vision pro. Imagine, imagine that submarine. Yeah, the air horn submarine party submarine.

2:02:43 - Andy Ihnatko
This is. This is a different navy. This isn't the village people ymca navy. This is the us, this is the german.

2:02:49 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, there's so much more to talk about. We're're running out of time here, unfortunately, real quickly. I had a big decision to make yesterday. I have $7,000 hearing aids that I had purchased and was right at the end of the trial period where I could have turned them in. I went to the audiologist and I'm thinking if Apple had come out with this hearing aid software for the AirPods Pro 2, I would have been able to test it and compare it. But now I don't know, should I keep my hearing aids? And I decided to.

In the long run Wall Street Journal story the hearing aid revolution that wasn't over-the-counter. Hearing aids have high return rates and I think that's because with an audiologist you get a personal, you know somebody to talk to. They adjust it, you go in and use also more of a commitment. You've spent a lot more money and you have a lot more time to get the hearing aids. If you just go and buy something Jabra hearing aids over the counter I don't think technologically and by the way, my audiologist agreed with me that the over the counter hearing aids are worse technologically speaking, but I think there is something to be said for the human touch. So I won't be able. I kept the hearing aids so that I, for you, I kept the hearing aids so that I can compare them to the air pod. Do we know when the hearing aid capability is gonna come out? I guess they're waiting software updates.

2:04:09 - Jason Snell
They're not waiting for anything other than a software update. I think so. I think it should be available. That might be a 0.1 feature.

2:04:17 - Leo Laporte
That might actually be nice yeah, well, I'll give you, I'll give you an unbiased review. Um, I have to a bit of a bias, because the difference between 249 dollars and seven thousand dollars is not insignificant and and also, even if someone buys them for the purpose of gee, I think I'm losing my hearing a little bit.

2:04:40 - Andy Ihnatko
It'd be nice to see if that will work. Even if they don't get a miraculous improvement in their hearing, they've still got a pair of AirPods, so maybe they'll keep them just for that reason.

2:04:50 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's going to be very interesting to see. I have so many other things to talk about I'd love to bring up, but we got to get out of here because Steve Gibson he actually posted show notes yesterday. He's so anxious to do the show.

2:05:04 - Jason Snell
We'll be back next week, so you know it's not like we're yeah, we're just going to be anticipating the end of the month anyway, so why?

2:05:10 - Leo Laporte
not Okay.

2:05:11 - Jason Snell
good, We'll save the M1 Macs falling with dark horizontal lines on the screen Copy paste into the next tab in the spreadsheet.

2:05:19 - Leo Laporte
Just move it right on over, John Ashley, move it right on over. You're watching MacBreak Weekly and we're so glad you do. If you're not yet a member of the Club, one way you could support this show if you appreciate it. Notice we had one ad. That means this show costs us money if we don't get you to join the Club. How about that for guilting you seven bucks a month? Could that make all the difference? It does? It makes a huge difference, uh. And you get some benefits ad free versions of all the show. We don't have to show you ads because you paid us, which means we got your money, which is what we need to keep going. You also get access to the Club Twit Discord, the special events we put on in there. We've got a Coffee Geek episode coming up on the 18th Stacy's Book Club, on the 25th MiKah's Creative Corner, I think is next week.

There's a lot of stuff we do in the club. To make it more fun, I want to do some coding stuff. The problem is I'm so slow. It'll be like a 12-hour video. Can you handle that? Anyway, we'll do a test. Help us out, would you twit.tv/clubtwit. We really appreciate your support and to all the Club Twit members. Thank you, Thank you from the bottom of my heart. The money doesn't go into my pocket. It really goes in the pockets of these hosts, the people who put this show together, people like John Ashley. It is not cheap to do this. Staffing is the most expensive part of what we do and we want to keep our staff happy and well-employed, including all of our hosts. Time for our Picks of the Week. Speaking of our wonderful hosts, let's get Alex Lindsay's pick of the week.

2:06:57 - Alex Lindsay
I've got two picks. One is, of course, there's been a hurricane and some friends in office hours. Aaron Houselidge is part of Connect Carolina and, just if you're looking for somewhere that might make a difference, they're really building up connections for you know, basically these are wireless hubs, it's amazing how many people lost connectivity.

Yeah, not just power, but even you know, everything else cell phone service everything Exactly and trying to coordinate everybody for safety, for all the other things. So they're building these hubs that allow people to get connected, and so they're raising money for that, and I think it's a great cause to get connected and so they're raising money for that and I think it's a it's a great cause to look at. So if you're looking for somewhere to help that's more on the geek side that is a great place of helping first responders be able to get connected there. connectcarolina.org.

2:07:47 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's good.

2:07:48 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, and then, because it's it's actually not part of the prime days, but it is a sale week the Insta360 Link, which is what I consider probably the best webcam out there right now, is on sale. It's $179. Oh, wow, and so this is less than we used to pay for the Brio's. There's a new Insta360 Link 2, and I'm actually not that excited about it because it doesn't have so. This is the original one, um, and the difference between the two is that the the insta360 2 is 199. This is normally 249, or it used to be 299, um, and now it's 179, and it has a pan tilt, but it also has roll, which means that the camera can balance itself.

So it can, it can, it can basically level itself out, and that is not in the new one, and so I don't know how long this one's going to be around, given that it's on sale, but I think it's actually better than the one that's replacing it, or at least the one that's come second, and at 179. If you're looking for a good webcam, that's tiny. Leo's got one there. I have four of these, and so I may get a couple more because it's 179. Looking at you, yeah, but it's, uh, it is, and it can do. Follow, it can do this is amazing.

I love this and again, the quality is superb uh, this is what you can actually go through zoom. If it's connected to zoom, you go through zoom and pan and tilt it around. Uh, somebody else's camera, if they give you permission.

2:09:12 - Leo Laporte
So I put mine on a little uh tripod so I can get it on, you know, on at eye level on the screen instead of on top of the screen, although you could put it on top of the screen, yeah, but it is, it is a fantastic zoom and you can hang it upside down as well, so you can yes, you can reverse it and it's it is 4k or or 1080p, um, and it's got the software that controls it, um, probably the best in class, like color correction. Oh yeah, I love it.

2:09:37 - Alex Lindsay
Framing control you can save multiple positions. So, for instance, if you want to show your desk, and then you and then something else, you can save those positions and just hit the presets and that'll just knock it out, so and you make those keystrokes and so anyway, it's a great webcam If you're looking for one that's under 200.

2:09:57 - Leo Laporte
This is probably the best one there, so 179.99. Uh, you don't need the tripod bundle because it stands. It supports, you know, standard tripods. But, uh, you can get an additional tripod bundle for 20 bucks more.

2:10:06 - Alex Lindsay
Uh, insta360.com, it's the storeinsta360.com, and that's good input that you don't need the new version, the old one's fine the new version is less expensive and what the way that they say so, when the sale ends, this will go back to 249, and so this will be more expensive. This is the better version. I think what they thought was that, hey, we could sell more if it was less than 200. What do we take out of it to get it down to that price? And um, so they, they, they took out the gimbal or the, the, the roll, and so they, they took out that one axis, one motor. Right, I would definitely. When this price goes up, and if you listen to this three months later and you go, oh, I still want one, it's two, 49. It's still worth it. Still worth it.

2:10:46 - Leo Laporte
That's what I paid for mine.

2:10:48 - Alex Lindsay
Because that that leveling there's so much little fiddling, especially when you're putting it on your monitor or on your laptop or on something else. Getting it to level is not a minor a minor thing, and so having to do it on its own is a pretty big deal, and once you get used to having a webcam that has a full gimbal, uh, really hard to go back. You know like it's. It's not like I'm either on a super 35 sensor, like what I have now with the fx 30, but when I go traveling or I need a small camera, the only thing I'm using are these links, yeah I bring this x3 with me to the uh, their insta camera.

2:11:22 - Leo Laporte
I haven't insta 360, I really you know you could do is you put it on a whip like a real and it's like a. It's like a, it looks like a drone.

2:11:29 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, I've had a couple. There's a couple folks in office hours that use them and they shoot these 360s and then they do pan and scans inside of them. Yeah, I haven't been that excited about about that as much, but you know. But but they are cool cameras, um we.

2:11:42 - Leo Laporte
We shot some commercials with manthony nielsen and told me how to use it like a drone. We've shot. Remember the electric bike we had? Uh, we shot it was. It's amazing. Yeah, the quality is not as good as this camera or even probably the uh insta 360 link, but it's kind of cool yeah, I don't know.

2:12:00 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, it is, it is, it's cool, it's a cool one and we definitely see some and the 360 footage of we were they uh doing it? They were doing streaming, where you can push it, you can stream from it and then people can open it up on a player and look around. And so I was thinking of doing that here.

2:12:13 - Leo Laporte
That's one of the like, maybe setting this up so you can, you know, look around at me, hi in the studio, I don't know. Yeah, I mean that's a bad idea. Uh, storeinsta360.com, they do make good stuff, I must. I must say Jason snell.

2:12:30 - Jason Snell
Pick of the week yeah, I'm gonna follow up. Uh, there was a pick I made last year for an app called stop the madness and it's now stop the madness pro and it's 15 and I recommend it highly. What is the madness we're stopping? Madness we're stopping is the internet, and the web in particular. This is an app from uh, the underpass app company and in jeff johnson, and it is. It is. It's not an ad blocker, but it is a browser improver, enabler.

2:12:58 - Leo Laporte
Yes.

2:12:59 - Jason Snell
And so it works with all the major browsers, and the pro version is universal now, so it will run on your iPad, your iPhone and your Mac, and the settings will sync via iCloud.

2:13:09 - Leo Laporte
I'm getting this for Lisa. This was driving her crazy yesterday. Her bank wouldn't let her paste in yeah Account number.

2:13:15 - Jason Snell
A lot of it is like or there are like websites that I read, where I want to command click on the link so I can save them in tabs and read them later. And they're like no, certainly you want to replace this list of stories with this single page and read it now. And it's like I don't. That's why I command clicked, why that's why I command clicked. Why are you blocking me? So all of that stuff and there are lots of settings here but all that stuff you can turn it off, you can have it, not hijack your clipboard, not put things on your clipboard you don't want. And here's the one that I really like, which is all every site you go to now that says hey, would you like to log in with Google? At this site, in the upper right hand corner, it's like no, you can't do that Off off. And so that's the madness. It's not saying like stop advertising. It's like stop degrading the basic web experience that we want as users, and that's what Stop the Madness Pro does.

Stop the Madness has been doing that for years. New Pro version and the sync is really nice because you set your settings the way you want on your Mac and then they're also on your iPad or your iPhone.

2:14:17 - Leo Laporte
It's great $15, but you buy it once and it's everywhere. Yeah, and it's in the App Store.

2:14:22 - Jason Snell
And if you bought Stop the Madness. There's a bundle you can go and see and you might get a discount depending on when you bought it, and all that, but it's in the App Store.

2:14:29 - Leo Laporte
Stop the Madness Pro Upgrade bundle. It's good. Okay, Good Rick. Oh man, I'm downloading it right now. That's awesome.

2:14:37 - Jason Snell
Stop that madness.

2:14:38 - Leo Laporte
Leo, stop it, it's driving me crazy. Andy Anotko, what's your pick of the week?

2:14:45 - Andy Ihnatko
My pick of the week is dull, boring monospace fonts. God bless them all.

2:14:50 - Leo Laporte
I love them.

2:14:58 - Andy Ihnatko
I'm a fan I. If you're a coder, you want to find a really good monospace font for your coding environment. But for people like Jason and me, who do most of our writing in Markdown and BB Edit or Ulysses, the time we used to waste as writers not writing by choosing a good pen and a good ink and a good paper, is like what is the best monospace font? Ooh, I think. A good pen and a good ink and a good paper is like what is the best monospace font? Ooh, I think, ooh. So there's a I've been curating like a long, long list of really good monospace fonts. A lot of them are free. My favorite right now is JetBrains Mono Very nice.

Because, it's not boring, it has a little bit of life to it while still serving the role of being extremely clean, extremely easy to read and just lets you focus on actual words without distracting. But I recently found that there's a site called CodingFontcom and, by the way, jetbrains Mono is a free download. Codingfontcom is partly to promote an app that they're doing, but is a single place that has a collection of like a couple of dozen like coding, like monospace fonts and like a playground where you can see them in action. So I mean, I think they even have, like the, the monospace comic sans version in there which is, by the way, very good.

I love it yeah, I was, you know, don't it redeems I use that terminal when I want to have fun yeah, yeah, um, but yeah, it'll help you A again.

If you're putting off writing the thing you're supposed to be writing, it'll give you a good 15 to 20 minutes of distraction. But on a more positive thing again, I make fun of this sort of stuff, but really I have to say that my productivity in Ulysses increased by a non-zero amount once. I before I encountered codingfontcom, but I was sampling a whole bunch of different fonts and I finally realized, yeah, JetBrains, Mono, that's the one I really really like.

2:16:40 - Leo Laporte
How do you get it to change fonts? It's not.

2:16:43 - Andy Ihnatko
Look, tap on the list on the left.

2:16:45 - Leo Laporte
I think yeah, I'm tapping, I'm a tapping.

2:16:47 - Jason Snell
Oh, that's a you're in. Are you in font tournament mode? You're going to find which one you like the best.

2:16:55 - Leo Laporte
I like I have used b612 mono for a long time. But what about oxygen mono? Oh, that's pretty. Font turn. Fear of mono, what a good one. Fear of code, even better. Oh, I love in consolada. I don't know these guys. Let me see, I, I don't want, I don't want serifs in my mono. This is good JetBrains. There, it is, there, it is. So what is I'm having it?

2:17:18 - Jason Snell
oh, it's a bracket you're finding the winner exactly.

2:17:24 - Andy Ihnatko
You go through all of them and you wind up looking up basically okay, this is one this is the one I want, okay, alright, well, I'll keep doing this.

2:17:33 - Leo Laporte
This is free codingfontcom, and I actually have had this bookmark for a long time, because if I ever want to get in a conversation with coders, that goes on for a long time. You just say well, what font do you like?

2:17:46 - Andy Ihnatko
And then you're still using DM Mono. Oh, come on.

2:17:51 - Leo Laporte
GitHub recently published some very good working coding fonts that I really like a series of them, but on the other hand, you know, it's fun to just change every once in a while, right?

2:18:03 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, it's a change is as good as a vacation, or whatever they say. And also, if you don't want, there are two tabs to the window play font tournament, which is the knockout version, or you can just click on browse fonts and it will just like show you a list of fonts and samples and it'll let you navigate that way.

2:18:19 - Leo Laporte
I am currently using the GitHub fonts in my Emacs, but my terminal, I think, has the comic sans. I can't remember, but it's kind of. It's always kind of fun. Anyway, good, one Coding font mono. Uh, for those of you who, uh, I'm sorry, dot com.

2:18:33 - Andy Ihnatko
Thank you Whoops.

2:18:34 - Leo Laporte
For those of you who, uh, yeah, I'm sorry dot com. Thank you, whoops.

2:18:37 - Jason Snell
For those of you, and a lot of them are free. I mean, that's the thing, is you? You get the ones that are base systems of yours. But like I've been using jetbrains mono for a while now and it's like, yeah, it's just free and it's so good, they're a bunch of them, they're just free fonts simplicity is the hardest thing to do, particularly in a font, and it boys that nail it githubs.

2:18:54 - Leo Laporte
Uh, fonts are called mana m-o-n-a space and it's a, I think, quite a good family and I've kind of settled on these for a little bit of time. But uh, you know, there you go. I'll probably change my tune soon, andy, and not go. Gbh is, are they calling?

2:19:11 - Andy Ihnatko
I hear, I hear them what are they saying A week from Thursday 1230. Go to WGBHNewsorg to listen to it, live or later.

2:19:18 - Leo Laporte
Nice, it's great to have you. Thank you, sir. Mr Jason Snell is at SixColorscom and his podcast is SixColorscom slash. Jason, is there anything you're particularly proud of these days?

2:19:31 - Jason Snell
No, I'm ashamed of it all.

2:19:37 - Andy Ihnatko
Ashamed out of these days, uh no, I'm ashamed of it all.

2:19:38 - Jason Snell
Ashamed, shamed it's all good. Is there something you're less ashamed of than others? I mean, the listener to MacBreak Weekly may appreciate the upgrade podcast I do with mike hurley I love that relay.

2:19:45 - Leo Laporte
It's very, that's our weekly dive into all these similar topics and of course, you'll be doing your colors soon. Halloween, I hope you have a little orange and black in there for us.

2:19:58 - Jason Snell
Those are not official. Well, orange is an official apple color, but otherwise it will be the usual spread of the apple rainbow.

2:20:04 - Leo Laporte
I think apple will be in the black this quarter. They will be probably. In all likelihood, they're not going to lose money this quarter. That would be spooky, wouldn't it? That would be scary. Jason does a lovely job with the Apple quarterly results, and October 31st will be no exception at six colorscom. Alex Lindsay, we've already talked a little bit about office hours. What do you? What's going on with your good friend Michael Krasny and gray matter?

2:20:31 - Alex Lindsay
We had Jim louder back on.

2:20:33 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, jim came on.

2:20:35 - Alex Lindsay
He was great. So, uh, that's it. That episode just came out today, um so, uh. So Jim was on and, uh, we have Malcolm Gladwell this Friday. Wow.

2:20:42 - Leo Laporte
That's a big one. Can people listen live?

2:20:45 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, we've been. We've been um backing into just doing audio for a little while. Um, as we, as we kind of work, work through those, whether the quality of the audio without being able to double end. On Zoom, we wanted to increase some of it because, unlike this show, we have a lot less control over who's doing what and what hardware they have and whether they're on Wi-Fi and everything else, and so we've been kind of experimenting with that. But we're probably going to stream the Malcolm Gladwell one.

2:21:11 - Leo Laporte
That one, there'll be a lot of interest.

2:21:13 - Alex Lindsay
Friday at 11 AM and most likely it's either going to come from a studio, it's going to come from the studio in my house. So we'll see how that? How that, gray?

2:21:19 - Leo Laporte
matter dot show. I'm going to see Jim on Saturday, where there's a tech TV reunion picnic on a Saturday to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the second year of tech TV.

2:21:32 - Alex Lindsay
He thinks about this so much that when you're asking questions he just has you know like he's got his newsletter on the end and if you're not subscribed to that it's always great and I always kind of I feel like I keep up with things, watching the little newsletter that goes by Nice.

2:21:43 - Leo Laporte
Nice, very good. Thank you, Alex, thank you Andy, thank you Jason, thanks to our club members for making this show possible. We do Mac Break Weekly Tuesdays, 11 am Pacific, 2 pm, eastern 1800 UTC. And, just so you know, the sugar industry of America has made sure that we will stay in summertime until after Halloween, so we will still be at that time, 1800 UTC, until November. Then everything changes. Everything changes, and I'll give you the new calculations at that time. It's too much for my little brain to figure out, but we don't change. It'll be Pacific standard time, but it'll still be 11 am Pacific standard time. You can watch us live. There are seven different streams now and I'm so proud of this.

Thanks to the folks at Restream, we're able to do the show. We use Ecamm, we use Zoom ISO and we use Restream, so there's three different products. Actually, we use Splashtop and MacStadium too. John Ashley, our producer, is Splashtopping to a Mac studio in MacStadium and the Mac studio is running Ecamm Live, and that's where the switch is. It's a crazy solution, which again, thank you, club members, because you help us pay for that but we do, thanks to Restream, also stream it live to seven different places. Of course, club members can watch in our Discord. We have a stage going, but you can also watch on YouTube youtube.com/twit/live. All of our shows that we do live are streamed there. Same with twitchcom slash twit, slash live. All of our shows that we do live are streamed there. Same with twitch.tv/twit.

I know that's a little confusing. Kick, Facebook, LinkedIn, x.com. I know I'm missing one of them, but I can't remember what it is. Oh, that's the Discord. So that's seven. So watch it live if you can, and if you can't, don't worry, because we make it into a podcast. Remember those? They used to be really big. So we you know we're old timers we like to make a podcast. You can download it from the website. Remember those? twit.tv/mbw. You can also watch the video on YouTube. There's a dedicated channel to MacBreak Weekly. You'll find the link at twit.tv/mbw. And there's also, of course, a podcast feed which you can subscribe to with any podcast client. Just subscribe to it, choose audio or video. You'll get it automatically the minute we're done. Thanks everybody for joining us. It is now time, which means it's time for me to say get back to work, because break time is over. Bye-bye.