MacBreak Weekly 946 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. Everybody's in the house Alex Lindsay, Andy and Akko Jason Snell. Of course, apple released its quarterly results. Jason's got the color charts to explain Was it a good quarter or not. We'll talk about a big Apple acquisition. Could be good news, could be bad news for fans. And then, of course, finally, the new MacBook Pro is announced. We'll talk about speeds and feeds All that coming up next on MacBreak Weekly.

This is MacBreak Weekly episode 946, recorded November 5th 2024: Slow and Steady. it's time for MacBreak Weekly, the show where we cover the latest news from Apple. The A-team is in the house Alex Lindsay from officehours.global. Good morning Alex, hello, hello. Good to be here. You survived the time change. You survived Monday night football. Good luck with election day the gauntlet.

0:01:12 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, I already wrote. I voted so long ago that I forgot. I forgot what I voted on, like I know you know, I voted my mail it's nice, it's a luxury, also with us Andy Ihnatko from WGBH Boston.

0:01:24 - Leo Laporte
He is in Greater New England. It's good to see you, Andrew.

0:01:28 - Andy Ihnatko
If we're the A-team. Could I be Howlin' Mad Matt Murdock? Sure, you can be anybody you want. He looks like he has fun as opposed to the others, which is just all.

0:01:38 - Leo Laporte
And also here a man whose fingers are of every color of the rainbow because he's been making charts Jason Snell six colors

0:01:45
Andy, I think you'll find you've conflated the uh a team's howling mad murdoch with marvel's daredevil matt murdoch, and that they are different people. No, no prize for you. I believe that you're not.

0:02:02 - Andy Ihnatko
you're not familiar with the new disney If Theory, in which you're the crossover universe between the A-Team universe and the Daredevil universe, I believe he has the best of both worlds.

0:02:13 - Jason Snell
I ain't going on that plane Cyclops.

0:02:16 - Leo Laporte
It's the A-Team, but it's the X-Men. It's the X-Team or the.

0:02:19 - Jason Snell
A-Men, something like that. I don't know. We'll work on it.

0:02:25 - Leo Laporte
We'll work on it. We'll work. At our grocery store, all the clerks and I said, oh, spider-man. He said I'm, I'm exactly now which one Deadpool?

0:02:30 - Jason Snell
yeah, Deadpool's a little spider manny with this.

0:02:32 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I thought he was a little spider manny, I wasn't paying that much attention. Uh, hello everybody, welcome. Uh, the week after the week, uh, the of apple, um, when we last met, uh, we, they had released the mini and the, uh, I mac, I mac, and now and then, and then that day, the, the next day, they came out with the, um, the macbooks. I didn't even you know it's funny I didn't even notice, like Thursday said well, did they ever do anything?

0:03:01 - Andy Ihnatko
Thursday was their, uh, annual I was kind of kind of the opposite. It was like I was kind of out of sorts on Thursday when there was no new hardware announcement. I was like, well, what am I? What am I refreshing this page for?

0:03:12 - Leo Laporte
yeah, and then there was nothing. Friday, right, I didn't miss anything today. Okay, no, so they arrested. So did you get? Do you have? Does anybody have anybody not anybody, in particular Jason Snell have a, a MacBook Pro or a Mac Mini to hand?

0:03:28 - Jason Snell
Well, they don't come out until Friday.

0:03:31 - Leo Laporte
Oh, and of course the embargo lifts tomorrow or something like that, so we wouldn't make you talk about it or anything violating the spirit.

0:03:42 - Alex Lindsay
We'll say the laptop view. This gets back to Apple's launch. There was a lot of discussion near the end of the week like should Apple keep on doing this kind of launch thing? And 23 million views on YouTube 23 million views on YouTube and they owned Tech Meme for three days. It was like for three days it's all that was on Tech Meme at the top. So if you're wondering if you're going to see more of this, my guess is yes.

0:04:08 - Leo Laporte
Sorry, let me turn off the magical hello sound. Yeah, 23 million views in six days is pretty good. This is the MacBook Pro announcement.

0:04:18 - Jason Snell
And they get to be the number one tech story three days running, which is pretty smart.

0:04:22 - Leo Laporte
So maybe there's a vote for this. As a reporter, it's a, so maybe there's a vote for this. This is a good and as a reporter, it's probably easier for everybody. Yeah.

0:04:30 - Andy Ihnatko
Once a day.

0:04:30 - Alex Lindsay
yeah, there's a lot less filler.

0:04:36 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, like, especially when, like those of us who like, only get like one at bat, like per day, or whatever it's like okay. So here's an announcement with three different tech, three different products. All of them are kind of interesting. None of them are a blockbuster. Which one do we sort of give short shrift to and which one do we declare I'm going to spend most of my word count and most of my attention on this. So it's nice that we can talk about things like hey, wow, look, there is now 16 gigs of system memory across the entire line. Or hey, look, finally, for the first time, we've got that new glare-coding display on the MacBook Pro.

Like, all these little details, that kind of like maybe would not have borne a great mention. And yeah, we don't need a big circus for every single event. I think that it's great when they do it for something like Apple Intelligence, where they really do have to tell a major story and lay the ground and lay expectations correctly, have to tell a major story and lay the ground and lay expectations correctly. But when it's like, yep, these are three. Really, this new Mac mini is really nice. Hey, wow, this new processor, the family that's coming to the MacBook Pro. That's a real big boost forward. It's nice to be able to space these things out and not treat it as though we need to roll out all the dogs and ponies, just for a simple but interesting new story.

0:05:41 - Alex Lindsay
I did find myself by the third one. Every time the person came up with talk about Apple intelligence I was like, oh, I can skip over that.

0:05:53 - Jason Snell
That's somebody who did a lot of work. Was the woman who has to have every single video. Has a lengthy Apple intelligence demo. If you were not sure if Apple was pushing Apple intelligence, enough boy were they.

0:06:00 - Alex Lindsay
By the third one. I was like okay, and I can just skip over this, and it was nice not to have to sit through. So the chat room wants to know alex, how many mac minis did you buy? I have not. I have not bought any of them yet here the problem is, I don't know what. I don't know what I need yet, um, and I have a lot of mac mini. I have translated, I mean he hasn't found a client to buy it for.

Well, yeah, I mean there has to be a reason for it. I mean I know I sound like I just buy hardware willy-nilly, but it's usually connected to a job.

So I don't have. You know, I think we are looking at. Actually, I'm potentially going to do something where we have just turn one of them into an encoder, which looks interesting to me, and I probably will end up getting one of the base units to do some testing. But I have these M1 and M2 Mac minis and they are super fast and I you know for what I and here's the thing is I don't I use them, I use them sparing. I mean, I use them for different things and they all do what they do as fast as I can imagine them doing them. And so it's not really. And I have a Mac Studio which has a lot more IO. So I don't know. You know, right now I'm trying to figure out where I would put it or what I would use it for, but as soon as I have a good excuse for it, I'll probably buy one.

0:07:14 - Leo Laporte
I think this is the quickest I've ever felt like. I bought the, I bought the Mac Mini with the M4 Pro and the next day they asked for Max. I mean, admittedly it wasn't a surprise, but that's 24 hours. Uh, I mean, I will say I'm left with.

0:07:29 - Alex Lindsay
I know it's going to be another six months, but I've been kind of like if the minis and the mac pros are this fast, macbook pros are this fast, I really want to see, yeah, studios and pros you know, like it's just like ultras right there'll be, yeah you know, I think it's going to be complicated.

You, I do think that the challenge that Apple has is the problem that I'm having is that the hardware is outrunning the software, in the sense that there's not many applications. If you're not doing 3D, if you're not doing some heavy lifting, there's not many applications that give you a reason to buy a new Mac, that give you a reason to buy a new Mac. It's just that these have jumped so far forward that numbers is going as fast as it needs to go and many of the games that you can buy are going almost as fast. Sure, they don't have ray tracing, but most people aren't going to notice.

0:08:17 - Leo Laporte
But they do. Don't they now have ray tracing?

0:08:19 - Andy Ihnatko
They do, and I'm saying the new ones now have hardware accelerated For those who aren't watching the video feed. That was twice that Alex used air quotes around the word ray tracing. It's kind of like there's a lot of things that are hard to render.

0:08:31 - Alex Lindsay
And when they say we have 4X anti-aliasing with global illumination, you have my undivided attention. You know ray tracing is okay. We've been doing that for 20 years, so it's fine.

0:08:42 - Jason Snell
Alex makes a good point that a lot of people I've seen complaining about like oh, they still compare this stuff to Intel and they do but they also can compare it to the M1.

Anything because it's that good, like the Apple Silicon era, is so strong. And then the second thing is we computer nerds over-assume how often people replace their Mac hardware. And there is still one of the reasons Apple keeps comparing things to Intel. It's not just to make Apple Silicon look good, although it does do that. It's because they know how many people are still on Intel Macs and so they're still trying to sell them on coming over to Apple Silicon. And they're like all right, well, you waited till M4. Now's the time right. But they know it, because I've heard from a lot of people who are like oh yeah, I'm still using an iMac from 2018, or I'm still using a MacBook Pro from 2016. And I don't live like that because I'm a tech nerd and a tech journalist. But a lot of people like a computer is a big, expensive purchase and they make one and then they use that thing for eight years and they still need to be convinced.

0:09:52 - Alex Lindsay
And I may have to start traveling a lot again. So I may actually get a new MacBook Pro at some point, but I have an older one, a 2020. It was like the last Intel MacBook and I had to render something on site. I had an event last week and I had to render something on site and I, oh, I'll just open up the laptop and open up motion. It was. It was this, a countdown clock, but I'd done all this 3d countdown clocky things inside of motion and it renders in about four or five minutes on my Mac studio and I figured, oh, it'll take 15 or 20 minutes. I was two hours. It was two hours.

Like it was like not, it was not like a little slower, it was unusable. Like I was like, well, I'm going to live with what I have. I mean, it was a minor change, but it was like I figured, oh, I'll just throw this in. No, you can't do that. So I think that it is. I mean, especially now, now that you're getting to these M2s and M3s, m4s and M5s I guess next year the Intel machines are. I mean, I try to explain to people you have no idea what's on the other side of just any upgrade. At this point I was surprised to look at like when these new ones come out, I always go look at the like Walmart and Costco, like have they dropped the price? No, so the M2 Mac minis are still $20 less than the new ones.

0:11:08 - Leo Laporte
Wow yeah price no, so the M2 Mac minis are still are 20 less than the new ones. So wow, yeah, it's. It's a weird thing, but they'll drop it out there with one of the price guns.

0:11:12 - Jason Snell
I mean honestly, if you've got a laptop I I know that people people have different buying philosophies, right, and some people are like well, I'm gonna buy a nice one and then use it for a long time, rather than buying a less nice one and using for a little time and I think that's a valid way to go.

I will say, though, that you could get for $9.99, you could get an M2 MacBook Air today. That would also completely blow away your Intel laptop, whatever it is. But, yes, I also understand that maybe you want a MacBook Pro. The screen is amazing on the MacBook Pro. I love the MacBook Air, but, like there are lots of reasons to get a MacBook Pro and, yeah, you're probably going to be more comfortable about using that for the next eight years.

0:11:48 - Alex Lindsay
For me it's that now that if I have to go out and actually do work in the field, then I will actually use up the computer of how far I could go, especially because I've learned how to make motion crunch my Mac any of them. So that's been and that was hard for a long time so I did purchase a Mac mini I, which one I.

I held off as long as I could a big one, the little one, medium one got the biggest one. I could get whoa, that's a lot of that's a lot. That's a $5,000 like 40 so no, it wasn't.

0:12:23 - Leo Laporte
It wasn't that bad, so maybe I didn't get that.

0:12:25 - Alex Lindsay
I mean it was 27.99 yeah so that you yeah, you can go all the way with the hard drive and uh no, I got two terabytes yeah you could have got yeah, you want to go to eight terabytes, but I got no, I didn't do that.

0:12:35 - Leo Laporte
I got uh 64 gigs of ram. I got the uh, I got the one in the bottom below the fold, the um, the it's funny and then I upgraded the chip so I got the m4 pro with 14 cpus, 20 gpus, I got uh 64, I maxed out the memory 64 gigs and I got two terabytes. That's pretty max. That came at 27.99. That's pretty max. I mean, the only thing I could have done is gotten four more terabytes and, yes, that gets it up to 45.99, but I figured two with thunderbolt 5 and two terabytes. And yes, that gets it up to 45, 99, but I figured two with thunderbolt 5 and two terabytes internal.

0:13:09 - Alex Lindsay
I'm probably okay. You know the thing is with thunderbolt 5 I might be tempted to go back to one terabyte, or definitely not more than two terabytes, like you got, because the problem with thunderbolt 4 was that it did max out at half the speed of the internal drive of the Mac studio at least. And so, but theoretically, um, you should be able to get, uh, raid systems now that are running as fast as well. I mean, technically, um, they, they, they could be running as much as 15 gigs a second. I think that'll probably be more like eight to 10, but that's twice the speed of the five gig per second that the Mac studio, the original Mac studio, runs.

0:13:48 - Leo Laporte
And there's another point, which is that the store in Sequoia I don't know if it happened earlier, but we'll let you install large applications to external drives, Right.

0:14:00 - Jason Snell
So suddenly I don't have to put everything on that internal drive.

0:14:04 - Alex Lindsay
I don't find that. I have that. I don't think applications really take up all the space. For me it's camera files, yeah.

0:14:10 - Leo Laporte
Well then, that doesn't matter, you can put that on an external drive.

0:14:12 - Alex Lindsay
Well, you couldn't. I couldn't before because it wasn't fast enough, like I.

0:14:16 - Leo Laporte
Oh yes.

0:14:26 - Alex Lindsay
If I take 6K raw files from a Blackmagic camera and throw them onto an external drive, I can't edit it at full res. I mean, I have to build proxies and there's a whole bunch of issues with that, and so being able to have an external drive system that can do as much as 10 terabytes a second is important for video editors. Again, it's not for everybody. I mean, there's a lot of people that that is not going to ever be a problem, but if you're a big part of apple's market our video professionals and being able to take their raw files from their cameras and be able to edit them without having to go into proxy mode is useful here's the settings in the app store download and start large apps bigger than a gigabyte to a separate disk and then you can choose the disk.

0:15:02 - Leo Laporte
I don't know. I think that's good for you know what that's for? Games is what that's for, because they tend to be four or five, six gigabytes. This Valheim, I think, it's almost five gigabytes.

0:15:12 - Alex Lindsay
So uh, so curious to see if this turns out. I know that there's been a lot of talk about it becoming a gaming platformer yeah somebody put that out right, there was an article that says uh, mark, german, mark.

0:15:23 - Jason Snell
German. Yeah, I was kind of like, not only that, but there's some people say well, finally, apple produces a competitor to the Xbox.

0:15:31 - Andy Ihnatko
I'm like no, it's nice that AAA games. It's nice that the most demanding and most graphically challenging game on the AAA market, oncs, is coming to mac next year, but if you think that people are going to be buying a mac instead of an xbox, something that is well if you love death stranding.

0:15:55 - Leo Laporte
Uh, you're set man or site, I guess cyberpunks coming, I mean right there.

0:15:59 - Alex Lindsay
I mean, if they, the problem is they're I'm sure that they're porting it in a clumsy way over to the mac and they're not. If you wrote these games, if you actually went through the trouble and I personally think Apple should pay someone to go through the trouble to do this and went through the trouble of two or three years of actually optimizing for the hardware and optimizing for the operating system and taking full advantage of it, you'd probably find that the games run three, four times faster than an Xbox.

0:16:29 - Jason Snell
And at much higher levels and much higher quality.

0:16:32 - Alex Lindsay
But you'd have to optimize everything to do that and that would take a lot of money and a lot of time. It would be tens of millions of dollars to do that.

0:16:38 - Andy Ihnatko
MARK MANDELMANN, and it's really only worth it If they're going to be putting investment in gaming. It really is only worth it if they're putting the money in places that are going to create more app store transactions, because that still is the lion's share of the money that they make from the app store. Games is the largest segment, but also in-app transactions from those games. So it's a prestige thing and it's certainly nice to have that in their portfolio if they have again really good AAA games ready. But really, if they're going to make sure, if they're going to really be planting seeds for later harvest, they're going to want to make sure that whichever one has the most monkey-like press-the-button-get-a-banana-pellet feedback loop for in-app purchases, that's the kind of stuff they're going to want to put money into.

0:17:20 - Leo Laporte
Well they already have those on the iPad and the iPhone. I mean that's the majority of games on the iPhone.

0:17:25 - Andy Ihnatko
Better banana pills.

0:17:26 - Alex Lindsay
Part of it, though, I think gets back to Apple needs a reason. I mean, they've built such powerful hardware that they need a reason for people to buy that hardware, and games are a big reason to buy faster hardware. Gamers are the ones that have the fastest graphics cards. The most you know, they build their own systems.

0:17:44 - Leo Laporte
PC gamers for systems. Pc gamers for sure.

0:17:45 - Alex Lindsay
PC gamers, and so so the the thing is is that I think that, beyond in-app purchases which I do think, I agree with Andy that are important I think that there's a push for I think what Apple needs to do is get people to put things on their computers. I mean, this is the problem with the iPad there's nothing on my iPad. I have two iPad Pros. I haven't gotten the newest one. Why? Because there is nothing that is going to run any faster on my iPad than what is there right now, and so that's the challenge, and I think that Apple needs to find more. And that's where video comes into play, that's where 3D comes into play, that's where heavy scientific calculations and games there's not many other things that need that kind of hardware.

0:18:26 - Jason Snell
So Gurman's analysis is very weird and I think we've said this before. I really admire Mark Gurman as a journalist who's got sources and his reporting about Apple future stuff is impeccable. Sometimes they put him on the spot and they ask him to be a pundit.

And I, he doesn't always, it's complete punditry and, I think, misguided, because he's sort of like oh Apple can make this thing into a games thing. And anybody who's lived five years, let alone 25 years, of Apple trying to do games knows that Apple doesn't understand games at all. And any gaming that Apple is successful with is accidental. And in fact you could argue maybe it's best if it's accidental because if Apple tries fails, but if they don't try, they somehow sometimes succeed anyway, despite themselves. But that all said, I will say this apple's experimentation with their game porting, toolkit stuff that they've been doing for the last couple of years, yeah, isn't that interesting just to me that they are making an effort to basically make it easy for people who are building PC games to get them to run on Apple's platforms. And if they keep at it, if you look at some of the other groups that are just like random open source groups out there, like the people who are trying to get a PC games running on Linux, right that I think that there is a path forward. But again, it's not Apple spending money on titles and getting like three titles that are AAA from four years ago to run on their platforms.

I think it's that if they keep pushing forward with a gaming toolkit to the point where they can say look, if you're building a Windows game, you can also sell it on the Mac.

Here's the sales figures. You will get an incremental 5% 10% revenue boost and we've made the tools so easy that there's almost nothing you need to do. If they could do that, I think that you could get in a scenario where Mac gaming is essentially PC gaming and other than I know at the high end, where you've got high end graphics, cards and stuff. It's never going to be that right, but it will be compatibility on Steam and in the Mac App Store and other places that they want to do it, and I do think that that's a smart gaming strategy for them because it's not hands-off but it's literally. We're going to push our platform up to be equivalent to the work you have to do for Windows and no more extra work than that. And then you you know you do, you. We're just making it so you can be on our platform without a lot of effort.

And that's similar to street, to steam doing it with the steam deck, right when they, where they it's it's not windows, but they built a compatibility layer that lets you run those windows games on the steam deck. It's a similar kind of thing, so that that I find encouraging, because it's not Apple's usual game nonsense, is it as easy?

0:21:08 - Alex Lindsay
to write to metal as DirectX. I I don't know actually, um, I don't know if it's as easy I I do actually think that for for dollar for dollar from Anthony Nielsen project.

0:21:19 - Leo Laporte
Red's blog says that their version of cypherpunk Cyberpunk 2077, will not be available on older Intel Macs, will require Apple Silicon and will, quote take full advantage of Apple Silicon and advanced technologies of metal, including Metal FX, the upscaling that is the equivalent of DLSS.

0:21:39 - Jason Snell
I think the game porting toolkit is doing a lot of translation stuff, where they're translating your Windows stuff into Apple stuff instead, and that because of Apple stuff, where they're translating your Windows stuff into Apple stuff instead, and that because of Apple Silicon, they have the ability to have pretty good. I mean, what Apple says is you can't just click a button, you need to do a little bit of performance work. But again, if the amount of work you need to do is less than the extra revenue you're going to get for being on another platform, then it makes sense for game developers. Yeah, and I think also.

0:22:03 - Alex Lindsay
I don't know if it's easier, but I do think that the dollar for dollar, the new Mac like M4s and so on and so forth at the same price would probably outperform a PC doing the same thing. The GPU, cpu and memory bandwidth is a big deal when it comes to texture maps, oversampling lots of frame rates. All those things are things that it is actually probably capable of doing better. Dollar for dollar, you can probably build a PC. That's better, but not.

0:22:34 - Andy Ihnatko
The thing is that's not necessarily the most important thing. A lot of the reasons why some of the most popular games are the most popular games is because they are designed to run on a piece of spit with a diode in it. I mean you can build a $500 PC that can run a lot of the most popular team games out there and that's the whole reason why they became a popular team game. The problem is that it's not something that is on developers' minds that gosh. If we really want to seize the bull by the horns, we're going to have to target Mac. My goodness, we're leaving a whole bunch of money on the table, I think. I mean I agree with what Jason was saying.

I think that's very, very smart that if Apple is doing something very smart by basically trying to say that we're not going to fund your game studio $2 million to port all of your games to our platform, we're not going to even try to cuddle you and wine and dine you and convince you that you should be giving the Mac platform day and date with all the other platforms, what Apple can say is that whatever amount of effort you put into porting your game over to the Mac with our tools that we've given you.

It's going to be outstripped by the amount of money that you're going to make by selling that on the Mac platform. Exactly. So I think that's a very, very sensible thing to do. If Apple decided to have a new game czar whose entire job was to start game studios and co-invest in EA and making sure that Madden is perfect for the Mac, I would think that that's kind of a fool's errand, or at least not the most efficient way they could be spending their money. But by creating that Windows translation layer, that was brilliant stuff for them to do. It's exactly what they should be doing and I hope it pays off for them.

0:24:18 - Leo Laporte
What is Apple's natural market for the Macintosh? I mean, they've kind of given up on pros a little bit. Right, they don't have gaming.

0:24:28 - Jason Snell
Only at the super high end and they never had gaming. I mean, part of it is ecosystem. Part of the reason that the Mac has been so successful more successful than it's ever been in its history is because of the success of Apple's other products that start with the iPod and certainly with the iPhone. You've got this thing where people are exposed to the Apple brand and they like it and then Apple says well, you know, it's better with a Mac than a PC, so maybe you should get a Mac and it's simpler and it's nicer and you know. So some of it is niceness and luxury and there's some of that. It just works quality to it as well, and it's the industrial design and the software and the ecosystem, and there's a lot of stuff at play. But I do think that Apple has built the Mac to the size it is based on. You know, it's just it's nice to have an iPhone and a Mac and have them all work together.

0:25:13 - Alex Lindsay
And I think that for individual content creators it's still pretty popular.

0:25:18 - Jason Snell
Photographers, for sure yeah. And you know, I think that you know Apple, a lot of creators, yeah, artists.

0:25:23 - Leo Laporte
I think that you know Apple A lot of creators yeah, I don't.

0:25:25 - Alex Lindsay
When we work with creators, we don't. We see some PCs. I mean, it's definitely a handful of them, but it's pretty. It's a pretty Mac centric and iPhone centric world. You know, there the, there are people who, once they start building a system, they read a bunch of books and they get a bunch of PCs to do their editing and so on and so forth. But the reality is is that, especially if you're doing Premiere, a PC is better.

I don't think Premiere runs very well on a Mac and, but you have a very large contingent that are using Final Cut and and Resolve, you know, and and I think that those are, and so I think that in that world, that's that and I think it's leaned back. I think Apple did fall behind for a while, like the Intel, I think, was really holding them back. I think that in that world, that's that and I think it's leaned back. I think Apple did fall behind for a while, like the Intel, I think, was really holding them back. I think that a lot of times we felt like in the you know, the 2010s that you could get more performance out of a PC, but there's a lot of individual Apple's market are people who are in spaces that are less than five people or individuals, and they just don't want to do the tech support that's required on a PC. That is different than a Mac. It's not that a Mac has no viruses, but it is easier to administer for an individual, I agree with you and I agree with Jason.

0:26:41 - Leo Laporte
I would say it's ecosystem and inertia, because once you go Mac, it's just agreeing with you. Alex, you just stick with it right, very? Few people go the other direction.

0:26:53 - Alex Lindsay
I think that for me the problem is I get a PC and if I don't have the enterprise version on that PC the first time, it updates and breaks a bunch of things, I'm like I can't use this for production. I just immediately just go unless I have somebody else to manage this for me. I don't want to deal with it personally. So I think my my I have PCs sitting in my system right now, but I don't. I don't put them in anything that I deal with on a day-to-day basis. They're kind of little pieces of glue and they're usually really tiny ones or a really big one that I'd have to deal with updates all the time, and that is stressful in production.

0:27:27 - Leo Laporte
I will mention, because I waited to the end of the day and made a BTO order it's November 20th is the delivery date. Ernesto on our YouTube says he ordered his back and it's coming the 19th. So I think the 8th might only be for certain models in stock kind of thing. Do you think these are real, these benchmarks?

0:27:49 - Jason Snell
they're usually real they usually match the finals there's somebody who's running bench so.

so I think the way it works is, if you don't pay for geekbench, things get uploaded without and and and like you have to pay and people don't pay, or people don't know what they're doing, or people get access and they do know what they're doing. But we've seen this for a while now that some devices get out there in the field and those Geekbench numbers get uploaded to the Geekbench browser, and so generally I think they have been proven to be right.

0:28:17 - Leo Laporte
Well, in that case, if you bought a MacBook Pro with the Macs, you should be pretty darn happy. This is the highest what was somebody said? The highest number on a geekbench single core test ever and a remarkable uh performance.

0:28:34 - Alex Lindsay
Um and uh pretty good on the multi-core and remember this is this is not the ultra, this is not the max.

0:28:41 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, this is not the imagine what an ultra will be, which is and another normally it's two maxes.

0:28:45 - Andy Ihnatko
Right, makes it two maxes, make an ultra and another thing keep in mind this is not running on like a desktop pc with a thousand watt power supply. This is running on a mobile computer.

0:28:54 - Alex Lindsay
That's pretty damn impressive and you look at the memory throughput again. Those are the kind of things that, when you're talking about games and video and 3d, the memory throughput on these systems is outrageous. Like you know, it's an outrageous bus system, yeah.

0:29:12 - Leo Laporte
So good on you if you got yourself one. I would love to hear from anybody. Nobody's got it yet.

0:29:19 - Jason Snell
I guess Friday Looks like it's going to be pretty good in the Pro we were saying this last week because it was something we saw in the mac mini is the pro seems to be taking because m3, the the max, took a big leap and the pro just kind of got, was incremental, but the, the, the pro, this time took a huge leap.

the approach of that middle chip, that was that's the one I got on the uh, on the mini, because yeah and I talked I think I can say that I talked to some people at apple, without getting into details because they're very iffy about this, but I thought I you know I talked to some people who do chip stuff at apple, um, and not behind the scenes, just in a briefing, and you know they seemed really excited about that number that the memory bandwidth and the m3 or m4 pro is 75 more than it was in the m3 pro. That is a. That is a number that doesn't usually go up by that amount in one chip generation. But I do think it's partially because the m3 pro was a half step, whereas the m3 max was a big step and this time what we're seeing is they've all taken that little half step forward, but that m3 pro to m4 pro has taken the big step and that's why even some of those preliminary numbers and just looking at the specs, the Mac Mini and MacBook Pro if you go up from the base chip to the Pro chip, it's substantial.

Now, obviously the Max, you're getting double the GPU cores right. If you do stuff that's GPU bound, you should get the Max right, like there's a lot if you, if you do stuff that's GPU bound, you should get the max right Because it's it's so many more GPU cores than the pro. It's not even, it's not even close. It's a, it's a no brainer. But if you're just kind of a regular person who's not going to spend the extra money on that, the pro is really, you know, looking like it's going to be a huge step forward from wherever you're coming you know M1, m2, or Intel.

0:31:12 - Leo Laporte
Let's take a little break. There's still quite a bit of stuff to talk about. You're watching MacBreak Weekly, the premier show for Macintosh users, with Jason Snell, Andy Ihnatko, Alex Lindsay.

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Let's talk six colors. Yay, it's a, me it's a me quarterly revenue by category iPhone less than half this quarter.

0:33:45 - Jason Snell
Yeah, you know, don't worry, next quarter it'll be more than half, because it's the holiday quarter and that goes way up. I just you know this is basically what the numbers have been all along. Half of Apple's revenue, roughly, is the iPhone and then these days, a quarter of it is services, look at services.

0:34:00 - Leo Laporte
Look at it growing.

0:34:01 - Jason Snell
And then wearables. Mac and iPad are, you know, in the in the just below 10, and that adds up to a hundred.

0:34:07 - Alex Lindsay
So uh, yeah, that's that's.

0:34:09 - Jason Snell
that's how the way to think about is wearables, mac and iPad are about the same, and then there's a quarter services in half, like the wearables Mac and iPad share the other quarter that isn't.

0:34:17 - Leo Laporte
Now I do notice that that, uh, a couple of years ago, q4 revenue was like much, much higher. Uh, why is revenue diminishing? I mean q4 is the big, is the big revenue quarter, right?

0:34:30 - Jason Snell
no.

0:34:31 - Leo Laporte
Q1 is the q1 is okay this is a record.

0:34:33 - Jason Snell
This is a record. Fourth quarter for apple oh okay, but it's a record. Um, they have kind of reached a new plateau of their overall revenue so they're there it is a q4 record, slightly up from last year, which was presumably a Q4 record because they do that a lot.

0:34:52 - Andy Ihnatko
There's also an anomaly this quarter because remember that in early September, the EU court decided that yeah, apple, you do owe $12 to $13 billion that doesn't go to revenue, but it goes to the profit line. The profit line is 10 billion less than it would have been.

0:35:08 - Jason Snell
Also, the chart you were showing when we were talking about that was Mac revenue, not total Apple revenue.

0:35:12 - Leo Laporte
Oh, okay, that's why I was confused, and the Mac.

0:35:15 - Jason Snell
Yeah, the Mac hit a real high 2021 with Apple Silicon and the pandemic and has come off of that high a little bit to a little bit. You know it it it's one of the rare Apple products that doesn't kind of hit a plateau and stay there. But I think it's because it was so such a huge number of Macs sold during the the uh pandemic and also the Apple Silicon transition that it's. It was hard for them to maintain that level of sales but they have come down to a a plateau that is higher than they were when, you know, before the pandemic a little bit but, it's still, you know, biggest Mac Market ever, essentially, but not the biggest sales.

Those were in like 21, basically continued rise in services revenue yeah, down a little bit.

0:35:57 - Leo Laporte
Uh, its rise was down a little bit, but yeah it continues to rise it's double digit, 12 instead of 14 last year.

0:36:03 - Jason Snell
You're not gonna, you're gonna, you're not gonna to sniff at double-digit growth anywhere and the service just keeps going up.

Wearables has stalled, though that's an interesting one, is that the wearables home accessories category, which is primarily driven by AirPods and Apple Watch, it's just kind of flat. It really expanded and was a reliable growth source for a while, and it's reached this point where it's 25% of Apple's revenue and now it's just kind of sitting there. So I don't know the reasoning. Is that flagging Apple Watch sales? Is it that they didn't update AirPods for a while? I guess we'll see, certainly not the Vision Pro. So I guess we'll see.

0:36:40 - Leo Laporte
Vision Pro is in there, but probably doesn't make much of a difference.

0:36:43 - Jason Snell
Can't imagine that it does.

0:36:45 - Leo Laporte
Wearable revenue down 3%. Here's the total revenue and it does look good. Yeah, it's a good Q4. Good solid.

0:36:53 - Jason Snell
Q4. It's on the plateau and then again we're expecting. I think they even guided to essentially a record Q1 holiday quarter, or at least better than last year's holiday quarter, which wasn't quite a record which is what wall street always wants to hear about.

0:37:12 - Leo Laporte
What's next? I do? I do note that your, your line, your average is is is pretty flat it's not like revenues.

0:37:15 - Jason Snell
This is what I yeah, that's you know, plateau, uh, big geography, uh, fan, uh, that's what. That's what happens and it's actually happened historically. Apple goes through these moments where they have inflationary growth and then they sit there for two, three, four years at that level. Now the bad news is, if you're a Wall Street type, you want it to keep going up. The good news is they don't give it back.

That's, I think, one of the interesting things about Apple building its business is they have these moments of growth and they don't hand it back. Like the next year it's still up a little bit, and then the next year maybe it recedes a little, and then the next year it's sort of flat, and then eventually, what you want is that you know, year five, year six, it does the big uptick again and then finds its way. What you don't you know, because a one-time success like we saw with the Mac a little bit in 21, is nice, but what you want is the tide is going to rise and then it stays at that new tide level. That's a really nice thing for their business. So yes, from a Wall Street perspective their business is kind of flat, but I would say from a what's-the-health-of-the-business perspective, they had huge growth whatever three years ago that they've entirely held on to it's solid.

0:38:25 - Alex Lindsay
They have built a plateau near the, near the top of mount everest yes like. I mean it's kind of like there's the air is starting, yeah air is starting to get thin you know, like up there, you know you got to you got to wear packs, you know, you got to really think about your profits so it's an, you know so the fact that they plateaued is in growth is something, but it's an enormous amount of money like.

0:38:44 - Leo Laporte
Profit in the fourth quarter is, uh, 14.7 billion dollars. This is interesting. The gross margin is almost 50 margin.

0:38:54 - Jason Snell
I mean they really are extracting every penny out of everything they sell yeah, now keep in mind services margin, and I I think I have a chart. To this extent, services margin is a lot more than product margin close to 100, I'm sure, but but services margin is a lot more than product margin Close to 100%.

0:39:06 - Leo Laporte
I'm sure.

0:39:07 - Jason Snell
But yes, apple is a very high margin business. It always has been, but it's never been more than it is now, because you've got, in addition to their high margin hardware, they've got the impossibly high margin services business.

0:39:18 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, yeah, the stock was down like a point and a half or something when the market reopened the next day. But if there are a lot of reports about how investors are disappointed, it's for the usual reason not because they're not doing really well, not because they're not hugely profitable, but because they didn't beat the estimates that these analysts had for them for that quarter. And, if anything, it's just a show of faith from investors and that wanes and webs depending on uh, uh, depending on the month. So who cares?

0:39:51 - Leo Laporte
Year over year growth very good in China, uh, and Europe and the Middle East America's a little bit down. But again.

0:39:59 - Jason Snell
You know, they're, they're, they're coming off that high when you. When you look at it this way, it looks like there's a big thing and a plunge, but again that's a growth rate. So they had the big growth rate and now they're kind of like in this flat period.

0:40:09 - Alex Lindsay
And if you're an Apple?

0:40:10 - Jason Snell
investor, which I'm not and I'm not allowed to be, but by myself, because that would give me, you have no boss. I've never invested in Apple, but I know a lot of people who follow this stuff do this stuff do what?

I would say is the question is when is that next growth spurt coming? If it is, and what? And I'm sure that's what wall street is focused on is what's the next thing? And we know that there are reports and that apple has even kind of hinted at big plans in the iphone product lineup, mark german said like a folding phone and a super thin phone that might come next year, and they're trying. I think it's very clear like they want that next iPhone super cycle where there's a really new iPhone that kicks them into a higher gear. And you know, we'll see if they can.

0:40:53 - Leo Laporte
That seems less and less likely to me.

0:40:55 - Jason Snell
I know right but.

0:40:57 - Leo Laporte
I would have said that before the last one too.

0:40:59 - Jason Snell
I honestly I would have said it before the last one, and it is a question is that all driven by new hardware?

0:41:09 - Leo Laporte
or is it also that the iPhone replenishment cycle just goes like?

0:41:10 - Jason Snell
that Well, I'm sure they were hoping.

0:41:11 - Leo Laporte
Apple Intelligence would be a big driver. That's unknown yet.

0:41:12 - Jason Snell
We don't know, and they've said that'll take a year, basically, for them to know if Apple Intelligence. They acknowledge that Apple Intelligence isn't going to sell a lot of iPhones today, but they're hoping that it will sell a lot of iPhones over the course of the next year or two.

0:41:26 - Andy Ihnatko
That's why the Q&A during these is so interesting, because it gives you a reflection of what are analysts really interested in, what are they really worried about and what are they kind of betting Apple's future on. For instance, in recent earnings calls, Apple would have to answer a bunch of questions about China because they're getting unprecedented amount of competition from Huawei and other Chinese local brands. I think this time they didn't get any answers whatsoever. It helped that their numbers were already up. They seem to be battling that problem very, very well.

But so many of the questions were about can you give us any color, any indication about how Apple intelligence is going to affect future purchases of the iPhone? There are also questions about the differentiation now between the iPhone 16 Pro and the iPhone 16. And, Tim, are you learning anything about where people's level of interest ends? And of course, they didn't have a lot to say of substance about it, but mainly repeating the to be honest, accurate thing where they're saying we're rolling this out in stages. We don't expect any real boosts of interest because of that, but we are going to have a product that is not going to be AI complete for another couple of years, so we're not going to. We don't have to really answer that for now.

0:42:42 - Jason Snell
We're not going to. We don't have to really answer that for now. And it's not just function. I mean those of us in the U S especially and in the English speaking world can focus on the fact that Apple intelligence, right, like first wave was 11, one or 18, one. Second wave will be 18, two, which will be out by the end of the year, and then there's going to be an 18, three and an 18, four and an 18, five, right, and this is a whole year long thing for features. But the other thing to keep in mind is 18.1 is US English only. 18.2 adds Canada, australia, new Zealand, south Africa and UK English and they're saying that next spring they're going to add a bunch of other languages which will bring it into, I think, china and the EU and some other places.

So it's not just because Apple is a global company and the iPhones a global product. This isn't just a feature functionality rollout, it's a. It's a region by region rollout which is not right like we're so primed to. Apple just makes it available everywhere on day one, which they didn't use to do, but they've. This is very Tim Cook right now. They make enough and they are everywhere immediately.

Not the vision pro but, like the products that matter are everywhere, but not Apple intelligence, and that means that the iPhone rollout now is kind of regionalized, at least for this one selling point. So that is a total change. And they acknowledged as somebody who does a transcript of it, which means that I need to sit there and listen to every word that comes out of it. Even though I use an AI transcription, I have to verify it because there are plenty of mistakes in that AI transcription. I sit there and listen to it and they spend a lot of time saying you know it's going to take time and Wall Street needs to understand Apple Intelligence, they think, is going to be a growth driver for them, but it's not going to be like flipping a switch. It just isn't.

0:44:27 - Andy Ihnatko
So many of their questions were about Apple Intelligence, including how I think that was the second time in a row. They got the question of how I think that was the second time in a row. They got the question of how, if they're going to be running a lot of their models on Apple Silicon in their own servers, how is this going to affect capital expenditures? And once again they said well, it's hard to a little bit of a shimmy duck saying that, well, the thing is, it's not like we buy a computer and that's what we run something on. We do stuff that we own. We do stuff that we own. We do stuff that we basically buy compute from. So it's hard to say. However, we don't really think that it's going. We've already been spending for the past three years. We don't feel as though there's going to be a big burst that's going to affect our bottom line in the next several quarters.

0:45:07 - Jason Snell
Plus, their secret sauce is that they're running on device, which means it's your electric bill that goes up instead of their electric bill, which is brilliant, actually the distributed computing thing, where they've got the chips that can run a lot of these models just on device, and so that is a fact. They also said I don't know if you caught this one, Andy people were like so Apple Intelligence looks like really hard. This one I love those analysts looks really hard. Are you going to spend even more money on r&d to make this hard?

stuff and the response was like again, they didn't say it this way, but basically it's like yeah, but you know we killed the car and, uh, all of that money that we spent on that is going to go into this. Essentially, they're like there are other projects that we have. Uh, you know we're taking we're taking we freed up.

0:45:51 - Andy Ihnatko
It's very clear that that was.

0:45:52 - Jason Snell
Their answer is like look, we spent a lot of money on a lot of research in the car project and a lot of that's just going into ai.

0:45:58 - Andy Ihnatko
That's what. That's what I just kind of quickly say before before you go, alex, this is this is what I'm going to really miss about luca. As the cfo, he has a way of saying yeah, we feel as though we gave you those numbers already and the answer to that question, and there's a little bit of that. I don't want you to feel like a piece of garbage right now, but they would not be inappropriate for you to feel like a piece of garbage for asking such a stupid question.

0:46:20 - Jason Snell
But luca gives and luca takes. Also, sometimes the analysts will say luca, I noticed. For example, this happened, I think, last quarter. I noticed that your margins are at an all-time high and lucas response was like are at an all time high and Lucas response was like yes, I am so glad you noticed that they are right.

0:46:42 - Leo Laporte
It was like gold star for you. So look at my street.

0:46:43 - Jason Snell
Apple CFO is is getting turned. As we said, I think, a few weeks ago, he's he's turned into a pumpkin. He, he like, gets a an office and he gets to focus on one thing. It's like this semi-retirement thing we talked about, where they want to hold on to their execs and not just let them go straight to the golf course every day, only three days a week or something. So, luca Maestri, this is his last time on the call. I'm sure that he has trained his replacement well to do a similar thing, with gold stars and occasional shaking of the finger, wagging of the finger for bad questions.

0:47:20 - Alex Lindsay
And and occasional shaking of the finger, wagging of the finger for bad questions, and the hard is the hard is Apple's number one. Hard and simple are Apple's two big moats that they do things that are hard and they do things that they make things that were complex, simple. And I think that they're doing both of those with Apple intelligence to some degree. You know, like that, you know to the level that they're successful at those two things, they, it'll be a good business for them. But I think that you know, like that, you know to the level that they're successful at those two things, um, they, it'll be a good business for them. But I think that you know, I, I, uh, it'll be really interesting to see how much they leverage. They have the advantage of building the OS and building the hardware, um, and there are obviously other people doing AI solutions on chip to distribute some of that out to the computers, although it's going to be really interesting to see, I think that we're going to end up seeing Qualcomm capitulate to ARM, because there's got to be a bunch of people out there telling Qualcomm like you're going to set the whole industry back five years, other than Apple, if you don't like figure this out, because I don't know if you're tracking, if you guys are watching that intently.

But but arm canceled their agreement with Qualcomm, like it was kind of like they can take you to court, but there is, there is this legal way, without a court saying, hey, we're not going to let you do this anymore. Um, it's hard to get out of it because it's in the contract that they can just give them 60 days notice, and so it's going to be really interesting to see how that goes. But, um, but assuming that that gets itself sorted out, apple, I think, still has a pretty big advantage because of the vertical nature, and I think apple keeps on leaning into that. We're going to keep on building vertical systems because that's what they're good at, is not? They're not good at, uh, heterogeneous systems, it's just not, it's not in their nature.

0:48:52 - Leo Laporte
So Any other color from the earnings call that you want to add, or should we?

0:48:58 - Andy Ihnatko
Not much. They did, they did All. All what I wanted to say was that there were a couple of interesting hard questions that they got, one being that okay, basically there is one candidate who might be elected who wants to tariff the crap out of every industry and as a company that has to import stuff from outside the United States, are you worried or planning about that? And Tim, like almost explicitly, said yeah, I'm going to take a dive on that one.

0:49:25 - Jason Snell
Yep, no. He had two questions where Tim was basically like nope, not going to answer, and one of them was if Trump does tariffs, because I also, like it's easy to say oh well, Trump's talking about tariffs, so what if? And you know what Tim Cook's not going to say is you know, we did four years with that guy and he we brought him to. You know, we and we managed him Right Like we managed him and we made it work. And if I need to do that again, I'll do that again. But he's not going to say that out loud, but we know what happened when trump was president last time, as tim cook showed up at the white house and he took trump to a uh, the mac pro factory and they negotiated our facility for your pr thing absolutely because?

because at the same time, like there's the tariff story, but also there's also the apple is one of our great american companies stories, and that requires diplomacy. And tim cook is like four years ago. They said he's a master of diplomacy with china and with the white house and, like he has to deal with this stuff, I also want to mention the other one was somebody asked what about the doj and google and all that money you get from google?

0:50:26 - Andy Ihnatko
and his response was like I'll save that for another day okay, which is a big deal, because if they lose $18 billion in services, yeah, maybe services no longer looks like the shining star that it once was.

0:50:41 - Leo Laporte
It's fair to say, though, it will be a while, and Tim could probably pass that on to John Ternus or whoever's successor.

0:50:50 - Andy Ihnatko
Sundar Pichai's big statement on it is slightly troubling, but maybe absolutely correct for a CEO saying, not saying that well, we're right, they're wrong or B, we're on the right side of history. His big statement, especially to investors, is yeah, this is going to take years and years and years to litigate, don't worry about it, don't worry about it. I think he actually said it during the earnings call last week too. Yeah.

0:51:11 - Leo Laporte
We actually talked about this a little bit on sunday because we had amy webb on, who is kind of a very high level management consultant.

She's a futurist, but she's brought in to talk strategy with the department of defense, with ceos, and I did bring up tim cook as kind of, I think, the perfect example of how to manage an uncertain political situation. You know, he was in china the same day india and they announced that they're going to be making many, many, many iphones in in india, starting next uh generation, and he's very good at balancing these uh, these conflicting things. She compared that to somebody like elon musk who has made a um, almost um pascal's wager, if will, with the election, saying well, let's think about this, if Harris gets elected, she's not going to retaliate for me being a Trump fan. If Trump gets elected and I were endorsing Harris, that could be a problem. So the wise thing to do is support Trump, just in case, and knowing that even if Trump doesn't win, it's not going to be as damaging if I did the opposite and you know. So that's another way to do it.

0:52:22 - Andy Ihnatko
I'm glad Tim's not doing that, because that seems a little bit cynical, and it should be said that Elon Musk is not just hedging his bets, he really is all in and committing his entire platform. There's so much upside and this is an upload.

0:52:38 - Leo Laporte
He knows that he will get if Trump wins today. He will get great rewards for that. But he also knows there will not be a big punishment for it if he doesn't.

0:52:50 - Andy Ihnatko
But Tim. Let's give credit where it's due for Tim. He is really, really good at balancing those things, at keeping his hands clean while shaking his hands with people who have a great power to hurt Apple and to hurt his employees. And we're not just talking about what's going on with tariffs, but what's going on with manufacturing. Also, remember that Apple intelligence is not going to work in China unless Apple reaches a deal with a Chinese-owned AI company to provide basically the AI for that.

That's another very, very delicate thing that, had it not been for 10 years of groundwork he's been laying down there, he wouldn't have the credibility and the good relationship to rely on. The fact that he makes the government looks really really good, no matter what that government is, is really really an asset to Apple. I will say that and people who've been listening to the show for years and years and years know that there was a time where I'm like I hope we don't find out in a bad way that Apple doesn't have a line they're not willing to cross, like when they're told to get rid of VPNs off of an app store or get rid of these podcasts that this government doesn't like. They seem to have danced on the right side of that. For now, I guess what is going to happen is let's hope things don't get so tense that we actually find out where that line is, and I have faith, but it's hard.

0:54:11 - Leo Laporte
Well, Amy, of course, has been doing a lot of work in the last couple of months with CEOs we live in a very uncertain time, Absolutely and and her motto was embrace uncertainty, you know, and plan for variety of outcomes. But you've got to think strategically and you've got a plan, and I think no one does a better job of this than than tim cook. I think you got to give him a ton of credit and I will talk about.

0:54:37 - Alex Lindsay
I want go ahead. I just want to say one thing we always talk about what steve would do.

0:54:40 - Leo Laporte
Steve could not manage that oh no, no, like this was all visceral, all emotional. Just be yelling at people and he'd be you know and and I you know, this is almost the opposite.

0:54:51 - Alex Lindsay
yeah, I think this, I think that you know, I think there's a lot of things that Steve would have done, that probably would have continued to grow products and so on and so forth, but this crazy management of all these governments and rules and everything else I think Tim Cook was built for.

0:55:06 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, they began a 4am email from Steve saying I have some thoughts on the size of that yellow star on your flag. It is disproportionate to the rest of that flag and I've got the suggestions, yeah.

0:55:18 - Leo Laporte
All right, let's take a break. I do want to talk about Apple intelligence, because we have it and German says we're going to get the next tranche December 5th or thereabouts, which isn't very far off. You're watching MacBreak Weekly Andy Ihnatko, Alex Lindsay and Jason Snell.

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I have to say now that I've been using you know I have Apple intelligence on all my devices, turned it on last week, got it very quickly. I'm starting to kind of think more highly of Apple's staged rollout. I think if they had dumped a lot of features on us a lot of them would be missed, never used. It might be too much for people. It's very subtle but all of a sudden I'm getting replies in my pretty good replies in my text messaging. I love that.

Frankly, I love the notification summaries. I think they're very useful. I used to just turn off all my notifications because it was overwhelming. I love it that. You know we showed it last week. You know five to 10 people have visited, rung my doorbell instead of one for each person at the door or that was good on Halloween, by the way. Or your garage door has opened 23 times. I like that. I think that's a good feature. I have to say I'm kind of coming around. I haven't used the summaries much, but I think that that's also putting simple, straightforward, easily discoverable features into Start seems to me the right way to go. Agreed.

1:00:56 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, I think it makes sense and I think that, again, I don't think Apple's in that much of a rush.

1:01:01 - Leo Laporte
No, they don't need to, they can roll this stuff out.

1:01:02 - Alex Lindsay
I mean, I have ChatGPT and MidJourney open most of the day doing different things, and I've been playing with Claude and I don't feel like I'm waiting for Apple. My life has stopped because Apple doesn't have those features and so I don't, you know. So I think that they can kind of roll these out relatively slowly and really build that out, and I think that that's going to be the. That's going to be a huge advantage for them, because they're able to think through it in a way that I think a lot of the other developers can't. There's such a there's everyone's racing against each other to such a degree. Apple has the ability to kind of go slow. The thing that I show everybody, you know and this has been on the Android platform for a long time is you open something in Photos and get rid of things. It's crowd pleaser.

1:01:47 - Leo Laporte
Yeah.

1:01:48 - Alex Lindsay
Like it's.

1:01:48 - Leo Laporte
You know, you open it up and just get rid of it, because everybody has a photo with something, somebody or something and it might get rid of.

1:01:53 - Alex Lindsay
I would just, and I used to do it in photoshop, but I was like I, you know, I uh you were a wizard, I take things into and do gen.

You know, janitor, and and I will say that apple's version of it is not as good as photoshop's. I mean, like you know it's, it's cute. Um, but for little things, like I shot something yesterday I had to send someone. There was a paint can in it. You know, it was in my shop and there just happened to be a pinky and I was like I don't feel like having that there. Just kind of just clicked on it and it disappeared, okay here we go, yeah, yeah, it's amazing, I think wonderful.

1:02:20 - Andy Ihnatko
Uh, go ahead. I was just gonna say I wonder if this is an error. I I do agree that apple doesn't have. They don't have to go fast. They're not in a situation where people are going to stop buying macs if they don't have AI features built in. The industry is still trying to make the case to people of AI features that are actually useful and practical, as opposed to make for a great demo or a good white paper on something that you should be very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very worried about. So they have time to do this. Have time to do this.

What I'm interested in is whether Apple has the guts to move forward on AI. I was concerned when Craig Federighi talked to Joanna Stern on the Wall Street Journal last week or the week before about the Apple Intelligence rollout he was talking about. Oh well, we're concerned about the truth of an image, and should we be doing this, like all these philosophical questions, whereas I think it's definitely part of the conversation we need to have about? Is it should be? What's the danger of making images and videos so easy to edit, easy to change? Nonetheless, again, if I took a picture of my kid and I accidentally made it look like there's a palm tree growing out of their ear.

It's great to be able to remove that palm tree. It's really great to be able to remove that paint can. It's really great to be able to like be in a group photo by taking the group photo, then switching yourself out with somebody else standing in a new place and now be able to combine yourself so that now you are in the group photo as well. There's going to have to be a lot of stuff where Apple might have a moment where they have to say we can't allow these purely academic discussions, philosophical questions, direct the amount of features that we're willing to put into our products, because it could be that there is a good argument to be made on both sides and it turns out to be product that people really, really want.

1:04:15 - Alex Lindsay
So that's the thing that kind of concerns me yeah, I think that the issue is you don't want to come out too early, like you need everybody to make the missteps. I mean, there was a lot of stuff when I was on call for help with leo. I had this thing where people could send photos in and I'd fix them right, you know. So I would. You know people would send these photos by.

1:04:30 - Leo Laporte
This is, by the way, 20 years ago, 20 years ago.

1:04:33 - Alex Lindsay
It's hard to believe, and so people would. You know. I'd get 100 photos a week would get sent in and I'd pick one that I would do and invariably every week there would be some wacko that would send one in and he is weird looking and he's got this girl and he wants her to be comped in. He's like this is my niece, I want to be comped in. He's like this is my niece, I want to be comped into the photo with her and I'd be like I should report you, but I'm just not going to do the photo.

1:04:58 - Jason Snell
Like I'm not going to do that you never told me this.

1:05:06 - Alex Lindsay
It was like this constant flow of weirdos who wanted to be comped in with girls, you know, and the thing is, I think that Apple.

I think it, it it takes, um, I think that that that it's not that you can't, you can stop that, but I think Apple doesn't want to be the first one Like. That needs to be something that we're going to let you know, let everybody else take those, let everyone else be in the front line, and we're going to sit back and let everyone take those arrows and then we'll we'll roll in and do it slowly and maybe more thoughtfully, or put some guardrails in watching what everybody else is doing. You know, it's kind of the. It's kind of what was it? What was the Tom Cruise movie where he keeps on never, he keeps on doing it over and over? They changed the name of the movie.

1:05:48 - Jason Snell
Oh yeah, Edge of Tomorrow. Edge of Tomorrow, yeah, Live.

1:05:52 - Alex Lindsay
Die, Repeat and the they changed the name of the movie. Sort of, yeah, they did For marketing reasons. It's a great movie, by the way. Yeah, I liked Edge of Tomorrow. I've watched it so many times, oh you know what that explains it.

1:06:03 - Leo Laporte
Because I said to my wife oh look, there's a new Emily Blunt Tom Cruise movie I haven't seen, we started watching it.

1:06:11 - Alex Lindsay
She said you've seen this. And I felt like I was in it because it was a repeat of the movie I think I've seen it as many times as he's gone through the cycle, and so you know I just start where he wakes up, on the base and then I watch the rest of it and the act one is like nah, whatever, anyway.

So you need to see it once, you need to see act one once. No-transcript. They're throwing caution to the wind and they're just saying, yeah, we can make it, you can do anything you want, and that's, you know, problematic yeah, we can make it.

1:06:53 - Jason Snell
you can do anything you want, and that's, uh, you know, problematic. I was going to mention um, it's absolutely true that Apple is doing this in part piecemeal because they have to right. Obviously, they're, they're, they're catching up, they're running as fast as they can. Uh, and you could argue that if, if they could have shipped all these features at the moment, they would have, but they couldn't.

1:07:12 - Leo Laporte
But here's the thing.

1:07:13 - Jason Snell
I think you make a very good point, which is, I think, dropping a load of features, hundreds of thousands of features, on people in a single release. Even I mean back in the Mac era, where it was like you know, the Mac was the thing Apple did and it was 2010 or whatever like, and you're all computer users, so you know you're going to get your new features. I could sort of see it, although it was overwhelming even then. But today, where you have a much more diverse user group, you've got a lot of low-tech people who have a smartphone and they're not like oh, I just love noodling around on my Mac and I got new features to noodle around with. They're like they have to learn it and then they put it in their brains brains and then they don't change and it's very hard for them to glom on to any new features.

If you dump your year's worth of features in a single go in september, guess what? They're? Probably every feature drop, every version drop. You do. There's a chance there's like a 10 chance that they'll discover one feature. So you should.

I think, for usability reasons, you should probably drop five features or three features or whatever every couple of months, not a hundred features at once, because I think if you drop five features or a hundred features, there's still only that percent chance that they're going to pick up one of them. So why not? It's like we were saying about the Mac why not do three Mac events on three separate days and get three chances to get people's attention? I feel this way with all software. Like you can ship a hundred new features, nobody's going to learn how to use. None of us have the capacity for that.

So in that way, I think that by accident, not only is it an advantage because Apple can see how everybody else is dealing with AI rollouts and adjust on the fly, because the advantage of being a little behind is that you don't have to learn those lessons, just like Tom Cruise in that movie whose title keeps changing, but you also have the luxury of, kind of like spoon, feeding it to your users and saying why don't you try this? And their ads are like this too, where over time, their ads with use cases will change. Because that's one way you convince somebody to try a feature is you actually do an ad? You?

have to show it and I could don't get me started. I think a lot of Apple's Apple intelligence ads are real bad, but I get what they're trying to do, which is lead people into those use cases as well. So I think they would not have chosen this method, but I think it's the right one. I think it's better for users.

1:09:40 - Leo Laporte
And who else does it? Google does it with their Pixel phones. They do monthly Pixel feature drops, so they probably have them all done, but they roll them out a little bit at a time and that way you can absorb it Exactly.

1:09:55 - Jason Snell
They're titrating because it's overwhelming and it and it suppresses upgrades if the features. Apple learn this with ios 7 right, like if you drop dramatic changes on your device, uh in a single go, uh, people stop updating their phones, like after ios 7. There were no updates for a while for a lot of people, because they're like apple completely pulled the rug out from under me with this. Os change so and apple wants you to update so, so instead, uh, parcel it out very carefully. They do this with emoji too. That's one of the reasons they don't ship the new emoji set with a point o.

They wait a couple because it will eventually become a fomo thing where you're like why are you using an emoji that I do not have? And then you get that emoji and Apple intelligence features and generally features. I would argue Apple's been moving this way, but I really like that idea that in June they say here's what we're doing for the next year, and then that's a promise to roll all these features out over the next year, but not all in September.

1:10:52 - Alex Lindsay
Please just don't do it yeah, I'm always surprised at how my, my kids have know so much about the phone, like they'll show me something every time they grab it. They'll be like it's just kids. Oh, here's how to. Here's how to actually you know?

1:11:05 - Leo Laporte
don't you know that the kids these days, I mean you know, but aren't you on a show called mac break weekly? How could you not know that?

1:11:11 - Alex Lindsay
I know exactly well. It mostly obviously it's the phone that they, that they they know really well, and I think that to to Jason's point is that there are so many features that are hidden into these things at this point and I think I would love for Apple to go as slow as possible because I find that there's so many things that aren't as stable as they used to be and there's that whole like snow, like kind of want a snow leopard cycle where Apple didn't feel like they had to add a bunch of things because they could. They could probably use a year to tighten things up Slow and steady is not bad Slow and steady for for all of us, right.

1:11:45 - Jason Snell
It's for their I'm sure, for their developers too, right? I mean, this is one of the reasons why this happens, not just for Apple intelligence, but for lots of stuff. Why Apple started doing some of this is, you know, imagine being an Apple OS developer and being told that you need to get every brand new feature to fit and finish final for September, instead of being able to triage and say these features in September, like we've been saying about Apple intelligence these in 0.0, these in 0.1, 0.2, 0.3, 0.4, 0.5. That's way better and the software quality is going to be better and, like all of it is better to do it this way. So I love that in some ways, apple being behind sort of forced them into this, and I hope they do this next time too. Like, obviously you want the cutting edge, most important features that are going to sell iPhones to be there at launch, and I'm sure they will try to do that next year. But it's okay if some of the stuff waits a little bit. That's fine.

1:12:36 - Alex Lindsay
Right.

1:12:37 - Andy Ihnatko
And the great thing is that they don't, as they demonstrated, they don't have to come up with the entire story on their own.

They can say they can roll out Apple Intelligence in 18.2 by saying anything that we're not studly enough to be able to do with AI, apple that we're not studly enough to be able to do with AI, optimal intelligence eh, we'll let ChatGPT do that, we'll let you look out for that.

And if you want to use another service, another app on our phones, we are more than happy to host Gemini or Cloud or anything else as an app on the phone. So all they have to do is put themselves in a position where they're not getting in the way of whatever AI people want to use. Because, again, we're not in a place yet where people know exactly what they want. It's a really good thing to have AI that's deeply, deeply rooted into the operating system, so that when you're using the Google Assistant or you're using Shlomo, it's just suddenly turbocharged with smarts. It's just suddenly turbocharged with smarts. But we haven't demonstrated yet that people necessarily require AI that's built in at the OS level, that the people who want AI will just simply pay the $20 a month and install Gemini or install ChatGPT. The ones who don't care about it.

1:13:52 - Leo Laporte
They're happy of having wacky custom emoji generated for them from time to time. Let's take a break when we come back. A big acquisition by Apple leaving the future somewhat uncertain.

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Kind of a shock Came out of nowhere this week. Apple bought Pixelmator, makers of Pixelmator Pro, Pixelmator for iOS and the Photomator apps Much beloved apps. I loved Gus Mueller's take. He's the guy who does Acorn, yeah, and he says I didn't realize this. In fact, it kind of surprised me that Pixelmator and Acorn came out roughly at the same time, 15 days apart in 2007. Same time, 15 days apart in 2007. And since affinity, which makes affinity photo and affinity page pages, and all of that was purchased by Canva in March, acorn is the last independent Mac image editor from that era, steve Trang, acorn is the cheese, mark Leary, I like Acorn and I still actually I used both. They do different things and he says, yeah, there was a lot of overlap. So what's happening? Is this a acquihire? Is Apple going to bring back Aperture? There are a lot of questions. What?

1:18:28 - Alex Lindsay
are your thoughts on this? I don't think they're bringing back Aperture. I mean, I think that this could be incorporated into photos. It could be its own app. Um, you know it could be. You know there's a variety. I mean, when we saw there's other things they bought that they've absorbed into other apps. There's other things they bought that let they let stay kind of where they are. Um, I think it'd be a great addition to some of these other tools. I'm I have to. We talked about this on office hours a little bit. I'm not that excited about paying another subscription like it's not like. I don't think that would get you.

Yeah, Pixelmator was not a subscription, right, I mean it was an option, you got it yeah yeah, I think there was but there was an option okay, yeah, if you wanted to do it that way, but I think, uh, the uh, but you could get it for 50 bucks. I bought, I bought both acorn and Pixelmator pro or whatever, or bought it as they were released. So I didn't. You know, I've had them since since then. Um, I think that I think the purchase of affinity probably put, um, a fair bit of pressure on both of those apps because, you know, suddenly they had a lot more money and affinity had done a better job at being more photoshop, like you know, like. So so it was, uh, so it had. It had a couple features. Um, uh, you know the.

I used affinity mostly. I used pixel meter for a long time and we used, so it had a couple features. I used Affinity mostly. I used Pixelmator for a long time and that used to be the standard thing that was installed onto most of our machines at Pixelcore.

I moved to Affinity for two reasons. One is they had this very odd 360 painting tool that the other one, nothing else, had. So that was one reason. And they added TGA alpha, uh, at my request, and so there was a. So, because I couldn't find another thing other than photoshop that would, that would export tgas. And I, admittedly, went to to Pixelmator and said, hey, I really need this export. And they're like, oh, it's not not a big demand for that. And I was like, okay and so, so, anyway, so, and affinity, uh, put it in. And so a bunch of us all moved to affinity because it was finally a photoshop, a non-photoshop tool that would export the stuff we needed for black magic switchers, you know and so. But that was, that is a unique use case yeah, well, there's a million actually, speaking of images out there, that's, that's the thing.

1:20:29 - Leo Laporte
You know, like it's a major was one of the first uh to put image erasing. I was really blown away by how well it did a few years ago.

1:20:37 - Alex Lindsay
I think that the big thing is that, by not being constrained by the technical debt that Photoshop had, there are so many of the plugins that Pixelmator does and that Affinity does and that Acorn does that are much, much faster than if you do it in Photoshop. You can do them in real time in a way that you can't do it otherwise. In the same time, I don't think what's interesting is I actually don't think that Pixelmator is at the pro level is really that competitive with Photoshop. It doesn't have alpha channels, it doesn't have, you know, a lot of the other things, so it's a great app for Apple to get without getting. I don't think that.

I'm not sure what Adobe thinks, but I doubt they look at that as something that's digging in deeply into their bottom line, you know, and so. So I don't think you're going to get a like a chain, you know, a reaction from Adobe by buying this and and I think that it is it would be an incredible tool next to Keynote, or you know. You know, being able to add that's what I was hoping is that they would have they, or being able to add that's what I was hoping is that they would have they, would add it to the iWork. That's what I. If they did that and made it part of that thing, I think it would be a much better solution than if they started charging us a subscription for it.

1:21:43 - Leo Laporte
But Gruber points out, photomator integrates with Apple Photos.

1:21:48 - Jason Snell
It does very well.

1:21:50 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, so there is something to be said for making that, making that be, you know a part of the apple photos my gut feeling.

1:21:57 - Jason Snell
I mean photomator. It's funny. Photomator has been doing ai uh, replace like cleanup in photos for years now. Right, and and it was frustrating that it wasn't in photos. It's got some nice tools. My hope is that the the stuff that's been going on with Photomator maybe gets put some people on the photos team and get some improved editing tools in photos. But Pixelmator that's the question. When I initially okay, apple can do this two ways, right, and my initial thoughts were, oh, they're just gonna eat this thing.

And we're never gonna see it. I actually think Pixelmator is so advanced and there's so much of it that I actually have a hard time imagining that they would just swallow it whole and we'd never see it again. So here's my best guess now is this and this is just a theory, I don't know anything about this, but what matters to Apple? The iPhone. What matters the most about the iPhone to Apple? In many ways, it's photography. So I think maybe there's an argument that Apple camera technology and the people involved in Apple's camera stuff are very ambitious and in the end, whatever they build, however ambitious it is, it has to integrate with their consumer photo app, because that's all they got. And it makes me think.

Maybe somebody said can we have a more advanced photo editing app as part of our Apple software that doesn't force us to toss every last thing we do into photos? Could we have something? Because we have Final Cut, we can toss things in Final Cut, we don't have to toss them in iMovie, and now those are across platforms. Could we do something a little more advanced than photos? And they looked around and said, well, actually we could.

And that maybe that's what motivated this purchase is they want a platform for a photos pro or pixels or whatever they want to call it, that allows them to have something like final cut and logic for photography. That's not Photoshop and it's not Lightroom and it's not trying to be, but that lets them say and if you want to do X with this new, amazing future iPhone camera feature, we have the app for you that you get for free or for a subscription price or whatever. So right now that's my guess is that something like Pixelmator will stick around in some form and that maybe that's why Apple cares so much is that there's a part of Apple, which is the iPhone and photography, that Apple actually really does care about. And once you start thinking about, every photo feature you add has to get stuck in photos, a consumer image library and light editing app. It is actually kind of a mismatch, and if they built every feature for iMovie, you would be saying the same thing.

1:24:56 - Andy Ihnatko
So that's what I think and what makes Pixelmator unique. I'm not going to compare it to Acorn or others. I'm going to compare it mostly to Photoshop, because if you're just talking about, is there really really good? There's the built-in photo editor you get. There is the intermediary thing where you're still pretty much just sliding sliders around and you want to use AI features. And then there's Photoshop, and Lightroom will give you that, photoshop will give you that. It's not even that expensive. I think it's still just 10 bucks a month. You just want those two apps.

What owning a company like Pixelmator will do is that Pixelmator is something that Adobe products aren't. It is down to the DNA. It is a Mac app. It is an iOS app. There is nothing about it that seems like there was any quarter given for making this multi-platform. It was just what is. You could even think of it as the most florid demo of every single Mac technology there is Down to Metal, down to the APIs, down to user interface everything. It is an elegantly Mac product.

So I don't know why Apple necessarily would want to own it as opposed to be happy that it exists and keep promoting it in their keynotes, as they would like to do. I would be shocked if it were hey, we could really make the Photos app spectacularly great and steal all those really great AI features. Of course we'll throw everything else. We're not going to actually have the app itself. I don't think they would be stupid enough to do that and I don't think that the pixel meter team unless that would be a hell of a big truck filled with the sort of notes, the sort of bank notes that are only in like ripley's, believe it or not the kind of like the ten thousand dollar william friedkin note or whatever. That's how much money they would have to do to say, oh, we're gonna, we're willing to basically put our product in a basket and send it down the river.

1:26:58 - Jason Snell
Well, I mean, I'm sure there's a price, I'm sure that there is a price for which that they might not care. But I think you're right. I think the counter might be could Apple take pieces of it and put it in Pages and Keynote and Freeform and like? Freeform is kind of design-y a little bit, but I don't think it's the right fit. I think the right fit is to do a really good photo app and if you haven't used a Pixelmator, like it's Photoshop, basically it's got layers and it's got vector tools and it's like way beyond like photos.

The app could not contain it. It doesn't make sense. Photomator is like nice features that should be in photos. Pixelmator is like nice features that should be in photos. Pixelmator is Photoshop. So now Apple has a Photoshop that, as Andy pointed out 100% right, is very Apple-y. It is the most Apple-y.

1:27:42 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's why Acorn with all respect to Gus, acorn isn't going to get acquired because it's so not a Mac.

1:27:49 - Andy Ihnatko
Well, it's a one-person shop, so it's amazing. Yeah, but no, I love it and I use it all the time.

1:27:53 - Jason Snell
It's an old-style Mac app, whereas Pixelmator is like a Mac and iPad and iOS cross-platform in Apple's platform.

1:28:01 - Leo Laporte
It looks like Apple made it.

1:28:02 - Jason Snell
Yeah.

1:28:04 - Andy Ihnatko
And that's another reason why it would confuse me if Apple did not continue to support it as a separate product. I would hope so, because it's not just hey, wow, it's photo. Cyber product. Because it's not just hey, wow, it's photo. It's now. Instead of using just pushing sliders around in the photos app. Now I've got like something that's almost Photoshop-like. It's not just Photoshop-like it goes off on its own direction.

As Jason mentioned about the vector tools, it's not just for hey, I want to increase the brightness here. Hey, I want to do layers, hey, I want to delete something from the background. It really is a 100% independent creative tool, so, as its own thing, it is a natural fit for Apple's portfolio, particularly if they make a kick-butt iPad version of it. It is such a great way to show off all the technologies that Apple has been investing in for years and years and years, including the AI tools that they are, like, as we discussed earlier, kind of not philosophically excited about putting into the mainstream camera app or the mainstream photos app. They could still offer all that sort of stuff with this free app that you can download alongside iWork.

Again, it would be such a damn shame and such a damn disappointment if they did not simply continue it as Pixelmator, or even if what they did with it was again give it a new name, but it's still clearly Pixelmator. There's still the Pixelmator group that's updating it. Only they now have access to the silicon. They now have access to. Oh, by the way, here is what the GPU on Apple silicon, in five years, is going to be able to do. You get to start supporting it right now and you get to start telling us what this hardware?

should be doing now. I mean, I'm not going to go so silly as to think that, gee, this would be a great step towards having a touchscreen Mac, wouldn't it? But that's as far as I go. But the worst thing absolutely would be oh great, there's a Pixel. I can recognize the bones and the blood splatter evidence of Pixelmaze acquisition in this one new feature that's on my iPhone.

1:30:06 - Alex Lindsay
I think that one of the things that Apple could have been looking at is, hey, we need to have more control over there's a lot of features that we'd like to take advantage of with Apple intelligence, with all of the data that you know these are. We're talking about computational photography. Apple, you know, has a lot of data connected to those photos and you know something, nothing's really taking full advantage of those right now, other than photos, and probably that's still kind of hidden under a veneer of consumers, consumer interfaces, and so so I think that, uh, I think that apple could have been looking at this area and you know they could definitely build their own team and do this. Or you could buy a team, you know, buy a company and have the team there, and I think that there's a lot of value in Pixelmator being able to integrate with keynote, integrate with pages, integrate with being able to add USDZ you know features to it, being able to do those kinds of things.

One of the things that Adobe is actually pulling away from Apple on is the ability to generate high-quality 3D assets. You know, and Apple, that's a big deal for a lot of what Apple is doing with AR and VR, but Adobe is crushing it. And why are they crushing it? It's because they bought algorithmic. So they bought one company that brought all Adobe may, had a bunch of failures for a decade, gave up and bought this great company out of France that really brought all the tools they needed into it, and they just keep on leveraging that end over end over end, and they're building simplistic, simplistic. Now I can't Neo project.

Neo is this simplistic modeling tool that you can, that you can grab onto and start to build stuff, and so I think Apple needs those, those, those generation, because they need to control. Apple likes to be able to control its own destiny and with final cut and motion and logic, they control their own destiny in those areas of you know, it doesn't mean that everyone's using those, but they have somewhere they can push that technology into it and at least prod people forward in that area, and so I think Pixelmator fits that bill as far as in a still image, vector image. You know that type of thing being able to do that. So I think it's a great purchase. I don't think they're going to tear it apart. I think that you could see a bunch of the features that they have fed into it, but just those features I think Apple could write themselves. I think that having the apps themselves, I think, is useful.

1:32:21 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, they have a professional video and film editing tool. They have a professional audio editing tool. It makes sense for them to say I want to have a professional static image generator tool, but, as you say, it's not just necessarily 2D images. Again, the thing that keeps the thing that Adobe does, that keeps its hooks into me, that guarantees that 10 bucks or $15 a month for me for the photography packages. Oh, so now if I have a piece of art of a flying toaster but I'm thinking, oh boy, I wish it were head on instead of three quarters, it will turn it into a 3D object and I can now spin it and have a straight-on version of this 3D toaster, even though I didn't have to turn it into a 3D object myself or give it any hints. That's the sort of problem solving and like, I don't have the skills to do this myself. But hey, I've got $15 a month for this photoshop and it's got a brand new feature that dropped last month.

Yeah, if apple can do things like that, if they can make it so that anytime I want to do advanced, advanced asset creation I hate to use those buzzwords, but that's the best way to put it because I don't want people. I don't want to start the the thought that, oh, this is just an adobe photoshop alternative. It is like an asset, a creative asset creation thing. Anytime I'm in a keynote and I need an object to dress this thing up with, either generating it with AI, or editing something that I already have, or drawing something brand new, or transmogrifying something. It has such slick integration with something like Pixelmator.

1:33:49 - Leo Laporte
That's the tide that will elevate all creative boats on the Mac, the mac and on the ipad apple's relationship with adobe has been tenuous, uh, for a while apple was in the steve jobs era was really very anti-adobe. Right they were, they weren't I?

1:34:06 - Alex Lindsay
think they were really frustrated with adobe, you know, because they what they what, what the problem that they had is, as they move to um, as they move platforms. Adobe was taking a long time because Adobe has an enormous amount of technical debt inside of their apps and they've been slowly taking those sections out and updating them and everything else. But it's not trivial for Adobe to move Photoshop or Premiere or other things to a new platform. There's a lot of stuff that's based on things and Adobe is also managing multiple platforms and they, you know Apple managing multiple platforms and they, you know, apple's just one of them there, and I think that. And so I think that I think what Steve Jobs got so upset about is he would release a new OS and Adobe would tell everyone hey, don't upgrade, you know if you're using our products, because we can't and then it would go for a year.

1:34:50 - Jason Snell
I think at one point it went for a year.

1:34:50 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, where photo and then it would go for a year, I think at one point. It went for a year where photo you know, and I think that's when you know, it was six. It was either six months or a year that it took Adobe to get Photoshop to the new version and that infuriated.

1:35:02 - Leo Laporte
But then at some point Apple realized Photoshop is critical to the platform, probably why it abandoned Aperture right. They didn't want to compete head to head yeah, I think that.

1:35:19 - Alex Lindsay
I think that what happened was I think there was a push to make photo photos a lot more, have a lot more features. That got a lot closer to aperture and then it gets to a point where like, why do we have, why do you?

1:35:29 - Leo Laporte
have both. You know they're going in the other direction and I have to say that Pixelmator and photometer are good choices because their user interface looks a lot like photos. Yeah, if you, I mean you don't if yeah. So I think maybe photos pro is a very interesting thing they did down to their website.

1:35:47 - Jason Snell
Right, looks like an Apple website. They, they as a company, they and there are some companies not all in the Apple ecosystem are like this where they're like we're just going to try to be Apple, we're going to. What would Apple do is the touchstone in every way, and if you get bought by apple, that's kind of good, right, because you were already there and and so, yeah, whether it's photos pro or whether it's pixels or I don't know what, uh, yeah, that would be.

If I had to guess right now, that would be my guess is that they will keep it intact in some form, sort of like what happened with workflow when it got bought and turned into shortcuts right and, by the way, the team is in lithuania.

I don't know if that makes a difference, but I think Apple's pretty I mean Apple's third-party apps are in. I think the Logic team's in Germany right, like they're all over the place, okay, and if you're not in Core OS, you can afford to not be in Cupertino. So I think Logic and Final Cut were both purchases and they left the teams in place and the Logic team yeah, logic team was in Germany. So they're still in Germany and they may have developers elsewhere. But I will tell you it's very clear from their release notes that there are a lot of Germans still building Logic because they're very Occasionally I see some English that I'm like that looks a little like a German speaker did that and also, again, very meticulous and detailed. The best I don't say this often enough the best release notes in Apple software are Logix release notes.

1:37:12 - Alex Lindsay
They are detailed.

1:37:14 - Jason Snell
It's every change.

1:37:19 - Alex Lindsay
Every time I see it, I think imagine if everybody's change notes were like this. I mean, it's like BB Edit level, where it it's literally every change that happened there was a small corner of a button that we didn't like and we softened it.

1:37:28 - Jason Snell
Yeah, exactly yeah, this all right, once called this, we got it. We got it, we were during it.

1:37:35 - Andy Ihnatko
During a night of tense sleep, we were visited at 4 32 am by the ghost of steve jobs saying I have a note on the rounded rectangle that you're using in here.

1:37:49 - Leo Laporte
That's hysterical. I love it. Well, I'm really rooting for the Vilnius team. I'd love to see them make this more than an acqui-hire but really a product that Apple could add to its kind of suite of free apps that it provides with every Mac and every iPad. That would be really amazing.

1:38:01 - Jason Snell
Yeah, I mean they could do it as a subscription, because Final Cut and Logic are subscriptions, so they could do it that way if they wanted to. We'll see.

1:38:12 - Andy Ihnatko
New Apple Watch has a bigger screen. Maybe we're going to finally get great photo editing on the watch Pixel made our watch.

1:38:20 - Leo Laporte
That would be pretty funny. That would be hysterical. All right, let's do it. We've deferred it long enough. It's time for the Vision Pro segment. What do you?

1:38:30 - Jason Snell
see, what do you know? It's time to talk to Vision Pro.

1:38:41 - Leo Laporte
Are we disappointed with Ming-Chi Kuo's ZEIT yesterday saying uh, as I understand it, production of the cheaper Vision Pro has been delayed Beyond 2027 for a while now. That means Apple's only new head-mounted display device next year will be the Vision Pro with an upgraded M5 processor.

1:39:01 - Alex Lindsay
Credible, I don't yeah, I don't think. I don't think it's changed. I think they have this thing like Apple is discovering this thing and Apple's going to go to their day are and Apple's going to do these things. I think Apple's been on the same path the whole time and and I think they're just talking to different people like like Apple's decided to make a cheaper one and Apple has maybe never decided to make a cheaper one.

1:39:19 - Leo Laporte
Next, year like you know, like it I don't know if it I I really well for people holding out, for that it's good to know, or maybe not, I don't know. Yeah, I mean maybe.

1:39:28 - Andy Ihnatko
I think that I like the idea that they understand the difference between a 3 500 vr headset that has no that people can't figure out how to how they would use it, and a 1500 vr headset that has no great apps for it and no great use case for them. Personally, it doesn't solve the problem. I think that they know that if there's a problem, the problem with Vision Pro is not price of access. It's that again. Why are you spending? Why would you spend in a world that has the MetaQuest? What is your reason for spending more than $600 or $700 on a headset like this?

And unless you're an enterprise, unless you're doing laparoscopic surgery, there's not a whole lot of great answers to that. So if that's true, I like that idea. Let's upgrade the processors, because we've got new processors so that whatever job is doing right now, it continued to do very, very well. But I would love to see Apple, if there's a really new version of the Vision Pro, I would love to see it be the obvious residue of Apple having learned from their sales experience over the previous two years, as opposed to oh well, we need to have one in pink and green, and then that's the reason why people aren't buying them. No, it's not according to german.

1:40:43 - Leo Laporte
They do have a initiative code named atlas which gathers feedback from apple employees on smart glasses. They they're looking at the existing market and this is german's sources, who say additional focus groups are planned for the near future, but an apple focus groups are four or five years from a product. Yeah, this feels like it's no news at all, like of course they would be doing this.

1:41:07 - Jason Snell
I don't love that, that the response to the meta ray bands is. Let's form a committee.

Let's form a committee like it feels like that and I mean, who knows if they're also working on it, but I think that that's a little concerning to me.

I did think it's interesting that german's also reported that Apple might be considering something that is not quite a cheap Vision Pro but more like a. You know, you take the compute off and you put it on the iPhone and it's a simpler device and it's just specifically what he says is an accessory for watching movies, and I thought that's really interesting, right, like if we believe that some immersive content and also watching movies on planes is a great feature of Vision Pro, could you build kind of from the other direction, something that is not as immersive and it's not as heavy and all the compute is on the iPhone, but that could get you not spatial computing but maybe a really nice entertainment device and have that as an experiment in or even just even a virtual display Like that is the thing that gets me hooked on these devices the idea of again being someplace other than my house but still have, like my full, like, multi-screen display.

1:42:15 - Andy Ihnatko
It's something that people keep responding to, and the fact that I think there was another news item about 18.2, excuse me, the next version of the vision pro os, finally giving you the widescreen virtual display, which sounds like a trivial thing, but it's like. This is what people like about using this thing. They love having.

1:42:32 - Jason Snell
Yeah, you can do wide and ultra wide and it's also my understanding is it's a much higher quality. That's just out in the latest beta, developer beta for for what? For? Uh, vision os and you need the Mac OS latest beta. But I haven't tried it yet. I'm looking forward.

I need to upgrade one of my Macs to a 15.2 in order to get that, but that is yeah, you're right, these are interesting ideas. To say, what if we don't have every product? Be everything and slice it in a few different ways. Because, again, if they figure out how to do immersive theater or immersive whatever and you can lower that barrier, slice it in a few different ways. Because, again, if they figure out how to do immersive theater or immersive whatever and you, and you can lower that barrier, you don't necessarily need to be a full-on vision pro computer. It could be a simpler thing that is designed for very limited interaction and just viewing and and using your iphone as the compute would also help sure, and how apple would it be for them to not have a pair of glasses?

1:43:25 - Andy Ihnatko
that is like DisplayPort over USB-C. But oh well, and if you have an iPhone, you can use that as, basically, if you have the Mac, giving a display through the glasses with the iPhone as an in-between, essentially rewarding people who are all in on the ecosystem and encouraging people who might be considering getting like, a Samsung phone instead of an iPhone, say, yeah, maybe you don't want to do that.

1:43:53 - Alex Lindsay
Well, I do think that anybody doesn't think that Apple's trying to find a cheaper version or an AR version. I mean, I'm sure that that was part of very early plans of where they're trying to get to. You know, this is a gamma test. It's not even a beta test. This is our alpha test.

1:44:08 - Leo Laporte
This is like a Well. It's also market research.

1:44:09 - Alex Lindsay
Yes, right, but they're doing some market research internally, but what I'm saying is the whole thing that some of us have bought is a giant test. $400,000 was about the sample that they needed. I don't think that they're measuring success or failure based on the number they sold. I think that you need them out there in the public and let people play with them, figure out what's working, not working. It's just a giant R&D project and I don't think that they're learning any lessons from the sales right now, because I don't think that they care.

I think that they just need a bunch of people using them and Um and and, to see what, what's working, not working, how to get things done. There's so many things that a lot of us are learning because we all own them, you know. So I'm developing things. I look at it, I go, okay, that didn't work, this didn't work, but you have to have. You know, the people who are using it now are people who are obviously early adopters, and Google did the same thing with Glass for a while and that didn't work out well because of the camera and the type person that would get it first. But the idea is you need to get a larger sample than just closed betas out there and have people using it. I think that's what Apple's doing right now.

1:45:20 - Andy Ihnatko
I disagree. I don't think that they would roll out a $3,500 product that's available to anybody who walks into any Apple store if they did not intend it to be a platform that made sense for the entire ecosystem. I just don't see Apple doing that.

1:45:33 - Alex Lindsay
I think they do think that. I just don't think they think it now Okay.

1:45:37 - Andy Ihnatko
And also remember that when Google released Glass, they were explicit saying that they didn't say. When Google released Glass, they were explicit saying that they didn't say this is the new, next new revolution in computing and wearable. It was like we think this is a really interesting idea. We've taken it as far as it can go, like inside our labs, we are making a limited number, a low capacity run of these to put it out in the hands of people to see how society responds to these things. This is why we're calling you explorers.

1:46:02 - Alex Lindsay
They did very dangerously, jump out of a dirigible over top of Moscone and run it in. That's exciting.

1:46:10 - Andy Ihnatko
That was the good old days when you just got. I mean, if you can pay for a skydiver, why not pay for a skydiver? That was real.

1:46:16 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, oh yeah, okay, so many.

1:46:28 - Andy Ihnatko
But yeah, I think that part of the problem was just that, as we've been saying a couple times during the show, like, apple has at least a five-year lead time in doing anything, and I think that the idea of a wearable like the Vision Pro made absolute, complete sense when they greenlit this project to almost irrevocably go forward and things changed. But not enough for them to say let's just forget this all happened. It was still a product that they could sell. They figured that we're not going to lose money on a 2024 run of these things and maybe that will set the ground for whatever we do next.

I agree with you that. I think that it's not contributing to their bottom line, but it's contributing to their understanding of how such a product could use. Bottom line but it's contributing to their understanding of how such a product could use. Just one quick thing, tailing back to something we were talking about last week when we were talking a little bit about what might be discussed during the earnings call, we saw they were going to talk about Vision Pro and I think we agreed that it's going to get like one sentence kind of under their breath to acknowledge that it exists. And they said and we're really excited by what people are using Vision Pro in surgery. Anyway, the Chinese headwinds that we're now featuring, so we didn't get that one mentioned.

1:47:28 - Alex Lindsay
I think that the issue for those of us who have been developing for these headsets for a long time, the thing that I'm most excited about is that I finally have a headset that can get remotely close to what we could see as possible. Like it's expensive to build that headset and the MetaQuest doesn't get there, you know, like it's good, but you're kind of like, oh, it's fine, like it's the 3D is okay, you know, and if you pick up your phone and do spatial streaming, it's a little better. Like you know that it's there. But when you look at, when you look at Submerged I mean for there are many things about that that I didn't like but that is the highest quality 180 degree stereo footage I've ever seen, and and we finally had a headset that could display it.

You know, and I think that that that the impact of that takes years in the entertainment industry to to have, but there's a lot of people in the entertainment industry that have these headsets and they're looking at them, trying to, and that you apple needs to spark that. There's no way to spark it with another cheap headset that's going to do substandard video, like you know. Like you know, you're not going to get people thinking about it because they're used to looking at it. You know, this is the first headset that I've put on that I would prefer if I'm not watching with my family and the player actually works. I mean, like the amazon player, I still have to watch on TV because the player in the Vision Pro stinks, but if it's a native player playing video I would rather watch it on my Apple Vision Pro than my TV. If I'm by myself, you know, if my family's out, and that has never happened in another headset and it costs $3,500 to build a headset that does that.

1:49:03 - Andy Ihnatko
I respect your opinion. I just disagree with it. I think I see the difference between the Vision Pro and a sub-thousand dollar headset as kind of the difference between, like a Mac Mini and a Mac Pro, in the sense that the Mac Pro can get 128 gigs of RAM, system RAM, and the Mac Mini is limited to like 32. I guess my there's something really important about a machine that can have 128 gigs of RAM like being able to run these huge, huge models, financial models, scientific models, training, ai, that sort of stuff but I don't think that's something that's relevant to most people. If you're selling this as a consumer item, you're not, you're giving, you're making a very impressive piece of hardware that's impressive in ways that most people are not going to be able to respect.

1:49:51 - Alex Lindsay
But I don't think. But what you have to sell first is the content creators, who are just tired of everything looking like poop. You know, like, you know, like, like, you know, like, when you put on the headsets and you've worked all the all this time on this movie and you put the headset on on every other headset, it was kind of like um, like you know, like, like, like, this isn't worth watching a whole movie on um. You know like it's, it's fine, but it's not worth watching a whole movie. On the first time that I put that, I watched a movie on the vision pro. I was like, oh, I could actually see this as a platform to watch things on. Now do you have to get the price down? Absolutely, but you, in the current technology, you can't do it and you can't get people to build for it if you can't get them inspired to to use it. I think that's the challenge okay and that's the vision.

1:50:33 - Leo Laporte
Pro segment now you know we're done talking the vision pro I'm just waiting for somebody to use ai to either cut that out and listen to only that, or to cut that out and never hear it, but it could do it either way, I'm sure. A couple more quick stories before our picks of the week. Apple's decided to buy 20% of Global Star, which does the iPhone satellite services 20%. That's not like buying the whole company, but that's.

1:51:05 - Andy Ihnatko
That's a $1.7 billion investment in the whole company. But that's, yeah, that's, that's a 1.7 billion dollar investment, a part of it to 1.1 billion to essentially pre-purchase uh, pre-purchase, uh their usage of the system uh, 400 million, I think, to uh for 20 of the company, and then also 270 million additional to essentially help them out with their debt. They had some, the company has some debt that's due in 2029, and now that's gone. That's amazing. I saw another analyst talk about whether or not this means that Apple will have more of their bandwidth, and it seems as though that's not true. They seem to think that Apple's going to be sticking at about 85% of what the company can provide. But boy, what a huge, huge, huge investment in the idea of this, not simply as an emergency service, but as a way for people to do messaging and they're launching more satellites too, aren't they?

1:51:55 - Leo Laporte
yeah, about 40, I think recently. Yeah, very interesting. Uh, us consumer finance protection bureau has ordered apple and goldman sacks to pay 89 million million for early Apple card failures Things they fixed pretty quickly.

1:52:13 - Andy Ihnatko
Well, that was a big deal. The complaint mentioned about 150,000 consumers who just did not get their customer service tickets. Like, I got a fraudulent charge, I need you to stop this or do something about it and getting no answer whatsoever. Also, they accused both companies of your being misleading about interest payments and stuff like that. So, yeah, they was a pretty big failure.

1:52:38 - Jason Snell
Big scoop for the upgrade podcast, Jason sent us an anonymous message that said that Apple is working on 90 Hertz refresh screens. That would not be pro motion but would be liquid motion or something like that. I mean, who knows what marketing name they'll do, but this makes sense.

in reviewing the iPad mini, one of the things that really struck me is, as an iPad pro user, just the slow refresh rate I noticed it interesting and I know that a lot of phone observers have said that for the price of apple's iphone 16, uh, which is a still a premium phone compared to android phones, you should probably have a refresh rate higher than 60, and I agree. I think this is like the equivalent of Apple holding down the base RAM in systems At this point. 60 hertz is not enough, I would say. And so this anonymous person who, according to Mike Hurley, is one we've heard from before Again, we're not really trying to break news, but all of a sudden we did a thing in a podcast and a bunch of people wrote articles about it, so that's interesting. Anyway, this person says that they are working on a 90 hertz refresh and that maybe that will be them raising the bar a little bit on refresh rate on their devices.

1:53:54 - Leo Laporte
Good, awesome.

1:53:55 - Jason Snell
Yeah.

1:53:56 - Leo Laporte
All right, let's take a little break when we come back your picks of the week on bended knee, all our fabulous fans who are not yet members of Club TWiT to consider spending a mere $7 a month to keep our operation going. We've had to close the studio. We've had to lay off people. We've slowly shrunk down to a tenable size, I think, but it does require some help from our audience and I think that's the right way for us to go forward. Anyway, I'd like to, I'd like to really make that be how we support the podcast, our listenership, what you get at every versions of all the shows. You don't need to listen to ads. You paid for it. You also get access to the Club TWT Discord, which is really a great hang. It's my favorite social media hangout great, smart people talking about interesting things, not just our shows. You also get access to special programming that we don't make available in public right away, things like our coffee club and our book club, and we did the photo review last week with Chris Marquardt. The plan is to stream those live. That's, by the way, another thing. The club's made possible to stream those live and then make them private to the club for the first month and then, after a month, make them public to everyone, because we want to build our audience right so you get early access to those kinds of things.

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Let's get the picks of the week with Mr Jason Snell, our first picker.

1:56:17 - Jason Snell
All right, first picker, great. There's an arms race happening in my neighborhood about holiday things.

1:56:25 - Leo Laporte
Oh dear.

1:56:25 - Jason Snell
People with giant inflatable pumpkins and stuff.

1:56:29 - Leo Laporte
I feel inflatables are really cheating.

1:56:31 - Jason Snell
Yeah, and then lots of lights, people putting lights in trees and lights on their fences and lights on their houses, and you know, I'm never gonna like, I'm never gonna out excitement them. They're always going to be those. People are motivated, but I do want to be like in the game. I going to be those people are motivated, but I do want to be like in the game. Uh, I, I, we, we put up cheap, lousy holiday lights on our roof line for years. They last a couple of years. They fall apart. They leave like stupid plastic anchors that snap off.

1:56:58 - Leo Laporte
After a while. I had to go around the house picking up plastic anchors for years.

1:57:03 - Jason Snell
Yeah, it's just the worst like thousands of them everywhere. So I I can't say that everybody should do this, because there there is a uh, I I found a reddit post that linked to a google doc where our google spreadsheet, where a guy actually listed all of the companies that make permanent holiday lights and them in terms of like, uh, cost and uh, do they project down or do they do they shine out and how do you mount them?

and after all of that, I am going to recommend everlights, because it's what I bought myeverlightscom. They will do professional installs, but there's also a diy kit. A lot of our listeners probably would be into the diy side. That's what I got is the diy kit. It's a bunch of lights and a wireless controller and a base station and a bunch of aluminum sheet track and the idea there is that you mounted, you can also. Actually it's made so that if you've got traditional gutters which I don't you can just drill a hole every nine inches and the little lights stick out of the gutter and then you put a little plastic cap on the other side and screw it in and then they're anchored there. But they're really robust. It's four wires, so there's a power, a ground and then two data cables so that you have the ability, if there's it's more robust Basically if one of the data cables loses connect, they've got another one and it's all very flexible. You can snip it wherever you need to and then reattach it and they've got a bunch, bunch. They include in the starter kit, a bunch of heat shrinking connectors so that you can keep uh everything waterproof. And I managed to sort of like snip bits with a, with scissors, out of the aluminum so that I could get it underneath the overhang of my roof, which is flat, uh, but has some, some beams that stick out from the house. So I I snip little little spaces so that I could slide it up and the beams wouldn't get in the way. Screwed all that in all the way across the front of our house, put in the line, wired it all up.

They've got an app that you use to control the patterns. They come, you know they do a bunch of different colors, but they'll also like, do patterns and blinking and anything you want out of it. They've got a bunch of pre-built patterns. You can build your own and I've been pretty happy with it so far. I'm very impressed it is. It has hit the spot. It was a fun, although a little bit challenging, just because it took a lot of time. Fun challenge to set it up.

And now that I got it, we don't have to hang little plastic clips, we don't have to have the crappy. These are much higher quality lights. There are other options out there too. But I'm just going to say, if you're getting tired of the holiday light thing, paying a little bit more and getting ones that will last is a better approach if you can afford that initial upfront payment. So far I'm pretty happy with it, happy how it looks, and so, yeah, and they've got an app. It's completely iOS controllable and presumably Android controllable too, but I didn't check because I don't care. And yeah, it's good, it's good, I like it. So Everlights myeverlightscom they are very nice. I had a support issue. They responded to my email, they responded to my phone call. We got it all working. So, um, it's. It's a small group of people in utah that, uh, that build these things and sell them and uh, and yeah anyway.

2:00:16 - Leo Laporte
So that was my so what are you gonna do after, uh, christmas? Are you just gonna turn them off, or?

2:00:21 - Jason Snell
no, no, I'm the emperor state building of my neighborhood. Now, man, I've got, I've got. Uh, I got you know, thanksgiving lights out there and, uh, I'm gonna have some on the on the days the cow plays football.

It's gonna be blue and gold out there and uh, my wife has already instructed me to build a hanukkah pattern where I'm gonna have eight lights that start with one yellow and then and then grows over time. I am, I'm all in, so this is gonna be fun. It's like everybody out in the street is gonna be like what does that even signify? I guess?

ask, but I will know it's Veronica lights you know, ask me, ask me why the lights are that color. I will probably have a story for you. So yeah, we'll see how long that lasts before I say I don't want to be the Empire State Building anymore. But for for now, if there's something to celebrate, I will find a way to celebrate it in lights.

2:01:14 - Leo Laporte
I think that's great Everlights. Thank you, Jason. Alex Lindsay, your pick of the week sir.

2:01:21 - Alex Lindsay
So I've talked about this in the past. This is for a always works solution for getting usb in and out. I still consider this the the best one in the world. Um, this is a usb pre 2, oh yeah I love yeah, I've got.

2:01:36 - Jason Snell
That's how you're hearing me too.

2:01:38 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, this is there's the mix pre, which is more complex. This one is a tank, um, and but it's eleven hundred dollars. Yeah, so it's a problem. It's so, and you can see, at one point I don't know when it was, but at some point this is number 58 that I owned Wow, so we use them for all of our kits.

I was, I've been out trying to get audio into the iPhone so that I can take in board records when we're doing spatial streaming, and so I didn't want to do $1,100 a unit streaming and so I didn't want to do $1,100 a unit. So it's trying to figure out how do we get it down to something a little less. And what we found or what I found so far and I'm gonna be testing it some more today, but so far it's worked perfectly is this is the Neva duo and there's a Neva Neva solo and this is a USB C audio interface. It will do, it does have it. It has some outputs, some quarter inch outputs on the back, but, more importantly, it's got two XLR inputs on the balanced inputs there, so you can get the and this is only, I think, $89.

And I think that the Uno I guess not Solo, but the Uno is only $59. And so far these have worked real well. Not the same build quality or the same number of features that I'm used to with the larger one, but, um, for getting these basic sources in. If you're looking for something like that. Um, this is working fairly well and it works with the iphone. It's a little tricky because since 17.6 the iphone has been really tricky about which connector, which audio interfaces that it will see, and so this is one of the ones that it will see, and part of it is because it doesn't have a lot of feature sets in it. We've had trouble getting it to consistently see the MixPre3, the Scarlett, a bunch of other things, and so this one is inexpensive, can plug it in, it'll do microline and it's working pretty well for us.

2:03:27 - Leo Laporte
What do you use for the output output? What do I use the output for? No, what do you use the output for the iphone? How do you connect the iphone to it?

2:03:35 - Alex Lindsay
oh the I, oh the iphone, I just plug it in, it's just usbc oh, so the usbc port on that will plug this usbc, you just plug straight into your iphone.

2:03:43 - Jason Snell
Now you have an interface I wish it had like powers too.

2:03:45 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, uh, the iphone will power. Now I'm usually in the kit that I'm using it for, if I have it I thought that was the power.

2:03:54 - Leo Laporte
The usb connector was the power and audio out, but this could be audio in as well so, uh, it's audio in is what I'm using it for it can do audio out. It's got two quarter 20s on the back so it's doing do audio out.

2:04:05 - Alex Lindsay
It's got two quarter 20s on the back so it's doing balanced audio out. I'm using it with this, the way this is kind of set up. Tonight I'm actually my daughter's playing at Hot Monk tonight. If anyone wants to see your daughter's playing at Hot Monk, yeah, With Toad the Wet Sprocket.

No, no, the high school she goes to does the high school has a rock band class and that rock band class gets to go. So it's like six or seven bands that play four songs each and they're all playing at Hot Monk tonight and her it's the battle of the bands. Yeah, there's no battle, but they have a good time. She's part of a band two bands actually but the band that I'm gonna go record is Joystick Failure.

Does she sing? Does she play? But the band that I'm gonna go over to joystick, she's playing. I think she plays rhythm guitar in one band and either drums or bass in the other band. So she's she's very talented, she is. She plays a lot of she plays a lot, but yeah, so this is the, the rig that I'm taking with me. This is this is using the Belkin four to one us. Yes, we pre to.

2:05:06 - Leo Laporte
I know this is big. This is somebody's dad is a big nerd I was.

2:05:12 - Alex Lindsay
I offered to bring three cameras, a switcher, a live view and stream the whole thing, and I was told dad, no, no, no, so so this is. So this, uh, this is what I'm using here, so I have power going into this, and then this will go into that, and and then the phone will hook into all of this, and that's how you get all the things to go. So, anyway, but but finding this kind of an inexpensive interface to get into the, into the phone, was a thing that we needed to figure out.

2:05:40 - Leo Laporte
And you just earned us $10 with that pick from Hassan Ahmad, who says my favorite podcast on YouTube, and forked over $10 on YouTube, hey, I don't know what YouTube money conversion rate is, but Thank you Hassan and Thank you Alex for the pic. So we use a lot. We let use the scarlet focus, right, scarlet? Would this be a?

2:06:00 - Alex Lindsay
replacement for that. You think theoretically. You know I haven't tested it, I'm using line ins, so you always got a.

The way you measure with an interface is with mics, because the mic interface, the preamp, is much more important. That's a key. So I haven't tested this one with microphones. I did test it with like an SM58 and it was like, and it works, so, but I didn't test it in, but I, you know, I haven't tested it for like, what is the, what is its base noise level? You know so what are those types of things. But we'll try to do that in the future and I'll let you know. Okay, cool.

2:06:32 - Leo Laporte
It's a good price. Esi's Niva Uno or Duo, which isn't quite correct Italian, but we'll take it. That leaves Andy and Natko for your pick of the week, sir.

2:06:51 - Andy Ihnatko
Okay.

Well, there's a lot of reasons why we have Notes apps, which is one of the reasons why I have lots of Notes apps running at the same time. Two of the reasons are one you want to have something hAndy when you need to write something down right now before you forget it, like you're on a phone call or something like that. And another one is when there's just a piece of text that you need to come back to time and time again, like in my case. There's a terminal command for doing something really, really hAndy in one fell swoop, and so I just keep it nearby so I can just simply copy and paste it when I need it, and so that's why one of my favorite apps for the Mac is called Tot T-O-T. The URL to find out about is totrocks, and it's a very, very, very correct URL because it does indeed rock. Very, very simple, very, very clean. It's a menu bar app that just simply has seven one, two, three, four, five, six, seven pages of notes, so that whenever you need just to write something down, like someone's giving you a phone number I need to write it down, click on the menu bar and just simply write it down. That's great, or you can organize these seven pages any way you want. It's not six colors, it's seven colors. Each one is a different color and so, again, if there's ever a URL for a regular Zoom meeting that I have and for some reason Zoom is not discovering the URL for it, I can go to this note and quickly grab it from there, and that's really all I need to say about it.

It's not really complicated. It has shortcuts, support. You can use Markdown If you want to use Markdown, that's fine. And it does sync to iCloud so that, if you have it can sync between your Macs and your iPhones. But if you're just using the Mac version, it's absolutely free. You can just download, install it. It's free $20 one-time purchase if you want to use it on iOS and therefore use the iCloud Sync service. But again, it's been on my menu bar forever and again, it's one of those things where, if there was a new version of macOS that it weren't compatible with, that would be a very, very bad day. I'd have to like I'd have to make some changes.

Uh, and I'm re-recommending it now because every now and then you really have to. You really should take a look at the tools that you rely on each and every day, uh, the most and make sure that it's still the best solution for that task you have for it. I spent a few days, like last week, looking to see is there another like really quick, hAndy, take a note and keep it hAndy, utility, whether it's a menu bar or a widget or whatever like that, and I wasn't able to find anything that was nearly as good as that. Again, for this simple task. It's not the central truth of my note-taking, it's not what I reach for when I need to jot down ideas or things like that. I use Google Keep for that.

But again for that simple task of I right now have to write something down. I don't have time to launch an app and or I need to. Oh, what's that Unicode dingbat that I sometimes use to end blog posts with? I just keep that cut and pasted right in there so I can just simply grab it. Really really great. It's by the Icon Factory, so you know it's pretty good stuff. Again, highest recommendation.

2:09:49 - Leo Laporte
And it has an excellent URL totrocks. Thank you, Andrew. Thank you Andy Ihnatko, Alex Lindsay, Jason Snell. Thanks to all of you for joining us.

We do MacBreak Weekly every Tuesday, 11 am Pacific, 2 pm, eastern, 1800 UTC. Actually, no, it's 1900 UTC, because we're now on standard time, 1900 UTC. You can watch us do it on eight different streams. We are now on YouTube, Twitch, tiktok, facebook, linkedin, kik and, of course, our Club, twit, discord. So lots of ways to watch us live. That's why I mentioned the live time.

But, honestly, you really can also watch or listen anytime it's convenient for you, because we make a copy of the show and distribute it via the internet. They call that a podcast. You can get your copy of the podcast at twittv, slash mbw. That's our website. You can also, if you go there, you'll see a link to a youtube channel dedicated to mac break weekly. That's for the video, of course, but a good way to share clips. If you said, oh, I gotta send this tot recommendation out, you could do that very easily with the youtube channel. Of course, the best way to do it is subscribe in your favorite podcast player so you get it automatically the minute it's available. Andy, when are you going to be on GBH?

2:11:09 - Andy Ihnatko
next, not this week, but the week from Thursday at 1230. Go to wgbhnewsorg to stream it live or later, or stream any of my previous reports.

2:11:18 - Leo Laporte
Jason Snell is at sixcolors.com. Go there for the color charts. Stay for the fun. You also will hear a few podcasts with Jason. You can find them all at six colorscom slash Jason Indeed.

2:11:31 - Jason Snell
Thank you, Jason.

2:11:33 - Leo Laporte
And Mr Alex Lindsay, office hours Global what you doing on office hours these days.

2:11:40 - Alex Lindsay
Well, a lot of what we're doing. We're actually simplifying things a little bit. For a while we're not having as many of our second hours so that we can move the quality of the show forward, because we've been lagging a little bit and so we're adding. We just added 4K, so we're now streaming in 4K, which we realized it hits a different place in YouTube, so everything's sharper for some reason, even in 1080p.

2:12:01 - Leo Laporte
Oh, that's interesting.

2:12:03 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, so we've done 4K, we're moving finally to HDR 60 frames, a second 5.1. So those are all getting added to the show over the next two months and so it will be a very pure Q&A because we're not sure how every day will go. So, anyway, but we've decided to get real aggressive about solving that between now and the end of the year. So you'll see a bunch of that and some pretty interesting tests as we get a little closer to that.

2:12:27 - Leo Laporte
Nice.

2:12:34 - Alex Lindsay
OfficeH hoursglobal. You can watch every morning and you can even participate if you go to the website. You can just go and 24 7.

2:12:37 - Leo Laporte
You can just go ask officehours.global and uh, you can just ask a question and then yeah, listen to your questions, yeah we get to, that's usually within a day or two and, of course, greymatter.show the, the show, the, the podcast you do for Michael Krasny at graymatter.show. Thank you everybody for joining us. Of course, if you haven't voted yet, I give you permission. We ended a little early, so you have six minutes before security now to go vote.

I'm sure it'll be that quick, make sure you do your civic duty. It's actually a great feeling to vote and have your voice be heard and, as my wife always says, if you don't vote, you don't get to complain. So vote. We will be back next week with the same old crew and the same great stories. Thanks for being here. Now I have to tell you, unfortunately, it's time to get back to work because break time is over. Bye-bye.