MacBreak Weekly 966 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. Alex, Andy and Jason are here, and so is iOS 18.4 and MacOS 15.4. But where's our watchOS update? We'll talk about all of that in just a little bit and we'll celebrate a very special birthday Apple incorporated 49 years ago today. If Apple did not exist, how would computing have been different? We'll talk about that and a whole lot more next on MacBreak Weekly.

This is MacBreak Weekly, episode 966, recorded Tuesday April 1st 2025: Chunks of Corn. It's time for MacBreak Weekly, the show we cover the latest Apple news with Mr Andy Ihnatko. Hello, Andrew.

0:00:59 - Andy Ihnatko
Hey there, hi there, ho there. Happy April Fool's Day. Oh God, I know, I know I thought that only to honor it, like I was doing some house cleaning this week and I found my number two badge from the prisoner. Oh that's good and I thought oh, I'll wear my number two badge, and that will be like a soupçon of whimsy. And then I thought that, well, perhaps we don't really have it?

0:01:19 - Leo Laporte
Is that in your cupboard since?

0:01:21 - Andy Ihnatko
1982? I mean no, it like the, the next I I have, I have, I have a. I told you all a while back that like I happen to be going to the met opera, like on halloween oh yes, I remember. And so I put together a boba fett cosplay that would be appropriate for the met opera. And then I thought, gee, I think I want to have like another one of those standing by for like the next time that happens. And so I have a, I have a number two costume, like including the right, including exactly the right scarf, exactly the right shoes too. Uh, ready to go.

0:01:53 - Leo Laporte
And the scarf could do double duty for a kind of doctor who thing as well, I would imagine kind of.

0:01:58 - Andy Ihnatko
But that's. This is what I love about the internet. There is like if you go to the, the replica, the prop forum, there is somebody who has freeze-framed and said no, no, here's, it's not. It's not just a school a, a college scarf, it is. Here is the. Here is the exact frequency of the, of the uh stripes on it and the and the routine of colors and also then someone came hey here's.

here's a company that will, that will does like school uniforms, that will actually make whatever you want, and so I had to make me Okay, that's the last time.

0:02:28 - Leo Laporte
I introduce Andy first. Jason Snell is also here. I've decided to be Baron Samedi for this, the intellectual Baron Samedi.

0:02:34 - Jason Snell
It's not Halloween, though. That's not how that works. Oh, hello everybody. I look forward to us discussing the latest Android news and what's going on with uh surface and tell us more about uh Alexa and, if we're really lucky, maybe some samsung galaxy fun.

0:02:54 - Andy Ihnatko
It's the 20th anniversary of apple being bought out by sun and rescuing the company.

0:02:58 - Leo Laporte
Oh, god, wouldn't that be. Oh and also uh, Alex, I called you Alex Gibson before the show, but he isn't.

0:03:05 - Alex Lindsay
He's Alex Lindsay but you know it's new for you. You know I'm new in the show I'll get used to it eventually you know you'll get used to the Gibson Lindsay, Lindsay.

0:03:14 - Leo Laporte
They're very close, they're both kind of British and Alex Gibson look, we changed the lower third to reflect that office hours.

0:03:21 - Andy Ihnatko
Dotbal, whatever his name is, that's identity theft is not a joke, jim that's right, Bob.

0:03:29 - Leo Laporte
Uh 18 4 and 15 4 came out last night. I snuck up into the attic and uh rebooted all the machines to bring them up to date and I think that every one, five, six, seven, eight devices have now been updated. I believe in the house.

0:03:50 - Alex Lindsay
I think my problem is that I'm on the betas so I don't ever know what's working, what's not working. When are people going to see things?

0:03:58 - Leo Laporte
Well, I can tell you, recipes in News Plus is not exactly the killer feature.

0:04:04 - Alex Lindsay
I have to admit that I'm using it all the time like really I've had it, for I was like I don't know you've heard of the internet yes, it is, but here's. But oh, have you haven't used it, right? Yeah?

0:04:14 - Leo Laporte
well, I have like so.

0:04:16 - Alex Lindsay
There's no ads the timers are built in.

0:04:19 - Leo Laporte
It's easy to tag, I mean I haven't used it with the timers, oh yeah, so it does have time.

0:04:24 - Alex Lindsay
Do the same, and you push a little button and it just opens up a timer, like it, like in the, in the app it's. It's not perfect, like there's definitely a lot of things that I would love to you know, but as a um, you know step-by-step. I think that there's. I haven't found a way and maybe you know. Like it, just you know it tells you what the ingredients are in its own section. And the big thing is, is that on the web and in most of these either, these are, these are all recipes, I think, that come from the magazine partners that are part of Apple News.

So, that's where this is coming from. When you go to the web, you know, of course, because the way the recipe business works, every 10, you know, seconds, I mean every every like one inch, you get another ad, you know, and there's all this stuff that you have to kind of dig through and you know, um, I guess you don't, you don't know, you don't use an ad blocker?

0:05:11 - Leo Laporte
well, no, but I use paprika, which will what I yeah, that's what I do too, and you just pour it in the paprika.

0:05:16 - Alex Lindsay
Look at this and it goes right. I'll just grab all the things and put it and I don't yeah, I don't, I don't add a lot of extensions to my my stuff, so anyway, but so, so anyway, the um, uh, so, um, you think it's better, is what you're saying. I don't think it's better than paprika. I just think that it's good enough. That paprika isn't big, you know, like, like the. The thing is it's very limited, um, it's well, that's the thing.

0:05:37 - Leo Laporte
I just do a web search for the recipe I want I know and I find it and then I put it and that's what I do.

0:05:45 - Alex Lindsay
But for me what I love is that it goes by like it shows up every morning.

0:05:50 - Leo Laporte
I mean I use that I don't care what the Apple editors think is a good recipe.

0:05:53 - Alex Lindsay
And I go through. What happens is it shows you one and then it shows you a whole list and I just kind of scroll through looking for things that are like oh, that looks like that'd be interesting. Oh, that looks like that'd be interesting. It's not replacing paprika for me, it's just that it's like it's really well, well-designed, well-laid out. Um, you know, as a, as a version one, I think it's actually. Uh, I've been, you know, using it for a couple of weeks and as a version one, I think it's pretty slick.

0:06:16 - Leo Laporte
I have it on my iPad. Uh, I don't have it on a laptop. Oh, it's not in the Mac.

0:06:22 - Alex Lindsay
I don't know. I've only used it on the phone because that's how I cook. So if I cook I'm cooking off my phone. I don't cook on the phone, it doesn't get that hot, but I use the phone as my guide.

0:06:36 - Leo Laporte
Here's the thing, the biggest problem. It's a general problem with News Plus, which is it's an editorial selection of the news, and I just find it so much easier to just go out in the inner, the public internet, and find the news myself. And it's the same for recipes, in a way.

0:06:50 - Jason Snell
I just don't Jason, you don't use, you use, uh, some other I use mella, which is by sylvia, or ritzy um, which is a great app too, and so is um paprika. They're really good, they do.

0:07:01 - Leo Laporte
They're very similar where you can parse web pages and pull them in and save them in your own platform. So it's on everything and I don't care about that, mla is yeah, I don't care yeah it's a it's a apple platforms only, so it's very good, well designed I mean the.

0:07:16 - Alex Lindsay
I have to admit that, probably at this point, 50 of my recipes are chat gpt, so I don't really you know like it's you know, that's the shameful thing I I don't want to say, but when I my actual search starts, like when I wanted to make bagels in perplexity and what I do is I go from there to the sources if I need to.

A lot of times I've really tried to eat everything that I bought. You know which is hard when you go you know. What I mean by that is that you buy a bunch of produce. I don't, I buy mostly produce, I buy very few packages of things, and so I ended up with a bunch of produce. I've kind of whittled away a bunch of it and then I'm like, okay, so I have this, this and this leftover that was, you know, aspirational, uh, or or home, and I go, I got this thing. How do I cook it, you know? Or we have a CSA, you know, you get the box of vegetables and half of them are stuff you've never seen before and it's great.

You go, I have a white radish and a pink cauliflower and something else, but you don't do that in News Plus. You do that. No, I do that in chat. But I will say that what I like about it is is that that's that's a user driven way to find, you know, find something that is kind of random to some degree, but it comes out 95%, it comes out good. But what I love is that I love actually the curation of oh, these are. You know, I didn't think about putting those two things together. I didn't think and it from visually and from the title it looks like it might be interesting, so I just tab it like I. I tab a lot of things.

0:08:48 - Leo Laporte
I haven't cooked them all you know, I cook them, but I think we should call when I'm brainstorming 18 for the homemaker edition, because it also adds robot vacuums to home kit. So maybe this is the homemaker vacuums.

0:09:01 - Alex Lindsay
Does anyone have one? They really freak me out like.

0:09:03 - Jason Snell
I keep on thinking that I should get one. Jason, you have one, I have a Roomba, yeah you like it.

0:09:08 - Andy Ihnatko
I just, I just wish that I was, my house was starting.

0:09:11 - Leo Laporte
Jason kind of rolled his eyes like, could you use a Roomba or would it have to be a maybe an all-terrain Roomba?

0:09:18 - Andy Ihnatko
yeah, me too. It's like I've got so many cables going here and there I like in my office.

0:09:23 - Jason Snell
It's basically goat pets, I mean it's not like a sort of hoarders, but it's like a box got put someplace because I need to remember to pack it. Modern robot vacuums either use visual or LiDAR and they avoid piles of things. Cables are a little bit harder. Sometimes they will do that. I have three pets in my house. I do have a Roomba. It works fine.

It really is solving the problem of my wife and I are not going to sweep every day. We're just not going to do it every day and I can run the robot every day and it it helps. It fills its little bag, uh, full of cat hair, so and dog hair, so that's great. And dust. Could it be better? Yes, is it designed? Are robot vacuums designed for people who do not work at home? Yes, they are loud and annoying. They get in your way. It seems like every time I want to be in the kitchen, the robot is in the kitchen and I'm stepping around the robot or it's bumping into my leg or whatever. But I like it. I wish it was quieter and I wish it was more efficient, but I keep using it because it picks stuff up and our we have lots of pets in our house and I just it. It really does help. Uh, since we're not, you know, sweeping or vacuuming twice a day um, what else is in 18, 4 slash, slash 15.4?

oh, and I guess I should say it's. It's some newer models from roomba, I think for my robot, but definitely for roborock, which is, I think, now they have to be home kit enabled uh, and they're. And what they are is they're like matter enabled robots, and now uh home app will see those guys, although if you've got like homebridge or something, you can enable other robots pretty easily uh nine to five mac.

0:11:08 - Leo Laporte
Is uh saying that robo rock?

0:11:10 - Jason Snell
yeah, robo rock, they're number one they're number one.

0:11:12 - Leo Laporte
They're number one I think I never even heard of them yeah, it's, uh, yeah, they're big and very popular they're rolling out a firmware update to put home kit support on. It's a handful of its models, which is it's hard to hold them in your hand, but they are, uh, quite a few the s8 max v, the saros z 70, 10, 10 r, the q raevo curve. Well, how did robo wait a minute? I thought I robot was the dominant company, uh they were.

0:11:40 - Jason Snell
I mean, there's actually a great episode of the verge cast a couple weeks ago where uh dav talked to Jennifer Pattinson Toohey, who is their smart home she's so good and she's got a million robot vacuums because she covers that category for them.

And she tells the story about how iRobot. Basically they were going to get bought by Amazon and they were such a dominant player in the robot vacuum market at that time that there were a lot of regulatory issues and the deal was off. And what happened in those two years while that deal was going on is they weren't sure what their strategy was going to be, because Amazon was supposedly going to buy them and all of their patents started to expire and Chinese companies started to build kind of originally knockoffs and then does this sound familiar improvements on the original and in a rapid period of time the Amazon thing fell through because they were too dominant. They lost their dominance, they got way behind. They may be close to needing to be bailed out by a buyer because they might go out of business.

Buyer because they might go out of business and they've, uh, they sort of pivoted to making robots that are much more like the competition than they used to be, despite their many years of r&d. It's kind of a sad story that involves. I mean, I would say the saddest part about it is they lost a lot of velocity when amazon wanted to buy them and the fact that they got that, the deal got knocked off and the result is that they're not even dominant anymore. They're kind of falling apart.

0:13:09 - Leo Laporte
Can you use your Roomba with HomeKit?

0:13:12 - Jason Snell
I have HomeBridge oh, you need HomeBridge, which will let me do that, although what I do. So the Roomba app for iOS for people who have Roombas out there has widgets, and so what I do is I have and it has shortcut support. So I actually have a shortcuts widget with all my robot commands in it, so I can uh and it's on my um, it's on my, like the, the little widget screen that's to the left of the home screen pages do you have on your iphone?

I don't I have, I have one leo, but then I also have the widgets on the side that you kind of. You swipe in smart yeah and it's got a. It's a. It's a single widget with four shortcuts on it, and the shortcuts are like open the app, send it home, pause it or I forget what it is, started again, or something like that, and that's what I use to control. So I don't even use the app.

0:13:55 - Leo Laporte
But it's not automated. I use. There I use it's built-in automation and I stopped swiping over uh when my 401k started plummeting, and so well you need to take stocks off of your phone.

0:14:05 - Jason Snell
I have to take stocks off my phone.

0:14:07 - Leo Laporte
That's what you need to clearly talk about. It's not doom scrolling, it's side scrolling, but it's doom. All right, um, all right also, eek, eek, uh, eek. This the eco, eco facts d-bot. These are all Chinese, aren't they?

0:14:23 - Jason Snell
let's admit it oh yeah the chinese the chinese have have figured this out and, like I said, they sort of start. It's the classic pattern. They started making knockoffs and then they started improving, and it was at a moment where I robot was kind of in flux and they kind of shot past them, and isn't it?

0:14:43 - Leo Laporte
interesting. I mean, that happened with drones. It's happened with everything uh, phones, drones. I was listening this morning to a country boy will survive and I thought, yeah, unless the country boy is using anything made in china. Uh, these will all cost more as soon as the tariffs kick in tomorrow, on liberation day, congratulations.

0:15:04 - Jason Snell
So get your d-bot now, I guess yeah, anthony nielsen in the discord, pointing out something that's absolutely true, which is this what happened with evs as well as well, not in the united states because we aren't allowed.

0:15:17 - Leo Laporte
But uh, everywhere, everywhere else, the chinese evs are cheap and, uh, pretty good it's ironic because, as flow connects, pointing out in our discord that iRobot came out of DARPA research in the United.

0:15:30 - Jason Snell
States? Yeah, originally they were. I mean, jennifer Patterson-Toy tells the story and I should say she was also on Tech News Weekly with Micah talking about this topic too. She was yeah, she was, but yeah, they used to be a much more kind of highfalutin robot research company.

0:15:50 - Leo Laporte
And then eventually they said, oh, people want us to make vacuums, so that's, or, as we think of them, cat transporters. Yeah, huh, okay.

0:15:55 - Andy Ihnatko
Well, anything else in 18-4, that's, uh, thrilling and exciting, and uh, there's, there's a new ambient mode in uh and uh for for audio. So now, like, if you write in the control center, if you want to say, oh, I want to, I want music to study from, or I want I'm trying to get to sleep or I'm trying to chill or I'm trying to meditate, there's actually like five categories you can just check. I don't care what it is, just give me like ambient sound for meditating and it will.

0:16:20 - Leo Laporte
Now you know what spotify does with that is, they play fake music. So is this going to be real music? What is it going?

0:16:26 - Andy Ihnatko
to be. I think it's real.

0:16:28 - Leo Laporte
I hope it's real. That's kind of an issue on Spotify.

0:16:34 - Andy Ihnatko
And they're also very proud of expanding AI to more languages and more countries, including VisionOS. Yeah, it doesn't seem like to be a huge like feature, uh, update mail is getting the uh, the new categorization feature, right, yeah so that's, that's, that's something.

0:16:53 - Leo Laporte
So now, let me ask a question is this update going to re-enable uh apple intelligence?

0:16:59 - Andy Ihnatko
uh, not the stuff that's screwing up. I mean it is, I mean you are.

0:17:02 - Leo Laporte
You are getting priority notifications if you turned it off, though, will the update turn it back on? It has in the past, right. Yeah, I don't know, I suspect.

0:17:12 - Andy Ihnatko
I mean I guess we all have it turned on yeah, that's like a dark pattern that no one's happy with. Like it's, things seem to be getting turned back on, whether you want it or not, or in some cases, like when you do the update that it opts you into something, it doesn't give you a clear way to opt out again when it says oh congratulations, we've given you this feature that we're not sure that you want, but we want to make sure you use.

0:17:37 - Leo Laporte
You're welcome Jason Snell, did you run off and get your roomba? Is that where you went?

0:17:40 - Jason Snell
I'm I'm having a b issue in my right now. A b has gotten in and I'm trying to see if I can get it back out so please, if you hear me screaming, it's because the bees have attacked not the bees, not the bees yeah, there's a little. There's a little bee carpenter bee that's making a little nest outside and my office and I think maybe one of them got in. So not great, not great. Please stand great, please stand by. That's not a new feature of 15.4.

0:18:10 - Leo Laporte
If you need to run off, please don't hesitate.

0:18:13 - Jason Snell
Yes, if I just am not here for a while, that's probably why.

0:18:17 - Leo Laporte
If I hear ladylike screams, I will know. Oh dear.

0:18:24 - Jason Snell
That's what I do. I just want you to know?

0:18:28 - Leo Laporte
uh, did you know? So are we done? I mean 15, 4. You should probably update they're probably security updates that we yeah, yeah, there usually are.

0:18:36 - Andy Ihnatko
There's a bunch there. It's also interest a couple of one, couple of interesting things that there was. They updated as usual. Everything but the update for watch os got pulled, like almost immediately. So pat, so you can. Only they haven't explained why. Nobody's got an answer from apple. Apparently I guess there was a bug that got found very, very late, so that got pulled. There's also they also in released security updates for some uh ops, for some a bunch of macs and devices that don't run the latest drop. So that's interesting too. So if you're running an older iPhone or an older Mac, if they invite you to update, given that's a security alert, it's probably a good idea to update that. But yeah, this isn't like a game-changing update, this is just another 0.1.

0:19:24 - Jason Snell
Eight new emojis well, I forgot about that, and actually for people um apple intelligence, support for what it's worth french, german, italian, portuguese, spanish, I mean, like there's good.

I don't know if that happened during the b incident, but um, yes Andy briefly mentioned that during a bunch of languages, which is nice, and the quick start feature which we talked about a couple weeks ago, where, just like with your phone, you can hold a phone next to a new mac and it'll. It'll sort of zap over your apple id and stuff and just make it easier to log in and set.

0:19:55 - Leo Laporte
Oh, I like that. That's that old cloud, that funny little cloud thing. Yeah, yeah, you can take a picture of um. You get a new sketch style in Apple Image Playground. Has anybody continued to play with Image Playground or is?

0:20:10 - Alex Lindsay
that just like I mean, a lot of us have Midjourney, and then ChatGPT came out last week.

0:20:14 - Leo Laporte
Oh, that's right. Do you studio Ghibli in Image Playground? No.

0:20:18 - Jason Snell
I play with Image Playground. Ironically, I do enjoy and still, I like Image. Playground.

0:20:23 - Alex Lindsay
Here's the thing.

0:20:24 - Jason Snell
I still make Genmojis and I think they're fun. In fact, I think that Apple has failed in making them as fun as they should be, because you've got your emoji, reactions and messages and they're too small. They need to blow them up and make them bigger so you can see what emoji you're reacting there. But I still will make them there, maybe a couple of times a week. I make like an idea for a fun emoji to react or something. But image playgrounds I mean, I'm sure there are people out there who don't know any better who are using them, but they're not good and they're so far behind the state of the art that I don't know why. If you wanted to generate an image, you'd use a different tool.

0:20:59 - Andy Ihnatko
Well now, that's particularly I didn't see something, gpt, I'm sorry, go ahead, go ahead, Andy, I was. I was just going to say like chat gpt, the native image has been blowing me away like where I'm at.

I'm at the point where it's like I'm going to start giving it things I don't think it should be able to do, like I took. I'm sorry I didn't put this in the notes or anything because it's spontaneous, but so I said, okay, there's like on my walk on last week there's's a battered old, like standard, like mailbox, you know US Postal Service mailbox. And later on in the walk there's this house that has these beautifully like Mexican painted. If you go to my Instagram I think I've posted it there's like this, beautifully painted like Mexican planters. So I said, okay, take. I asked, I asked a chat GPT, take this picture of a mailbox and make it look like it was painted like the beautiful colors and and styles of that planter and I'll be damned it. Basically make it looks perfectly like this mailbox was painted like that planter. It's like you. I was hoping you would fail miserably and now I don't know what to think about anything.

0:22:05 - Leo Laporte
We did on Sunday. I played around with it. I made a Rembrandt-style Twit logo, complete with brush strokes. We also did. I think this was Ian Thompson in Studio Ghibli mode. Why are you not showing this? There we go, thank you. There's Mona Lisa in Van Gogh style and Grumpy Cat. We had to do the obligatory Studio Ghibli, so that's you know. Look at that. And here's the disaster girl the house on fire. She's smiling.

0:22:37 - Alex Lindsay
Compare that to Image Playground. I think, as Jason said, I think if you don't know any, if you're not using any of these and you're like, oh, this is not, like, look at what I can do, I think it kind of makes sense. I think that for those of us who are kind of in it because I use it for practical things, like my yard I looked at the yard it's not doing very well. I took a picture of my yard and just told it to design something new and I want it to be kind of you know, and it did a great job. You're saying chat GPT, not image playground, kind of you know. I said you know, and and it did it, it did a great job.

Like I'm trying to this is the chat GPT, not image playground, exactly, and so the thing is is that you're so used to it, just work. Here's the problem is between mid journey and chat GPT. I'm just so used to it just works, like, but I get cool things out of it, and maybe it's not exactly what I wanted, but it's still amazing that, uh, that when I go to image playground, you're like okay, incidentally, uh, just as we were doing that on the twit on sunday, sam altman tweeted can you please stop?

0:23:32 - Andy Ihnatko
you're killing us so we're being loved to death yeah, loved to death a great problem to have.

It's still a problem, but yeah, well, it's a problem when it when it costs a lot of money to create these things, you know but that's that's what I was going to mention, that now the ethics become a little bit more complicated, because we can still say that, ok, well, look, if all we're doing is saying, oh, please, make this look like it was drawn in Studio Ghibli style, that's where, ok, well gosh, these AIs were trained with this artwork that was created by humans without their permission. But when you get to things like I want to make this mailbox look like it was painted like. I'm giving you everything. I'm saying paint this like it was painted by the same people who painted that and it gives you a perfect photo of it, that's when you start to say, yes, this was still developed and trained with stolen photos, stolen artwork.

But now you get to the subtle question of artists were also trained, so to speak, by being influenced by other artists. Are we now in a broad category of there? You can't point to any one artist or any school of art that was that's being ripped off here. School of art that was that's being ripped off here. It's now a binary thing where you have to say it's just learning how to take. A person has decided that I want this to be, to look like that. I'm giving you all of the stuff to work with created by human hands. Now, what are the ethical implications of this? This is becoming more and more interesting as we go on.

0:25:04 - Leo Laporte
Here are the oh, actually, I'm going to try this. Dr. Du suggested a chat GPT prompt. Paint me like one of your French girls, so I'm going to try these. Yeah, maybe we should hold off for a little while on that. One New emojis are here. There are eight of them, and this will help you in your emoji playground. You have what is that? A woeful smiley face. There's a fingerprint, a splat, a radish, a deserted old oak tree, a harp, a shovel and the Welsh flag.

0:25:44 - Jason Snell
You are not uh entirely right, I think where did I go wrong here? It's face with bags under eyes is the official unicode description technically like a root vegetable.

0:26:00 - Leo Laporte
It says root vegetable leafless tree, harp, shovel and sark.

0:26:08 - Jason Snell
I thought it was whales sark is an island in the channel.

0:26:11 - Leo Laporte
It's one of the sort of semi-independent channel there's still.

0:26:15 - Jason Snell
The king is still in charge there, but it's not part of the uk.

0:26:18 - Leo Laporte
I stuck them in in wales and I totally apologize to all our sarkians.

0:26:23 - Jason Snell
Doesn't it feel like we're running out of the need for new emoji now?

0:26:26 - Leo Laporte
Boy. Well, there's got to be every other flag in there right by now.

0:26:33 - Jason Snell
If that's where we are.

0:26:34 - Leo Laporte
If that's where we are, I'll be using that Sark? Flag for something.

0:26:42 - Andy Ihnatko
And also for fan communities for the movie Tron, because Sark was the main villain in Tron. It would be like like fan fan communities for the movie tron because sark was the main villain. It would be like an inside any kind of david warner long overdue.

0:26:53 - Leo Laporte
Long overdue uh, the troll emoji revised during the 15-4 beta period, so we don't get a troll emoji. According to emoji Pedia, the green troll usually shown holding a club. There there's some discussion. Apple's troll holds a scepter instead of a club.

0:27:12 - Jason Snell
Okay, whatever anyway anti-troll the yeah, an anti-troll yeah, new, new, uh, new Syria flag too.

0:27:23 - Leo Laporte
And thank God, there is a bagel. Okay, there is a bagel and the bagel appears to have cream cheese, so but that is, that's been around, or something.

0:27:33 - Jason Snell
Keep in mind that it's all down to the implementation, because we have we live in a world of what's called a delightfully emoji fragmentation, where every platform gets to decide the art for the emoji. And they try these days they try to not be an outlier, because it can lead to deep confusion if you send something on your end on an iphone, right somebody?

0:27:52 - Leo Laporte
on android or whatsapp or whatever.

0:27:53 - Jason Snell
It's a completely different kind of vegetable.

0:27:57 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, by the way, the bags under this guy's eyes are not that baggy. They could be bad. Look at my eyes they're much baggier than that. So I guess it's just a time how tired down?

0:28:07 - Andy Ihnatko
are we by like, by work that we said no, no, he's not exhausted enough, he does, he doesn't look weather beaten enough to be he's not my any.

0:28:15 - Leo Laporte
No, no, sirree Bob. Uh, I I kind of buried the lead here um. This is the 49th anniversary of apple's incorporation.

0:28:26 - Jason Snell
Yes, april fools yeah, so next year is going to be something. Huh yeah, do you think they'll do a?

0:28:32 - Leo Laporte
big 50th, I think so I think all of our favorite companies are turning 50, microsoft's turning 50, all of them. Computing would be totally this is uh, this is william gallagher writing an apple insider computing would be totally different had apple not been formed 49 years ago today. That's an interesting question. If Apple did not exist, would we have had to create it? Would we have come up with something similar?

0:28:56 - Andy Ihnatko
I don't know. The thing is that's a great topic because, the thing is, the brilliance of Apple in its first 10 or 15 years wasn't in coming up with something that no one's ever considered before. They're mostly implementing things that have been talked about and were being developed and other nerds had been building for a long time. But the idea of having a desktop computer that's based on the 6502 processor, that has its own onboard video, that has its own keyboard, putting it together in a way that it makes sense and can make that next leap, same thing for the Lisa, same thing for the Mac, where it's not that they necessarily invented the drop-down interface. We all know the story about, you know Zero Park but these were things that Xerox and other people have been basically working with for a whole while. They're the first people who basically went all in on this in a way that here's here's an actual working version of this that you can actually evaluate on your own.

So I I don't know the good, I the the influence they've had every time they've dropped something like the mac, the apple uh, the apple ii uh, or the iphone, is inarguable. On the other hand, these were paths that other people were walking down. So it's interesting to wonder if CPM and S100 architecture would have won out. And now, instead of having proprietary hardware and proprietary operating systems, the basic the 82% of the entire world is build your own hardware, bring your own software. Here are standards that will help it work, and you don't necessarily have to be all in on any one company or platform. And so, instead of a handful of trillion-dollar companies, you have a whole bunch of billion-dollar companies that are sharing more slices of the pie.

0:30:45 - Jason Snell
I'm sorry to say that Go ahead I could jump in there and say, yeah, I I such a great hypothetical question. My gut feeling is that everything got nudged a little bit more by the presence of apple as a company. That was a little bit of a renegade right. Like I don't, I think a lot of stuff is inevitable in terms of tech, but I think that there's also paths that don't get walked down, or don't get walked down in the same way. And so you know, would Windows 95 have been in existence if the Mac didn't exist? Or would computers still look like? Computers probably wouldn't look like Windows 3.1, but they wouldn't necessarily look like modern Windows, let alone Mac OS.

0:31:30 - Leo Laporte
But going back to when Apple was founded in 19. What is it? 79?

0:31:36 - Alex Lindsay
76?

0:31:37 - Leo Laporte
49? It was a green text on a black screen, all caps, 40 characters. We didn't have GUIs.

0:31:45 - Jason Snell
No, back in those days. I mean they were trying to nudge. It's the same thing, right? They were trying to nudge the personal computer, the new personal computer industry, into being friendlier, into being something that could be more appliance-like. That was obviously a Steve Jobs obsession, was like how do we get this in a friendlier, more appliance-like way? And that drove other companies in that space to try and react to that and be more consumer-friendly in the early days. And then there was the nudge with the Mac and the interface and all of that. The nudge with the all-touch smartphone design is another great example of that.

Later on, you know it's hard Like I don't think. I mean we're talking parallel universes, sliding doors here, but I don't. Apple has definitely made all the technology in the world better in some ways, because it was always. It's just sort of fundamentally there as an outlier to kind of nudge people in the direction of things that were maybe more humane in a bunch of ways. We could argue about the net, but I feel like you do need an agitator, and I'm not sure they would have had the right, proper agitator to do things like push the tech industry to be a little more humane than it otherwise would have been.

0:32:59 - Alex Lindsay
I think that there's a handful of places where Apple changed the paradigm and then there's a lot of places where Apple just made it way better. You know like what, what was already happening. So if you look at the, you know I had an Apple two or whatever long, you know, uh, uh. But there was a lot of other things that I was also using, a radio shack and a Commodore 64 and you know like, and they were all kind of equal, like you know, like they were all. I was using them all, but none of them were particularly better.

In fact, I would say the Commodore, in my opinion, might have been, could arguably be, better than the, than the Apple, the Apple's, what I had at home. But the Commodore could do a lot of other graphic stuff. But when the Mac came out, I just like you know, it was just a completely different shift of what was possible. And then then there was just, you know, then there was just a lot of progression of that um for and, and then I think the ipod wasn't revolutionary as much as it was. Just it very much refined an idea. You know it took something that everybody else was doing and then they said, okay, well, let's show it, let's, let's show you what design can do, like you know, like here's what can design can do for your thing apple's very good at that like like the watch with with the thing. It's not that they're revolutionizing something as much, as they're just just showing you. If you just polish it up a little bit, it's going to get, it's going to be a lot more popular than what you were doing.

0:34:13 - Jason Snell
It's not that it's doing something different, it's just making it a lot easier and a lot more enjoyable to do it I don't want to get into you know too much into the deep mythology here, but but I mean, I think the truth is it comes back to that connection between jobs and Wozniak where I think if you look at a lot of those companies back then what you had is they were founded by and operated by a bunch of tech nerds and they had very similar sensibilities.

And so you know, even like Bill Gates and Paul Allen, you've got people who are very similar in their outlook. And the advantage of that weird dynamic between Jobs and Wozniak is that Woz was the tech guy, he was a lot like those other founders but Jobs wasn't Like like he wasn't that technical but he grew up in the valley and he knew technical people and he had like different kinds of ideas. And you know, you look back at the jobs biographies kind of a strange guy but what was most important, anyone kind of a hippie and he was eating fruit for a while and all of these things right.

0:35:23 - Leo Laporte
Apples only right.

0:35:23 - Jason Snell
He has an apple, only thing yeah but you know, and he went to read and he took a calligraphy class, which is why he cared about fonts and like there's so many of these stories, and I think that is one of the fundamental root things. If we are I guess I am talking mythology a little bit here about what made Apple different is that one of their key people and leaders throughout that whole period was a guy who was not like all the other guys and they were all guys, uh, who were founding these, these computer companies in that era, Cause jobs, just you know, he, he was thinking of other things and trying to broaden things out, and that made Apple a little bit weirder and different and have different goals, but still had the incredible tech backing of Wozniak, who was a total tech genius.

0:36:13 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, and I think that you have this mixture of you know, you have accountants of like how much is this going to cost? And you have techie guys that are just like, well, it's good enough to do this, like the button works. You, you know like that kind of thing and and there was a. I think that one of the things you see with apple a lot and and folks who and here's the thing is how, when we look at how much it affects things and folks that use macs like, um, you know, use apple software, are super sensitive to it and and if you let them actually run some of the design, you look at a, a program like you know, frame io, or a service like Frameio, which Adobe bought from Emery Wells, who was on this show long, long ago.

Emery, what Emery brought to Frameio was great taste, and so you know, like, like what he brought was. He's super particular and he wants the button to work, just so and he wants everything to feel a certain way when you're doing it and you feel that through the entire interface and it's pleasurable to use, you know like and it's. And you go to there's other things like I'm, because I use lots of these aspera and like aspera, you feel like you're opening up a unix window, like you know, like it's like there's no design. I'm sure there was some design, just not very much. Um, you know, to make it work it's really fast, but it's not the same as you open up Frameio and you just feel like someone actually thought about this. And I think that that's the difference, and I think it's not just that Apple did all these things, it's that the people who use that hardware and that software also are picky, you know, and push things you know and aren't willing to put up with very much not work.

0:37:39 - Andy Ihnatko
The very big deal that separated Apple, particularly in the 70s and 80s, is that they had a point of view. They had a creative point of view about what technology could be. Creating software, creating hardware, is a creative act. It's not just simply engineering, picking the right component to put into the right kind of circuit, and there was a lot of opportunity for a lot of different outcomes.

Apple didn't break word processing open. That was probably WordStar and KPro. Cpm was the word processing platform. They broke open spreadsheets with VisiCalc as being the default platform for VisiCalc, but quickly other platforms were able to do that just as well. So the question becomes why would I want to go to any one of those other platforms if they're giving me more choices? I can buy, I can do, I can do them less expensively, like with the commerce 64, all these other things. It's like no, this. This has a point of view that I understand, this is a style that I like and that I understand the story that they're trying to tell with their products, and so therefore, I feel as though there's something special about, and and specifically, an Apple IIe running Apple Writer or running Apple Works. That is not the same as a K-Pro II running WordStar on CPM.

0:38:56 - Jason Snell
Yeah, I also want to mention, since I'm saying, what was weird about Jobs in those days what wasn't, but he was a business. He was like a business guy. Even when he was a hippie without shoes, smelly, eating fruit, he was always like, how do I sell this, how do I get you know? A little not necessarily like a con man, but he was kind of like a mover and an actor and a cajoler and I honestly again think that some of those companies in that era had people who thought that way, but some of them didn't and they were babes in the woods and the ones that survived at all had somebody who was doing that and that was the other bit of protection I think that Jobs gave Apple is that he was ruthless when he needed to be and he was always trying to think about where he could make money and he was always happy to promise things that he didn't know he could deliver, which is that classic story about how they promised a certain number of Apple ones, even to get the company started and they did not have them.

Um, and so it was BS, basically, but he knew that if they agreed, he would have the money to make them and they would be. You know, right Like that you, you need somebody like that. So so they had, they had some special characteristics and that's why they were different and that's why you know that's. I don't know if that explains apple all the way to 2025, but it does explain how they got out of 1976 and made it far enough along to get enough momentum to do a lot of interesting things. And why they're in their dna is something that's a little bit off and different and that makes them a different company yeah, and his uh more recent years, when was has been a little less judicious about talking about jobs.

0:40:33 - Leo Laporte
I remember him saying uh, every time I came up with an idea, steve would say we can make a business out of that. Going back to the blue boxing uh, you know, phone cracking stuff, we can make a business out of that. They did. And there was a man, there was an alchemy, I think. Uh, without was, you don't have it.

0:40:52 - Jason Snell
Without jobs, you don't have it exactly it was a magic, a magic pair of mismatched pals. I mean this. Now it's a buddy movie, but like it kind of is. That was that was the brilliant tension. There was tension um yeah I think in a lot of great duos there is, there is that tension right. A lot of great groups and duos like in music and things like that. You have to have a little bit of that. I think.

0:41:13 - Alex Lindsay
I think it forces people to prove what their belief is. You know, like they have to prove it and push it up against something, and if they don't have that, they can easily just go down the wrong path for a long way.

0:41:23 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I wonder if there are any examples of that we could cite in recent life. Let's take a little. I'll leave that as an exercise for the listener. Let's take a little break. We'll come back, uh, with more. We're happy anniversary, apple. Yeah, I wonder what they're gonna do next year. That'll be, that'll be an april fools to remember. No April Fool's jokes in this show, except for my hat and Andy's button. We are, we are. I did briefly consider starting the show with Lisa wearing my shirt, but then I thought better of it and changed my mind. You're watching MacBreak Weekly April Fool's edition, with no April Fool's jokes. Remember, google used to spend like many, many cycles. Every division had an April Fool's joke. They don't spend like many, many cycles. Every division had an April Fool's joke.

0:42:08 - Andy Ihnatko
They don't do good ones too, like hey, how about playing Pac-Man on Google map streets? Like how about yes?

0:42:14 - Leo Laporte
yeah, how about we spent 400 hours developing that, and 400 hours we maybe could have used to make maps better? How about that? Uh, anyway, I'm glad that, uh, most of the stories I saw this morning were real. And no, uh, tesla did not get purchased by amazon. Just you know, in case you saw that yeah, and the and the zen browser.

0:42:35 - Andy Ihnatko
I didn't even bother to click through, but remember how we were talking about the zen browser a couple weeks ago. So, oh yeah, we're switching from Firefox to a chromium.

0:42:43 - Leo Laporte
Oh, no, I don't say that that's not funny, that's true. Not funny, no, and I am a Zen devotee. These days it's working out nicely for me. Yeah, I really like it. All right, let's take a break. We'll come back with more news.

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0:46:34 - Andy Ihnatko
One quick update While while we were recording, apple has has finally re-released watchOS 11.4. So it's now, whatever they, whatever reason they pulled, it is now solved. So now you can actually update watch OS to 11.4. Interesting, yeah, it has that new breakthrough breakthrough notifications turned off. So like, if you can designate an alarm as OK, I don't care if I, if I put you in silent mode this alarm, I should break through anything like that. So I think that's the only breakthrough.

0:47:03 - Leo Laporte
Silent mode is what is called alarm option option and sound and haptics now that of course the phone has had that forever, I guess it makes sense that the watch should have it. Yeah, I don't sleep with my watch on, but I guess that makes sense.

0:47:14 - Andy Ihnatko
Apple wants you to Apple I know really really really wants you to we can't save your life unless you're giving us more data.

0:47:23 - Jason Snell
The sleep apnea works that way. The vitals app works that way, like they really want you to to sleep with your watch now I will say I have.

I I got a series 10 and this was happening and I haven't written about it yet. But I have this piece going around in my head right now, called sleeping with the apple watch, because that's what I've been doing for the last four months and it takes some getting used to because I used to charge like overnight and now I can't, so I charge a little before bed. Sometimes I forget, but sometimes I remember I charge when I'm in the shower. I try to do it that way. Here's what I will say. It's not that obtrusive and the data is interesting. I'm glad to know that I do not have elevated instances of breathing anomalies. So I'm glad to know that I do not have elevated instances of breathing anomalies. So I don't have sleep apnea. That's great to know. But I will say this Alarms are great. I vastly prefer an alarm that is hey, hey, hey, hey. A little tap on my wrist, hey, hey. Much better Time to wake up.

0:48:21 - Leo Laporte
Then do, do, do, do do, do, do, Especially if you sleep with somebody, because you don't want to wake them up, right yeah?

0:48:28 - Jason Snell
well, also. Yes, that means that lisa gets up really early I can wake my wife up either either, or I can choose to try to let her sleep, because it's a private, you know it's just me being bugged by it.

0:48:39 - Leo Laporte
I like that part of it a lot what band do you wear to make you see, I have a big titanium, that's got.

0:48:45 - Jason Snell
I can't sleep I generally am either wearing the the knitted loop or a sport band.

0:48:50 - Alex Lindsay
So something, something yeah, the rubbery one that came with it is all I've ever.

0:48:56 - Jason Snell
Yeah, I have some others, but but the I'm currently actually using the rubbery one that came with this, which is the sport band.

0:49:02 - Leo Laporte
I've often slept with something soft and rubbery, but this would be the first time I'd do it with my wall.

0:49:06 - Jason Snell
Hey, oh hey oh, Alex, yes, sir, oh yes Alex.

0:49:11 - Leo Laporte
I don't know what that means, Alex. By the way, I tried, in the same vein, uh to uh convince chat gbt to paint me like your french girl, and it refused it said I couldn't generate that image because the request violates our content policies. You, slime bag, did try French Canadian. Maybe that was it. Ah yeah, it's funny that it would say no to that. I could see it says well, what you know, give me more information. But no, all right, Alex, you sleep with your watch on too.

0:49:42 - Alex Lindsay
Huh, oh yeah yeah, I, I, I, I mean I have to admit that I've become a little obsessed with the health app in general, like I just, and so I'm just constantly paying attention to all these weird. The problem is, you give me a bunch of data and my brain can't stop processing the data and so looking at how long I slept and whether what kind of sleep it is, and when I went to bed and when I got up, and how I, and then I think about how I feel the next day and you know, and, and like what did I do beforehand, and there's just definitely lots of. I mean, it definitely affects behavior, you know, um and uh, like I it it, I think that over I don't know, I've been doing it for a long time now. I think that I it it also affects, like, my willingness, like I have a do not disturb.

The start turns on at 6 PM, and that came from the sleep app, because I was like I need time to not be talking about work, you know, and so to not be thinking about it and everything else, so that I can slow down. I don't go to bed at six, but but I usually get to bed between 9.30 and 10.30. And I and I, but I just need that time to, like you know, finish up whatever I'm finishing up have dinner, do whatever else I'm going to do, watch TV, do you know whatever? Have some time down and then get. And I did that because I was noticing how my sleep was all broken up, because, you know, and I was noticing, like, when I did that, and so now I just, you know, it's almost impossible to get ahold of me after six.

0:51:06 - Andy Ihnatko
I'll just I'll, I'll. I'll just add that, like a lot of like health and productivity problems either went away or were definitely partially addressed when I made it like an absolute hard and fast rule eight hours of sleep every night, whatever you have to do to make that happen. You have to make that happen because I was like having a bad time for months and months and months and I had to like look at, okay, let's start with before we, before we like get blood tests and like go to doctors. It's like are you doing anything profoundly stupid that runs counter to known medical facts? And one of them was that, okay, maybe I'll get like four hours one night, maybe I'll sleep in 12 hours the next night, maybe I'll get six hours. It's like no, I have to like start turning off screens and I will not have an alarm. I will basically sleep until there's an alarm that will not go off until after eight hours, because there is almost never any excuse for me not to get eight hours of sleep and then fix so many things.

0:52:02 - Alex Lindsay
I'm not capable of sleeping eight hours, but I but I um, I'm not not usually, and so but it's funny cause it does ever long periods of time. It says your average this year is five hours and 57 minutes. Your average all of 2024 was five hours and 53 minutes. You know like it's all, like that's about how long I sleep. You know like it's, but it is. But you, you get and the and the problem is you get that data, whatever it is, whether it's your exercise, your weight and I think blood sugar will probably come eventually, all these things and especially when you're tracking it over long periods of time, it gets super interesting. Like you know, you see these huge patterns as opposed to things, and it's just that we've never had access to that kind of data before, where something you're always wearing is kind of just slowly, and I would never trust anyone but any other company but Apple, not because I think Apple is good, but I think privacy is part of their core business model.

0:52:57 - Andy Ihnatko
And this is another area where Apple can really clean up with AI. I mean, mark Gurman was talking about this during his newsletter, but the idea of, like I would love to be able to give ChatGPT or Gemini. Here is my sleep data or here is other like heart rate data collected over the past month. Is there anything that I could be doing to improve my health or to improve my cognitive ability? And I'm sure that an AI would be able to, like, do wonderful things with that but would I trust I'm going to give medical data to Gemini or OpenAI? Gemini maybe if I knew there was going to be a really great benefit? Openai almost certainly not. Apple absolutely yes.

0:53:40 - Leo Laporte
Kevin Kennedy, md. German's Power On newsletter this Sunday. Apple's uh focus will be on health. He quotes tim cook saying in the long run, apple's uh going to be best known for its health initiatives. Its greatest contribution to society will be in health care. He does mention that glucose non-invasive glucose monitor, which is they've been working on, they say german says, for 15 plus years. Uh, the idea originated when jobs was alive, which is, yeah, 15 years ago. Uh, to add a sensor to the apple watch. It's difficult, right? Yeah, uh, he says apple's health team is working on something that could have a quicker payoff project mulberry. It involves a new revamped health app plus an AI health coach. That's kind of interesting, you know. Remember, apple might have a lot of ideas, but they have to get them past the FDA. No-transcript, they don't have to get it past the fda anymore. I don't know what the who was there at the fda, anybody? Most of them were fired yesterday, so um but.

0:54:46 - Jason Snell
I still think you gotta get approval right yeah yeah, yeah, although health coaching may be a different right, like there's a lot of non-doctor features. Yeah, it says the service would be powered by a new ai agent that would replicate, at least to some extent, a real doctor.

0:54:56 - Leo Laporte
That's when you get in trouble, when you give on doctor features. Yeah, it says the service would be powered by a new ai agent that would replicate, at least to some extent, a real doctor. That's when you get in trouble, when you give advice right, you know you really ought to put a salve on that.

0:55:08 - Andy Ihnatko
Or don't worry, it's not cancer, um every, every apple whole feature likes like afib detection, sleep apnea detection. It's not that wow, they finally had a breakthrough. It's like no, they finally got approval from the fda to be able to say we have detected afib. Even there, they can't say here's exactly what you should do, right now and they very quickly get, you know, get.

0:55:29 - Alex Lindsay
They step back pretty quickly. You know like. You know like like I don't. If you're having anything that's odd, very quickly your phone, your phone, will tell you that I can't tell you anything. You should just need to call your doctor. Go call your doctor.

0:55:38 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, the company Gurman says is training the AI agent with data from physicians it has on staff. They are opening a facility near Oakland, california, so physicians can shoot video content for the app. It's also looking for, oh dear, a major doctor personality to serve as a host for the new service. Like Dr Oz, like what gets fired from the administration.

0:56:07 - Andy Ihnatko
He's going to need a fallback, maybe, yeah.

0:56:09 - Alex Lindsay
Well, again, I think that there's there's, there's this kind of bigger picture of you know doesn't have to be like here's how to fix, here's how to sew up a wound or here's how to deal with you know an ulcer. But there's so many places where you know the vast majority of our health problems are systemic. You know bad choices by us, you know like.

0:56:29 - Leo Laporte
But you know the medical consensus shifts all the time on that stuff. And anything that they're going to be allowed to say will be so anodyne is to be useless. I mean, you know, like it can pretty easily tell.

0:56:40 - Alex Lindsay
I mean it, it can.

The thing is is that we're starting to realize that you know everybody's different, and I think that the thing is is that it, no, it, having a bunch of data and then knowing like my, my wife, can eat as much carbs as she wants.

In fact, I think her body actually, uh, runs better like she, just she, just she just feels better when she eats lots and lots of bread, and if I look at bread, I gain 10 pounds. So I think that an app that starts to understand what you're like and where you're going with it, along with impacting if you look at recipes five years from now, along with being able to manage a diet, a diet, manage, fitness, manage you know what you're, you know these other things it can handle a lot of those things that are oftentimes just seen as too complex to deal with. You know as and that's what apple's good at is taking complexity away from things that people just don't do because it would be too hard, like it'd be too like, oh, I can't quite figure that out german says they want to get into food tracking, which would of course, sherlock a number of apps.

0:57:41 - Leo Laporte
Yeah uh, the new Dr Locke AI agent will help users with the nutrition features. See, but again, consensus goes all over the place on this stuff.

0:57:49 - Alex Lindsay
I mean, the bottom line is just don't buy anything in the middle of the, of the, in the middle aisles, like that's the only food consensus that you really need. You know like then. That hasn't changed for you know 100 years.

0:57:59 - Andy Ihnatko
You know like it's but part of this could be maybe it won't be as complicated if apple were to go in this sort of direction to become. I want apple's role wants to be a little bit more active and proactive in helping people get more healthy or and achieve certain goals. Maybe it could be more along the lines of apple fitness, where it's like they're not, it's not an artificial intelligence chat bot that is you're having a consultation with and it's giving you advice. More like, by having such a broad and in-depth view of the health data of all of its apple watch users, it knows what kind of video content it should be creating and putting in this channel and giving to people as resources of. Hey, if you're, if you're trying to get, if your goal is this here, or if you, if you're, if you're, if your doctor has basically put you on like a, a heart medication for this. Here are some things to keep in mind. Here are some stats to track. Here are some activities to try. That in itself would be very interesting, I think.

0:59:00 - Alex Lindsay
Go ahead. All I was going to say is that it doesn't. I think that it is not even just general. Seeing what you're doing, it can say you're not sleeping well, and if you're tracking what you're eating, it's going to know what that is and over time it can build very complex models about. If it has all this data, it can everything know, everything. I mean cause it keeps track of your steps. When you're just walking on your phone, you know, um, when you're like.

I was talking to somebody who manages stuff, they said we know what your heartbeat is based on your pace, like, like, like you know, like you know, there's so much data that is there, um, that's kind of floating around. But Apple can, you know, start to build a better model of you, of your physical, like what you're sensitive to, what you're not sensitive to and just the way you move. It can figure out a lot of things, you know, especially when you're telling it a little bit of data, um, that pins it in and then it starts, and then, but then someone says, well, I want to lose. You know, I want to lose 20 pounds over the next six months. You know, and design me, design me, design me a workout schedule, a diet that kind of thing, and, and, and, and.

1:00:06 - Andy Ihnatko
It could do that, chat box, chat box, chat box. Gpt can do that, so yeah.

1:00:13 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I should point out that there's increasing evidence that the sleep trackers, among other things, are actually dangerous for people. They make them sleep obsessed. They make them anxious. They actually don't improve the sleep. They the sleep worse. I think sometimes you could actually say too much information is not a good thing when it comes to your health.

1:00:28 - Jason Snell
It it makes you um worry about things you shouldn't worry about although I mean my counter argument might be that if you've got a really good sleep assistant or health assistant that's machine learning driven and is sort of sitting between you and the data, that's among the things that it could do for you, right?

It could say your sleep seems fine, don't worry about it, instead of you just obsessing over the data. So there's potentially a place for something that's like an intermediary between you and your data so that you don't look at it and get obsessed with it. I, something that's like an intermediary between you and your data so that you don't you don't look at it and get obsessed with it. I think that's really interesting as a possibility that first we do first what we do is build all the data and show a simple data report and get everybody freaked out about the data, and then we build an ai agent that lays on top of the data and says don't look at the data right, great, they call it orthosomnia, and this is an article from the journal of clinical sleep medicine.

1:01:23 - Leo Laporte
Are some patients taking the quantified self too far? And uh, and that's exactly the issue. By the way, 10 of us adults wear use a wearable fitness sleep tracking device on a regular basis and 50% of the rest would consider buying one. So it is a big business, but it does make people anxious and in fact you know it's been my own experience it does not improve my sleep and it definitely doesn't improve my day when my watch says oh, you know you didn't get a good night's sleep.

1:01:54 - Andy Ihnatko
You should be in a bad mood today yeah, my weird thing is I have never, with an apple watch, with with a Pixel Watch, with a Samsung, every time I've tested some device that's supposed to do sleep tracking, I have never had it give me consistent results.

1:02:08 - Alex Lindsay
That's another problem, isn't it?

1:02:10 - Andy Ihnatko
I mean I'm expecting like okay. So I know I've probably fell asleep at around two in the morning and now I'm awake and it's 9 or 10 in the morning and it will tell me no sleep tracking data collected or you slept for 90 minutes. It's not like you slept for eight hours and only 90 minutes worth of it was any good. It's just so useless to me. I don't know why that is. Maybe I've just got furry wrists or something.

1:02:35 - Alex Lindsay
I find mine to be laser accurate. When I travel and I fly and pull a red eye or something like that, it shows all it lines up.

1:02:42 - Leo Laporte
Have you compared it to another device, For instance? I have an aura ring. When I wear the Apple watch and the aura ring. They do not agree.

1:02:50 - Alex Lindsay
I don't know.

1:02:50 - Leo Laporte
It mostly just agrees with my experience I have had at one point three sleep trackers, cause I also had one in my mattress and it was three different results, right?

1:03:00 - Alex Lindsay
maybe they're better now, I don't know, I guess I just feel like it just feels like it lines up to put on my watch and my watch it feels like it lines up with my experience.

1:03:07 - Leo Laporte
That's all you know it's well, why then do you need to watch? Why don't you? Don't you know that you're jet lagged?

1:03:14 - Alex Lindsay
no, no, no, it's not, it's, it's the, the, it's the deep sleep versus the. You know, core sleep versus the. You know, and, and really thinking about what, what I'm doing, to cause one one thing or the other, and just kind of generally keeping track of what I'm doing, um, I find to be very interesting, you know, like, and, and I find that my diet and what I do before the show, you know what I do, the conversations I have, the, everything else definitely affects the front end of that. You know, and um, and so I, you know, and I, when I stopped drinking caffeine, you know, in the day, that definitely made a like, I just looked at how I was sleeping and I was like, okay, I really have to stop by two, you know, like, not drink any more caffeine, but after two o'clock all right, let's take a break.

1:03:57 - Leo Laporte
More to come. You're watching MacBreak Weekly. Alex Lindsay, who sleeps like a baby. Jason Snell, uh, who sleeps, breathes beautifully at night, yeah, and wakes up silently. Andy Ihnatko, who's just too damn furry to do anything. And me, I'm leo laporte and I always am having a crappy day thanks to my Oura Ring. Notice, it's on my middle finger. I'm just I'm not saying it. No, actually it's funny because they're now very hot. Everybody's got them and I keep trying them.

This is the most recent one and I keep putting it aside, saying you know, I don't think this information is making me feel better. You know what might make you feel better in the real world? Go to the doctor.

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Did they fix the uh, the uh turn on reactions alert? This is from a blog. Birch tree, this alert must die, matt birch here, uh and I, you know what bir Burchler.

Yeah, burchler, sorry, not ear blur, you know, matt. Yeah, sure, Nice guy. Yeah, he's right about this Smart guy Drives me freaking nuts.

1:08:06 - Jason Snell
So what happened is there was this spate of things where people were like at their therapist and they were doing like you know, confetti and fireworks and stuff, yeah. And so now apps can say I don't want those on. And the problem is that Apple wants you to know that they're available and I think the bug was that it's supposed to let you know that the app has turned it off and you can turn it on if you want one time, but at least in the beta cycle it would never stop. And so, like every time I would launch certain apps, they would.

1:08:46 - Leo Laporte
I would get that alert saying hey, you can turn on reactions, if you want, before every show. I get one now, yeah right so we're using the cameras for the show exactly annoying I, I don't think I've seen it in maybe they fixed the final, but I'm not for sure sure about that I just updated last night's, but I think they might have fixed it. I didn't see it this morning.

1:09:09 - Jason Snell
Yeah because and this is one of those things where people are like, oh, it's all a conspiracy, apple's out to get us and you know, generally it's probably a bug like the same thing where people are like they turned Apple intelligence back on when I updated, when I turned it off, it's like it's probably not policy, it's probably a mistake. Um, it happens, but yeah, it was so. It's interesting to watch that chain of events though, cause it's like I don't want accidental activations and they're like okay, it off by default. Then the user doesn't know that they could turn it on if they want to, so let's tell them. It's like okay, but then how often do you tell them? And it becomes this whole.

1:09:44 - Leo Laporte
You know how you know I just uh, come on and I do two thumbs up and just wait there until something happens and nothing happens.

That's good, that's a good sign we had for a while. I think, john, actually right, we had. We, when we do, uh, what we're doing right now, we're using Zoom and then we use Ecamm for the editors and the Ecamm's running on a Mac at Mac Stadium and it was putting reactions in. So I wouldn't see the reactions here, right, am I right? I think so. Yeah, because the chat room would say oh Leo, you did it again and no it was yeah, no, yeah, no, I remember that.

1:10:20 - Jason Snell
Yeah, I think it was the mac anyway.

1:10:22 - Leo Laporte
I think we figured that out, and this doesn't do it anymore. It's kind of. It was always kind of fun when the reactions happened, though I have to admit, oh god, no, that's the I.

1:10:32 - Andy Ihnatko
I. I think that if if there's any like video of me, like on a stream, like being incredibly angry, it's when, like I just like made a gesture and suddenly confetti rains down and it's not like oh gosh, that shouldn't be like apparently they're saying in the discord that you triggered copious balloons earlier.

1:10:54 - Leo Laporte
Maybe that was for apple's uh birthday, I don't know that wasn't, that wasn't me.

1:10:58 - Andy Ihnatko
I think I turned, I've got. I turned that not just off, I turned it the hell off.

1:11:05 - Leo Laporte
Firework. Oh, there's some balloons, I just saw them. Because you turn it back on, though, Jason.

1:11:11 - Jason Snell
Yeah, and you can manually turn it on. Oh, you can do it manually. Yeah, all from that little not control center, from the little camera menu. Yeah, exactly, if you really want to do that, you can do it, it's I mean that's fine, I I understand like rock and roll oh, I didn't notice there's a fog machine on that one.

1:11:27 - Leo Laporte
That's good, and like how come?

1:11:30 - Andy Ihnatko
like we still have to wait for, like the max headroom backdrop like that's. That's the only one that I really want, just like the intersecting colored lines on a black background that like shifts, like the corner of a cube I'm sure we could do that yeah, yeah, I'm sure there's a way it would be nice if we could do that um fran, this is, this is.

1:11:51 - Leo Laporte
There's a certain irony to this. So apple got a lot of kudos from everybody except meta when they added the app tracking transparency setting. You know the one that pops up when you install a new app and says do you want to allow this app to track you all over the phone? And you say no, and Meta says 10 billion dollars off the bottom line. France is now finding Apple over app tracking transparency. But there's, there's a big, but it's one of those things they didn't say you have to stop and the fine was a measly uh, I don't know. Four million francs, 16 162 million dollars measly from apple's point of view.

1:12:34 - Andy Ihnatko
I don't understand that at all so you know, I mean go ahead, go ahead, Jason I understand okay, so it is perplexing.

1:12:44 - Jason Snell
I kind of understand it in this case, which is apple, is apple has done something very simple, which is app tracking transparency, and what's happened is they've gotten kind of out, regulated by france, which has said ah, but, but these are the rules that you need to follow, and what that means is that, like, if you, if you answer the app tracking transparency question, you also still need to answer facebook's questions about this and have its settings involved. And this is an ongoing trend now, where the issue is not that Apple is protecting its customers, because it is. What the regulator in France seems to be saying is that it's added too much complexity because there's the Apple alert and then there are these other alerts that come in from Facebook, and that's too much. But to say, well, apple, I'm going to fine you for protecting your users. It does seem kind of baffling, but I understand where they're coming from. It just seems really misguided because Apple is trying to be.

You know, I think this is a case where Apple is trying to just make it real simple, dead simple, just like do you want this or not? And the regulator is like aha, but no, we have more comp, ha ha, because it's France. We have more complex rules and complex questions that we want to ask Apple get out of our way and the result, unfortunately, is that a lot of these other things. You get put in this dark pattern funnel where they want to lead you down the wrong path and, you know, find a way to make money off of your data in some other way, being facebook, uh, where apple doesn't want that. So it's a. It's a very weird situation where I kind of understand where they're coming from and, yes, there is potentially added complexity, but like to to say, stop, apple, you're fined for protecting your users is also just a wild thing to see.

1:14:43 - Leo Laporte
While the objective pursued by AT&T is not in itself open to criticism, the way it is implemented is neither necessary nor proportionate to Apple's stated objective of protecting personal data. But, what's weird, in 2021, apple asked the French competition authority and they said we cannot find fault in what you're doing. This is ahead of the launch. The authority chief, isabelle de Silva, said it could not intervene just because there might be a negative impact for companies in the ecosystem. So it's just, I don't. I wouldn't blame apple for being irritated by this one. Germany is still investigating, remember. In the eu, it could be a much more, uh, significant penalty, in fact, up to 10 of global revenue, which is like I don't know what is apple's global revenue? I mean, that could be billions, right?

1:15:43 - Alex Lindsay
I mean 10% starts to get close to how much they're paying, how much they make in the EU. So they might just go well, you know, like this isn't worth being here. So I think that that's the challenge, and you know, the EU is far more. They care far more about trying to figure out why their businesses can't be more successful than they are about users. You know, like that's what all this is it's all about?

1:16:05 - Leo Laporte
It's really them saying you're hurting our companies.

1:16:09 - Alex Lindsay
And their companies are complaining to them about. Well, it's all these American companies that are beating up on us. And how do you and all of these regulations are all based on that Like, how do we have our not very? And they have so many impediments to being successful that come from their own governments that I don't know if they really can be competitive in the environments that they're in.

1:16:32 - Andy Ihnatko
And also there's another factor is that there was an article in the Financial Times a few days ago about how the EU is quietly planning to enforce DMA and other laws against American companies, but not to be really aggressive regarding fines, because they want to tee off the American executive administration as much as they possibly can. So that's sort of insulating them from a lot of the fallout from a lot of these things. So 10% off of everything, 10% of their entire revenue, is probably never going to happen, but it's always going to be a calculus of how much can we find them, so that we are enforcing this law in a meaningful way, but not in a way that will cause Tim to fly down for another chicken club sandwich at Mar-a-Lago and complain that, hey, we need an airstrike against Brussels because we don't want to pay this fine.

1:17:35 - Leo Laporte
What is Apple's response to the new Utah App Store Accountability Act that was signed into law last week by the governor, so we've talked about it before. It is now the law? Have they responded?

1:17:46 - Jason Snell
Negatively to it.

In my mind, it's the same story, which is Apple has a plan and a system that they think is the right one in terms of how you deal with verifying the ages of the users of services, and the various legislative bodies and regulators disagree, and so you end up in this weird position where Apple may be forced to do things it doesn't want to do, but also that are potentially not great for its users.

In the case of the Utah law, it's this idea, yeah, that we've talked about here that Apple believes that if you want Facebook to know that you're the right age for certain kinds of content, that Facebook should ask, and what the state of Utah is saying is no. Apple and Google, as the app store providers, have to ask, they have to keep that on file. You know, and Apple's like we don't want that information, we don't want to pass it on to other people. We really do not want to be involved in this process and I understand it from a. I don't want to spend the time and effort. I get that part, but I think that they also make a privacy argument that you don't necessarily want to be in position of providing uh personal information to other parties.

1:19:04 - Leo Laporte
Steve Gibson had such a good suggestion and I wonder if apple might consider doing this. He said the best way to do this would be for apple to allow a parent to enter a birth date into the phone of the 100 yep, and then. So apple doesn't know that birth date or doesn't know anything about it, and, by the way, the parent could enter whatever it thinks is appropriate. So the parent could say, well, my 13-year-old really is as mature as an 18-year-old, so I'm going to say she's 18. Or my 15-year-old is as mature as a nine-year-old, so I'm going to say she, she's nine, because the parent is the only one who really knows the, whether, what's appropriate for the child. And then the the app store could just go by that and say this can't be installed, uh, without giving up any information. No verification is needed, uh, and if a parent doesn't want to participate, they don't yeah, I agree.

1:19:55 - Andy Ihnatko
I think the only the only solution that makes sense, that does the least amount of damage and solves the greatest amount of problems, is for an app to simply get a yes or no answer from the device saying that is this app appropriate for this user, and not have to know the gender of the user or the age or anything, just, is this appropriate? No, okay, then I won't show this content or I won't allow this app to allow this. Allow a new account to be created on this I wonder why apple doesn't implement that.

1:20:24 - Leo Laporte
It seems like that would be a great solution that would get it off the hook all right, yeah, yeah, well, they may be forced to do that.

1:20:30 - Jason Snell
Now they also. There was that talk about the api that would allow the apps to query an age range and not a specific birth date, which is such a great idea. The idea that facebook could ask like is this a kid, is this person over 15?

1:20:42 - Leo Laporte
and apple would say yes or no, right, but that it wouldn't give personal information person's a great idea and it's still, and it keeps the power in the hand of the parent where it belongs, because the parent gets to decide what the emotional age of the child is. Yeah, and there's no need for the parent to prove that he or she's an adult, which this utah law would require every user, yeah, to hand over age information I.

1:21:07 - Andy Ihnatko
I honestly think that if there's some sort of industry coalition that decided that this were a good idea, then apple would happily join that coalition and contribute to that coalition, similar to the way that they were happy to put and ended encryption into their support for rcs as soon as there was like a blueprint for the, the actual standard, to happen.

I don't think that they'd be terribly interested in creating a standard that would just be another conflicting standard that may or may not be deemed acceptable to a government entity or supported by Instagram or any other app, but this is an area where I think the industry needs to get together and decide that here is where world legislative intent is heading.

Here's how we can head off problems and actually create solutions. Not just head off liability for ourselves, but actually create a solution to a problem that is on a lot of people's minds, not just legislators. I hope that happens because, again, as much as we can make very valid arguments about privacy, there's also I think there is agreement on at least some level, that there is content and apps that should not be available to kids, or a parent who's involved in their kids' lives should have the ability to basically have some oversight and there's always nuances there, but on a broad level I don't think there is uniform agreement that a kid is just like any 28, 29, 30-year-old iPhone user and should have access to absolutely everything without oversight and without restraint.

1:22:41 - Alex Lindsay
And I also think that at some point we have to realize that we might not be able to make a law about everything, like there are things that should and shouldn't happen, and sometimes we're not going to be able to. Like this, the what we're seeing in the EU, what we're seeing in all these States, is like there's got you know the for for lawmakers. You know they have a hammer and everything's a nail, like every everything that's wrong in society. We have to write a law for. And I just don't know, I just don't know, if our lawmakers are technically equipped, mentally, to be able to write these laws Like they, just they, you know they are. They're not, they have no idea.

Most of them don't use email, you know, for a variety of reliability reasons, but they won't, they don't use email. Most of them spend very little time on the internet. They have uh kids with almost no uh life experience advising them and and I'm I speak from experience, not from things that I wrote, that I read you know, like so, and and they, and they, just they just have a bunch of crazy ideas in their head that comes spilling out into laws. You know, think that it we just have to be, uh, you know, I think that at some point you're just not going to be able to fix it all by writing another law like and I think it just makes it more confusing and and more messy than what it was before uh, the next generation of apple's car play.

1:23:55 - Leo Laporte
Any takers? Anyone? Anybody, apparently not. Uh, apple touted porsche as being one of the companies that was going to implement next gen carplay, but it is not in their announcement.

1:24:08 - Alex Lindsay
I have to say that I rent a lot of cars and I think the number one resistance from car makers is they can't compete with apple's interface. You know, and the issue you get into is if they keep on letting apple install it, no one's going to want to use the one that they want to charge their users for. You know, and I think that they, they really have this idea of charging and their interfaces are just, I can't say the word on the show. And so you know, and, and you just like, who thought this up? Who thought that this was okay all the time, like, you know, like, like, and, and so then I'm like, okay, I just need my iphone to just do the thing, like, I just need, like, just stop. And so I think that the the problem is that you know apple is better at this than they are and I think they don't want to put these things. I mean all of their interface. I have not sat, I have not been in. I'm in a lot of different cars. I've not been in one car where I thought the interface was remotely competitive to what I have in carplay and's this, whatever the version is, for the last five years. So so they're not they're, they're just so bad at it because they're.

The problem is is that they they aren't trying to build a product.

They're trying to build a product that's serving a whole bunch of things that don't include the user, like how do I sell you on things, how do I make sure that you have all these other things, how do I and it's this mishmash of all of these things and how to you know? And and instead of they don't have a clear vision, and Apple tends to have a much as much, tends to be much better at clear vision of what they want to give you on these kinds of interfaces. And it's just so frustrating to use a car without carplay because they're in and if they, if I can't connect for some reason, my car, my, my, my phone to it, I have a suction cup in my thing. I can use the LED screen as a nice smooth surface to suction cup my phone to it and just call it a day. But it's just really they're not good at it. They'll never catch up with Apple and the problem is, if they let Apple in, their users won't want, want them to, they won't want to go back like there's no.

1:25:59 - Leo Laporte
Well, I agree with you. The car, the car manufacturers want the data and they don't want to give apple all that data. I have a bmw i5 which actually has a hybrid solution that works quite well. In fact, I live in the bmw interface, not the carplay interface. I can go to the carplay interface quite quickly, but I get a nice hybrid combination of stuff from bmw and apple and it works quite well and I use apple maps and I and all of that stuff. So I think it is possible. I bmw i5 uh does a very good job with it, but, um, I just don't agree.

In fact, teslas don't even allow you to use carplay. You have to have to bluetooth your phone to the tesla like a, like an animal right yeah, I, I don't, I'm the.

1:26:44 - Andy Ihnatko
The thing is like, uh, maybe part of what's throwing them off I do agree with what Alex is saying is that I in an ideal car makers world, they would have full control over those, that center console and and the data that goes through it. However, another part of that is that what, if what value are you giving to a potential customer who doesn't have an iphone, who has like an android phone, who wants android auto? Are you basically adapting? Are you basically are? Does the next generation carplay make it just as easy to whatever screens are built into those devices, excuse me, into those cars?

1:27:20 - Leo Laporte
Oh, that's a good question. Can you use Android with that?

1:27:22 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, the big magic show demonstrations of the next generation car play is that the dashboard is one continuous piece of glass and Apple is putting up the speedo, they're putting up the tack, they're putting up everything and A. I don't know if that's going to be flexible, if they will again, but and if and if you. Uh, I don't want Steve, I don't want uh Tim to basically be answering a question to your Q a and say, well, I'm sorry that your mother's car doesn't work with an Android. Maybe you can convince her to like get an iPhone instead.

1:27:55 - Leo Laporte
Uh, it's actually looking at this, I I agree. I don't think I would want this in my car, to be honest with you, because it is so apple centric, uh, and and that raises a great issue I, the cars that don't allow you to use android, android auto.

1:28:10 - Andy Ihnatko
I are off my list, for sure and and and also design cars are are accomplished as automakers. They have accomplished designers as well, at the exact same level of Apple. And do they want to say, no, we're not going to design the user interface for our users. No, we're not going to design instrument clusters and positions. We're going to allow an outside company to have that level, to have the sole access to that canvas, as opposed to we want to. We have our own style, we have our own idea of what a car interface should look like. So there's a lot going here. I don't think it's just that they don't want to give up power. I think that the best situation for consumers is to simply say, yeah, we will support anything you want to do. Or, given that the two biggest players are CarPlay and Android Auto, we are not going to make any decision on the design of this car. That makes it more difficult to use one platform over another.

1:29:07 - Leo Laporte
I think that's sensible and I think that's what's happened. Aston Martin and Porsche both previewed next-gen CarPlay vehicle designs in late 2023, but neither has released it. Apple announced this in 2022 at WWDC, so it's it'll be, you know three years ago. Yeah, I have a feeling it's not going to happen.

1:29:26 - Jason Snell
I don't think it's going to happen. I think I think that they're. I think the car makers unreasonably think that their cars are your more your most important personal device when it's your phone. But I think, reasonably, they think that they would like to control the car experience. And I think where car makers get confused is when they say, well, we aren't like GM did, we aren't going to put CarPlay or Android Auto in our cars, because you should use our cars and use apps in our app store. And it's so stupid because I don't care about your car, I care about the apps on my phone. I want to use my podcast app, not whatever podcast apps you make available on your car. My phone is my most important device. It's always going to be my most important device for everything except driving.

That said, you know there are lots of things that integrated cars offer like, uh, you know electric cars, they've got maps. The maps are attached to where you're, where you can charge. They do things like pre-conditioned batteries, like there are reasons why, or anything, lane keeping, self-driving features, all of those things where it really is part of the car and it's not part of your phone. So I feel like the right thing to do is really to say we've got our part, apple's got its part. Find ways for your phone and your car to talk to each other, not do things like ban CarPlay. But what Apple tried to do here is say, hey, let us help you.

And I think the truth is most car makers say we have to do this ourselves, not just because, oh yeah, we want to charge people for our connected package and all of that, although because, oh yeah, we want to charge people for our connected package and all of that, although there's some of that going on, part of it is like well, no, it's our car and these are car features and they don't belong to you, they belong to us. You stay in your, in your box, whereas Apple was thinking like let us help you. You don't understand user interface and maybe they don't, but I think if I was an automaker, I would say we need to. We can't just cede this to Apple and we can't make it that our UI of our car changes when you have an iPhone nearby. So you know there's a nice center path here. I don't think the new CarPlay is it. I think working with car manufacturers to find out ways that you can get your car closer to your phone in ways that are good for the user.

1:31:40 - Leo Laporte
That makes sense but not analogous to what's going on with smart tv. Smart tv interfaces are universally god-awful, especially samsung's, but they still. You know, even if I use an apple tv, they supersede the apple tv until I finally get out of the samsung interface and get into the apple tv interface. But they make, they make money on it, so they're going to keep doing it.

1:32:01 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, I mean, I think that the, yeah, the, the. It's not that they don't have good designers because they've got great designers, they have the best, they have the money to do that. It's that they have too many missions and so and most of those missions, you know, every bad design is usually has an accountant somewhere behind it, you know, like. You know, like you know, and of someone trying to like, how do we graze some more money off of the user? How do we? You know, like, I mean, I think a lot of car manufacturers really want a subscription service. I mean, they, they, they sold me a car 10 years ago. I'm still driving it, you know. They didn't get any more money on that, you know. And so so they, you know getting.

Also, when Apple came out with this, they were still threat rumored to be making a car. That is a huge problem, and I think that that was them when they launched it. I think that they were like oh, you're going to take all the data, figure out how our cars all work, make one better, because they could, like, that's the thing is it was scary, as Apple could. If you give Apple all that information, it could make potentially a better car. It didn't end up making it a better car, which is why they stopped working on it. But I do think that the problem again for the car manufacturers they have too many missions and a lot of them have to do with making money. And the same thing with the TV screens, which is why, like mine is just an Apple TV, like it just goes to HDMI 3.

1:33:19 - Jason Snell
I don't have any like't. It doesn't. I don't interact with my. The difference, the difference is that a car between a car and a tv are are great, though, in the sense that there are lots of things that that is a car function, that you need the car to do, and that the phone, your phone, isn't going to do and therefore you either need to do what the new car play was trying to do, which is sort of allow the the, the car data to break through Apple's interface in various places, and you know. Again, I don't think it's unreasonable for them to say, though, there are things that we need to control, because it's like the speedometer and our driving package and car charging planning and things like that. It's like okay, fair enough.

Where it verges into ridiculousness is when the car manufacturer says oh no, we have to build a wall between you and your smartphone because we not only is it like no, everybody's going to love listening to podcasts on our podcast app instead of their phone. It's madness, right? It's like you would never think that, but they're like but we want to optimize for revenue and we want people to pay for our package. I was like all right to pay for our package. I was like all right, so you know what? What should happen here and I don't know if it ever will is there should be an extension of CarPlay that continues on. That is not the quote unquote new CarPlay, but it's like an extension of the existing CarPlay, which Apple's working on. That that lets car makers comfortably use what Apple wants to provide while also doing what they think they need to do in a way that lets the user have the power. And that's the thing that is at the core of this that we're all talking about.

Which is where this gets bad is where one company honestly whether it's Apple, they're not doing this, but whether it's Apple or the car maker says we're more important than you. It's Apple or the car maker says we're more important than you. And that is like the GM decision about CarPlay. Is GM saying no, no, no, it's going to be great because you're going to have to use an app a podcast app that we approve, and a music app and service that we approve, and it's not going to work as well as the one on your phone, but it doesn't matter, because we approved it and it's got to stream via the cellular subscription you need to pay us for. And if you want to use your phone, you can, but you're just going to have to do a Bluetooth thing and it's going to be dumb and you're not going to be able to control it, and like that's when the car companies lose their way.

1:35:32 - Leo Laporte
That's the Tesla story. By the way, Let me show you the BMW interface. The bmw interface and I think this is the key is that cars need to have bigger screens and they're getting them so that they could put carplay. Carplay looks beautiful there. You don't have to have car play there and that was a.

1:35:46 - Jason Snell
That's actually a new feature, leo, we didn't even talk about. Is that the big new carplay feature is? Yeah, I think they added that like a third row. Yeah, for giant carplay screens. It's great and cars should have these big screens.

1:35:57 - Leo Laporte
I can switch to a bmw interface here on this screen. The driver's screen does have components both from bmw like how much energy I'm using, but also from apple, with maps the directions show up. There's even a heads-up display where apple maps shows turn by turn. So bmw has decided let's, let's allow you to use Android Auto or CarPlay in conjunction with our stuff. They do have a whole page of stupid BMW apps. I never go to that page.

1:36:27 - Jason Snell
Sure, but you can. I mean, yeah, that's, I was just. I was just using a CarPlay interface on my mother-in-law's car this weekend and it's a Toyota, and you know that's the nice thing that Apple has done, where their stuff is integrated into CarPlay, where there's like a Toyota app right, but all it is is the thing that takes you to the car menu instead of the CarPlay menu and you can see the stuff there and Apple has been adding over the years. We all get caught up on this new CarPlay stuff, but Apple has been adding support for multiple different shape screens in dashboards for a while now and that's the nice that is. The wave of the future is for a car maker to say, oh yeah, I guess you know, if I've got this screen here and this big screen over here, apple can have that. If they want, that's fine, we'll let them have that plus the big screen and like and just work together, because you know that's that's. You should be working together to make your customer happy right.

1:37:26 - Alex Lindsay
That's what you should be doing Well, and I have to admit that I, when I pulled my for my car, when I pulled the two din, you know old radio out and put this all happened because my headphone jack like of all things, my headphone jack didn't work. So so my wife has a much more advanced car. I have an old car that's like a truck, like a beat up truck, that is is a van, and and I I pulled it out and I started, when I started working with all the wires, I was like what I really want is just something that has a USB-C in. You know, like I just want a flat plate that holds an iPad that I can just drop down and just have it do all the things. And because all those interfaces are there, like how it talks to my, uh, my steering wheel, the surround, all the things are in those little wires hanging out on the back of that stereo. And I started thinking what I really want is just something I slide in there and has a little mount for my iPad and it just does a USB-C in, and then we'll call it a day and I can just, you know, and and I don't, and and I'm, you know, thinking about it.

You know, like there's, there's there may or may not have been some 3d prints of these, of of something that slides in there, but I I just feel, like a lot of people, I think, as car manufacturers keep on going down this path and I see this talking to my uh, I don't know if you know, with my kids at least there's, there's this kind of all. They and a lot of their friends are starting to pull back from social media, from their tech. They want foldable phones, they want, you know, like they there, and I think that there's this as the companies start to keep on trying to turn this crank of, I want to grab onto all the things that you're doing and they're not very good at it. I think you might see a lot more pushback. Like I have no interest in buying a new car. Like I just like it's so, like all this stuff has me just go.

1:39:05 - Leo Laporte
Oh, that's but you do use email right, or do you have somebody print out the emails for you?

1:39:11 - Alex Lindsay
I use email. I use email I. I I respond to it slowly. Uh, you know, I do, I check it, I check it. I have. I check it a couple hours apart. I don't check it regularly. It doesn't do anything. I sometimes go several days without checking it.

1:39:26 - Leo Laporte
It's a great feeling, I must say.

1:39:29 - Alex Lindsay
Text I'm super responsive, so there's text Discord. Those kinds of things I'm very tied into. I hate email.

1:39:37 - Leo Laporte
You're watching MacBreak Weekly with the man who hates email, Mr Alex Lindsay. Uh, Andy Ihnatko is also here. He loves sideburns and the prisoner, but he is not number one, just to be clear about that. Be seeing you, yeah, be seeing you, not yet stay here for a moment more. J Jason Snell is also here. He, uh, he is saluting like, uh, an emoji. I know how to salute from an emoji. Now, that's, that's right. That's it, yeah, that's right. I also have bags bags under your eyes. Yeah.

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Maybe an opportunity for apple. You know mls is coming back. I'm getting all the plugs on apple tv. Subscribe. I have no interest, I'm not. But the nfl apparently has decided to exercise an option which will get it out of all of its media right deals in four years, in 2029. That means cbs, espn, fox, nbc and amazon. Apple is very interested. I remember when the uh, when thursday night football came up well, I mean grabs nfl is in the driver's seat.

1:44:05 - Alex Lindsay
I mean at this point, you know it's one of the biggest. You know all the big sports are this is a moneymaker and and they have all these streamers with all this money. Uh, to get them into a bidding war just seems to be obvious. Like, why would you stick with any contract you did a couple years ago in the current environment?

1:44:23 - Leo Laporte
because what everybody wants is big, live sports, biggest audience ever for this year's Super Bowl uh, yeah it's interesting because Google, of course, bought Sunday a ticket which I pay for a lot for on YouTube TV and I think it definitely is a driver to YouTube TV, but that's that's just one part of the whole uh puzzle. They don't mention Google in this story, which makes me think google's more recent deal is still locked in past yeah, I think I think that is a maybe a and it's not a.

1:44:57 - Jason Snell
It's a rebroadcast deal, not an initial broadcast deal. Right, it's not the same. It's kind of a repackaging, they're always. These are for the these are for the broadcasts, the. The player, by the way, that's not mentioned in the existing contracts that the nfl has dealt with in the last year, is netflix, which did those christmas games that's right, and netflix is just sitting there and they're not currently an nfl partner and they have lots of money and they really like live events now but you know this is going to be expensive and advertising.

well, it is going to be expensive, but you could argue then that netflix is the one that could benefit the most because they have the greatest audience, they have the largest audience of any streamer. And they have an ad package plus. All their subscribers get ads for sports, not just the people on the ad plans.

1:45:44 - Leo Laporte
You just wrote an article about it. They want them in there too. What did you call it? Descending into the ad, my unsuccessful journey into. Netflix's ad tier.

1:45:53 - Jason Snell
I lasted one show on the ad tier. I couldn't take it because I've been ad free for everything but sports for the last 25 years and I couldn't take it anymore.

1:46:00 - Leo Laporte
Uh, you haven't, you have to build up your ad immunity over a period of time.

1:46:03 - Jason Snell
I can't also they missed. I mean, they also did a bad job with their ads. I mean, let's, let's just face it. They had a prestige show like uh, adolescence and the the ad load in it is stupid and it's in the wrong parts of the show and what are they even thinking there?

1:46:17 - Leo Laporte
Adolescence was probably made without ad breaks. It was certainly made without. It's all shot in one take, much of it's shot in one take.

1:46:24 - Jason Snell
Entirely shot in one take. So you throw Netflix in the mix and then you throw somebody like Apple in the mix as well and here's the truth of it the NFL. For people who don't know people outside the US or people who don't pay attention to sports on broadcast TV, last year 90 of the 100 top rated events of the year on television were NFL games and the previous year was like 98. Other than like the Oscars, like seriously, this year was a little down, not because people weren't watching the NFL, but because there were a bunch of presidential debates and stuff that also draw.

But NFL games are the number one bankable draw in the US and so everybody is a partner and that's really good for the NFL, because then everybody is a media partner. They get lots of money, but they also have this control where they basically you know if you have a big media outpost, you are in business with the NFL and that's good. But it also gives them a little bit of control over you and the money starts to flow. So that's the question is does Netflix come in? Does Netflix try to take over for a traditional broadcaster or just get a special? Try to take over for a traditional broadcaster or just get a special and does Apple make a run at some aspect of this? Because, again, it's a really good business to be in.

1:47:39 - Alex Lindsay
Right, and there are lots of different ways of slicing this up. The broadcasters have been slicing this up for years, where some get these games and the other ones get those games and some get Thursday night. Well, amazon's got Thursday night now. But the idea is that the NFL has been pretty good at kind of divvying these all up to diversify risk and to make sure that everybody's all involved in this process. But I think that it's not like it's going to. It probably wouldn't be all Netflix or all Apple or all Amazon, but it could be it could be everybody.

1:48:09 - Jason Snell
It could be all of them, yeah.

1:48:11 - Alex Lindsay
And it could be everybody, it could be all of them, it could be more partners. Yeah, yeah, and it could be. We're just going to stream. You know. The question is how exclusive do they want to get? I mean, how exclusive do they have to be? Also, you know, because you know, now, we don't.

1:48:19 - Leo Laporte
They also have an app right NFL. Plus, they have their own streaming.

1:48:24 - Jason Snell
They do. For some it's sort of in market. It's complicated and international.

1:48:27 - Leo Laporte
That's, by the way, their biggest problem, isn't it that it's complicated?

1:48:31 - Jason Snell
It is Well, yeah, but no. Their biggest problem is it's complicated, but the truth is it's not so complicated that they aren't the king.

1:48:40 - Leo Laporte
And they don't make the maximum. 127.7 million people watch the Super.

1:48:43 - Jason Snell
Bowl this year, maximize their revenue, right, like all of these things are happening. And, to Alex's point, like a couple of things. One, they are at 17 games headed for 18. They're going to do an increasingly large number of games outside the US. They could literally do a full schedule of outside the US games with various visiting teams as they increase their schedule. So that's interesting from a scheduling standpoint in terms of timing. And then what I would say the thing to look at that I'm interested in is NFL rights. They've added Sunday night and Monday night and Thursday night and Thanksgiving and Christmas, but the core rights that are currently split between Fox and CBS. The whole they date.

That concept dates from an era where there were three broadcast networks in America and you had like two channels in every market that showed NFL games on a Sunday. Well, they don't have to do it that way, like that. I know that that's been there since Alex and I were watching and you were watching. We were little kids watching. It was like it was on two channels. But they don't have to do it that way. They could have the rights, they could bring in another player, they could play on other days, even more days than they already do.

1:49:59 - Leo Laporte
They could have different time slots like and trust me, the nfl knows that and they know what maximum they're gonna eat the whole schedule.

1:50:01 - Jason Snell
So much inventory because there's so many teams that they will and they can and will, and this is the problem with college.

the rise of college football is like if college football crosses the n, like they did this year when they they put one of their playoff games on the date of an NFL playoff game. When the NFL told them not to like, the NFL could bury them because the NFL is King and so they will go into every slot they can and maximize their revenue, and so it could be a really big deal when this all comes up.

1:50:29 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, they. I think that the they could also just go well, we're going to have everybody broadcast these, you know like, they don't have to give any any they can. They can just give all the services all access to all of those things and probably charge, and then say the SERP for the services. They say, well, you're all on your own to figure out how you promote us, right? You know so. So the thing is is that they could. It could just be cross-broadcasted across all those things and they could probably charge each service the same amount that they're making now and just Forex everything that they're doing in front of them, and the services wouldn't like it, but they'd still pay for it because it is so lucrative and they'd have to figure out then what they'd have to compete for is how they add value to that, to the brand you know, and that would be very complicated, you know like and super competitive and super good for the NFL, not necessarily good for the brands that are involved.

But I think that you have three players. Really it's Netflix, because they have so much scale, and Apple and Amazon, because they have so much money. They don't really they can bid into something that doesn't even necessarily turn a profit. They have multiple upsides. They don't just have to sell advertising Kaiser. So same model, you know, like you know that they don't have to make money on this project, you know, and so so there's so many places for them. I, I think, the other, I think the broadcasters are out like I don't know how they compete with, uh, the streamers, like there's not, they're, they're on their, they're, they're not doing well now and it's only going to get worse if they have to compete against teams, Jason uh, have influence in that?

1:51:51 - Leo Laporte
Do the San Francisco 49ers get to say we got to have a local station?

1:51:55 - Jason Snell
Yeah, I mean, the owners are the ones in charge here, and so they all know that they want local TV. Local TV is not going anywhere.

In fact one of the reasons the NFL is so successful. But to Alex's point, if games weren't available on CBS and Fox, let's say what they would do is what they've been doing all along, which is they put any game that's not on local broadcast that the local team is in, they put that game on local broadcast. So you could be in a scenario where there are a whole bunch of games that are only on Prime Video or Netflix but your local team will still be on your local station.

1:52:29 - Leo Laporte
That's why I was surprised with the Amazon deal, because those Thursday night games were only on streaming.

1:52:37 - Jason Snell
And I thought, oh, the locals were doing it. If the Kansas City Chiefs are playing the San Francisco 49ers on Thursday night, on Prime Video it's on in Kansas City and San Francisco.

1:52:46 - Leo Laporte
But I have to say Amazon got great ratings. It was very successful, and so the fact that everybody else in the rest of the country had to watch on amazon did not seem to deter the audience.

1:52:57 - Alex Lindsay
yeah, particularly, it's a pretty good deal and it's worth a lot of people to launch the app and and and we hope that people invest in it, because amazon's about two years behind youtube. I mean, if you look at the youtube ticket, if you actually like the player is so much better than amazon's player that it's that. That it's you know. So we hope that that they stay, you know, competitive is it all sports?

1:53:17 - Leo Laporte
I mean march madness is going on right now. Uh, they say the tv ratings are surging to a 32 year high, despite no cinderellas. It's mostly chalk so far. I don't understand sports talk. So I don't know what any of that means the number one seeds all one.

1:53:31 - Jason Snell
Uh, it is okay, it is. Sports is the fork against, like it used to be. What was on TV was our commonality as a culture and the fact is most of that is now on demand and shifted and not part of our commonality. But sports, sports is Not everybody's a sports fan, but all that stuff happens live and you need to watch it live.

1:53:54 - Leo Laporte
Highest rating since 1993 for march madness, yeah, and I think that's amazing.

1:53:57 - Alex Lindsay
I think the part of it's gambling too.

1:53:59 - Leo Laporte
So a lot of it's gambling.

1:54:01 - Alex Lindsay
A lot of the nfl knows that right a lot of people are watching because they have something at stake. You know like.

1:54:06 - Jason Snell
You know like it's true, but I would also say that you can be a sports fan like. I don't gamble and I'm not interested in watching sports. That's not live, I'm just not oh no, it doesn't really matter.

1:54:19 - Leo Laporte
No, I tried to watch some Giants games because I missed them live and it's like, uh, no, it's delayed.

1:54:25 - Jason Snell
I mean, mlb has a great product called the Contents Game that lets you watch the whole good parts of the baseball game in 20 minutes, which is awesome, but like it's different as long as a baseball game should be.

1:54:35 - Leo Laporte
It's an extended highlight reel instead.

1:54:36 - Jason Snell
But but yeah, so, anyway. This is. This is the challenge is how do you get a communal moment, and other than those things like presidential debates, of the academy awards, most of it is sports and and that's why, while everything else is kind of going down the, the NFL rights, the college football rights, the college basketball rights and all the huge NBA rights deal that NBC signed. These are all. That's why, because, also from the other side of it, if you have a broadcast TV network, as those businesses have descended, like what is left for them? And the answer is sports, sports is left for them.

1:55:13 - Leo Laporte
Not even news Sports. All right, I'm sorry to all you nerds who are going. What are they talking about? They aren't, but let's talk about something nerds care about NaNoWriMo is shutting down, yeah.

1:55:25 - Jason Snell
Okay, so sorry for taking over this part of the show.

1:55:29 - Andy Ihnatko
No, no, no, you are the expert First. Sorry for taking over this part of the show but no, no, you're the expert first explain what nano rhino is.

1:55:33 - Jason Snell
Nano rhino there's a guy named chris baity who came up with this idea that he thought was funny, which is he and his friends would write a novel in the month of november. It's one of these, you know, it's like a stunt of do a thing in a month, um, and they did that for a while and then they decided to kind of popularize it and they ultimately set up a non and uh, and the idea there was to provide a platform for people to come and say I'm going to do it and to log their words. And then they built up some education resources so that it could be taught in classrooms, and it just kind of went from there and they built community forums. It was a very kind of like early to mid to mid two thousands idea. And, uh, I was on the board for about I don't know five years. Uh, as chris baity was getting out of it, he didn't want to do it anymore after, like I think, the first year I was there, he had enough of me. Uh, no, he just was tired of doing it. But it kept on going and they said they're shutting down. I haven't been affiliated I don't know if I even know a single soul over there anymore. They had a couple of scandals, they like. Last year a lot of people were really angry because they had a sponsor who was like AI related, and a lot of people in the creative community obviously are really angry about the idea that you know you could use AI to help you write a novel or something like that. And previously they had had a community scandal where I'm not I'm even hazy on the details, but my understanding is there was some bad behavior by some people who were there kind of municipal liaisons and it showed the. It showed the limitation that a a time on the board.

That was a difficult, difficult nonprofit to run, because the concept is just out there which is write 50,000 words in 30 days. That's not a thing that you need anything for and and even when they provided a platform for you back in the mid two thousands, like today, it's totally unnecessary. You can do this anywhere. There are tools to track you. It's a concept that's out there in the world. They tried to make the world a better place by building a lot of educational resources.

That was really nice, but the truth was it was all small dollar donations by people who were like I did it and I'll give you $10. And it's hard to sustain something like that, especially when I feel like it got less necessary over time. And then the moderation part of it we're going to have a bunch of forums and we're going to set a bunch of in person meetings in various cities, and all of that for a little nonprofit to do. That it's. It was not something that was ever really a great thing long-term. You throw in a couple of these scandals that even if, even if they weren't in you know, necessarily a huge deal, it's enough to diminish enthusiasm among parts of the community. And if you're relying on the community for small dollar donations to keep your lights on, that's not going to work out. So it's too bad.

But the good news is it's not illegal to write 50,000 words in 30 days. There will be plenty of websites that will tell you how. Encourage you and let you track it, and I encourage it. I wrote three novels because NaNoWriMo did it and before you say, yes, but if they're published, if they're not published, they don't matter. First off, lots of first time published novelists have like eight novels in the drawer and it's how they learn to become novelists and no other thing gets punished because you do it for pleasure or because you do it for practice. If you think it's dumb to write a novel, if you're not a professional novelist, I recommend that you go down to your local basketball courts and yell at all the non-NBA players who are playing basketball.

Or the painters, or the singers or anybody else who's not doing it professionally.

1:59:09 - Leo Laporte
No, one will ever hear me in public, I promise you.

1:59:14 - Jason Snell
Yes, but you can still do it. Why? Why? Why play the piano, leo, if you're not going to be a professional piano player? It's a pleasure, right? So it's a shame, but the concept lives on and you don't need a website for that.

1:59:23 - Leo Laporte
You don't need a non-profit I think the focus, though, on the negative events, the moderation and its forums and the ai takes away from something uh. A nano rimo spokesperson said, uh kilby in a video. Too many members of a very large, very engaged community let themselves believe the service to be provided was free, and I think that that is kind of maybe the fundamental moral of all this is so much has been provided for us on the internet for free, and it turns out we learned it wasn't free, it was. It was, you know, attention based it was. It was, um, advertising based. Uh, that people stopped paying for things, and I think it's an important uh uh lesson to be learned.

Yeah, I mean, we can keep it but it's a shame that it couldn't continue.

2:00:14 - Jason Snell
Yeah, I agree.

I mean, I think that the problem always when we were doing it was what do we have to offer?

Because the fact is, it's fairly easy to do a word tracking thing and you can have a self-organizing community that says hey, in my town we're all going to meet at this cafe and we're going to write during November. You don't necessarily need it to be blessed by some central organization, and that was always the challenge with them. So, really, what it ended up being was this is a fun idea and if we turn it into a nonprofit, we can maybe do some good with it in like in education, which is, I think, one of the great things that they tried to do with the, with the money that they raised, was keep the website going, keep the community going, but also put that money into educational resources so that teachers could take the month of November and do creative writing projects with their students. I think that's awesome, but in the end, yeah, the Internet. I mean, this is the funny thing it's still the Internet, but the Internet of 2005 and of 2025, they are very different.

2:01:11 - Leo Laporte
Very different.

2:01:13 - Jason Snell
And for good and bad.

2:01:15 - Alex Lindsay
I think that you have to figure out what your value proposition is and why it's different, and a lot of times, people put something up and they go, okay, well, it's cool, we made this all there, and they're not really paying attention to what makes it, so that someone looks at it and goes, wow, I can't really, I couldn't do that.

Like, if I look at, I have to admit for me, if I go to art and I see art that I can't do, which is most of it, I'm like, wow, that's amazing. If I see something, though, like a square on a piece of paper, I'm kind of like I don't know, and I feel like a lot of times, services people build and put together, when they first put the square on a piece of paper, it was amazing. But at some point, people are like I could do that myself. You know, and I think you have to figure out how you're providing something that is uh, um, that people clearly understand the value that they would be getting if they, if they put money into it meanwhile, in the same period of time as nano raimo has been around, the nfl has raised 186.4 billion dollars.

2:02:06 - Leo Laporte
So I guess the value proposition of uh guys with helmets and pads hitting each other is higher than that of people like Jason writing a novel it's really hard, like, like, like that, but I think that's a good.

2:02:19 - Alex Lindsay
I think what you're pointing out to is a really good example of you. Know, you, you have these. The most athletic person that you ever probably met in many cases was the quarterback for some high school football team, and then only one out of about 10,000 of them end up at college. And then they, and then they still have trouble finding just one out of 28 to be good at football. You know, and, and then that, and that's just one position. Uh, and then you, you take all that value and you put a bunch of, there's only one, stephen King, my friend.

2:02:50 - Leo Laporte
I mean, uh, it's hard to become a great novelist as well, oh no it is it is, you're 100, right? Um, not nearly as rewarding. I guess that's the point. By the way, no, uh, no truth to the rumor that movember is going under. Uh, I think you could still grow a mustache you can still grow.

2:03:08 - Jason Snell
I mean that, and that's the point, right. It's like it was a weird thing to have a non-profit for, because it's literally just a thing you can do, right, and so they tried to make the best of it.

2:03:18 - Leo Laporte
I like the education thing.

2:03:21 - Jason Snell
I really believe that, like running a marathon or something like that, like setting yourself a goal to write creatively, any writer will tell you if you don't do it every day, if you don't do it, you know you will get rusty and and you need to kind of like keep working at it and so saying you got to write 1600 words in a day. It can unlock your creativity. It can make you think of yourself as a writer. It could it change the way I look at the structure of novels that I read now, because I can see how they are assembled in a different way than I could when I hadn't written three of them, and definitely as a person who is a professional writer, being reminded of the practice of it that you need to keep doing it and that it gets easier actually believe it or not when you keep doing it, but when it's hard you still need to do it. That's a huge lesson to learn. There's so much great stuff about the idea of saying it doesn't matter where it goes if it goes nowhere, if nothing comes of it, to say I'm going to write 50,000 words in November, because you will learn a lot about yourself and about how stories are told and about how books work and so many other things. And then the last thing I'll say, for a pitch of this as a practice, is the lesson you learned from NaNoWriMo is don't get too precious with your words, as Andy classically says one of my favorite, Andy, and not co-isms.

What you want to do is keep pushing the cursor from the left side to the right side, and that is the job of being a writer. And so you don't. When you're trying to hit 1600 words a day, what you don't do is write 400 words, think about it, delete them and then write another 400 words. You just power through, because any professional novelist will tell you editing is for later. Get the words down now, and NaNoWriMo teaches that lesson really well, which is just get it out. If it's not good enough, you know what, don't worry about it. You'll come back later maybe and fix it, but just get the words down, because so many people the roadblock to writing is that they write a sentence, think it's not good enough, delete the sentence, stare at the cursor and then they leave. It's like just keep writing, keep pushing that cursor forward, like Andy says, and that's a huge part of being a writer.

2:05:26 - Andy Ihnatko
Writing is not finishing the first third of something and getting it perfect. Writing is finishing something and it's awful. That's what writing is, because the vomit draft is what you work with. Editing is writing, so it's like you don't get credit for. Oh, I had this great idea and I wrote the first chapter of it, like great, when are you going to finish it? Oh well, I'm still polishing. No, you've got nothing to polish. You have to. You have to have the thing finished that was a great line from the.

2:05:50 - Leo Laporte
Uh, there was a wonderful four-part documentary of saturday night live and one of them was about the writer's room and I think it was julia julia lewis, no, it was teeny tina fey who said uh, what we're doing is vomiting. The goal is to pick the chunks of corn out. I'm sorry for that image. I apologize. We're going to take a little break when we come back. I would very much like to get your picks of the week, gentlemen, prepare. Uh. And for those of you who are watching the show, uh, you know, note what happened to nano raimo. Uh, we are not a non-profit and we do have advertising, um, but most of the profit goes into paying these guys, paying the editors, keeping the lights on and the internet bills and all of that stuff. And, uh, fortunately advertising does cover, you know, about 90 of that. That still leaves a pretty big chunk, and that's where you come in. If you like the shows you see, if you want to see more of them, if you want us to continue to put the shows together, as we've done for the last 20 years, I would love to get you into the club. Club twit is the way to support our Enterprise. Here it's. We keep it inexpensive seven bucks a month for that. Seven bucks, I think we give you some good benefits ad free versions of all the shows. You wouldn't even hear this pitch because you'd be a member. Uh, you also get access to the club, to a discord, which is where a bunch of really cool people hang out and have a great time, not just during the shows, but we talk about everything there's, there's, you know, anything nerds are into, including, yes, sport ball goes on in the club twit discord. So it's a great hang. It's my favorite social network. Uh, you also get access to the special events that we do. For instance, thursday uh, we're gonna have a photo segment with, uh, chris marquart, our photo guy. Uh, that, actually I guess that's friday. Let me look. We have all the events scheduled here. Is it thursday? Yeah, thursday 1 pm pacific we'll go over our photo assignment. Brilliant, chris has been giving us photo news and stuff like that. It's great.

We're coming up still micah's uh, crafting corner at the april 16th. We're going to do another coffee event with mark prince on the 18th. He's bringing along liz happy beans. I guess we'll be talking about coffee beans. And there's that ai user group. I missed it again, darn it. But I will be there friday, april 25th, 1 pm. I have to write it into my calendar. That's the key, uh, and that's been a lot of fun too. Anthony nielsen, our ai guru, started that. So all of this to say it's a club of people, like-minded people, who are interested in technology, who listen to the shows and who want to support what we're doing here at twit. We really appreciate your support. Twittv club, twit, if you're interested, we really appreciate it. All right, let's get our picks of the week. Jason Snell, why don't you kick things off?

2:08:38 - Jason Snell
Okay, well, I think I'm going to go with a repeat from a couple of years ago, because it's still out there, it's still free and we've we've been talking lately about the issues involving, like Amazon shutting off the USB side loading hole from Kindles and like how do you get things on your e-reader or your phone or wherever you want to do them, and I just want to put in a plug again, because I think I did this like in 2023 and I want to do it again. There is an app called caliber. It's at, I think, caliber dash ebook. Is it org? Does itcom caliber e-bookorg? Is it com? Caliber-ebookcom?

And it's free, and it's an e-book library app that will convert e-books into other e-book formats. You can take Mobis from Amazon and put them on your Kobo. There's so many things you can do with it. It will be your library, you can read in it. There's just so many things you can do with it. It will be your library, you can read in it. There's just so many things you can do with it. So, caliber, there is also a third party DRM plugin or DDRM plugin. You can. You can get that will strip DRM from a bunch of common formats and I'm not saying it, to pirate the books. I'm saying to put them on other devices, move them around.

2:09:54 - Leo Laporte
I moved all my kindle stuff over to my kobo. Uh, because I I own those books, don't I? I think I do I.

2:09:59 - Jason Snell
I mean they might say you have a license to it, but I think morally if you bought it, you could put it. You should be able to put it anywhere you damn well please. And caliber helps you do that. The ddrm plugin you can search for it. It's gone through a few versions. Now I have a, a Kobo. I also use a plugin called Obok, which is Kobo backward. You literally I can plug in my Kobo and if I've got a DRM ebook on my Kobo, I can suck it back into Caliber with the DRM taken off of it. Because, again, if I want to put that on an Android based reader or anywhere or just read it on my mac, I can do it. It's, it is the definitive ebook utility and I highly recommend. It's free, it's open source, it looks like it, but it's really good.

2:10:44 - Leo Laporte
Yes it looks like it, but it's really good. Yeah, I agree, really fantastic. Everybody who has ebooks should have caliber, caliber, ebookcom.

2:10:54 - Andy Ihnatko
Good pick, Andy and I co pick of the week mine is something I'm sure everyone's heard of, but I finally bought one recently because of the amazon sales. It is a simple usb like power meter, power tester. Uh, when I first heard of these a few years ago, the good ones were like $50, $60, $70. The inexpensive ones look like crap, but they seem to have settled on a single OEM design that's now like $10 to $15 and loaded with features. All you do is you put this on the end of USB-C or something else and it will just simply show you what's going on in the charge. So it'll give you here. It's telling me how many volts it's drawing how many amps. This also has multiple displays, so it can show you also what the temperature of the battery is. You can get another page that shows you a graph of how the amps and how the volts are changing over time. It's super, super useful because there's so many times when you really need to know what's going on. For instance, when I got it just last week again, I knew these things existed. I didn't know exactly how useful they were.

I've had this adapter for ages for my Android phone and for my iPad. It's a simple little dongle that breaks out data and charging so that I can actually like plug in headphones to my iPad while I'm charging it. But I've always, I've always been concerned like but does it, does this have the right wiring so that if I, if I connect, like a a, a, a fast charger to it, will it still charge fast or will it charge slow? By plugging this in and plugging it through, I can say, yup, it's charging 40 watts. That's what it should be doing. Things like I brought props today. Things like here's one of my favorite little Bluetooth speakers. I don't know how much it draws when it charges, whereas I have these wonderful anchor chargers that I've recommended before where, depending on how many devices you have plugged in and where you've got them plugged in, it might get 100 watts, it might get 40 watts, it might get 12 watts. I know that. Okay, now I know this only draws about 10 to 12 watts when it's charged, so I don't have to worry about putting this on the same charger as I've got my, my, my MacBook on right now, because I know that between the two of them they can still both charge fast as possible. And finally, like I've got a bunch of things inside the house that are they just don't work anymore and, for instance, I have like a rechargeable light that stopped like charging.

I've got one of my favorite little pocket cameras, my little Panasonic Lumix LX10, which won't really charge up. You want to know, is the thing dead, dead, dead, dead dead? Or is it charging? The charging circuit is working. The device is trying to charge the battery, but there's something wrong with the battery and it's not charging quick enough. So, for instance, I found out that my camera is working, it's alive. It's not as though the CPU or whatever has fried or something. There's something wrong with the battery or the contacts. It's only charging at 0.01 of an amp, which is rather low, whereas on the light, this thing will not even light up at all, which means that it's totally inert, it's doing absolutely nothing. So, whereas the camera might be worth trying to fix, the light is probably just completely just sphincter and at least it's worth tearing it apart to see if there's anything obviously wrong with it. So that, like I said, these are really really good. I'm, I'm.

I put in the show notes the diy more usbc power tester, uh, because that's when I got like, you'll see like a dozen, two dozen different makers, different sellers that look exactly the same way as this. I chose this one because it the price dropped to 10 bucks from15. I had some Amazon store credits that needed to be used and also it was just kind of time. And now I've realized, oh, I should have bought this a long time ago, because it's just a cool thing to have inside your bag, because there are times when, like I said, you just need to know what's going on.

Also, lastly, things like the charging speed and the charging profile changes as the device gets more and more fully charged. Not everything that you're trying to charge will have like a series of five LED lights. You can't, and you also can't like, for instance, have your MacBook plugged into a wall outlet, like at the airport or whatever, and tell you how far along it is to charge. You would have to open it up and then unlock it to find out is this fully charged? Can I take it off the charger? Whereas by looking at this and saying, well, when I first plugged it in an hour and a half ago, it was charging at 40 Watts. Now it's charging at like five. That means that it's at barely the end of its charge cycle and it's probably 90% or more. Like I said easy thing A lot of great use for $10 and a lot of different ways to use it.

2:15:59 - Leo Laporte
Thank you, Andy. Awesome Pick of the week Alex Gibson, Alex Lindsey.

2:16:07 - Alex Lindsay
Alex Gibson, that's my new name. Yeah, exactly, last one wasn't that expensive, but this one is I. I I've got only three thousand eight hundred sixty dollars, so I'm obsessed with surround sound. Now, if you look at that, we didn't talk, we didn't have an apple vision pro. Uh, uh, we didn't do a vision pro segment today, but but there's the update went out and um, so the new spatial library is there and one of the things that you start to go through spatial video and immersive video is that you just realize you need more surround.

The audio makes a huge difference, and so I'm going down this path. I'll probably, every once in a while, pop up with another one of these like, hey, I found another mic, because anybody who's doing what I'm doing, you have to pay attention to that. And so I'm taking this to nab and this is how I'm going to cover nab. Well, part of what I'm going to cover with nab, this is a bicycle. It looks like a bicycle seat it's funny it doesn't look that big on the website.

That's huge it's not like a little, not like a little mic. The optics may be closer than they appear, so it looks like a bicycle seat.

2:17:12 - Leo Laporte
Yes, yeah, it looks like a little bicycle seat. Now what?

2:17:13 - Alex Lindsay
it has, is it has a little? Uh, it has.

2:17:15 - Leo Laporte
It's actually a 5.1 microphone so don't sit on it, so yeah, don't sit on it.

2:17:20 - Alex Lindsay
It's very expensive to sit on it, um, yeah, so it's got a, you know, a little mic input or three-eighths, or a mic input here, and then it's got a little connector here. Now that connector basically goes in and comes out as just standard old xlr. So this is just five one, like, we're not trying to calculate anything, figure anything out. It's five mics that are, or six mics that are coming out, um, that are, uh, that are here, and so you just plug this into your mixer. So what I'm going to be doing is plugging this into my mixer, mixing that um and delivering it actually to a live view with all of the tracks embedded into it. So it'll be when I stream to youtube. It's going to be a 5.1 mix, leaving the live view um, you know, and not have to do any other processing like we do with ambisonic um and it's. You know, this is about as high quality 5.1 mic dpa makes. Dpa is the company that makes this and they make some of the best mics that we use it's a good mic.

it's a really high quality uh microphones, but I, you know, and what I'm interested in, of course, is to use it with. I find that when we do event coverage and we start to include more of the surround whether that's binaural or 5.1 or other things you just feel more like you're there, you know, and so that's what we're going to be experimenting with. Uh, we're doing some something a little bit. You know we'll be streaming on Sunday only. So Sunday will be the day that we stream with the backpack, um, with the live view wandering around, and, um, we'll be experimenting with taking, still having people with handheld mics.

But those hands, those, those will be those handheld mics will be just in the center track and then we'll have the surround there and the way we have it set up, we can control the mix between the two and the 5.1 makes it a lot easier, anyway. So I thought I'd show it. It's kind of a fun little microphone and we'll talk more about maybe in the future. We'll talk and maybe show some examples, but I will be streaming from NAB on Sunday for a couple hours in the afternoon. So stay tuned and just keep your eye on our YouTube page.

2:19:18 - Leo Laporte
DPA the 5100 Mobile Surround Microphone $3,860.

2:19:22 - Alex Lindsay
And I didn't know this existed until like three weeks ago. It's really cute. It's what you need though. Yeah, exactly.

2:19:29 - Leo Laporte
Officehoursglobal. I guess that's the big story NAB's coming up this weekend.

2:19:33 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, I'm going to be speaking, I'm moderating, on Saturday and then talking about remote presentation and so on and so forth at the BEA. So this is the Education Association and it's kind of a secret that no one knows that you should know about. It's on Saturday, so it's not going to be on the regular day. It's on the weekend when you have lots of conference stuff, bea basically it's all educators and there's one little track hidden in BEA that is all spatial audio, spatial video, how to get the most out of your remote presentations, and so I'm going to be there. Um, so if you look for me uh, look for me in the schedule, you only need an expo pass, which you can get if anyone's going to NAB. You know, hopefully you're. You've gotten the email from some company that says you can have a free expo pass. But you only need a free expo pass so it doesn't cost you anything to go.

Um and uh. It is uh, it is the I don't know. I mean, I just feel like it's the coolest. It's the track that I will sit in. I don't, I'm not a big when I'm not speaking. I'm not a big track goer um and uh.

But if you look at this here. You'll see that there's all these tracks, but the ones that are hidden in here, like spatial and immersive video for classrooms um, you have, you know, drones and immersive experiences, and this is all one that doesn't cost you anything. It's the it's kind of the secret, the secret set of tracks. These are all tracks here, so there's lots of them, but I'll be speaking in the afternoon there. So if you're interested to to meet me or see me talk about remote presentation, bea 2025, which again is in the West Hall and again I'm just surprised that no one knows it's there. It's the coolest collection of talks that are there. I'll sit through all of them in the morning and then speak and then go back into the audience and sit and watch the other ones, so it's really good.

2:21:29 - Leo Laporte
Andy Anatco, I know you're getting close to launching your and not code calm. I saw a plea on blue sky for input yeah, I'm doing.

2:21:38 - Andy Ihnatko
I'm now working. I've got all the details now worked out and now it's just basically a choice of if people want to support my blog with money, how can I best serve those people, make them feel loved and welcome, and is is $130 a month too much to ask for and or is a dollar a month too little to ask for? Somewhere between those two.

2:22:01 - Leo Laporte
Somewhere in the range there.

2:22:03 - Andy Ihnatko
I also want. If someone wants to give me $130 a month with not expectations, hey, I'll take it, Thank you. So yeah, so there's a lot of. I'm nearing the final push here. I'm very, very happy, Very excited.

2:22:14 - Leo Laporte
Andy is on blue sky. I H n a t ko. If you want to respond to his feedback, request is most. I just, I'm just just looking for like what do you?

2:22:25 - Andy Ihnatko
what do you like about memberships? What makes you feel loved? How much do you? What do you feel is value? Or you're just saying thank you for doing what you're doing? Here is some money. I'm not expecting any return, but I will take the podcast anyway, thank you.

2:22:37 - Leo Laporte
Whatever, that's super stuff, thank you thank you, and you're getting a lot of response too, I see, which is great good. Yep, uh, Jason Snell is at sixcolors.com, yes, and of course his podcast, or sixcolors.com slash Jason, uh, anything you'd like to plug my friend?

2:22:56 - Jason Snell
Let's say we continue the parade of guest stars on the Upgrade program on Mondays Guest dads yes. Yeah, guest dads, not ghost dads. That's different. And we're not talking about him Guest dads every week and talking about tech with people I know who I don't normally get to talk with usually is kind of fun, and so every monday, while mike hurley is on paternity leave, we're doing that at relayfm slash upgrade nice, there it is making more of technology.

2:23:27 - Leo Laporte
Uh, thank you, Jason, thank you, Andy thank you, Alex.

Thanks to all of you, a special thanks to our club members for making the show possible. You can watch us do MacBreak Weekly every Tuesday, 11 am Pacific, 2 pm Eastern, 1800 UTC. We stream live on eight different platforms. You don't have to watch us live, but you can. I guess is the point, especially if you want to chat back at us. Club members are watching in Discord, but there's also Youtube, twitch, TikTok, x.com, Facebook Linkedin and Kick, so there's plenty of places to watch, uh, but you don't have to because, after the fact, you can also download the show at twit.tv/mbw. There's a link there to our Youtube channel dedicated to the video great way to share little clips. And, of course, you can always subscribe in your favorite podcast client. Just look, look for MacBreak Weekly audio or video, and if you will leave us a review when you do, because that really helps us generate more interest, more activity, a larger audience, it's probably the single best way we can promote the show. So your help is much appreciated.

Thanks for being here, everybody. We'll see you next week. And now it is my sad and solemn duty to say get back to work. Break time is over. We'll see you next week. Bye-bye.

2:24:42 - Mikah Sargent
Hey, focus up. That is what I said to hands-on tech when we looked at the relaunch. It is time for us to focus on one topic at a time and make sure we're answering that question. I am answering that question as thoroughly as possible. If you are a member of Club Twit, you can watch the video version of this show completely ad-free, of course, listen to the audio version ad-free. If you're not a member, the show will still be available to you in both ways. You can watch the video on YouTube with ads, or you can watch the audio as you always have. I mean, listen to the audio as you always have in our feeds. In any case, you got to tune in to Hands On Tech because I guarantee there's going to be a question you're going to want to have the answer to, and from time to time I also review a gadget, a gizmo or something of the sort. You gotta check out Hands-On Tech and I can't wait to get your question.