MacBreak Weekly 969 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. Jason is back, Andy Ihnatko here, alex Lindsay as well. We'll talk about rumors about a new Apple TV. What would you like to see in an Apple TV? The new Apple Watch Ultra another rumor, in fact, a lot of rumors Plus. Yes, finally. You've been waiting for it, you've demanded it, you needed it. Ping pong on the Vision Pro pro. It's next on MacBreak Weekly.

This is MacBreak Weekly episode 969, recorded Tuesday, April 22nd, Earth Day 2025: Here Comes the Pizza. It's time for MacBreak Weekly, the show. We get together with some fun people and talk about the latest Apple news. The fun begins right now with Jason Snell back from a visit to Memphis. He was walking in Memphis.

0:01:00 - Jason Snell
Yeah, that's right With my blue suede shoes, no less. You know, the fun begins with Jason Snell. Never a phrase used when I was in high school, so thank you, sixcolors.com.

0:01:12 - Leo Laporte
We missed you. Last week we got Doc Rock on, but it's always nice to see the doctor.

0:01:17 - Jason Snell
Doc Rock yeah, that's great. I'm happy to have let him step in my place.

0:01:21 - Leo Laporte
And you were doing something really good.

0:01:23 - Jason Snell
You doing some work for St. Jude which I know relay.fm does a whole uh marathon uh come september 12 hours of live streaming, uh, in jerry lewis style and uh. So this is kind of we're kind of like filling the tank for that will hurley be back for that? Hurley. Mike hurley will be back. For that he wasn't at this thing, but he will be back. He's back from his paternity leave. He'll be in memphis and uh, and we'll have a whole upgrade crew and he's back on on upgrade with me as of yesterday.

But, uh, it was good to see that, I mean, they do some amazing work there and and this time we actually were very lucky, we had a very small group of us actually kind of went through, uh, the bottom level of the hospital and I'll tell you, um, it's one thing to know psychologically, mentally, emotionally, about what saint you does. It's one thing to know psychologically, mentally, emotionally, about what St Jude does. It's another thing to walk past a bunch of kids who are being treated for cancer at the hospital, and that's the first time I'd experienced that part.

It was a really yeah, it's a pretty emotional thing. So we'll raise, hopefully, a bunch of money for them in September.

0:02:19 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, also here Andy Inotko, who dances to the beat of a different drummer continues the gags and laughs comes fast and furious with Andy Ihnatko, especially during the fact checking portion of Andy's.

0:02:37 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, he's a laugh a minute.

0:02:39 - Leo Laporte
I'll tell you good to see you, andrew, and he knows the pope. He's shaking his hand, mr Alex Lindsay.

0:02:46 - Jason Snell
The next Pope, ladies and gentlemen, Alex.

0:02:47 - Leo Laporte
Lindsay no, he won't be the next Pope. I think you have to be a Cardinal first. I think no Americans ever.

0:02:52 - Alex Lindsay
I don't think that they're going to let me do that. But Andy dragged me into blue sky. It's so much nicer, it's so clean, like I was. Like, are you?

0:03:01 - Leo Laporte
Are you in blue sky now?

0:03:02 - Alex Lindsay
I've been in blue sky, I didn't do anything. Andy pointed out there was a conversation about light and magic that came up about and Jason sent me an email and Andy sent me a couple.

0:03:13 - Jason Snell
I sent you a screenshot of it because I knew you weren't on blue sky. So I was like here's the thing that happened on blue sky. I have a screenshot, alex. I don't know what you do with it, but take it.

0:03:19 - Alex Lindsay
Talk about you get caught doing something that you weren't supposed to Not really, we weren't supposed to be doing. 25 years later, in a trailer, I finally remember.

0:03:30 - Leo Laporte
Wait a minute. You've got to tell us when is this.

0:03:33 - Alex Lindsay
It's in the trailer for Light and Magic and it doesn't show me. Well, I show up in the show. So in the first episode of Light and Magic You're in it. Yeah, if you go to 45 minutes and about 47 minutes in the first episode of the second season.

0:03:46 - Leo Laporte
So this was unveiled at the Star Wars celebration. Yeah, and this is the trailer. Okay, oh, I got to see this.

0:03:54 - Alex Lindsay
So where would Well, in the trailer itself.

There's a screenshot of it in our Discord and someone pointed it out as I remember it, because it took me a little while to remember, I was like I knew that that was my screen, but I didn't know, I couldn't remember what that, what was going on. And then I remembered what it was. Was that the I was playing around with this, uh, car simulator in electric image and dropping it onto this dune that I had built or whatever, and a camera crew ran in. So I quickly grabbed the queen ship and put it over top of that video and pit play, so it wasn't like a random humvee running through the desert, um and so, but that's so.

0:04:32 - Leo Laporte
So if you look at the car landing balfry's test on top of that space approach quick time and that's Padme's ship, which you were working on.

0:04:46 - Alex Lindsay
I'm pretty sure that that shot was the shot over Coruscant, so that's the shot where it spins over Coruscant I worked on that for like nine weeks and so anyway, so I'm pretty sure that that's my desktop.

0:04:58 - Leo Laporte
Well, thanks to Jamin Bull on Blue Sky who found it. Or is it Jamon Bull? I don't know, it might be a jamon bull, jamon, but if you, uh, if you and I I must have missed that uh little skeet, because I see I'm included in it, so yeah that's nice.

0:05:14 - Alex Lindsay
But if, yeah, if you go to somewhere like 45 minutes in or so, you'll see me wander by. I had helped put up some storyboards or whatever, and then there's another place a couple minutes later where I'm just kind of scratching my face in the background.

0:05:25 - Leo Laporte
Oh so you know you're gonna be in it. That's great well and, by the way, he skated as I know you can actually see me in the background in the first show at about 45 and 47 minutes. So now I can follow you on the skeet, the skeeter, the little skeeter on old beast guy the old beast guy. Good old beast guy. I'm following, Andy. Yeah, I am. Yeah, so Nice. I'm going to do more there, In fact you have the dark hair version as your avatar. Well, no, no, no, no, no.

0:05:51 - Alex Lindsay
It's even darker, it's pure black and lots of it. I forgot that I even had that much hair ever. So, anyway, you'll see a very young version, oh you version?

0:06:01 - Leo Laporte
oh, you created this account in the 2023, you just never used it.

0:06:05 - Alex Lindsay
I just keep on going. Oh, I'll get to it. And then I didn't. Now, now I'm in, I opened it up I was like oh this is really nice. I think I need to do more stuff here, so it is what twitter seemed. You know kind of was sort of in the old days yeah, yeah, so pretty, so I'm gonna be sweet, I'm gonna be there.

0:06:18 - Andy Ihnatko
More people want to follow me there, it's just the same name alex lindsay good l-i-n-d-s-a-y yeah can I just say this has been like the past 10 minutes, including the pre-show, has been the most alex lindsey moment ever where it's like oh yeah, well, I got, I got stories about hanging out with the pope and you know, hang out with it, oh yeah, well, I was at ilm and I was doing that. Yeah, I'm in that documentary.

0:06:40 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, I mean is rum slag in the documentary. He's not in the documentary um, but holding out for more money.

0:06:49 - Andy Ihnatko
Very smart, don't let disney weasel you out. That's right they were like yeah you know you got him, you got right by the. You know it's all about the back end.

0:06:57 - Alex Lindsay
You know they said we just want to do streaming. I'm like, oh, if you're new streaming, I still need a back end. I like I, you know it's gonna be important.

0:07:03 - Leo Laporte
So yeah, uh, I just did a search on blue sky for pictures of rum slag and there he is.

0:07:11 - Alex Lindsay
Look at that, it's a scuba suit spray painted or, or, or orange or whatever, and then like other stuff that was kind of thrown one of the.

0:07:19 - Leo Laporte
That's you in there, that's you in that. Uh, scuba suit and and it.

0:07:23 - Alex Lindsay
What's funny is it looks like I'm talking to myself if you actually watch the clip. And what happened was is that Jonathan Rothbart was next to me, but you could see his face, and because you could see his face, they decided to roto him out. So then I was just left there looking like I was crazy. Everybody wants a REM slug action figure. They still make them. They're like 50 bucks each. Yeah, they. Yeah, they still don't make them. They sell them. I think that they had a short run. Well, it was funny when I took a, when I, when I finished doing that clip, they had me do what's called a t-pose, so you put your arms out and you and so they can scan you and well, they and they just take pictures.

And back then they just took pictures and and I said what's this for?

and they were like the action figure and I'm like I'm gonna have an action figure and they were like they're like you're in maybe no george is going to have an action figure they're like if tier one sells well and tier two sells well, then we get to your action figure and I was like, oh okay, and I thought, for sure I'd have one, and then it didn't happen for 10 years, like it now, ironically, everybody's action figure is uh ai generated and appearing on blue skies, so we've come full circle exactly now.

0:08:21 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah, uh. There was a uh a tweet tim cook still using the x because I think he doesn't want to cheese off. Elon musk, little uh tweet joining people around the world in mourning pope francis today. Uh, and of course, he passed away. Over the weekend. I actually sent a note of condolence to our friend, father robert, who said, yeah, I was with him, uh, the night before, I guess. Uh, they kind of saw it coming and gathered around to wish him well on his transition to the next stage of life. Yeah, um, rest in peace. Um, uh, let's see what else is going. Uh, well, you know what this is going to be the rumor episode, I think.

0:09:01 - Jason Snell
Oh, because here that's right here that's the rumor.

0:09:04 - Leo Laporte
There's a rumor going around that this is going to be the rumor. Oh, one more pope francis story before we go on one of the rumors.

0:09:11 - Jason Snell
It's all popes and rumors today hopes and rumors.

0:09:13 - Leo Laporte
Get ready the popes and rumors show. Uh, his one of his last prayer intentions, according to fast company, urged people to look less at screens and and then he passed away. So is this good advice? Maybe, maybe not.

0:09:31 - Andy Ihnatko
First, first Jesuit Pope, I think Pope, I think so was he the first really?

0:09:35 - Alex Lindsay
yeah, a lot of first.

0:09:36 - Andy Ihnatko
First from South America, first it was from Argentina, yeah, yeah and also, yeah, and also, and also I've well, I know we're talking about apple stuff, but like he's, like the guy who said, oh, papal limo, no, I would be more comfortable in like a, just a white econobox, like, ooh, the papal palace isn't there like an apartment building?

0:09:55 - Leo Laporte
he's in the guest department where we put up people who are visiting.

0:09:59 - Andy Ihnatko
I just give me a suite of rooms there. Yeah, and oh god, very humble bradsonberger had those, all those gold written on it. See me playing his like 100 humility.

0:10:06 - Leo Laporte
Yep, yeah, it's gonna be like three caskets.

0:10:09 - Alex Lindsay
They used to do cedar, then lead, then elm well, and and the things that we did at the there was in conjunction with scolas, which was his, his schooling program, that he had built um while he was in argentina, and so it was really talking to school kids, you know to kids, and answering their questions and everything else, and so it was. It was definitely, I mean he, he definitely believed, I mean he was definitely embodying you know what he, what he believed or what he espoused.

0:10:35 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I think absolutely. I'm not a Catholic, but it's. He was a very impressive person and, of course, our father, robert, who is a Jesuit, was fairly close to him. So wishing you well, robert. Now to the rumor. That's the Pope. Now the rumors Apple 4K TV, apple new Apple TV coming in the fall. Is that right? Is that right? With a big chip upgrade. What are they going to add?

0:11:08 - Jason Snell
Like what are they?

0:11:09 - Alex Lindsay
what does it?

0:11:10 - Leo Laporte
need yeah.

0:11:11 - Jason Snell
Well, the good people at nine to five Mac, uh, who you know? Ryan Christoffel writes about this stuff a lot and he said you know it'll probably get a chip upgrade. One of the challenges with old Apple TVs is that those chips aren't necessarily being used anymore. So one of the reasons, like you know, it's already really fast, right, like I tested it, it's plenty fast, it's plenty fast, but they do need to have chips to put in them, so sometimes they revise them just to use a more modern chip, so that it has more life.

Probably there's going to be some aspect of what they'll call Apple intelligence support. My guess is that it'll be. You know something, either related to acting on requests from non-Apple intelligence devices and past you know, working on them or passing them on, or maybe some. I think you could add some TVOS focused ML features and brand them Apple intelligence.

0:11:58 - Leo Laporte
You saw that Netflix is going to start using chat GPT and it's a recommendation engine, I think, so maybe this makes sense for recommendations or searches.

0:12:06 - Jason Snell
Yeah, and there's lots of stuff.

The only thing that gives me pause is that they haven't done any of this with Apple Music, which is sitting right there.

But maybe Ryan at 95Mac also suggests that this might be where Apple's first Wi-Fi Bluetooth chip, replacing the ones from other suppliers that they designed themselves, might come in. So that's a possibility. And then there's lots of mysterious talk about camera support, and I you know I don't think they're going to make an Apple TV that you can like perch on the top of your TV like a Kinect or like that little Wii IR bar kind of thing, but I do wonder if they might like. I love continuity camera, but the fact is you have to pull a phone out of somewhere and put it somewhere and all that wouldn't be nice if you could have a camera like mounted that you could use for zoom and facetime and apple tv. And one thought I had is you know, you could just put a usb c port on the back again and then let people plug webcams into it you know, interestingly, that's what the Switch 2 is doing, and Nintendo's going to sell a camera that comes with a new Switch that you can add on.

0:13:09 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, because I like continuity camera.

0:13:17 - Jason Snell
But the problem is you can't make a standalone continuity camera really, because I mean you could, but it would have to connect wirelessly to the Apple TV. And I use the Apple TV for Zoom calls every other week with my wife's family and it's great, but I have to set up a tripod and put my phone on it and stuff like that. I'd much rather just put a webcam up on the top of the TV. So, anyway, that's one thing they could do as well is put a USB-C port on the back again so that they could attach a webcam to it.

0:13:43 - Alex Lindsay
I mean the other things that they could do if they wanted to. Is that one of the things that they could kind of stretch? Almost every TV that you buy is capable of 120 frames a second, although almost nobody uses it. Technically, the current Apple TV can support 120 frames a second, but they could, for instance, be more aggressive about that where they start to, because your phones now can all shoot 120. If you were suddenly able to, you know, have a place to send 120 at regular frame rate to your TV, you may. You know that that's something that basically only they can do, like you know. So it puts a lot of pressure on all the other underpowered um over the top boxes.

Uh, is that they could, you know, kind of flex that direction? I think that there is some potential for the Apple TVs to integrate with the headset a little bit, more so with the Apple Vision Pro, so, you know, being able to have a W1 chip or whatever they want to call it, some chip that makes it easy to understand where the Apple TV is, as opposed to you know how it's working with the headset, so that you can easily take the headset on and off. Because I think that where the headset? I don't think I want to watch a whole soccer game in a headset, but seeing highlights immediately afterwards or you know like a replay, where you're suddenly down there, is much more interesting, but figuring out that integration is important.

0:14:57 - Jason Snell
Theoretically, that's something they could do with handoff and it doesn't actually have to be that hard but that hard. But that's one of the challenges that they've had is again I go back all of these things are eminently reasonable, but I had that same thought about, uh, apple intelligence with Apple music, where it just sort of hasn't happened and I don't understand why. I would say handoff is a great example where there are lots of places where you'd want to take media you're listening to in one place and transfer it to somewhere else and other than, like iPhones and home pods, which they did, a lot of this stuff is just not there, like you still can't do that thing that was in that original iPod ad, where you're listening to music on your Mac and you walk away and put in your AirPods and in this case and walk away with your iPhone and like it continues playing what it was playing before, like it just doesn't do it. They don't have any of that and so I wonder why not? Maybe they need a good reason.

0:15:44 - Alex Lindsay
But, you're right, alex, if you're watching a movie on Vision Pro and you could just say transfer this to my TV and it should be able to just do a really quick, essentially airdrop, turn on your TV and start playing it. Well, but I think even further that I'm watching something on my TV and immediately says there's a highlight or there's a special thing for the Vision Pro, and I just put my vision pro on and immediately jumps to that, to to something that's specifically for the vision pro, that adds to that value.

You know, whatever that is, I don't I don't think that needs new hardware.

0:16:11 - Jason Snell
I think that that's just, uh, the software thing, because that is all within the realm of what they can do with continuity features.

0:16:17 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, they just have to do it right, but I agree I think that the, the the real challenge for apple is is keep on. They keep on wanting to add more features, and I would love I mean I'd be a very happy consumer if they said, hey, we're not going to do anything for the next year or two years at WWC, we're just going to make everything that we've done work, you know, and work well, and just really refine the experience of those things, as opposed to continually adding new things to the list, because I feel like Apple just keeps on adding new things to the list and I got a whole bunch of things. That kind of work.

0:16:47 - Jason Snell
Yeah, it is a challenge. Although I don't feel that way about tvOS, I feel like Apple has. They've been very slowly moving toward more unification of their two interfaces the TV app and the app launching home screen. And if you look at any other box, that's not sort of where it's going. It's going to a more integrated setup, at least by default, and I think they've missed the boat completely on um, on live streaming channels, and that's the. That's the one where I would really like to see a tv os improvement. But again, doesn't really require new hardware. That I think. The new hardware rumor, yeah, I mean my gut feeling is it's basically the chips are old in it and it would be nice to do a refresh there so they can keep doing it if they can get some price out of it, so that you know they can maybe lower the price of the box or or just maintain with their margin. That would be good too.

Um and honestly, they could use new chips without announcing it they I mean, they do that a lot where they just say, well, look, there's a new version, right? Um, they do need to say I mean, because the specs would change, but it could be super low-key. If they choose to do nothing but swap in a new chip, they'll just call it next generation or they'll call it 2025 and not make a big deal about it. If they support Apple intelligence features, they'll make a bigger deal out of it just because there'll be some features that you won't be able to use unless you buy the new one yeah, yeah, and also there could be some forward planning here.

0:18:08 - Andy Ihnatko
Whatever they want to do with apple tv in the next three to four or five years, the current hardware maybe can't really do it, so they want to make sure that god knows when they can release apple intelligence features for the, for anything. But they want to make sure that whatever they ship from x date forward can do whatever they have planned for this well, and we've talked a lot about tariffs.

0:18:27 - Leo Laporte
But presuming that tariffs will remain high in china, refreshing products gives you an opportunity to build the tariff, at least part of the tariff, into the price, like oh, we put a new chip in it, so it's 300 more.

0:18:39 - Alex Lindsay
You know that kind of thing yeah, it'll be interesting to see also they're going to really have to struggle with that, I think one of the things we've. We really looked at it with high you know, really high quality streams is the problem and that they're very bandwidth intensive, and some over the top folks are thinking about more storage where it can trickle like oh, there's a new release coming, so we're just gonna buffer a big chunk of it to you before you even get there, so that you know it doesn't have to wait as long Although bandwidth right now for most Americans is fast enough that it's not as big of a deal.

But if you really want to push the envelope of how good things look and it does feel like we're kind of topping out at 4k I mean, ak was a thing for a minute- but it's funny, isn't it, that, yeah, 4k had the, had that same kind of progression where there was no content.

0:19:27 - Leo Laporte
The hardware capability was there, but you could get content in NHK in Japan, but it did eventually kind of trickle out. We're still not seeing 4K in sporting events and things.

0:19:37 - Alex Lindsay
The hard part is that 8K is four times harder than 4K to send, which was four times harder than HD, and the challenge really is that. Number one is streamers don't make more money if you stream more things at higher resolution. So they don't like, unless they're charging you a lot more. Having you have an 8k signal is not in their bat, you know it doesn't help them. It's just really a lot of bandwidth and um.

The other thing is is that it's really hard to see the difference. Even for me, like, I can see the difference between 1080 and 4k on a, you know, 75 inch screen tv. I can definitely see the difference from 4k to 8k on a 75 inch screen tv. It's pretty hard, like you know, it's pretty hard to see the difference, and, and so, especially if you're at a normal seating, you know 10 feet away or 8 feet away or whatever it's really hard to resolve that, and so I think that 8k turned out to be really good for theaters. I can definitely see it when the screen is 40 feet wide, but are there any theaters to an 8K?

Yeah, there's a um. There's an IMAX uh, imax is not, but there is um. There's one screen in uh, Culver city, uh, that that Amazon owns. It's one of their screens and that screen is an 8K screen, the LED. So it's an LED 8K screen and it is unbelievable to watch. You've seen it? Yeah, sempty did a thing a couple years ago where they brought everybody in and a bunch of us went and looked at the 4K and the 8K and LED walls in a theater is kind of amazing, like when you go from dark to light. When you, when they walked out into the desert, you felt like you were in the desert, like suddenly there's so much brightness that your body had this reaction, like I'm in the desert, you know. So it's a. It's a different experience.

0:21:17 - Jason Snell
But audio is hard because you have to bounce the audio off the screen I got a piece of anonymous feedback for the other podcast to do about media stuff downstream from somebody in the sports broadcasting business who said, yeah, you got to get past this huge legacy and infrastructure and sports stuff, but they are. The goal is I thought this was interesting, alex the goal is 4K capture and the ability to distribute 1080p HDR, 60 frames per second and a lot of the 720p sports now this person says is already 60p, you know, outside or 60 frames outside of the legacy distribution and there are higher frame rate experiments for some sports. But one of the problems this person says is the quality jump between 4K cameras and 1080 cameras, even if your output is the same, is so jarring that the general feeling is that they want to minimize until they can kind of like, upgrade everything to 4K and then, even if they're outputting a 1080, have the ability to do HDR and higher frame rates.

0:22:21 - Leo Laporte
It is jarring when they use those short depth of field cameras on the field.

0:22:26 - Jason Snell
I know right.

0:22:27 - Leo Laporte
On the NFL.

0:22:29 - Jason Snell
And it's like, wow, that's really interesting. They do that in all sports now you see, that a lot with like baseball, when somebody's coming to home plate after hitting a home run and you get that film-like experience, but it's only for that one camera. It looks great, but then you just cut back to the rest of the camera.

0:22:42 - Leo Laporte
I understand what they're saying.

0:22:43 - Alex Lindsay
The hard part there is that it's very hard to get focus when a camera is up in the rafters at 300 feet from the field. If you give it a large chip, the focus distance will be like a half an inch. Using smaller chips allows them to keep things, especially when people are running back and forth. Camera operators for sports are other, you know, like, barely human, like they are the most amazing camera operators I've ever.

You know cause they? They're sitting there changing they're, they're tracking that person, changing oftentimes zoom and focus at the same time while they're. You know, those are on their handles and they're doing it all while they're moving. It's incredible.

0:23:26 - Andy Ihnatko
Also just being aware of everything that's going on, to know where to go to get ready for the next thing. As a joke well, not as a joke, as a beloved tradition every year, on opening day of baseball season, I post the live video of the George Brett pine tar bat incident. Where he where he charged it, where he where they, they, they take back his home run, this game winning home run, and he charges from the, from the dugout. That's the one time I've ever like you see the theatrical oh, hold me back, hold, hold me back. Guys Like no.

you could see that both teams they're like this is going to get murdered if we don't restrain him and I'm and, and as much as as familiar as I am with that video, I'm just amazed that the camera guy knew where to put the shot, framing the shot of the umpire standing in the foreground holding the bat, the dugout, with george brett like. Standing there thinking what's going on, got the perfect shot of the ump going and then george brett coming into the foreground. You could not have directed that as fiction as well as that, the camera, that the entire team did that, and so, yeah, that's why, like I, I'm really so impressed with how well they do these things live. I mean, I can barely, if you put a squirrel in a tree eating a nut, I can barely get the camera there in time for five minutes to get them to get the shot they're really good.

0:24:50 - Leo Laporte
I watched a documentary about F1. Imagine, yeah, a car going 200 miles an hour, six feet away from you, and you've got to follow it all the way across, from left to right. You're moving pretty fast. Those guys are nuts. Those guys are nuts. Now I can't show this because it's a major league baseball video and, as everyone knows, uh the major copyrighted broadcast is provided by the authority of the commissioner of baseball.

It may not be used and calls of the game and it may not be used for any reason, but I'll leave it to you. It's on the major league baseball uh youtube channel. I am surprised that Andy has not be for any reason, but I'll leave it to you. It's on the Major League Baseball YouTube channel.

0:25:27 - Jason Snell
I am surprised that Andy has not yet, because that's a Royals-Yankees game. I'm a little surprised that Andy has not embraced for his opening day tradition. The here comes the pizza moment from the Red Sox game, where a fan throws a pizza at another fan.

0:25:43 - Andy Ihnatko
That was also beautiful. An all-timer, because it's one thing to say, okay, you know what, there's a tense situation of negotiation on the field, where Billy Martin has raised an issue with the umpire, Okay. But when you say, you know what, there's something happening in the stands, I bet that that guy is going to pelt the pizza. Throw that pizza.

0:26:04 - Jason Snell
And then beloved color commentator jerry remy shouts here comes the pizza. It's amazing, it's amazing it is.

0:26:13 - Leo Laporte
It is the case that you have george brett and billy martin on the field at the same time that it is.

0:26:19 - Jason Snell
Yeah, it's a thing, it's a thing of beauty. I just wanted to say, um, talking about formats with Alex, hey, formats with Alex, I think that person who wrote in to me. I get the appeal of higher resolution, but I have to say the idea of HDR in more places and higher frame rates in more places, I think more people would notice and appreciate.

0:26:42 - Alex Lindsay
Generally, almost all of the research that we've seen so far is that frame rate and color depth makes a much bigger difference than resolution. So if you're going to pick those and they take a lot less bandwidth because making it HDR adds 10 or 20 percent to the stream, it doesn't add 4X. You know like 4K goes 4X If you go from 60 frames a second. If you go from, you know most people are at 60. I mean, a lot of people are at 60 now, but if you go from 60 to 120, for instance, which we've done tests on, that's double. You know it's not 4X, you know so and I would. I mean I've definitely had the opportunity to see 1080p at 120 versus 4k at 60 and I would take 1080p at 120 every day of the.

0:27:26 - Jason Snell
I mean it is so amazing like it is such an amazing experience hdr I mean hdr, like that's the thing that 4k I watched, like some soccer games are in 4k and I think it's real 4k, not like fox upscaling 4k. But the thing about it is not the 4k. The thing about it is, yes, if it's streaming and you can get do the bandwidth, you're going to get more bandwidth, more, a better bit rate than you did at 1080. But the truth is it's the hdr. Frame rate would be great. I'd love to see that too. But the hdr, the for sports, like the shadows are darker and the colors of the uniforms are better, and like it's just it looks so much better and you see it way more in sports because they actually shade the cameras towards taking advantage of the full spectrum.

0:28:10 - Alex Lindsay
When you watch HDR films the film is kind of drab. Like most films are their color corrected to be kind of drab, Like that's just the look that a lot of films take, so you don't really get to see HDR. When you get to see HDR is when you get sports and they turn all the dials up to take full advantage of the range. And you know, and it's really especially if you're looking at Dolby Vision, where they're able to really shade that and trim it all.

0:28:37 - Jason Snell
It's quite a thing. I mean early days of HD. I bought an HDTV and, like way before anybody else should, anybody should have, it was a CRT. It was a Sony trinitron oh my god, weighed 200 pounds, um, we had two. Two burly men had to haul it away when we were done with it, but, um, it was amazing.

But the, the moments that I remember that blew me away early in the hd era, were all sports, because sports, you know, sports benefits greatly from having those improved technologies and then everything else. Yes, movies are better in hd and tv shows are better in hd and it all happened. But those I remember the what is the athens olympics, I think and just being like I can't believe what I'm seeing here. I can see individual we take it for granted now but like talk about baseball games and things like that you could see individual people in the crowd and they were people where before it was like little pieces of confetti that would flicker, like you couldn't make them out, they were just sort of crowd noise behind, and now it's like I can see that guy's eating popcorn.

Uh, so sports is really benefits from this stuff and just being able to see like their premier league teams where I've seen them play on the 4k hdr stream and I'm like, oh so that's the color of their jersey, because it's totally different. Like alex, you probably know this, but I remember we don't see color the way like standard HD. The Denver Broncos orange is not in the color gamut. It's not the right color. You can't see the Denver Broncos in the right orange if you watch them on TV, because it's not in the color space. Stuff like that where you're like I can't believe what I'm seeing.

0:30:09 - Alex Lindsay
The Dallas Cowboys're. If you actually see them, see their uh, their pants in in person. They're kind of green, like it looks silver to the camera. Oh, that's interesting, but they had to make them green to make to look right snap green under snap, you know. So there's this. Wow, this is like bluish green, like they they have at the and in frisco or whatever. They have all the old ones and they were, they used to be silver. They used to be silver, and then at some point they realized though the cameras need.

0:30:28 - Leo Laporte
Need these like in the black and white movie days they couldn't really use red blood, uh, because red blood didn't print well so they use chocolate syrup, yeah which tasted, tasted good too um hell of an after party what, by the way, one rumor and ryan christopher refers to it as nine to five mac article, and it's from mark german is that there might be a camera. It's kind of a long shot yeah, I mean again, I feel like they should do it.

0:30:57 - Jason Snell
The question is, is it a camera or not? Because to me it makes sense to sell a camera as an add-on and have a way to do it and ideally have it be attached to buy a cable To do what Nintendo's going to do.

0:31:06 - Leo Laporte
I think is brilliant.

0:31:07 - Jason Snell
The other way you could do is you could reimagine the whole thing as a little thing that lives on top of your TV that is, a camera and an Apple TV box and attach it. But I feel like modular is the way to go with that?

0:31:19 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, because I feel like the problem is like a person like my my apple tv isn't anywhere near where I'd want to put a camera, like I have one apple tv that's like in another room, like it's in my server room or whatever, and then the other ones are all like somewhere that I wouldn't want to try to figure out how to put a camera, and I think it makes way more sense to have a new apple camera or whatever, or just make it available to web cameras.

0:31:39 - Jason Snell
you know, it could just be a usbc in yeah, literally, literally, usc, to say nothing of the fact of sorry to say nothing of the fact of like what camera can they put into the device?

0:31:48 - Andy Ihnatko
that will still be good two or three years later. Exactly, we're still complaining about the built-in cameras on iMacs and on MacBooks. Right, that's true, yeah, from two or three years ago.

0:31:58 - Jason Snell
Yeah, I hope they do that, though, because if you haven't had the opportunity to use it, continuity camera with a good camera sitting- on your TV, haven't had the opportunity to use it continuity camera with a good camera sitting on your tv.

It's like you're in a science fiction movie. It looks so good and it works with zoom and facetime. And all those, all those voip apps have have embraced tv os and uh, it it's really good. It is really. They do good noise canceling, so you sound decent, everybody else sounds, I do. These family calls on zoom and it's. It is like the thing that we all thought the future would be like amazing and you have legs, which is remarkable.

0:32:35 - Leo Laporte
The future has legs and he knows how to use them. Actually, in those old black and white movies, they also used to wear yellow makeup because, uh, the white skin was too pale for the all the monster movies where they do the transformations.

0:32:47 - Andy Ihnatko
All they would do is like put gel different gels over the lens, so literally. So it's like dr jekyll and mr hyatt some of the early werewolf transformations. It's like they put one set of like monster makeup on in one color and the normal makeup on top of that and then by simply changing the filter on the lens that would block out the normal makeup and highlight the monster makeup.

0:33:08 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, man, you know it was better in the old days when you had to work around the technological limitations sometimes too much technology, they still.

0:33:16 - Jason Snell
They still do. It's just different now. But I love. People are like oh, special effects have ruined movies. It's like they've been doing special effects since there have been movies.

0:33:24 - Andy Ihnatko
It's all a trick. The one constant is studios and creators who are like nah, it's not worth the effort, I can use this and it'll solve all my problems. Dumb and dumb.

0:33:36 - Alex Lindsay
I was watching something random from the Eastman House talking about the history of photography and they were talking about the fact that for a long time if you wanted a portrait portrait, someone came and painted it, you know of you, wow, and it was expensive and only the rich people could have it and everything else. And then suddenly these crazy kids with these cameras and everybody could have a portrait like they were.

0:33:54 - Leo Laporte
Like the whole industry is ruined because everybody now can do it there were uh people in the 19th century who were itinerant painters, who would go around and paint do portraits of you. In fact, I have one in my uh library over here of my great, great, great. Whatever grandfather from the 1830s was painted by an itinerant uh portrait artist.

0:34:14 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, and that that had a big effect on culture. There was a. There was a. There's a sculpture that I'm a big fan of. I've been studying for a long time in Boston, where there was uproar in 1896 because they thought that she was that this, this nymph was drunk, and part of the reason why that's right and part of the reason why was because she's smiling and showing her teeth, which is not something, because everything, everything was like. If people saw me for a portrait, they would be be very, very formal.

0:34:44 - Leo Laporte
She also had a bunch of grapes and some guy behind her fooling around, so who knows what.

0:34:50 - Andy Ihnatko
She was also nude.

0:34:51 - Leo Laporte
yes, but I'm saying who knows what was going on, but that was part of it. It was like she's got to be drunk.

0:34:58 - Andy Ihnatko
If you saw someone depicted like in a broad, actually actual, happy smile, as opposed to posing very, very stiffly for a photograph, it's like, oh well, they're, they're unrestrained in motion because they must be drunk.

0:35:10 - Leo Laporte
No one would dream of smiling and for a portrait. Uh, we will take a little break when we come back. Breaking news mark german's uh, sunday, uh, at newsletter is uh, is has been replaced by something that came out this morning about apple intelligence. We'll talk about that in just a little bit. You're watching MacBreak Weekly with Andy Ihnatko, alex lindsey, jason snell, the whole crew in town.

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I was gonna go with the leak that maybe iphone 17 pro will be available in sky blue, but no, no, I have an even better story. Mark german this morning, right before the show. Mike rockwell is now moving in, as you know, to run siri and he is bringing in people from the old team, the vision pro team. This is mark german. Apple's new siri engineering chief is overhauling the management team leading development of the beleaguered voice assistant. Mike rockwell, who was running vision pro, is starting to bring in his own people over from vision pro. I don't know if that's good for vision pro, uh, but you know who knows uh. You know john g andrea, who was the. You know the highly touted guy from google that apple brought in to run ai is kind of off in the desert now. He's still at Apple, I guess still an EVP, but still on the leadership.

0:39:06 - Jason Snell
He's still in charge of AI and machine learning, research and stuff, but he's not in charge of Siri. That's the key yeah because Siri is a product that needs to ship and be good.

0:39:16 - Leo Laporte
Yeah uh, fixing Siri German rights has become one of the highest profile challenges at Apple. You know the Siri's been sucky for a long time, so maybe he has brought in Ranjit Desai, a longtime deputy from Vision Pro. He'll be in charge of Siri's engineering. Rockwell told staffers from, according to Gurman, that the executive's background in high-performance, low-latency systems would help Siri reach a new level. Oliver Gutnacht, a senior Vision Pro software executive, taking over the team in charge of the user experience, nate Begman and Tom Duffy joining the Siri team to run underlying architecture. Wow, he's really brought in a lot of people. Yeah.

Stuart Bowers, who has led data training and evaluation teams, will get an expanded role working on Siri's ability to figure out how to respond to a user. David Wynarski, a long-time Siri leader, taking over a new group responsible for all voice and speech related components. This is an all hands on deck moment for Siri, isn't it? Yeah, it is it is.

0:40:20 - Jason Snell
They finally got there right. What we've been saying for a long time. It seems like the one-two punch of all the Apple intelligence failures and Siri in general being kind of bad and broken and behind seems to have finally led to a breaking point. And it does seem like, based on some reports, tim Cook's a little conflict-averse. He kind of wants his senior managers to fix it. Work it out which.

I get it, I totally get that. That wants his senior managers to fix it, which I get it. I totally get that. That should be the case. But I think in this case there was a lot of uh, you know, territorialism as well as a lot of like I got it, you take it, kind of going on and now he finally clearly has come in and said, okay, siri, over there, fix it to a guy who is pretty trusted and has proven to ship things and get those products out the door. And we can talk about the Vision Pro strategy and all that, but that's an amazing product and they shipped it and that's due to that team, and so turning them on this is a real challenge for them, right? Because this is a problem, as you said, leo. It's not like Siri was good three years ago. Siri has been broken for a very long time.

0:41:29 - Leo Laporte
It actually got worse, though I will admit it, but it wasn't good to begin with. Yep, yeah, earlier this year, engineering and quality issues forced Apple to postpone the release of uh apple app intense from may to april. By march, the company delayed the trio features indefinitely, in a rare retreat, these siri upgrades. In an internal meeting prior, the prior head of siri told staffers the system didn't work properly as often as a third of the time. Yeah, that's about right, he said. Employees may feel quote embarrassed due to the quote ugly situation. Yikes. Yeah, uh, no more embarrassment. Uh, you know, this is something they're. They're probably going to talk about next month or in june for uh, I would guess for wwdc, but they're not going to admit to this. What are they going to say?

0:42:34 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, this is probably the second WWDC in a row in which Apple has to make a big, big show to not just developers, but to users, to analysts, to the job market, to researchers, that they do have a plan for Apple intelligence. That was like unveiling the plan, excuse me, for ai. That was the big deal of last year's wwdc. This year they have to convince people that their future plan going forward is to not magnify the intensity of how they step on rakes inside the apple campus, that they're actually going to do productive things that actually work. It's not, this isn't? I wonder if part of the pressure to make sure that they don't solve this problem by half measures is all of the dogpiling, bad press they got in the past six weeks, which were just impossible to wave away, impossible to pretend as though. Oh well, gosh, that's just a couple of dissatisfied people who are just sort of leaking things that they shouldn't be leaking about. We'll have an all-hands meeting and reassure people that no, this is absolutely cool, it's not just.

I've just finished like reading German's article about this and like you're absolutely right, this isn't just oh well, we just we moved a few people from one department to another. No, this is more like they took people off of really important projects to this. This is how you know that this is considered to be a very important project when they're willing to stifle, to an extent, development of ios itself and also to divide the attention of someone who is working on Apple's betting the future on a product Vision Pro. Hopefully that means that, yeah, they figured out that whatever our plan was before, it's not working. We need a brand new game plan. We can't just add some chapters to the old one.

0:44:17 - Leo Laporte
Gurman writes. Jen Drea remains Apple's head of artificial intelligence. Reporting directly to Cook, he oversees core AI initiatives, including large language model development, infrastructure teams and testing operations those are, admittedly, very important as well as a measurement group focused on improving AI performance. Robbie Walker, former head of Siri, still reports to Jandrea and remains this is an interesting way to put it involved.

0:44:43 - Jason Snell
Involved. He's involved and committed although possibly polishing his resume.

0:44:49 - Leo Laporte
But looking forward to spending more time with his family and his charitable endeavors yeah, yeah, uh, although and this is kind of the key point of this whole paragraph he lost hundreds of engineers to rockwell yeah, exactly.

0:45:03 - Jason Snell
Well, yeah, I mean this is a takeover. Um, the house on fire metaphor. I mean, well, yeah, I mean this is a takeover. The house on fire metaphor. I mean that's about right. Right, this is a high priority for them.

And Leo, you ask what do we do at WWDC? What are we looking for there? What are they going to say, yeah, my guess is that one of the things that they're doing the new group coming in, rockwell and his team is saying what are we? You know what's our quick win? And by quick win, I think basically it's what can we announce at WWDC that we are certain we can ship in the next cycle? What do we got?

And that is they probably been doing a lot of triage. They've been talking to engineers, bypassing those old managers, and saying, like, what do you have? What state of affairs is everything? Because you probably need, like german keeps talking about oh well, they want to do an llm syrian. It's not gonna. He's always like it's not going to be available. For two years, it's been like not available for two years, for two years now, and and so I I feel like that is obviously got to be a priority, but you know, if it's going to take that long. You got to find I don't want to call it the low-hanging fruit, but you've got to find the parts of this, the aspects of what's going on with siri that you can get again I don't, you know, got a quick win.

Low-hanging fruit are probably not right, but something you can ship. That's appreciably better that you can do by spring of next year and announce it at WWDC and not have to apologize the following spring for failing to ship it. And that's tough. I don't know what's there and it's not like his new team has got. Oh well, let's just do nose to the grindstone for the next two months and then we'll have everything. Like it takes time, so I don't envy them at all having to do that, but I do think that that's what they're going to do is find out what we can ship, not you know, what can we show in june and ship by next march? That is decent. What do we have? What is the line from apollo 13? What do we?

0:46:58 - Andy Ihnatko
got that's good on this pre-apps but that's important. I was thinking the exact same thing, because a year ago.

0:47:04 - Leo Laporte
They announced stuff, they couldn stuff, they didn't and couldn't ship. So it's got to be something that has to be good. It's the embarrassing moment.

0:47:11 - Andy Ihnatko
Just very quickly, jason. I think you're absolutely right, because it's not just about. There's also a question of internal morale. This is a team that has been tarred with nothing but failure, despite working extremely hard about a project that I'm sure that initially they were Steve.

0:47:26 - Leo Laporte
Jobs would have let them go.

0:47:28 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, exactly, but part of it is that we have to give also our team a win that you are building something that is successful. Even if you achieve a small success on something, that's a stepping stone to something else, here's something that you can have tangible results of, being proud of having done this. That, I think, is really, really important for the team right now.

0:47:48 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, and the hard part is that there's no quick fix, so this is going to take time for them to figure out, you know. They basically probably have to grind the thing almost to the ground and start building up from it, and so I think that the challenge is always we're hoping that Apple doesn't panic and just try to keep on clopping things onto something that is kind of half baked, you know, and just really have Rockwell go in and look at it from the ground up and say we're going to keep this going, maybe we add a couple of little things to keep people happy, but we're really going to rewrite the entire, you know, basis of how this thing works, cause I think that's's what's necessary for it to really work. It's just there's a lot of fundamental, foundational problems with Siri that will not, will always be a problem, unless they just start over on a relatively clean slate.

0:48:36 - Jason Snell
Yeah and Jason, there's some conversation going on in our ClubTwit Discord about why not use OpenAI, chatgpt or Claude or some other, and Gurman reported that apparently Craig Federighi, the head of software, has said you know, no sacred cows, we can use that stuff if we need to. And the question is what does that mean? Does that mean and there's a lot of theories out there about that Does that mean they'd put somebody else's model directly attached to their OS? Does it mean that they would use those models to help train their models? Does it mean that they might make it sort of a modular system where they build, Apple builds features and you can use Apple's LLM or you could use maybe other LLMs to do that kind of thing? Are we talking in the cloud? Are we talking on device? Do you have to register? Do you have to pay? Like there's lots of questions out there. But to register do you have to pay like there's lots of questions out there.

But one argument is a quick win and this is coming back to a quick win for the new siri group. A quick win is to use existing llms that are good to do and offload more, optionally perhaps, but offload more to them. And I mean I I have talked to people who say I, literally everything I say now is ahoy, uh, lady, ask chat gpt to do this thing because because you just want to bypass the lady entirely and just go to chat gpt, like, well, that's probably not great. Like last year was all like, oh well, you can do chat gpt, but we won't make you.

That would be a quick win to say you got a favorite LLM, boom, it's in there. You select it, you log in, you get, we got it, we made deals with everybody, you're good. According to German, that Federighi was like let's not do that and you could feel how careful they were at WWDC last year. Because they're like we know you're all scared of LLMs. And this year it's like actually people like them, they're not that scared and it makes us look bad, so we're going to let them and they may even overcompensate, who knows. But that's the answer is that last year it felt taboo and this year they have said no, it's fine.

0:50:50 - Leo Laporte
So we'll see. It strikes me also that one of the things that the current crop of AI companies are realizing is that it takes a huge amount of server cap capacity to even answer these questions. A couple of days ago, Sam Altman at OpenAI said yeah, every time you thank ChatGPT, it costs us tens of millions of dollars for all the thank yous, because even responding to a thank you takes a server capacity gpt should always finish its answer with and I'll take my question off the air.

0:51:12 - Jason Snell
Yeah, really but.

0:51:13 - Leo Laporte
But the point being, maybe apple found it more difficult than it thought to do these local servers right to build out all this capacity, especially now that's possible, although what I I mean, they've got the ability to do a lot of that, I think what it comes down to this goes back to gianandrea and there are stories that, like gianandrea, wanted a lot of, wanted a lot of hardware that they that they didn't buy and that luca maestri said you can't have that many.

0:51:38 - Jason Snell
And then apple said that's not true, they did get everything they want eventually, which sounds to me like it is true, and they slow played them and they wanted it all now and they got it over two or three years instead.

So that is about building Apple models, and I think that is one of the core things here is there are models. Now in the Discord, people are saying, like, well, you know, apple doesn't like using other people's tech, and it's true, but they're playing for time in a way, because one of the problems is their models are behind and they need to get up to speed. And that's what Gianandrea's group is supposed to be doing is make Apple's AI models better and so that they can use them and they can use them in private cloud compute and they can use them on device. But in the meantime, other people have good models, use them, and I think that that is that's the part that's broken. Long term, I'm sure they don't want to use them.

0:52:25 - Leo Laporte
There's a total precedent for this. Microsoft, in the same boat, had its own models, but ended up making a $10 billion deal with OpenAI to provide Copilot, and now, down the road a little bit, they're starting to move back to their own models.

0:52:42 - Jason Snell
But that was, I think, a very similar situation where ChatGPT surprised everybody, yeah, and there haven't been any reports of this, but Apple has all the money, right, let's not forget. Apple has all the money.

0:52:52 - Leo Laporte
They can afford it.

0:52:53 - Jason Snell
Yeah, and so and I know there's a lot of stuff going on with Apple and tariffs and products and we'll see how it all goes but, like, if you're open to using other people's models, there are very few problems money can't solve, Whether it's giving open AI money, it's giving perplexity money. Whether you buy them or you just rent them.

It doesn't really matter If you're open to the idea of a strategic partnership where you can write a check and solve a problem that is critical to your business, even though it's you going to another company for help and that hurts your pride a little bit.

I feel like Apple is in at the point where they're probably ready to do that. I don't know if they will. There may be hangups with some of those companies, but certainly that has to be on the table on top of all of this other stuff. And an example would be make a deal with open AI or perplexity or something like that, or Google, even where some money changes hands. That means that users can use those, uh, those models without you know, doing 10 searches and being told you can't search anymore for another month, like, and they're like no, we'll pay for some of your searches and we're going to enable that for iOS and this is part of our deal. Like if, if it comes down now that they've gotten over the no other LOMs thing, if they need to write a check, they should, and probably they will.

0:54:12 - Leo Laporte
I wonder if Google's off the table, given their trouble with the FTC. They've lost two recently, two trials, monopoly trials, and in some ways they've been you know. It looks like they might have to sell Chrome, Kind of. I mean it's still a long way to the Supreme Court. They got caught spending a lot of money getting Samsung to put Gemini on their phones.

0:54:30 - Jason Snell
I feel like Google is on the table as an option, right, they've always been talking about. In addition to ChatGPT, you will be able to run Google. I think that they're unlikely to say we just made a deal with Google. Google's going to have all of our stuff, plus it's your arch competitor in it. Yeah, you know, at best it levels the playing field with android instead of protect potentially giving you a leg up, which is very good, focused on safety.

0:54:53 - Leo Laporte
Uh, it doesn't have the baggage that open ai or google have it's right places out there you could make an acquisition. I'm sure you know the perplexity's price is going up, but I'm sure you know apple has enough money to buy it the danger is that you ask look, if you ask john g and andrea, do we need to buy perplexity?

0:55:11 - Jason Snell
he'll say no, no, no, we can do that, we can do it the problem is how many years go by where you hear him say that and he hasn't delivered. And I don't know the internals there. But like that's the problem, is it you? Nobody is ever going to say, yeah, you should buy the people out there who are beating me at my job and use them to replace me. Nobody's ever going to say that. So that's where Tim Cook has to have other advisors he's listening to who are accurately gauging whether Apple can catch up. I feel like there are lots of signs that this is more commoditized and that if you put in enough money which Apple has and give them a couple of years, they are going to be able to catch up. If that's not true and you're Tim Cook you should spend that money and buy somebody else and bring them in and have them be your AI model. That's what you should do.

0:55:55 - Andy Ihnatko
But there are a couple of government problems with that kind of just. In general, with AI number one yeah, apple has the the biggest, the most powerhouse checkbook in the industry. But will the ftc allow a big three trillion dollar company to simply buy out like one of the major top ai uh ai companies? And secondly, even like for their progress in producing things inside apple, how a lot of the talent they need are residents of other countries other than the United States and it's going to get more and more difficult to bring that talent into the United States. Even if they can bring them in, it's going to become harder and harder to convince the people that they're going after that. It's OK, come here, buy property Apple has a lot of history you will not be thrown out on two weeks' notice.

0:56:47 - Jason Snell
Apple has a lot of history buying international companies and leaving the people where they are, though I think that in this environment, I think that's what they have to do. If they're buying a company and it's not in the United States, I think they would probably say you stay right where you are and it's fine. The Logic or the Final Cut developers, the Logic Pro developers, are still in Germany, and they were a purchase like forever ago and they're still in Germany, so I feel like they could get over that, but it is. I mean, it's FTC. Who knows what the FTC is going to do these days?

And if it was something like Perplexity and not OpenAI, then would that be different. I don't know. I I. I think that's a really interesting question is do they think this is something that they can truly catch up on? And and the deep seek thing makes me think that maybe they can do that, but I also the fact that they haven't makes me concerned that they just don't. They just don't have the culture or the skill, and one way to get the culture in is to buy some company that has a good culture for doing this and say you are now our AIML culture.

0:57:52 - Alex Lindsay
I think that the biggest obstacle isn't money or time or or whatever. It is this aversion to risk and not we're not wanting to give up the wrong answers, and I think that that that is what what it feels like. Like when you play with the image playground. You just feel like you are in a tiny as someone who does a lot of image prompts in in chat, gpt and mid journey and so on and so forth. You just feel like you're in this tiny little sandbox that we just don't want you to touch anything that might look even remotely sharp and and you're just like, okay, like you know, I'll go back to what I was doing and and so, uh, you know.

So I think that apples like um over arching this is, this is where they get hurt in a lot of places. They do great and a lot of people use them and they feel safe inside the, inside that walled garden, but but they're so careful to not have any thorns on any roses that they just can't quite get to a place where they could do this effectively. So I think that opening up, opening it up more for users who are already using chat, gpt or anthropic or whatever, making it easier for us to use, because right now I just do hey, shlomo, start start chat. And I'm in, like I'm just. I just opened up a text thing with with uh chat to be. Thanks to a listener here told me how to do that. Um and uh, just a shortcut, and I don't and I just so I do that all the time.

0:59:09 - Leo Laporte
I don't think anybody, I don't think anybody could do as good a job as of characterizing me as image playground.

0:59:16 - Alex Lindsay
It's just that looks exactly and it's got all these photos of us. Here's the worst part is I gave it a photo.

0:59:25 - Jason Snell
I know no, but it only takes one, I know.

0:59:27 - Andy Ihnatko
Come to your left eye and read like photos this is a great example, photos has thousands.

0:59:34 - Alex Lindsay
Oh my god, yeah alex is.

0:59:36 - Jason Snell
Alex is right, there is, and this shows you how they rushed. This is photos. Has an entire face. Uh, identification model it could make it look just huge amounts of data of what your face is like, and an image playgrounds does not use it. It doesn't use more than one image as a base. It is because they slapped it together in a short amount of time. That's why, right.

0:59:55 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, it's just yeah, cause what it could be doing in the background is building models of all your friends and all your family and everything else on your phone or whatever that. Everything else on your phone or whatever that you know, whatever that is using the faces database, using the faces database that's already there. Just just grab all that data and make it so that that you could do funny things with those all the time. Oh my gosh, I don't even know what I'm looking at. Can you read that bottom line?

1:00:17 - Leo Laporte
let's put a sunset in, why not? Uh, well, that wasn't much of a sunset. Yeah, this is the. I mean.

1:00:24 - Alex Lindsay
No, I can't imagine anybody plays with image playground and thinks, oh yeah, that's what I've been looking for yeah, it's a toy, it's a fun toy you use it if you don't have something else, like like you're doing something else and you're like, oh, it's kind of cool, you know, or or whatever, but but as soon as you have, but this is because of risk aversion.

1:00:42 - Leo Laporte
You nailed it.

1:00:42 - Alex Lindsay
This is because they they don't want to take a chance right and they put the little borders around them so that you absolutely know that it's a.

1:00:49 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's fake, fake and you're just like okay meanwhile I mean people are putting out deep fakes like crazy we're somehow surviving. Did you know? I invented the peanut, uh, anyway george washington laporte I'm looking crazier and crazier. I think they make giving me cross eyes. That's nice, thank you. Okay, let's take a break. I can't, I can't take it a great idea alex lindsey. Good to have you Andy Ihnatko. Wonderful to have you back. Jason snell, the MacBreak Weekly team is assembled as we continue in just a bit.

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Apple Watch Ultra 3 more rumors about the next generation apple watch. Uh, including 5g cellular and perhaps satellite messaging. Again, ryan christopher on nine to five mac. I love my Apple Watch Ultra. I guess we're due. It would be in the fall, right, that would be two years between releases.

1:05:59 - Jason Snell
Yes, yeah, they did. The first was at one year and then they skipped last year, so this would be a reasonable time to do it. Yeah, I love the as somebody who uses an Apple Watch cellular and leaves my phone behind the idea that you could have a cellular Apple watch with satellite support and 5g support so you're going to cover a bunch of bands of the cellular spectrum and have that emergency when you're out, just you know, out in the wilderness, and you can have it all on your watch even if your phone is not with you. I just think that's really cool. I think that's a cool, a cool idea for, for what is supposed to be an adventure watch, the idea that you could literally be out there doing an adventure with just your apple watch and you would be fine.

1:06:42 - Leo Laporte
That's pretty sweet you think it'll be just the ultra that will go 5g, or will all that?

1:06:47 - Jason Snell
well, the rumor is about the ultra I I 5g might be on the, the main ones too.

Uh, just depends, I would imagine, on the size and cost of the part that's the advantage of the power and the power management because, it's got a lot of battery in there too um, I don't think there are any suggestions that the satellite features would come to the main one and that that it actually kind of fits the the whole premise of this being a big, uh, little, pricier and adventure watch right, that's where you want those features is when you're out of self-contact entirely yeah, um, I haven't now.

1:07:19 - Leo Laporte
Ryan in his article says he notices how slow the apple watch's cellular connection is. I have not noticed that, but he says he's unlikely to want to use it for messaging and stuff. Uh, that 5g will make a big difference. Is that your experience as well?

1:07:32 - Jason Snell
yeah, jason, yeah, I think so.

1:07:34 - Leo Laporte
It's a little slow right now.

1:07:36 - Jason Snell
I mean, I don't know. I don't know where Ryan is versus where I am.

1:07:39 - Leo Laporte
He's in New York.

1:07:40 - Jason Snell
I'm not using. I mean I'm not actively using my cellular connection a lot. It's more that it's there and that if it needs to sync or if somebody calls me or texts me I get them.

But I'm not like a I rarely leave the house without a phone but I do, I mean, every day when I walk the dog I do it without my iPhone. It's just. I just don't want the phone in my pocket and I have a cellular watch and I let an AirPods and it works great for me. So it's a choice to do it that way. But that's you know. And the advantage of that is is that, yeah, if you're somewhere, your phone isn't and something happens, you're still connected if you've got the watch.

1:08:16 - Leo Laporte
And I have to admit, as an Apple Watch skeptic early on, I am now 100% all in. I mean I love it.

1:08:23 - Alex Lindsay
I think it's a lot of other good choices. I mean there's other watches, but it's pretty complete.

1:08:28 - Leo Laporte
Andy, do you wear an Android watch?

1:08:30 - Andy Ihnatko
I have one, but my—.

No, you wear Casio, that's right yeah, like, like I said, I'm really, I'm really interested in the new pebble watch, because the the breaking point for me is I can't be counted on to put the thing on a charger each and every night. It's not that I'm lazy, it's just that, you know, sometimes I'm I'm working at my desk and, oh, I just want to take this thing off and put it next to the keyboard and then I leave it there and just go to bed and then, uh, dang it, I have to leave in 30 minutes for whatever it is. And and rather than grab the charger, I'll just simply, oh well, here's an analog watch or whatever that is already working. And after doing that enough times, I realized I really didn't miss it. And I was, and I was, and I was an apple watch se user for like nine or ten months.

Uh, and the same is true, by the way, about the Pixel watch, which I love the design of it. I think it's actually prettier than the Apple watch. But exact same thing. Mostly, I'm using a watch to tell the time. Sometimes it's nice, when I'm having a busy day, to be able to quickly glance at a notification and realize that, no, I don't have to take my phone out of my pocket, but it's just not doing enough for me to justify a $300 and be the burden of again having to remember to charge.

1:09:42 - Leo Laporte
Can you buy your groceries with that Casio?

1:09:47 - Andy Ihnatko
I can't actually. There actually are some G shocks that are like $250, that have, that are one week battery life and have a lot of those basic features, without necessarily being like a run apps on this thing, color display closer, win awards for your activity sort of stuff. But even so, like my, I actually I actually have like a little. I actually have a little like chart, a little little Omni outlander doc of if I'm not going to spend $300 on a smartwatch, I've I to spend $300 on a smartwatch. If I have a $300 watch budget, what would I want to get instead? That would total up to $300? And it's a list of three or four really cool, interesting, fun and one dress watch that I'd be like ooh, a Seiko Series 5 would be kind of nice, and then I could also have the. So yeah, but that's just me.

I have to say that if I were to, I have to say the Ultra, particularly the specs of this new Ultra 3, if they come true are the sort of thing that would sort of draw me back in Because, like Jason says, the number of times where I walk I'm going to be out for like two or three hours running errands. I don't actually need my phone except for to take pictures. All I need is like emergency contacts and maybe the ability and, of course, tap to pay. And that's a nice looking watch. It looks like it won't break after three months. Uh, it's, it's pretty this has been very robust.

1:11:09 - Leo Laporte
I don't have a scratch on this thing. This thing's been really really tough. I really like it. Yeah, um, all right, well, we'll watch with interest. There'll be something to watch in september. Gosh knows how much more it'll cost. One stock analyst is saying now get out of apple, run for your lives while you still can not that we care that much about, uh, stock prices. Um, I don't think that's really our beat. But you know, sell apple stock before it sinks another 30 percent.

1:11:39 - Jason Snell
Uh says moffett nathan financial advice yes yeah, we're not giving you that advice.

1:11:44 - Leo Laporte
In fact, if you look at the apple stock, this was when the tariffs were announced and it plunged, but it's kind of working its way back up. I think it was over 200 again earlier today.

1:11:54 - Andy Ihnatko
In the intraday it's up 2.94, so it's doing all right I I did read that advisory, like this morning or whatever, and I was again because I'm not like a financial, like reporter. It's uh, every time I see something like that, it's like in the back of my mind it's okay, what major fund or major player really, really wants this stock to tank so that they can buy it at a certain level? Yeah, and that's something I always have to think about when it comes to financial stock predictors.

1:12:26 - Leo Laporte
Sometimes they are in the money but it's like eh, okay, and I don't think anybody on this panel has Apple stock. I know I don't Right and I know Jason doesn't.

1:12:33 - Andy Ihnatko
Jason Kuznicki. But it's different. It's different when, like Bank of America is is saying we are dumping Apple stock now, now, now, now now, because they don't really necessarily have. They don't have the same, I don't know. Again, I'm talking above my, my, my pay level here again. So I'm stopping for a phrase.

1:12:48 - Leo Laporte
I have stopped looking at my portfolio. I can't afford to really is.

1:12:58 - Andy Ihnatko
It really is like riding in an Uber where, if I'm scrutinizing this person's driving moment by moment, I'm going to be terrified. If I simply sit back and trust that in 43 minutes time I will be at the train station with my life intact, it'll be okay.

1:13:10 - Leo Laporte
If your retirement is a few years off, it's probably prudent not to pay any attention. Unfortunately, I'm right in the middle of my retirement right now, uh, and so you know I'm I'm just thinking, okay, um, I hope this twit thing works out. Um, I'd like to keep making uh living. Wow, it's a little scary, don't panic, right, thank you. Paul in our youtube chat says don't panic. That's probably a good advice in general. Well, I'm not giving you stock advice. Don't listen to us.

1:13:43 - Andy Ihnatko
Apple did drop, I don't know don't take advice from someone who's wearing like a 23 casio watch.

1:13:49 - Leo Laporte
That's right well, you know, that's one of the reasons I don't know if I should buy financial advice. You know, go to a financial advisor. If the guy's that good, what's he doing?

1:13:57 - Andy Ihnatko
working for a living right and if you had a casio watch, you've got to be in the game gotta be in the game man.

1:14:05 - Leo Laporte
Uh national advertising division whoever they are has recommended that apple modify or discontinue the apple intelligence claim they have now dropped available now from the apple intelligence page. I can't believe they still had it. Uh nad inquired. They have a little like they're part of the better business bureau's uh advertising stuff. So you know when there's a little weight when they say you know Apple, you probably shouldn't say it's available now yeah, also facing a couple of lawsuits, which were inevitable anyway, but there's like, yeah, it's not.

1:14:42 - Andy Ihnatko
It's not as though people are necessarily scrambling to buy iPhones because of Apple intelligence. At this point, I don't think they need to really force that, although they did have a couple of uh, was it one or more than one new YouTube ad about someone using generative emoji to create a dating profile or whatever. So it's not as though they've decided to not promote Apple intelligence at all.

1:15:07 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, Apple found also that Apple included its AI supercharged Siri beneath the available now heading, even though, as we all know, the supercharged siri has not arrived. Apple said no, no, we updated our promotional material and disclosures to adequately communicate their status. Apparently there's a small footnote saying coming someday. The company also discontinued its more personal siri video. That's the bella ramsey video. We know about that. Apple said we disagree with nad's findings related to the features that are available to new users now, but we appreciate the opportunity to work with them and we'll follow their recommendations.

1:15:46 - Andy Ihnatko
We disagree but we're going to do it anyway, okay our customers love our apple intelligence ads and we're pleased to tell them that our next one, we think, is our best Apple intelligence ad, and we'd like to share it with you now.

1:16:01 - Leo Laporte
Yes, Any other rumors you think that are worth spending some energy on?

1:16:08 - Andy Ihnatko
Well, you blew right past that blue vision it was a one-liner sky blue.

1:16:15 - Leo Laporte
You know when uh, apple insider rates a rumor as maybe I don't, I don't want to spend a lot of time on it. Um, sky blue. Uh, now they point out that uh, the the leak came from china, maj Buu. He claims to have the details on the exclusive color that is expected to debut with the flagship Apple phone this fall. The leaker says it'll be available in Yuan Feng Blue, which is sky blue, which would, I guess, look like this. I mean, I wouldn't call the M4 MacBook Air sky blue, not from the one I saw in your hands, jason Snell, but they did. I understand Sky gray, it's nice.

Blue gray yeah.

1:17:02 - Andy Ihnatko
Although there was one rumor-ish story that I thought was hysterically funny. There's like someone posted videos from an actual Apple store in China where they're showing customers like an aluminum model of the supposed iphone 16 air. Excuse me, this is what it's going to look like like, and not just like oh hey, I've just snuck this onto the floor. It's like no, they're. And this is if you want to compare the upcoming iphone 17 air with the iphone 16 pro and not buy the actual phone that's actually shipping right now. It doesn't seem like that yeah.

1:17:37 - Leo Laporte
It seems like it's going to be a bit of a Now. Was this an official Apple store or just some Chinese store that sells Apple? That's unclear.

1:17:44 - Andy Ihnatko
That's unclear and that's a good call-out because there's a bunch of Apple stores. I think Jason and I visited one in Bermuda that is not an Apple store, but it looks all the way down to the details.

1:17:59 - Jason Snell
It's an aspirational Apple store.

1:18:01 - Andy Ihnatko
Aspirational Apple. It's a Potemkin Apple store.

1:18:04 - Leo Laporte
This is also Majin Bu In China stores, using the CAD models I provided to show people how. So, in other words, he brought this into the store and got, and it looks probably his hands. I don't think this is proof positive that apple is showing this to.

1:18:22 - Andy Ihnatko
Oh no, I don't. I, I would never think that apple was doing it. It just made me amused that someone according to the story itself claiming that it was actually people who work at that apple store who are showing it off and the idea of like them missing a certain training video that they probably should have been had to watch, saying that yeah, don't also, is this a store or a kiosk in a mall?

1:18:44 - Leo Laporte
because I could see a hot dog stand right behind her head. So I don't, okay, I'm not sure exactly where this is.

1:18:50 - Andy Ihnatko
Anyway, I, I, I mentioned, I, I did point that I did mention this to the story because, again, I thought the comedy value yeah well, this is like I said.

1:18:58 - Leo Laporte
We're in the rumor we're in the rumor portion of the program and I did ask you. I said give me some rumors, let's see some rumors here. Uh, the vision air is. Are they really calling it the vision air? Mac rumors is using that. Come on, come on, man.

1:19:16 - Jason Snell
I I, yeah, I mean there's.

There is this rumor the vision pro rumors I feel like they're working on a bunch of different hardware options and they haven't settled on anything and everything comes out with this breathless like oh, this is the next thing they're doing, they're gonna make, or it's the one after the next one they're doing.

And you know, they show hardware and they're like oh look, that looks sort of like a thing that's in Vision Pro, it's like it could be, it could be. I doubt that it's from a production model. It feels more like they're just trying things out and seeing what they would be like and all of that I don't know. I mean, there's not a lot of heat about rumors of precisely what a next Vision OS product would look like. But if they I mean if somebody wants to get excited that it might be darker or something like I guess, go ahead. But the one that blew me away and I don't know if you guys talked about this last week or not, you probably did, but I love that Mark Gurman broke the news that they're trying to make the Vision Pro cheaper and lighter yeah, great idea guys.

1:20:13 - Leo Laporte
No kidding they were saying maybe they'll use titanium instead of aluminium.

1:20:19 - Jason Snell
Great, I mean. I have no doubt that they are trying to make the Vision Pro cheaper and lighter.

1:20:24 - Leo Laporte
That seems almost certain.

1:20:25 - Jason Snell
Those are the two things you need to do. So, yeah, get on it.

1:20:28 - Alex Lindsay
A lot of the other stuff is working pretty well. It's just weight and cost.

1:20:31 - Jason Snell
Yeah, make it cheaper and lighter.

1:20:36 - Leo Laporte
I'll buy it if it's cheaper and lighter. Nailed it, yeah, yep, uh. Apple has finally won its long-standing battle with the city of cupertino. Was it a battle?

1:20:49 - Alex Lindsay
I thought it was. I thought it was a battle between the state and the city, like the the. I don't think. I think that apple did it on purpose to funnel money to Cupertino and then the court said that you can't do that you can't do that.

1:21:01 - Leo Laporte
So Apple was saying every phone sold in California was sold from Cupertino by mail, I think. Oh, by mail. Okay, which makes sense. It probably was the deal. This is since 1998. Apple's treated all online purchases of products within California as if they were made in the city of Cupertino. The deal allows Cupertino to collect 1% of Apple's 7.25% sales tax by the way, we're over 10% here in Petaluma.

So, apple, if you want to open a little drop ship in Petaluma, a third of the revenue ended up being returned to the company because the California Department of Tax and Fee Administration, known colloquially as CUDFA, audited the city and determined that the state should get that revenue. Instead, the city needed to pay back any previously collected sales tax dollars. Apple was going to set aside Apple actually Cupertino was prepared to set aside 56.6 million dollars. That's a lot from a little city like Cupertino to pay back the amount. Uh, then they reached a settlement with kudfa. A lot I does not call the good, but it should be allowed Cupertino to keep the roughly 74.5 million dollars in apple sales tax revenue it had collected. But they did give apple back 12 point some.

1:22:20 - Alex Lindsay
I don't understand. I don't understand that that that case at all, because it's like, why did they not give it to the state? Like I don't understand, like I'm sure apple wasn't like banging down the door for the money, you know we need that 12 million dollars now, cupatino they charge, they charge the user for it. Like it's, not like like the money that apple, like you know it's in that little tax thing when you buy it like it's it is a windfall for any city.

1:22:42 - Leo Laporte
You know, uh, I know from our little town in petaluma, where they have turned away the big box stores, that we are suffering with potholes because there's no tax base, because they wouldn't allow these big tax. You know, sales tax revenue generating businesses in town. Uh, we got to figure it out. But what I will say, I'm sure it's a benefit for cupertino to have apple computer headquartered there.

1:23:03 - Alex Lindsay
Petaluma has done well, I don't know. I'm surprised they're having trouble with taxes. It just feels like it's the nicest downtown and it is.

1:23:10 - Leo Laporte
It's cute, isn't north of san francisco yeah, just just don't make sure you have a good suspension when you're driving. We're the pothole capital of california. They say uh, did you come up for the butter and eggs day parade on saturday?

1:23:25 - Alex Lindsay
I didn't I forgot about it. I, I should. I, when I lived there, I went there every single time I got pictures.

1:23:29 - Leo Laporte
It feels like everybody in california came. It has become a crazy zoo. It used to be just such a small town parade that the parade would go all the way through the downtown and then come loop around and I always felt like people watching the parade on its first pass would then jump in back to keep keep the parade going so that because there weren't enough people to both watch the parade and be in the parade, so they were sharing duties. That is not the case anymore.

1:23:56 - Alex Lindsay
You can barely move downtown during butter and eggs day yeah, it's been hectic, it's cray-cray, yeah, so we don't need you apple, we've got butter and eggs.

1:24:10 - Leo Laporte
If he attacks the butter and eggs, nobody said actually. You know, being the source of eggs is a pretty good deal these days, not bad. We get our eggs from a little farm up the road a piece for $5 a dozen. I think that's pretty much the standard. That's a great price.

1:24:26 - Alex Lindsay
Is it For Northern California?

1:24:30 - Leo Laporte
For, like real eggs, they are real. You know they're real because they're not white, they're blue and brown and green and all sorts of colors.

1:24:37 - Alex Lindsay
you're watching mac break, weekly home of the eggs the eggs leader but it's so funny when you go from california one thing about it when you go from california to some other like we were doing a job in south carolina or whatever, and there was like 18 eggs for two dollars and from someone from california, you look at them like what's wrong with these eggs? Like I don't know if I can eat these eggs, I don't know if they're you know. Like there's got to be something wrong, you know. But of course it's all. All the eggs are very local.

1:25:04 - Leo Laporte
Yes, yeah, yes and luscious back break. Weekly Andy, and I code jason snell. I almost called you jason alex, that's my middle name.

1:25:15 - Jason Snell
Is it really? I answered to that Jason Alexander Snell. Indeed, it is. Yeah, oh, that's awesome.

1:25:19 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I'm going to call you Jason.

1:25:20 - Jason Snell
Alexander, he stole my bit.

1:25:21 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's your bit. I didn't even know it was your bit. Yeah, and Alex Lindsay, we're so glad you're here. Vondelion wants X, meta and tiktok to play by the rules in europe, no matter who is ceo you put this in Andy.

1:25:43 - Andy Ihnatko
I don't even know what. Yeah, no, well, that was. It was a double. It was a double whammy because I think the um, uh, washington, no sorry wall street journal had a big exclusive article about how, oh the eu is like, was planning on hitting Apple and a whole bunch of other companies with a whole bunch of sanctions, including fines, but not just fines, but sanctions. But they decided to postpone it until some situations in Washington sort of sell themselves out, and it feels as though this piece that you called out was like the EU's head saying no, no, that's not true, we're not doing that at all, we're still them. We're like a dog on a snusage with those people.

1:26:19 - Leo Laporte
Don't worry this is why we have opened cases against tiktok x apple in meta, just to name a few. I don't know what ursula von der leyen sounds like, but I'm gonna make her sound like colonel schultz from hogan's heroes. We apply the rules fairly proportionally, without bias. We don't care where our company's from and who's running it. We care about protecting people, yeah oh is that is that a kind of off, kind of a glancing reference to elon musk?

1:26:46 - Andy Ihnatko
maybe there's again. There's been a lot of reportage and a lot of speculation about like what, that, what EU enforcement of the Digital Markets Act and act and other things are happening and now affecting actual US diplomacy where, like the, the Trump administration has been making noises that no, we regard this, these attempts to find America. We believe that the department, that the DMA, is specifically crafted to hurt American business and by golly if we're going to hurt American business, we're going to do it ourselves.

1:27:18 - Leo Laporte
Gosh darn it, not let some frogs do it in Europe. Jd Vance said we're going to tie we're actually going to tie participation in NATO to your continued aggressive stance against your American companies. That's crazy.

1:27:34 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, it's, it's. It's only been's crazy, yeah, it's only been escalating and there's no end in sight. Again, to quote Hunt for Red October, this is going to get out of hand. It's going to get out of hand and we'll be lucky to live through it.

1:27:47 - Leo Laporte
And now we've had our requisite weekly Hunt for Red October quote.

1:27:51 - Andy Ihnatko
I think we can continue on, we get to keep our liquor license. One ping only, oh no, we hunt for red october quote. I think we can continue.

1:27:58 - Leo Laporte
We get to keep our liquor license what a great movie, though what a great timer. Yeah uh, apple is celebrating earth day in five ways earth day is today.

1:28:13 - Andy Ihnatko
Today, I think, so happy earth day thank you, man, happy spokesperson for the earth yeah, congratulations to everybody out there on the earth.

1:28:19 - Jason Snell
We did it, everybody sticking with the winning team for another year. Let's go one more year.

1:28:24 - Leo Laporte
I don't know, I was around as a ute when earth day began in the 70s and it was really an attempt. It was an attempt to kind of focus people on the fact that we only have this one planet, mars. Notwithstanding and maybe we ought to take care of the darn thing Apple's homepage is updated to celebrate apple 2030, a plan as innovative as our products. Uh is apple? Is apple a good? Uh, custodian of the planet earth?

1:28:57 - Andy Ihnatko
pretty much like I was surprised that greenpeace had. So they they uh released their annual uh environmental progress report. Greenpeace had like a response to it which I thought okay, sit back, let's get ready. And actually the statement was more or less hey, Apple's doing a very good job. However, their suppliers are the real culprits in greenhouse gas emissions and other damage happening to the planet. So if even Greenpeace is not willing to stick its fangs into the neck of Apple about this, that probably means that whatever they're doing is seen as somewhat positive.

1:29:33 - Leo Laporte
I think the excessive use of green ink in this report proves that Apple is focused on green.

1:29:40 - Andy Ihnatko
Well, you know that the green ink has a lot of mercury in it. Oh, that's the big problem. Don't scroll too far down. I'm saying.

1:29:47 - Jason Snell
I do think that I mean is any big corporation that is selling lots and lots of products like super green? You know we could talk about like maybe you should, your product should all last longer and people shouldn't buy new ones. But apple has tried. I think genuinely this is not greenwashing. Apple is genuinely committed to driving change. They have been really since greenpeace called them out back like 20 years ago. You know they do the environmental checklist slide every time they introduce a product.

1:30:16 - Leo Laporte
Now they do now.

1:30:17 - Jason Snell
That came directly because they were criticized.

1:30:19 - Leo Laporte
They had a visit from Mother Earth a couple of years ago. They did they did.

1:30:22 - Jason Snell
They did, if you like, comedy bits. So I believe they truly want to do this, that 2030 commitment to be carbon neutral. I believe they truly want to do this, that 2030 commitment to be carbon neutral. No-transcript. So I think generally we could quibble about what Apple does, but I think Apple makes a lot of other companies look bad, and I think when other companies say we can't do it, we can't do it, we just couldn't afford to do it, they hate the fact that people can point an Apple and say, yeah, actually you can do it, you just don't want to. And I think that Apple like again could they do better? Yes, there are lots of ways, but I think that if you're talking about a giant, profitable, profit-seeking uh, shareholder, you know value-seeking corporation that is still showing a responsible commitment to environment and carbon neutrality and things like that, you will probably not find a company that's a better example than apple yeah, I mean it's tough when you're selling stuff that is destined to end up in landfill.

Well, even there, they've spent a lot of time reclaiming, like they built the robots and I know that some of that is for show but like they are trying very hard especially the tariff thing, I mean, this is actually part of that which is they? They they try to resell those products and refurb them and when they've ended their life, what they try to do is pick them apart and get all and and that's one of the reasons why so many of their products now use recycled elements is because they're pulling those elements out of old products and melting them down and then using them again for rare earths and for things they use for welding and for their aluminum. And like again are there skeletons in that closet? Are there things they could do a better job with? I'm sure that there are, and that's true with all recycling, by the way.

1:32:12 - Leo Laporte
All recycling is not as good as you think it is, but I do think that one of the things that Apple is doing Most recycling is not as good.

1:32:20 - Jason Snell
I still do it.

1:32:20 - Leo Laporte
I hope that some of it's worth it.

1:32:22 - Jason Snell
Some of it is good, some of it's not. My wife used to work for an energy firm that did recycling stuff and stuff and she's like oh boy, let me tell you, but they keep.

1:32:29 - Leo Laporte
But there is some keeps saying I could put plastic in my recycling.

1:32:32 - Jason Snell
I don't think they can recycle plastic most of the plastic they can't um glass and aluminum they can, yeah, plastic recycling, but anyway. So apple like, and it benefits apple too, in the sense that they can use these recycling chains to acquire materials that they would otherwise have to source from a mine in china that China is not allowing to be exported, or or from a mine in Africa where the people are horribly exploited, like some of it is. Uh, is that too? So even even there, and it's interesting how they do this right Like they, they have found a potential criticism and said okay, what can we do to offset that? And and the recycling they they, I mean they legitimately have made a big effort to get those to do a whole reuse chain where they're selling old phones, selling old computers and then when they reach the end of their life, they will take them, and they've got a system to take those components apart and not just check the landfills because they have value are they able to recycle uh airpods?

nope, they're just plastic and batteries. So no, they're one of the worst of all of apple's products. For that it's an interesting question. In the long run of what we've seen, the pattern right tends to be that the apple comes out with a product that's incredibly powerful and small and completely unrecyclable, and then over time and unfixable, unrepairable, and then over time, as time moves along and everything miniaturizes, they get better at that. So I would imagine that that'll, that'll happen. I know some other companies have tried to make air bud or earbuds that that have removable batteries Stainless steel.

Yeah, eventually.

1:34:05 - Andy Ihnatko
Aluminium. The progress report does proudly say that the air airpods pro 2 use 100 recycled gold in the plating of multiple printed circuit boards yeah that's expensive. Yeah, I mean and that's that's compared to like the other, like illustrations, where here is like here's what we make the box out of and here's how we recycle all of that.

1:34:24 - Leo Laporte
I always. It's a very beautiful report. I always think of the, the factoid that every plastic toothbrush ever made is sitting still in a landfill and will be, yeah, years to come. Um and so, but I mean, everybody has to do what they can and uh, I guess you know, uh, keep your pods going as long as they can apple is is.

I mean they did do an earth day activity challenge on your apple watch today. If you work out for 30 minutes or longer, you're gonna get a 2025 earth day award in the activity app congratulations do you get extra move points for like throwing tomato soup at a piece of artwork at a museum?

no, you're in or you're not do not do that please, I beg of you. Uh, they are offering actually this is real 10 off eligible apple accessories when they recycle eligible devices at app store, at the apple stores, through may 16th. Let's keep doing that, apple.

1:35:21 - Andy Ihnatko
Maybe not just for the months, maybe keep doing that the one thing that I'm still curious about is that and and I agree with Jason there's a lot of greenwashing, there's a lot of like. You notice that Google used to be a lot more quote proud and quote and demonstrative about its green efforts until they had to put 80 hundred more horses on their AI development and now they can't really source all clean energy to train all those models with, can they? And so now they're a lot quieter about what they're doing. Apple has a small section about artificial intelligence in which they mention that. Well, yeah, we try to do most of the stuff on device so it's not consuming more energy than was already going to be on the device. Apple intelligence servers are running 100% clean energy or renewable energy. I don't have it in front of me, but it doesn't merely make it clear. They're subcontracting cloud compute from Google and others to train those models.

And I don't see anywhere in the report it's 126 page report. Maybe I have, maybe I just didn't see it it doesn't mention well, here is here is how we're taking responsibility for the hit that we are contracting other, the hits we're calling out on mother earth, but through subcontractors and other hitmen. Uh, I think that that's gonna. That's an interesting thing that should be investigated. I don't. I'm sure they're, I'm sure they're working on it, I'm sure that they're concerned about it, uh, but that's the one thing that's missing from this where can I find my awards?

1:36:52 - Leo Laporte
I want my earth day award. I worked out today. Well, I can't find it. They said it's in fitness plus, but I don't see it anywhere. Uh, other things they're going to do. They're going to enable clean energy charging on the demo units in an apple in us apple stores, so they'll charge at times a day when the grid is cleaner yeah, okay well, I guess actually, you know what I like that, in that it shows that they're actually thinking from top to bottom.

1:37:20 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, if I mean it looks. It looks weird if they're saying oh well, here's a way that you wouldn't save a hell of a lot, but you'd save a certain, a non-zero amount, so why don't you do it like, yeah, maybe we should do it this way?

1:37:31 - Leo Laporte
just want to show you my earth day award.

1:37:34 - Andy Ihnatko
Look how pretty that is 2025 earth day and it's a and it means more because it was done through the voting of your peers.

1:37:45 - Leo Laporte
Yes, uh, I do not have the global close all your rings day award. However, I didn't even know there was such a thing. I have the heart month challenge, the veterans day challenge. I have accumulated a lot of awards I wasn't even aware of. Look, there's a little Easter bunny award.

1:38:03 - Andy Ihnatko
That's for Lunar New Year you have pressed a lot of levers to get a lot of food pellets, that's.

1:38:09 - Leo Laporte
I didn't even know. I mean, yeah, i'm'm gonna get back in there and you've been tricked into good health they tricked me um. Okay, anyway, you can read the entire sustainability report if you care.

1:38:24 - Andy Ihnatko
And green pace group it's very readable, it's very ill, it's I think it wasn't nice, it's not just for greenpeace. It really I think they care. Yeah, I agree they care.

1:38:32 - Leo Laporte
It's just difficult when you're a company that sells products, yeah, that have a limited lifespan and are made of plastic yeah, I mean both.

1:38:41 - Andy Ihnatko
Both things can be true that a this is incredibly good pr for apple and they also care genuinely about the environment. That's yeah, that one does not necessarily negate the other.

1:38:51 - Jason Snell
Indeed yeah.

1:38:58 - Leo Laporte
Andy, you have so many good stories in here. Meta removes use of Apple intelligence in its apps on the phone. Now you have that as an option as an app developer. Why would Meta take that out of their Facebook app and their WhatsApp and their Instagram app?

1:39:13 - Alex Lindsay
I'm wondering whether they don't get the access to the data.

1:39:18 - Leo Laporte
If I want you to use their app.

1:39:19 - Alex Lindsay
I think if you use the Apple intelligence for that, I think that Apple's not handing them back. Yeah, you typed first. They want to see all of it if they can.

1:39:29 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, I mean we're talking about like when you edit text and instagram or whatever, like in any other app, if there's editable text, you automatically get that little dingus that says hey, click here for apple intelligence features.

1:39:39 - Leo Laporte
that's been removed from pretty much every uh, every meta product and you can still do it with meta zone ai, of course, just not apples and I think you're exactly right. That's, uh, that's because meta wants that data apple. I mean, this is how valuable the data apple is. Actually using bug data reports for ai training yeah, it's free text anything we can eat, yep, that's.

1:40:09 - Andy Ihnatko
I thought that was unusual. I mean they they're used. I mean they're used to sort of like take it or leave it stands with all of its developers anyway, uh, or anything that's developer related. But that thought that was weird. There's no opt-out of harvesting that for ai.

1:40:21 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, look for this line everywhere where it says uh, apple may use your submission to improve apple products and services, such as training, apple intelligence models or other machine learning models. And your choice is go back, don't ask again or submit. You want to submit a report? You're going to do it, but you know how much is in there? Not a lot, yeah, I mean, it's a. You know, I submit the bug reports when I see them, but I don't write anything. I just say you can have it, that's fine yeah, it's, it's more.

1:40:55 - Andy Ihnatko
It's more interesting with apple than it would be with other companies, because they do try to establish themselves as no, we're different from google, we're different from facebook.

We totally respect user privacy. I don't think they're doing any damage by taking this information, because it's not like people are saying oh, I was, I was using I was, I tried to type my social security number in here and I typed it as blah blah, blah, blah, blah, but it gave you know, it's not as bad as that, but nonetheless, if they're, it's weird that there is not. That is part of the workflow of collecting data for ai. When it goes to the approvals process of apple as a new policy, there isn't immediately a, a point in the workflow that says okay, and at what point are we going to ask for permission to have, either ask for people to opt in or tell them they have the ability to opt out, and so it's weird that this is like a it's. It's true of nearly everything that apple does with ai, with uh, personal data or private data, but it's weird that this is an omission, assuming that, like, we understand this correctly poor john ashley's finger's been hovering over the vision pro button for the last two hours.

1:42:01 - Leo Laporte
Go ahead, press the button. Go ahead. What do you see?

1:42:04 - Jason Snell
what do you know? It's time to talk to vision pro also this goes before that previous thing where we talked about rumors about the video. Oh yeah, can you?

1:42:18 - Leo Laporte
move that in there. I forgot slide that. Just I didn't know that was going to be a vision pro story, so I didn't. I didn't prepare properly we need to talk about. We need to talk about that later, later. Okay, also, there's only one vision pro story and it's not great. Ping pong club brings realistic table tennis to the apple.

1:42:36 - Jason Snell
Oh, I gotta try that. Uh, my favorite app on the metaquest is 11 table tennis, which is a an amazingly accurate ping pong app, and I'm just gonna I'm gonna predict that this one's not going to be as good, because 11 Table Tennis uses actual controllers that know exactly where your hands are and how they're moving in order to do their very realistic, because holding a meta quest controller is very much like holding a ping pong paddle, and if you just have to use the Vision Pros on board hand recognition with no controllers, uh, I'm gonna guess it's not as good, but I will try it because I love table tennis and, uh, don't have a house big enough to have a table.

1:43:18 - Leo Laporte
you need a special basement. With a big piece of petrified wood it looks like I guess, uh, and little boxes ultra exclusive.

1:43:26 - Andy Ihnatko
This is like the the ping pong, ping pong rec room of a crime lord. That's how fancy this is.

1:43:31 - Jason Snell
I will check this out and report back next time, uh, whenever it it ships. If it's out yet, whatever, I will go get it um and and I'll report back yeah, my favorite location in 11. Table tennis is a mountaintop chalet. It's just delightful to play ping pong at the top of the world. You've done your skiing for the day and now it's time for some table tennis. I love it.

1:43:52 - Andy Ihnatko
Enlightenment and overhead smash. It's legitimately great.

1:43:55 - Jason Snell
It is a perfect use of that technology to do that. Now are you?

1:43:59 - Leo Laporte
playing a person, or are you just playing the Mac on this? It looks like.

1:44:04 - Jason Snell
Well, 11 will let you do either one. They'll let you do AI. I found that the problem is that this is such a quick reflex that you need incredibly low latency or it doesn't really work. But the AI players are great. Good for your practice, of course they're great.

1:44:17 - Leo Laporte
They're better than you, if they really wanted to be.

1:44:19 - Jason Snell
Well, there's a sliding scale, right? So you basically the way you play on 11 table tennis is you keep sliding up the difficulty until you can't win and then you realize that you've reached your limit as a player, and I'm. I reached my limit as a player in that game, but it's great fun, Great fun.

1:44:35 - Andy Ihnatko
I just say, though, it reminds me of, like probably my all time favorite game on the classic Mac, which was shuffle puck cafe, which was air hockey, and it was perfect, because I'm in air hockey, you have a controller in your clawed hand that you, that you, that you slide across a table. That's right. And what is it you have with your Mac?

1:44:54 - Jason Snell
you have a mouse, you slide across a table.

1:44:56 - Andy Ihnatko
Amazing, so it reminded me of like, if you've got, if I can just like have a, you must be right, I'm sure you're right that it's better with a controller, but the idea of if I can just stand in one place and just you know, like, pretend I've got a paddle in my hand, pretend I've got the Forrest Gump Chairman, mao style paddle competition.

1:45:13 - Leo Laporte
Darren Oki does point out. There is one big advantage to the simulated table tennis versus the real ping pong table you don't have to bend over to pick up the ball in the vision pro, and the vision Pro ball comes to you.

1:45:29 - Jason Snell
Yes, and that's the vision pro segment now, you see, now you know, we're done talking unless you guys can come up with any.

1:45:37 - Leo Laporte
Is there any?

1:45:38 - Jason Snell
any new immersive. That's it for now, not a lot of new content yet.

1:45:43 - Alex Lindsay
I mean, a lot of us are waiting for the camera.

1:45:44 - Leo Laporte
So so we're all waiting for when the camera starts rolling out but we just imagine those vision pro segments are gonna get longer and longer once they are camera comes out. Would you buy an MDR Dasher keyboard? Are you ready? Are you ready to start processing data for severance? Are you? Is your any ready? Uh, there is an actual mechanical keyboard from Atomic keyboard, based on the keyboard in severance. It uses a 70 layout built-in trackball. Yeah, just like the TV show deep blue housing, rounded keycaps.

1:46:17 - Andy Ihnatko
And just like the TV show, there's no escape key no escape key, control key or option key, so you're gonna have to have another keyboard next to it it's not a good keyboard, or you?

1:46:29 - Jason Snell
should buy a real keyboard and put the severance keycaps on it, like I did.

1:46:33 - Leo Laporte
That's pretty cool and uh, it's good enough. I say is that a commodore logo on your keyboard? No, that's the six colors logo.

1:46:41 - Jason Snell
Oh okay, sorry, I apologize but uh, yeah, it's the, you get the dasher, keycaps and uh, make your own on whatever keyboard you want.

1:46:50 - Leo Laporte
Oh, okay, okay.

1:46:51 - Jason Snell
Nice.

1:46:52 - Leo Laporte
That's what those are. Those are the Dasher keycaps.

1:46:55 - Jason Snell
Yeah, mine are. From what is it dropcom? Yeah. And they have Dasher keycaps that you can get as a set and put it on your.

1:47:04 - Leo Laporte
I'm guessing you're quite a fan of the old Severance.

1:47:07 - Jason Snell
Love it, and the keycaps are cool too. What does MDR stand for again?

1:47:11 - Leo Laporte
macro data refinement thank you, and we do a little bit more know what's going on.

1:47:17 - Jason Snell
I finally finished the work is mysterious and important.

1:47:20 - Leo Laporte
Okay, the work is mysterious and important. The work is mysterious and important. Uh, ted lasso back from the dead. Brett Goldstein compares it to a dead cat. Apparently, in his youth he had a cat. He thought it got hit by a car. They buried it, but it turns out it was a different cat and the cat came back.

1:47:50 - Andy Ihnatko
He was on a podcast. He told a story. They're asking about it like about what cad lasso came back to.

1:47:55 - Speaker 3
I'm afraid I went to university with and I think about this at all. He had a cat that died. He loved his cat and the cat was run over and they buried the cat, buried it and he was a child. They buried the cat in the garden and he lay in bed so sad, so upset and crying, and he prayed and he prayed and he wished I wish the cat would the garden. And he lay in bed so sad, so upset and crying, and he prayed and he prayed and he wished I wish the cat would come back. And then the cat did come back and it turned out that the cat they buried wasn't their cat, and I think about that all the time and there he is.

1:48:24 - Leo Laporte
He is, of course, not only one of the show's writers. He plays roy kent the, and that was kind of a serendipitous thing. They didn't originally cast him but no, he was a.

1:48:36 - Jason Snell
He was just a writer on the show and then he auditioned for the part.

1:48:39 - Leo Laporte
You should be a soccer player, um, anyway, so it's coming back. I don't know. Didn't they finish it like? Didn't they like wrap it up?

1:48:49 - Jason Snell
They really did. I mean, it was a story. They had a three-season plan and they told a story. And then there was a question of like are there more stories to tell, since it's wildly popular? And Apple's going to back a truck of money up to Jason Sudeikis' house, and I think he looked at the size of the truck and finally decided that it was worth it.

Also, I will say it is a British production. I know it's Apple and there's American producers on it, but they shoot it in the UK and in the UK especially, there is a grand tradition of shows going away and then coming back a few years later and then going away again and then coming back again, and I feel like American TV is starting to do that too, which is like you can just come back five years later or whatever. And I think that they decided the money was too good to pass up. And I think jason sudekas finally did come up with like an idea for what he could do that he would feel good about and uh, you know, I I feel like, as long as they want to make ted lasso's, uh, apple is happy to write that check well, and I think that for the streamers it's always so hard to find, uh, something that's successful, like you know, like with anything, with any series.

1:49:53 - Alex Lindsay
It's not just streamers, it's just with any series. They're all kind of a shot in the dark. You don't know if they're going to have the lightning in a bottle that's required to make them great. And so I mean you look at Andor, I mean I think I think Disney's spending $25 million an episode on Andor, because, wow, yeah, on andor, because wow, yeah, yeah, like it's even with the volume, they, they're spending that much money. They, yeah, they've put in 645 million for season one and season two so far they, just, they just what makes it so expensive, because there's a lot of ships.

They're shooting on a stage that no, no, yeah, but they're all yeah, it's a lot of ships, still a lot of it's not and it's a lot of sets too it's.

1:50:28 - Jason Snell
It's not the mandalorian.

1:50:29 - Alex Lindsay
I think there's a lot more stuff with the volume yeah, even with the volume, there's a lot of effects, there's a lot of other things that have to get done. It's not, you know. And then there's actors and writing and all the other things that are required and it just gets to, it adds up, especially when you start doing, you know, like the pit I think is rumored to be like five or six million they literally never leave the set like the set is done, it's, it's there. They don't have a lot of big actors.

1:50:52 - Jason Snell
They do three days of location shooting in Pittsburgh and then everything else is in LA in the studio.

1:50:57 - Alex Lindsay
I can't even imagine that they maybe three days.

1:51:00 - Jason Snell
No, they did they did there the rooftop scenes at the beginning and In.

1:51:07 - Alex Lindsay
Three days for the whole season, they spent for the whole season. Yeah, you know in pittsburgh three days for the whole season, they spent for the whole season.

1:51:11 - Jason Snell
Yeah, they literally had to write the script for the last episode, because they shot that at the beginning of the shooting block right, and so they had to know how it ended before they began, because all the outdoor stuff was shot in three days in pittsburgh and then it is remarkable.

1:51:25 - Leo Laporte
If you ever get a chance to see it, visit a soundstage. I remember seeing visiting the soundstage for parenthood and they just built a house like a two-story house, right, so you can move all the walls. But you can remove walls and, like the refrigerator, the back of the refrigerator you could take it out so you could shoot into the freezer as the guy opens the refrigerator. And of course they use uh duratrans outdoor stuff behind all the windows so it looks like they're in a real house. Yeah, it's pretty cool actually what hollywood uh can do uh on a set yeah, and managed to spend tens of millions of dollars.

1:51:59 - Alex Lindsay
The thing is is that well? But again, but that's how they got. You know, that's how they got the pit down to a reasonable price. Is that they don't have any, any exteriors, and or is all exteriors?

not only exteriors, it's exteriors on other planets you know they have to jump around a lot and so I think it comes out tonight. So it should be um. Do they shoot that on the volume though? I think I don't know whether they shoot. I have to find out. I know they do mandalorian on the volume. I know, man, that's famously. You know, one of the things that they you don't think about with a volume is they're going to put one into 3210 or something that was not quite as big as the that volume, and we have what we at 3210 had, uh, 6 000 amps, amps, not the 6 000 volts or watts, but amps, amps. You know, three phase, two thousand each phase and um, and it wasn't enough is that for the lion's screen?

1:52:49 - Leo Laporte
that's the volume that's the screen.

1:52:51 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, the screen is so it like it's just it, just it's so expensive to turn on, you know.

1:52:57 - Jason Snell
So you, just you, and then you have all the processing that is required to get it there and, yeah, you're building all out, I was gonna say my dreams of building one in my house I don't know if the volume is as much a money saver as it is a just a different creative tool, because you still have to do. You still have to build the worlds that are in 3d. What the the revolutionary thing about the volume is you do that work up front instead of waiting till the end to do it and the actors feel like they're there, I mean, and then, yes, that's it.

You do that work like like building a set, and then when the actors are there, they feel surrounded by, and also the director and the camera operator can move around and have it be, you know, artistic decisions based on what it's going to look like as if they were outside. And that's the big deal with the volume and the funny thing, they did talk.

1:53:45 - Alex Lindsay
There was a point in Light and Magic when it came out last week in one of these first episodes, where John Knoll just said, yeah, I looked out at these poor actors and all this giant set with green screen and thought, oh, those poor guys. Even back then they were just like and it looks, and I just remember when we were working on it how much like especially Ewan McGregor hated it, Like he hated the green screen because he's just like I don't know I'm looking at, I don't know where I am, I don't know how I'm.

1:54:11 - Jason Snell
You know, you know it was, it was always yeah, and with the volume they there's some set right, like they'll often have. The ground is there and there's some near foreground things. It's a lot like that, how they did planets in old star trek episodes. Right is, yeah, is they would have like some set dressing in the near ground and then they would just have that, that cyclorama with orange behind it and now it's actual background. But that means you are in a tangible set and also have some idea of what surrounds you and the lighting is dynamic, so the the light moves and like as an actor I know it's a little weird because the perspective shifts as the camera moves.

But, like as an actor, it must be so much better and as a director and a director of photography, it's got to be so much better to feel like you can control what you want the look to be. And I've heard from people in the VFX side who say you know, the beauty of it is, all those creative decisions have to be made up front. Instead of you know, they say, oh, we're going to do it like this, we'll fix it in post.

And then they see the VFX and they're they're like no, let's do something different instead. You agree to it up front. It forces everybody to be a little more professional, although I have heard stories where people then will shoot on the volume and say, can we change it now? And it's like no, what?

1:55:19 - Alex Lindsay
are you doing? And then times where they don't know you can tell when you look at the behind the scenes. They don't know, they just turn the set green, though they'll put, make a section green behind them, going like we don't know, we don't know what we're gonna do there yet we haven't made that decision and so all right, it's probably time to confess that the whole attic studio thing, the whole thing was just a fake.

1:55:38 - Leo Laporte
I never. It's a green screen. We're still in the east side studio. No, the whole thing was a bad dream. How could?

1:55:45 - Andy Ihnatko
you as a matter of fact. I mean, it's we. We all share a house, we're all actually right we all live together as a matter of fact, jason mean we all share a house. We're all actually right next to each other.

1:55:54 - Jason Snell
We all live together as a matter of fact, jason, here is that Dr Pepper that you wanted to borrow. Oh well, thank you, Andy.

1:55:58 - Andy Ihnatko
I really appreciate that. That looks delicious Tasty.

1:56:05 - Leo Laporte
If you're a gamer, I should get rid of this.

1:56:09 - Jason Snell
This is yours actually, jason. Yeah, that's my pick.

1:56:10 - Leo Laporte
That's your pick.

1:56:11 - Andy Ihnatko
I love it you're inviting all kinds of mischief when you, just as a joke, decide to put drop over green screen behind you nobody knows, this thing is huge and the discord is probably already full of people listening and not watching.

1:56:24 - Jason Snell
It's a giant green screen. I I. I would just want to point out that nobody knows that I'm also in front of a fake backdrop. It's very exciting here and now I'm going to turn it off, and oh, it's also my oh, it's the same that's fine, I just have a fake.

1:56:36 - Andy Ihnatko
I love it that you do that that's right for the double bluff

1:56:41 - Leo Laporte
but I am here oh is he real or is he remember? How can you tell? If you are a Mac gamer, you probably know about whiskey Not the one you drink, but the one you use to play Windows games on your Macintosh. Whiskey was created by an 18-year-old college student who's tired of it. He's attending Northeastern. He says it's always a balancing act between my schoolwork and dev work. So isaac marovitz is uh, this is from ars technica is uh, is basically killing whiskey. Um, he says to save paid apps, but really he's just tired and he wants to go back to back to school.

1:57:24 - Jason Snell
So good for him yeah, it's a classic story, right. There's nothing nothing bad here. He just was a kid who did an open source thing. And everybody was like this is amazing and he's like I have to stop now and do my homework.

1:57:35 - Andy Ihnatko
And because this is no longer 1991, nobody stepped in and said hi, here's $40 million. We'd like you to start a company based around this Right.

1:57:43 - Jason Snell
No. Instead, crossover's developers said congratulations on deciding not to do this product that competes with us anymore.

1:57:51 - Leo Laporte
Well done we'll take it from here. Thank you very much. Now I would like to know about this. There is a developer who has shown windows 11 windows on arm running on an air, ipad, air using emulation. Can I? Can I do that? That's thanks to the dma. This is windows latest spotted. This um, as far as I know, it's not been released if you're in europe, you've.

1:58:18 - Andy Ihnatko
If you, it's on the alt store classic alternative app store but it shows you that, well, if you can't, here's what could be done and there's a it's. There's a video and it runs. Seems to run as well as windows 11 on arm would run, which is not terribly great but certainly usable if you are you know, honestly, I run it on my mac in parallels and it runs very nicely.

1:58:43 - Leo Laporte
It's actually probably as fast on a macbook air or a macbook pro as it would be on many Windows machines. So I'm very happy with that. But it would be cool to be able to run this on my iPad. I agree.

1:58:55 - Andy Ihnatko
I got to say as much as we're all allergic to Windows to one degree or another, like the idea of I've got this really cheap iPad that I love for 90% of the things that I do, and it's nice to also have like an actual desktop operating system with full app support full everything support or even just for that, just that one game, right, you know or that or that one app prop.

I'm not sure if it's, I'm not sure if it's solid enough for gaming yeah, at least the the demo doesn't indicate that but it's not, but it's not as though, like I don't, you refer to some of these things as like bar bet apps, where it's like you want a 20 bar bet by proving that, yes, you can, you can post, you can boot windows and get past the post screen like, no, no, this is actually like a stripped down version of windows 11, but still windows 11.

1:59:42 - Alex Lindsay
Well, and then, and then, of course, you just get one of these and get a cheap one and it's going to perform better than the ipad, you know, like a good point.

1:59:49 - Andy Ihnatko
Well, actually I've got something on my Raspberry Pi where I just have a USB display adapter that basically allows I think we did this as a pick of the week a couple years ago A company has an app that is just simply take an HDMI input and put it in a window, put it inside the app view, so that you can have a Raspberry Pi or whatever hooked up to the video input and use your iPad as a screen. But nonetheless, because it's getting that through an app that is simply feeding through the HDMI signal, that means that it's just another app, so you can have all of your iPad workflow apps but also be able to tab into the uh raspberry pi, linux or whatever else you're running on it. I mean these, these micro they're, they're these really cool. Like aliexpress 120, 130 dollar.

Like deca card size windows machines that are useless for anything other than I would spend 120 so that I could have this sort of this one app that I need to run on my ipad but can't run on my ipad and I don't want to uh use, uh use vnc or anything like that. To get back to it, it's, it's interesting, it's an interesting option. Yeah, not worth moving to you do. There are other reasons to move to europe, but nonetheless it's not. It's not worth moving to europe to get, to be able to access it I'm moving to Europe just for that.

2:01:11 - Leo Laporte
That's all. I'm just doing it for that. That's the reason. And the fabulous Jamón Ibérico.

2:01:16 - Andy Ihnatko
I was going to say exactly that In Barcelona. I'm still like oh.

2:01:20 - Jason Snell
God.

2:01:21 - Andy Ihnatko
I wish I'd eaten more ham when I was in Barcelona.

2:01:24 - Leo Laporte
You know, they often talk to people on their deathbeds and people never say, oh, I wish I'd worked more, or, and they put it out. They put on a big lathe that never turns, but still it's a lathe, and just sometimes they say I wish I'd eaten more jamon iberico. I think I will say that on my deathbed, maybe it'll kill me.

2:01:43 - Andy Ihnatko
I I there was. They actually make jamon iberico flavored lays potato chips. Yeah, and no, it doesn't just taste like bacon.

2:01:49 - Leo Laporte
It actually tastes like yeah, sort of like ladies and gentlemen, we have come to the silly portion of the show. Obviously you're watching Mac break, weekly Andy, and not co chief silifier. Uh, mr Jason Snell from sixcolors.com he's very serious and Alex Lindsay, who has shaken hands with the late pope all of that in one show. Where else are you going to get this? Now it's time for our picks of the week. Uh, let's, let's start with you. Alex lindsey, why not?

2:02:24 - Alex Lindsay
I have I have it right here oh, he's got it right there, right behind him. I was gonna grab it when somebody else was doing their pick, but I can't yeah, I surprised you I'm sorry, I apologize a lot of times you have cameras and you want to wrap them, but you don't have the right bag.

2:02:38 - Leo Laporte
Um, you figure out how to just pull those off your bed, those old sheets. What is that?

2:02:43 - Alex Lindsay
this is a dompki, so this is a wrap. Yes, I paid good money for this piece of piece of, so you have a camera like that's the camera there, and so, but you don't want to bang it up, but you don't also don't need a. You don't have a place for it to go, and so these are. These wraps are made by a company called dompki, I think I don't. There's probably other people that make them, but these are all the ones I have.

I have lots of these and for and Andy's got a couple, um, but for taking electronics, metal lenses, cameras, mics, and you just want to wrap them in something to keep them from banging against each other. It's not like a huge thick wrap, it's just something that you want to throw. You know you want to throw around something. Um, they're about 20 bucks each and I've got so many anyway. So, um, you know, and so they're just great when you're trying to, like, pack a Pelican case and you've got to put a bunch of stuff into it, or pack your backpack and you just don't want the metal stuff banging against the metal stuff, to scratch it, and so on and so forth. They're a great deal and they've got. Basically, they just have Velcro, you just run them around and they just attach to themselves and you just wrap it up and, as you can see, Andy might have one or two of them.

2:03:49 - Andy Ihnatko
They come in all kinds of sizes.

2:03:51 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, there's like a little one. I recommend the 19-inch because you can always wrap it more. The 11-inch I find to be oftentimes the 15, is not too bad.

2:04:03 - Andy Ihnatko
I haven't got all the sizes, but they're great. I have to double his recommendation because for me it's not just just sometimes you have things that are kind of odd shapes and you don't necessarily need a bag for it, you just want to be protected when you throw it in your laptop bag or in your backpack. Or I love my mobile setup here. But before I went into my closet and got out surplus donkey wraps. It's like how do I carry two little LED panels and their chargers in one package? I don't have a bag that's exactly the right size, but I do have wraps, so I can just simply wrap them into one tight, compact package with some padding around it and it's just absolutely perfect. Not only that, but it's also again for my camera stuff. Absolutely perfect. Not only that, but it's also again for my camera stuff, because again, I don't want to carry a camera bag around wherever I go, because that's you know, I'm a person that a miscreant could think, hey, I could probably outrun that guy. So I don't want to carry like a camera bag with me, but I have my little like satchel bag and I don't have like a whole pile of stuff. I want to just wrap my like really expensive, really nice lens in something so that it won't get scratched up inside that bag, but nonetheless it will be a tight, compact package. It's in that category.

If you just keep buying these when they're on sale, buy them. There are some knockoffs that aren't terrible. Buy them too. And once you have just used it for the purpose you bought, bought it for, but then you put it in a closet, once you have this in as inventory, as a resource, it's like ah damn, I'm packing for this trip and there's no way I can get. Oh, wait, a minute, I've got those damn donkey wraps I can just put. I've got my, my microphone, the stand, the cables and a backup pair of headphones like all in one little wrap. Uh, actually I think I sent that to you, that to you, so could you wrap your lunch in it?

I mean, would my microphone burrito?

2:05:58 - Leo Laporte
so it's really just a piece of is it padded?

2:06:02 - Andy Ihnatko
it's simple. Yes, there's a little bit of padding inside, so and it's got velcro so it's easy to kind arbitrary the entire outside surface is velcro, so oh, for instance, if I want to wrap this dr pepper, can I could just put it in there so the it will work with anything, because it's got hook and loop on the inside and the outside.

2:06:25 - Alex Lindsay
Well it's all the, it's the velcro, whatever the, yeah, the entire outside. You could make a a little pope hat out of it even well, so you could. So you take you know, like you just like too soon okay, sorry, I shouldn't joke, so but you thank you, jason you're the conscience of this show, but like you know, you just anywhere, you grab onto it that camera that you're you're handling there.

That wouldn't be one of the new black magic it's not new ursa camera it's an ursa, but it's not this one, not the ursa yeah no, this is like it is looks our sign, as one would say, 12k.

So that's what I but she it doesn't have that special no, no, it's, it's the original 12k nice, that's a very nice 12k camera you just got thrown around there I, you know, you know, I will tell you if you show up to your kids, uh, high school with three of these, with three of these and some big lenses, everyone pays attention you know?

2:07:19 - Andy Ihnatko
so yes, iphone, iphone 12, yeah, that's, that's nice, are you?

2:07:23 - Alex Lindsay
james camera. Oh, my daughter. My daughter said it would be weird if I just shot really good footage of her playing. You know she's in the pit for the things I was like. Well, I'll just shoot everybody and we'll happen to get some of you too, so wow wow, domke D-O-M-K-E.

2:07:38 - Leo Laporte
It's on Amazon. You're looking for your donkey F stroke 34 M 15 inch protective wrap in a variety of colors. You also have your 11 and your 19 inch. If you're 11 and you're 19 inch, all with a built-in hook and loop. Thank you, alex. Andy, what do you got?

2:07:55 - Andy Ihnatko
Mine is just a bit of fun, an app that I just love the fact that it exists and I love the person who made it. Rich Siegel is a name that comes up on this show often. He is the creator again principal of Barebone Software and the creator of BBEdit, an app that I think Jason. I'd be surprised if Jason and I have another app that we've relied on for longer than we've relied on, bb Edit. Even just last week it was like how do I transmogrify this data every single week into a blog post because editing it manually is too hard. Like, oh wait, I just go to BB Edit, create a regular expression for search and replace. This is hysterical. And now it does it automatically. So he has a he turned a hobby.

2:08:33 - Leo Laporte
You mentioned that he repairs these KitchenAid mixers.

2:08:36 - Jason Snell
Rich, you know that pivoting from BBEdit to KitchenAid mixers is a thing that happens.

2:08:42 - Andy Ihnatko
He has to. He anticipated the tariffs and how it might affect the tech industry and his hobby is like repairing KitchenAid mixers. And his hobby is like repairing KitchenAid mixers and I don't mean, oh look, that plug was a little busted. I mean just like his BMW sports car, ripping it all down the brass gears, replacing this, repacking with grease, replacing worn out parts, upgrading, old parts.

2:09:04 - Leo Laporte
Hold on, I'm going to run downstairs and get my mixer and see if this works.

2:09:08 - Jason Snell
I have. Yeah, I mean, I've done it too. I actually done two mixers my one that I got from my mom and one I found literally sitting on the street. Yeah. And Rich guided me through.

2:09:22 - Andy Ihnatko
And KitchenAid mixers are apparently only until very recently. If it's 20 or 30 years old, so long as the molecules are still together, you can repair them, you can upgrade them. There's an aftermarket for replacement parts. And so he started a site called Mixerology mixerologycom for his like hobby pursuits and also as an information source. And of course, it got a little bit out of hand.

His partner is a is a librarian and a really, really good web developer. So she created, with Rich, a web tool for the Mixerology site that, if you type in the serial number of your KitchenAid mixer, it will decode the serial number to tell you when it was manufactured. And because Rich is the kind of genius that we should elect to hire office but is too smart to take the job of being in higher office, he decided hey, I'm a developer, I can just write an iOS app that will just why type in the serial number when you can just use your iPhone or your iPad to aim the camera at the serial number and it will decode it for you? So on the App Store you can get the Mixerology app available for iOS, and so you can just simply get find the date.

No mean feat to carry this thing. Oh God, yeah Up into the attic.

2:10:41 - Jason Snell
They're heavy, aren't they, leo? I agree they are pretty heavy.

2:10:44 - Leo Laporte
And now, where do I take a picture? What? What am I?

2:10:53 - Andy Ihnatko
Is picture what? What am I? Is there a?

2:10:54 - Leo Laporte
serial number somewhere on there. Go to mixerologycom that's looking for a serial number. Aim the camera at the serial number label underneath the mixer. It is on the underside of the mixer. Oh you, mean like the, the head of it yeah, although the base underside of the base.

2:11:08 - Andy Ihnatko
You'll see it oh you'll find the serial number on the label underneath the base of the mixer when you turn it. Oh, you'll find the serial number on the label underneath the base of the mixer when you turn it over to look. Use a towel or other soft pad to protect it, don't lift it yourself.

2:11:18 - Jason Snell
That's like we're doing. That's madness.

2:11:20 - Leo Laporte
But um, I don't, I think this one's so old. This is vintage. Like I don't have a base. Yeah, it should be.

2:11:27 - Jason Snell
No, that's it it should be in there somewhere on the underside.

2:11:30 - Leo Laporte
I love that this is a show where two people are holding uh stand mixers and he turned into prop comics at some point I don't know when that I mean so literally this one that I'm holding here.

2:11:39 - Jason Snell
I found on the street and I was running and I ran by it and I was like oh man, and so I came back home after my run, I got in the car, went and picked it up and emailed rich and said rich, what do I do here? And he and he was like, okay, I this, this model, I get this. I can send you a part for this. You need to order this part for this and you know, now I've got, uh, I grant you a second mixer, but, um, this one's probably going to one of my kids at some point and, uh, it's, it's awesome, or they'll get the one that my mom did, but also like an avocado green, which mine is my mom's one is avocado green too, and what I, what I did do with rich's help, is, um, I, uh, I opened it up and replaced a couple of things and re-lubed it with new grease, because the grease in there was, you know, 30, 40 years old and, uh, that was.

That was a nice thing too. They, they are built like tanks. That's the thing you learn from rich is there are parts that can fail and people like put them on the side of the road. It's like you can fix those parts and they will run forever, they will run forever.

2:12:36 - Leo Laporte
Oh, they never go bad. Yeah, I can't find the serial number on mine.

2:12:40 - Andy Ihnatko
Well, that might be a pre-1984 Hobart mixer. It is Pre-whirlpool days. Yeah yeah, yeah yeah.

2:12:47 - Jason Snell
It could be he's got examples of that too.

2:12:48 - Leo Laporte
It says KitchenAid on it.

2:12:49 - Jason Snell
You send that picture to Rich and he will tell you what it is. Let me tell you, we used to use Hobarts in the cafeteria.

2:12:55 - Leo Laporte
I remember those Hobart mixers. They had stand mixers that were as big as me. I mean, they're huge.

2:13:02 - Andy Ihnatko
Mixerologycom for the online version of that. It's free.

2:13:12 - Leo Laporte
Wonderful design for ipad. Not verified for mac os, but I could tell you it ran just fine. The only issue I had was I couldn't find my cereal and what do? You learn, you just learn when it was made basically you just, you just learned when it was made.

2:13:19 - Jason Snell
I would like to actually know when this was made, and then I can't remember when I bought it, but I have a feeling this is a couple of wives ago, I mean I don't know, but I think this might have been a wedding present from many, many moons, I mean literally, the mixer in my kitchen that I use is the one that made all the cookies that I had when I was a kid. It's literally the same, and it still works. It's amazing, 50 years later.

2:13:43 - Andy Ihnatko
It's the appliance, probably more than any other appliance in the kitchen, clients in the kitchen. It's the one that will destroy brotherly, sisterly bonds, when, when someone, when, when, when the parents like move and they don't want to take everything with them.

2:13:55 - Leo Laporte
And now we have to decide who gets the KitchenAid mixer by the way, I love it that the fact that this, this app, comes from Ocean State Mixer Repair LLC, yep, which is Rich Siegel's, that's right. Well, can I send this to? It costs more to send it to him.

2:14:10 - Jason Snell
he does have a contact page, mixerologycom he also, like I said, he also provides advice.

2:14:15 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, if you have a question or problem, please take a moment to find the model number and I'm somewhat ashamed that when you're right in the model number. Yeah, exactly you can't find them, tell me what the mixer says on the side, and whether the health head tilts up and down or the bowl cranks up and down, and if it's really old and doesn't say anything, tell me that too.

2:14:29 - Leo Laporte
It's really old and it doesn't say anything.

2:14:30 - Speaker 3
He's he's that kind of kind guy like he will help anybody about anything.

2:14:34 - Jason Snell
Yeah, thank you, but seriously, if your mixer is is broken, you can fix it mine never fix it it still works.

2:14:40 - Leo Laporte
I know, I know, that's I'm ashamed to admit, I have replaced it with a spiral mixer well, that see if it's working.

2:14:48 - Andy Ihnatko
Now you're just talking about performance upgrades and you can help me with that too.

2:14:51 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, uh, jason.

2:14:54 - Jason Snell
This leaves you for your pick of the week yeah, I'm gonna do something that's completely impractical and pointless, because it's nice, because, uh, do you like birds? I like birds. There are a lot of birds around who doesn't love and uh, this thing is called bird buddy. It is a bird, it is a charging, although you can get one without. It's got a little battery in it, bird feeder with a webcam in it and it takes pictures of birds and sends them to you and video of birds and sends them to you.

And you get little alerts on your phone that say there's a bluebird on your feeder right now. And not only that, since I work at home, I can actually go look at the bird, but I clean this up for the spring on your feeder right now. And not only that, since I work at home, I can actually go look at the bird, but I I clean this up for the spring and just and and set it up. And the birds are going crazy. I've had like so many birds the last few days and like, what's the practical nature of buying a bird feeder with a camera in it? None, none. But like like that bluebird is the king of my house. Now the bluebird rules and it does, it, does, it does, can you share?

2:15:56 - Leo Laporte
these on instagram you can share these it's 2k, you can send your photo library.

2:16:01 - Jason Snell
Uh, it shoots 2k video plus pulls out a bunch of stills. It's just using wi-fi and, like I said, it's little roof. It's optional, but like it's got a little roof with a solar panel on it, so as long as that panel is pointing in the direction of the sun, I never need to charge this thing.

2:16:15 - Leo Laporte
It's just sending me pictures of birds, all the time in my backyard, and if you order today, you get a free suet holder.

2:16:23 - Jason Snell
Yeah, well, some of the birds like the suet, and then they've got a hummingbird feeder as well.

2:16:27 - Leo Laporte
Which one should I get? The? They've got a hummingbird feeder as well. Which one should I get, the pro or the special Easter buddy with a bird?

2:16:31 - Jason Snell
buddy, I don't know, I have the pre, the older model, so the pro is probably super fun and fancy. And then they've got a new thing that they're doing where they're going to have like blocks, where you can have a feeder and different kinds and all of that, but that one is going on Kickstarter in a week, I think. But I just took a flyer. I was literally like bird feeder with a camera in it. That sounds fun and it is fun, so that's it.

2:16:55 - Leo Laporte
It's not practical I'm gonna get this for lisa. She loves the birds and it uses.

2:17:00 - Jason Snell
They use like machine learning algorithms to detect what kind of bird it is. And you can, and there's like a. You can look at other people's bird, you can have.

2:17:08 - Leo Laporte
There's a, there's a three-in-one nutrition set for fruit eating birds. There's a perch extender which attacks attaches for bigger birds. Bigger birds.

2:17:17 - Jason Snell
There's a solar roof yeah, I just got, yeah, I just got the basic I'm gonna get the basic one and I like it and I bought, and I went to my local hardware store and bought some, uh some, uh, fancy finch food and, uh, all the finches are very fancy and happy.

2:17:31 - Leo Laporte
So that's it, birds. Who doesn't like them? Who doesn't? And that concludes this episode, the kind of the wackiest episode ever of MacBreak Weekly. Jason snell is at sixcolors.com now with with mike hurley on the upgrade podcast at sixcol. I come slash Jason. Yep, he's back baby. Did he have a good time with his little new newborn?

2:17:55 - Jason Snell
yeah, I think I think he had he, you know, taken two full months off is a pretty great thing, so good for him to do that. Right now he's got a grapple with being a working dad. We'll see how it goes, yeah, yeah.

2:18:08 - Leo Laporte
Awesome, nice to have you, jason. Thanks for being here. Andy and I co is on the on the blue sky at I H n a t ko dot blue sky dot socials. Thank you for being here, mr Andrew, thank you very much. Pleasure to see you and Alex Lindsay. Office hours global. Anything you did your nab coverage was that.

2:18:28 - Alex Lindsay
That's all online, I'm sure it is, it is yeah, so we were, you know, um, we pushed that pretty hard, I think. We talked about it, um, we, uh, we did a 5.1, uh, we had that, that microphone, which turned out to be really great, oh that's cool okay if you listen to it in surround, you know it.

The now I can't listen to anybody else's coverage without surround sound, because when you hear it you're like, oh, that sounds, you just feel like you're there. And when people use regular mics where you cut everything out with an sm58 or whatever right, it just now feels so dead sterile, you know, and they're also so uh you did a whole episode on deconstructing the sphere experience.

2:19:09 - Leo Laporte
Are we talking oh, that's a different sphere, that's not the microphone sphere. That's we were talking.

2:19:13 - Alex Lindsay
We got into a conversation Vegas sphere, oh yeah, and extra hours. Extra hours is, you know, the Monday night, our Monday night show and it's uh, it's much more slow group. It's like a slow groove of us talking about, you know, and we were, but we were talking a lot about the sphere, so but now would I notice if I listen now, no, no, this is a different one. So we did a bunch of different things, so this is a different different.

2:19:33 - Leo Laporte
That was not.

2:19:34 - Alex Lindsay
That's my bird feeder, oh, but yeah. Yeah, so the um. But if you go up there, though, there's a um, there is some coverage where we walk around and nice and it's a it's fine, you are, yeah, yeah, uh, office hours dot global.

2:19:48 - Leo Laporte
They do it every day. So even if you know you missed last week, they you still got this week every single more day.

2:19:56 - Alex Lindsay
It's a crazy thing that we do this every day and and we were talking about that we have not. It's been over five years now, so we we've done so great congratulations.

2:20:04 - Andy Ihnatko
I don't want to be, you know, nosy here, but have you and you with? Has office hours issued its own environmental impact? Report we're saving people money by teaching them how to not we're saving them people.

2:20:18 - Alex Lindsay
We're saving the environment by having people do less travel and more virtual events. Virtual events is a someone asked me like what is your environmental impact? I'm like well, I empower events not to be all in person.

2:20:30 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I don't know how to calculate that for you, but you've added a new section to your home page at office hoursglobal, which is great all the audio visual stuff you've done over the years. So if people are late to the office hours game, there's a great list of things, everything from Dante to using motion to Luma. I mean this is fantastic.

2:20:53 - Alex Lindsay
The guys are good at showing a lot of the older stuff. The team works on that. I have to admit I'm not very past-oriented, so as soon as I'm done with the show, I never want to do that again. I'm like let's talk about the next show, but it's great that we have this incredible team that goes through and really pulls out those things so people can find.

2:21:13 - Leo Laporte
Find the information, yeah yeah, this is new on the page and I love it. And then all the special guests oh, look, me and Andy are on there. There you go. And others, many, many others. Uh, is daria musk? Uh, any relation to elon? No, okay, okay, not related.

2:21:31 - Alex Lindsay
Just curious she is. Yeah, she's a music artist in Connecticut. Look at all the people.

2:21:36 - Leo Laporte
This is great. They've really. There's a whole bunch of stuff now officehours.global and, of course, you can join the daily shows as well. Thank you, Alex, thank you Andy, thank you Jason, thanks to all our club members for making this show possible. Without you, there is no Twit. Seven bucks a month. You get ad-free versions of all the shows. You get special events we did our coffee event on Friday. We've got coming up Stacey's Book Club. This Friday will be our monthly AI user group and there's just so much good stuff happening in the club. And of course, you get access to the Discord, which means there's always a group of interesting, smart people. You can hang out with All that for seven bucks a month.

Now I have to tell you we're trying to figure out, as the economy goes to hell in a handbasket, if seven bucks is enough, and I think in the next few months we may have to raise our prices. But I will promise you this if you are already a member, you will be grandfathered in at the current price. So now would be a good time to go to twit.tv/clubtwit, to join the club. There is a yearly membership. Yes, as well. Uh, we'd love to have you, and it makes a big difference uh to uh, our going forward to continuing to do the things we do. So thank you to our club members. Thanks, wait a minute. All right, what? What did you make? Oh dear, you're outing me, Anthony. Oh dear, oh dear. So that will be the subject of our AR users group. You want? Let me do it full screen, make it more fun. Yeah, oh.

I got laser eyes and everything. That's fantastic. That's a little creepy. twit.tv/clubtwit, please join.

We do MacBreak Weekly every uh tuesday 11 am, pacific 2 pm, eastern 1800 UTC. You can watch us live on eight different streams. Club members, of course, get special behind the velvet rope access in our discord. But there's also Youtube, Twitch, x.com Linkedin Facebook and Kick watch wherever want. But you don't have to watch live because we also record this. It's a new technology. I think you'll find it very interesting and put it up on our website. At twit.tv/mbw, you can watch the video or listen to the audio or both. There's a link there to the YouTube channel. Great for sharing little clips. If you've got a friend with a KitchenAid, you might want to share that little clip of Jason and I showing our devices. You could also subscribe. That's a good way to do it and that way you get it automatically as soon as it's available after our Tuesday show. Thank you everybody. We appreciate your being here. It is now, I'm sorry to say, my sad and solemn duty to tell you get back to work because break time is over. Bye-bye.

2:24:41 - 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.