MacBreak Weekly 868 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.

Leo Laporte (00:00:00):
It's time for MacBreak Weekly. Andy's here. Alex is here. Jason Sells actually, literally here. Sitting next to me, we're gonna talk about that emergency rapid security response release from Apple. What's it all about? It's the first time they've done it. Did it work for you? We'll also talk about AI and why Apple's strategy is struggling and the original Apple Store. Moving to a new home. Can you tell us where the original Apple Store was? Do you know? Stay tuned to find out Mac Break Weekly's next

Andy Ihnatko (00:00:33):
Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is is Twi Twi.

Leo Laporte (00:00:42):
This is Mac Break Weekly episode 868. Recorded Tuesday, May 2nd, 2023. Burglar Fantasy Camp Mac Break Weekly is brought to you by Delete me. Reclaim your privacy by removing personal data from online sources. Protect yourself and reduce the risk of fraud, spam, cybersecurity threats and more by going to join delete me.com/twit. And using the code TWiT for 20% off. And by ACI learning aci. Learning amplifies expertise across industries that command higher pay ACI learning. Transforming how companies train and technology professionals learn to fuel the modern workforce for premium training in audit it and cybersecurity readiness. Visit go dot aci learning.com/twit. It's time for Mac Break Weekly, the show. We cover the latest Apple News. Uh, and look, dang it, we're gonna find some Apple news cuz you know why Jason Snell braved the elements. It was pouring rain this morning.

Jason Snell (00:01:50):
I I had no trouble getting here. <laugh>. There was no, there was no rain when I, I parted the, the skies. Oh, nice. And the, the sun led me here. He

Leo Laporte (00:01:59):
Parted. He he came up. Yep. And like the Red Sea.

Jason Snell (00:02:02):
It just, it did. Got out of

Leo Laporte (00:02:03):
The way on

Jason Snell (00:02:04):
1 0 1. Yep. Sonoma County said, welcome. The

Leo Laporte (00:02:06):
Cows moved

Jason Snell (00:02:07):
Over. Cows moved over. It's nice to see you in studios. It's good to be here. Wonderful. I thought I'd pop in six

Leo Laporte (00:02:11):
Colors.com. He's getting ready. Cuz Thursday you're gonna be, you're gonna be doing

Jason Snell (00:02:14):
That. I'm gonna be making charts. I'm into the chart. Mines Leo. After this I go straight to the chart, please. The chart. Mines. I gotta mine the colors. We need colors. I gotta get the bars. See some indigo. I gotta get some pie. I gotta bake some pie Pol

Leo Laporte (00:02:24):
For the red. Yep.

Jason Snell (00:02:25):
<laugh>

Leo Laporte (00:02:26):
Six colors.com. He's got all six of them. He's also, of course, a man of many podcasts. So we're always thrilled to have

Jason Snell (00:02:33):
Him More podcast than man now. Yes. <laugh>. He's practically all podcasts. Mm. <laugh>

Leo Laporte (00:02:38):
Thanks for, thanks for coming in. It's great to see you, Andy Ihnatko can't cuz he's far, far away on the East coast where, uh, the weather is crazy. Hi Andy.

Andy Ihnatko (00:02:49):
Yeah. We had a good 80 <laugh>, 84, 85 degrees a couple weeks ago. And geez, once again, see the, the, the what what people who don't who've never lived in New England, like need to understand is that there are two like phases of two specific phases of New Englanders being jerks and being stubborn. One comes in like October, November, where like, no, I'm not, this isn't cold. I'm not, I'm not turning on the heat. Like December. No, this isn't really cold. I'm not turning on the heat until you finally turn on the heat. And then comes a time in the spring where like, where like you turn, you turn the heat off again. And then even though like you get another like eight weeks of like 43 degree weather. Yeah. It's like I'm not turning. Oh, this isn't noble look, it's spring. They're they're buds. Yeah. There are birds on the la on the bow. They're lib. There are buds on the bow. Like, ugh.

Leo Laporte (00:03:33):
We had the, uh, weed wackers out to cut down the weeds. It grew all, cuz it was such a rainy winter all winter. And then it rained immediately after. So I thought, well, there you go. Also from joining us from Hollywood, it's Mr. Alex Lindsay of office hours. Hello. Do you do office hours on the road?

Alex Lindsay (00:03:51):
I usually do, but the stuff that I'm doing right now, uh, overlaps office hours. <laugh>. Oh, okay. It's an early morning activation. So, so I'm, uh, so I'm, I'm not on office hours for a couple

Leo Laporte (00:04:01):
Days. Okay. But still goes on. That's the beauty of office hours. Many people up.

Alex Lindsay (00:04:06):
It does. It's a big, big web. So we had, uh, I think today we had Nick Joshin from Drexel University talking about Oh, not real engine. And so Wow. Didn't, didn't, didn't skip a beat.

Leo Laporte (00:04:15):
Are you doing a lot of AI stuff on office hours now? Oh yeah. I'm really trying to decide. I can't decide. We talked a little bit about doing this weekend in ai, which has a terrible acronym. Tw <laugh>. I've gotta do that.

Andy Ihnatko (00:04:27):
That's all about me. And

Alex Lindsay (00:04:29):
That's kind of how we feel about,

Leo Laporte (00:04:31):
Wait a minute, that's your initial Sandy.

Andy Ihnatko (00:04:33):
What, what did Och go have to eat this morning? <laugh>. He doesn't

Leo Laporte (00:04:35):
Think about that. Feel

Andy Ihnatko (00:04:37):
About the wealth writer strike. I didn't

Leo Laporte (00:04:38):
Even think about that.

Andy Ihnatko (00:04:39):
We're we're, we're looking for Agi coming up next, but <laugh>,

Alex Lindsay (00:04:43):
They don't realize that that really AI is just Andy sitting there typing really fast. It's kinda like that shot from, you know, and he, Hey Andy, when he, Andy

Leo Laporte (00:04:52):
Could do that. I think

Jason Snell (00:04:53):
He's supervising a large, uh, room full of monkeys <laugh>. I do the work for him, but he, he provides them guidance. Nice.

Andy Ihnatko (00:05:01):
It's actually improved the smell in the office. We're very happy with Hook Duck <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:05:06):
So, uh, apple, uh, pulled the emergency alarm. They, uh, they they, they pulled the, the thing, the uh, rapid security response for the first time, uh, was it yesterday, uh, for Mac Os and iOS and I, iPad os uh, this

Andy Ihnatko (00:05:23):
Was something the subscript a Yeah,

Leo Laporte (00:05:24):
They had mentioned. Yeah, subscript A is weird, isn't it? They had mentioned this last year at, uh, WW d c that they had this capability, but they'd never done it except for betas. I guess you'd had, you'd experienced it, they d

Jason Snell (00:05:36):
Betas and it seems like they were just testing the facility of right, of doing this, which is can we push out a security update that isn't wrapped in a full, you know, 13.3 0.2 update

Leo Laporte (00:05:47):
And people who, you know, see these updates? I know I do. I go, oh God, my, I'm not gonna be able to use my phone for an hour or I'm not gonna use my Mac for an hour. This was very

Jason Snell (00:05:55):
Quick. It's very fast. Yeah, they, they, they had to do some work to break it up into, break the system up into little pieces so that they could, cuz the whole, you know, it's a whole, um, locked system volume, right? So they, they've done the work of breaking it up into smaller pieces so that they can update a targeted portion of the system volume that's cryptographically signed and locked and all of that. And they can open that up, uh, replace it. And that should theoretically mean that the updates are faster and smaller.

Leo Laporte (00:06:20):
Let's see, have they said anything about a 1641 A? No? Mm-hmm. So we don't know what was in that

Jason Snell (00:06:28):
Something important enough to do it, but that's all we know. Is that

Leo Laporte (00:06:31):
Really the case? So it's an emerge it is an emergency. That's

Jason Snell (00:06:34):
How it's supposed to be used. Yeah. Is is is otherwise they would roll it into 1332 and 1642 and instead it's 1331 A, which lets them just get that out faster without, I'd imagine also it's not disrupting their, um, development. You know, whatever bug fixes or improvements or whatever they're working on in 1332 doesn't get necessarily derailed by this. Cuz they can push this out faster.

Leo Laporte (00:06:58):
Last week on security, now, Steve Gibson talked about some, uh, zero days that, uh, Pegasus, uh, was taking advantage of on iOS and I, uh, you know, Pegasus style zero click exploits. Um, it was my understanding that they'd been patched already, but maybe not. Maybe not. Maybe, um, yeah, maybe there is something, there was something left with these and a zero day is the kind of thing you'd, you'd pull the trigger for. Yeah,

Andy Ihnatko (00:07:28):
Yeah. I I was reading that there was some, I didn't, I I didn't, uh, bookmark it for the notes, but, uh, there's was some sort of news, some sort of news item about how there was a new, uh, uh, Mac malware as a service that had sprung up. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:07:41):
Uh,

Andy Ihnatko (00:07:42):
And don't know if that is, if that's to address this thing, but who knows? Well,

Jason Snell (00:07:45):
Some, some of the, I almost got a bunch of different facilities now to fight bad software, right? Because they've, they've actually got their own anti-malware software that runs on your Mac and checks back home with Apple and they update the definitions and they can kill apps, um, immediately. Basically they can kill apps very, very quickly. That's not this though. So this is obviously something that, that, that required a change to something that's in one of their sealed system volumes somewhere that actual have to make changes to the OS in order to address it. They've gotta,

Leo Laporte (00:08:15):
Andrew, Andrew C. Cunningham said it, it is often WebKit related. Uh, of course that's WebKit is kind of your, your, your interface to the outside world. So naturally messages in WebKit are where a lot of these exploits happen. I should point out that there was a N S O zero click two weeks ago, uh, that used home kit and, uh, lockdown mode succeeded in preventing it. Of course, most of us do not run lockdown mode because it is so, uh, draconian. But the people who are presumably the target of these kinds of NSO group attacks, presumably would be, I don't know. I, so according it's just speculation

Jason Snell (00:08:54):
According to Andrew Cunningham, who, who does great work on this subject at Aris Technica, um, in his Ventura review, he actually mentioned these things called crypt taxes, which are the idea that they're not just having a single volume with all your system files in it. They've got these smaller little, little micro system volumes that you can update without having to deal with the whole system. So instead of

Leo Laporte (00:09:13):
Gigabytes, it's, it's megabytes.

Jason Snell (00:09:15):
Yeah. It's, it's much smaller and much faster. Yeah. It some could theoretically not require a reboot, although this one does. Um, but he said in his Ventura review last summer, that specifically Safari stuff and WebKit stuff Yeah. Was gonna be in those crypt taxes because obviously they identified where would we most likely needed an emergency security update. Right.

Leo Laporte (00:09:34):
And the NSOs O group always targeted messages as well. So I'm guessing that messages was, you know, Google did something similar with Android a few years ago where they moved a lot of stuff into the, in effecting the store. So they wouldn't even have to do this kind of update. They would just push it down through the Google Place store. Um, it's kind of similar. The idea is let's break this up into small pieces where we just update this little functions here,

Jason Snell (00:09:57):
Right. Because zero days aren't gonna wait for you to release a software update in two

Leo Laporte (00:09:59):
Weeks. Right. <affirmative>, right? Yep. Yep.

Andy Ihnatko (00:10:01):
And, and also to make sure that they could push out that update as quickly as possible without having to wait for like Samsung or OnePlus or at and t or Verizon to build that into whatever release they're gonna be pushing out to their own phones. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:10:12):
And, uh, don't freak out if you haven't got it yet because it is a rolling, uh, release. This according to Aaron P 613 at, on the Twitter, we know he's a reliable source. I don't know, <laugh>, this, this is the code, I guess. Uh, and so I don't know what that means, but, uh, somehow by looking at that code, you can see the granular ramping logic. Um, and so it's, uh, it's gonna roll out over 48 hours.

Jason Snell (00:10:40):
Well, as logical as it is to have this system for rapid response, you also don't wanna release something that works everybody's systems without having a bork 'em a

Leo Laporte (00:10:47):
Little at a time, I find.

Jason Snell (00:10:49):
Exactly. Yeah. Well that's how you do it. Right? Right. And then, and then if, if everybody's borked, then you stop the rollout for a while. Right. And if not, then you keep it going. It's a, that's, that's, it's gonna still be ra more rapid than if we had to wait for 13.3 0.2 to be released in two weeks. So

Leo Laporte (00:11:04):
I guess the advice is Lisa asked me, uh, yesterday, she said, have you heard about this? I said, no. What? She said, oh, I got to tell you something. And, uh, after gloating for a little bit <laugh>, she then said, but I have seen on Twitter, some people saying it's problematic. But I don't, I think that I immediately did it. I think the advice would be, even if you're not a Hollywood celebrity living in the hills with your own private, uh, screening room, you probably should update your

Jason Snell (00:11:30):
<laugh>. See, being in the studio means I got to see Alex give you side eye

Leo Laporte (00:11:34):
<laugh>.

Jason Snell (00:11:35):
No, it was really special.

Leo Laporte (00:11:38):
Nevermind <laugh>, I said nothing.

Jason Snell (00:11:41):
Everybody should update. I mean, we always say that anyway, right? That it, it's a, the security issues are real and everybody should update. And, you know, you might think I'm not a target, but like a zero click or even even some of the stuff that's click based, like people send junk texts to pe to just random people all the time. And if they have an exploit, well,

Alex Lindsay (00:12:01):
And it can, it's not them sending, they're not, it's not sending them to you. It's sending them out to 60,000, 600,000 or 6 million. There's, you know, when you, no one, you know, a lot of these are just, we're just gonna, you know, shotgun across every every person we have a contact for and just see who shows up.

Leo Laporte (00:12:16):
Yeah.

Alex Lindsay (00:12:17):
That's not the, it only has to be a tiny percentage

Leo Laporte (00:12:18):
Generally though, with NSO group style zero clicks. Cuz those are so

Jason Snell (00:12:23):
It's valuable

Alex Lindsay (00:12:24):
Worth No, those are

Leo Laporte (00:12:25):
So much money that you're not gonna use that cuz the minute you do a 60,000 person attack, everybody No,

Alex Lindsay (00:12:30):
No, no. You're definitely, you're definitely not doing that for that. Yeah. Yeah. Those are more, it's

Jason Snell (00:12:34):
True, but there's a whole gradient. Right? And the idea is that really, unless you've got a very good reason not to update your software, you should update, do it your software you've got, and it's not some sort of silly reason of like, oh, well, I'd just like to be up to date. You've got a good reason, which is there are security flaws when they're fixing 'em. That means somebody knows about them and they could affect you when you're browsing the web, when you're getting a message. Uh, yes. It's not the stuff that's been weaponized by groups like the NSO group. Right. Uh, but it's still, I mean, you should do it thing

Leo Laporte (00:13:00):
Short. That's the, you always have to tell people is you depends on your threat model. But in this case, if Apple's putting it out to everybody, there's a

Jason Snell (00:13:06):
Good reason. And they're not adding features. They're not changing it's

Leo Laporte (00:13:08):
Stuff, it's thing to do security

Jason Snell (00:13:09):
Fix. That is what this

Leo Laporte (00:13:10):
Is actually, it's been a long time since anything Apple's pushed out has caused problems. I remember there was one five or six years ago that froze that bricked your phone <laugh>. But that one, that hasn't happened recently. Yeah. And I think maybe that's the point of these rapid security response updates is that they're so f they're so piecemeal that they're not

Jason Snell (00:13:28):
Risky. I, I don't know what you all think, but I I sometimes think that iOS seven and the release of iOS seven was such a big mistake on Apple's part, not because of anything in the content. Because I would actually argue that skew morphism is more bad than good. And I think iOS seven actually took the iPhone in a new direction. We can argue about that later. But here's my point. I can't tell you how many regular iPhone users I've talked to who have stopped updating their devices in general as a policy. And it becomes super paranoid about it because of that one time that their iPhone updated. Yeah. And it completely changed the iPhone interface in an upsetting way without any warning. And like, that was a long time ago now. And yet the legacy of that, I still talk to people, friends and family who used to be like, yeah, I'll update to the latest update. They're now like, yeah, I don't really want to do that right now. And I'm like, you should do it. You know, to my mom. I do that to, to lo friends in the community and like, you should do it. But I get like, everybody still feels burned by some software update that messed up their thing. And,

Alex Lindsay (00:14:32):
And, and we're not talking about necessarily jumping from system to system. We're talking about just running these incremental updates that you should do all the time. There's a lot of good reasons to not update system to system immediately. Uh, oftentimes you want to, because it's not just Apple at that point. It's

Jason Snell (00:14:46):
All the third party software, all

Alex Lindsay (00:14:48):
The third parties that haven't caught up and there's, and you wanna look at them and look at their websites and say, are we we're ready for this? Or we're not ready for this. Um, and sometimes they're still not ready for it. But, um, but I, so that is, you might wanna do slowly, but, but definitely these incre, once you've committed to an operating system, these incremental Right. Get the updates

Leo Laporte (00:15:06):
Difference. <laugh>, you wanna know what it's like, just be a Windows user. Uh, that's always a lot <laugh>. I just, it's,

Alex Lindsay (00:15:13):
It's one of the big reasons that I just don't like, like I don't like having a lot of Windows machines. Yeah. Is this like, I had this thing with Oculus. I had a, you know, I had a, and and the problem with Oculus was, is it was like Windows would update. Oculus would break, right? Then I'd have to update Oculus, then Windows would update and Oculus would break breaking. It was like every two weeks I had to figure out why Oculus wasn't working. And then finally I just was like, okay, I'm just gonna wait for Quest <laugh>, like, you know, just <laugh>. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:15:37):
Uh, alright. So do it. And, uh, don't worry about it. It seems to be harmless. It's an important thing. Uh, for iOS, I, iPad, osm, macro os uh, not, apparently not watch or, uh, tv. I don't know. I didn't see any updates. Um,

Andy Ihnatko (00:15:54):
That's, that would be interesting cuz those are, uh, those are two apps without, uh, web browsers.

Leo Laporte (00:15:59):
Ah, Andrew, you have maybe hit upon it. Maybe it was WebKit. It, uh, apple has dropped the lawsuit against, uh, the, uh, executive Gerard Williams iii, who, uh, was a lead chip architect at Apple and left and founded Nuvia, which, uh, was then bought by, uh, was it Arm that Qualcomm bought new via Qualcomm. Uh, and Apple, uh, sued saying, uh, you brought, um, poached employees for Nuvia your startup, um, app Williams Fi counter filed his own lawsuit. Uh, because saying Apple tried to stop me from hiring people <laugh> and, and is recruiting from me. It's one of those back and forth

Alex Lindsay (00:16:45):
Apple rec and it's, go ahead. It's hard to, it's hard to do poaching or claim poaching in California. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (00:16:51):
That's a

Alex Lindsay (00:16:52):
Yeah. Not allowed to do that. Right.

Leo Laporte (00:16:54):
Apple, uh, has requested that the case be dismissed. Uh, doesn't explain why, uh, Williams had failed to persuade a judge to dismiss Apple's complaint. Maybe Apple and, uh, and Gerard have, uh, come to an agreement. I don't know. Anyway, it's over. So you can, you can holster your weapons kids.

Andy Ihnatko (00:17:16):
Yeah. That's a, there, there's, that's, you can always tell when there's no, it's, it's not a Samsung sort of lawsuit where there's no hatred, there's no real, there's basically, what are we hoping to get out of this? And I, both sides kind of realized that, okay, we're kind of done here.

Leo Laporte (00:17:30):
Knock it off. It was a knock it off. It

Andy Ihnatko (00:17:32):
Was lawsuit. It was a weird lawsuit anyway. It was basically a hackles raised out to each other to make sure that you're not gonna destroy each other. And then at some point, you just put it

Leo Laporte (00:17:40):
Away. By the way, Alex Reitz in our, uh, discord says nice haircut. You and I were at the, uh, <laugh>. You know, it's funny because it was, you mentioned last week you were gonna go get your haircut. We have the same, uh, haircut. And, uh, I, I had a haircut the day before and I said, you know, ox is coming tomorrow. She said, no, he's not. I said, well, you better check cuz I think he is

Alex Lindsay (00:18:00):
Pinged. And I, I had there, there's a complicated web thing to, to sign up and it's really complicated. And I, and I, and I didn't get to the end of it. So I was really glad that you did that because then she texted me and I was like, yeah, I'm coming. And, and, and I was like, oh no, I'm not coming. I don't have a little reminder. And then I got, we sorted it out.

Leo Laporte (00:18:18):
Pet peeve of mine. I don't every, every, everybody now has to have a web presence in web booking and stuff. Yeah. And they use the worst tools that are just out of date and they don't work very well. And they spin and they spin and they spin and it's so frustrating. And then I was an iot ot, hell over the, over my weekend trying to set up, I won't name names, but set up devices that were supposed to pair and didn't pair. And

Alex Lindsay (00:18:45):
I'm still

Leo Laporte (00:18:45):
Waiting. I have a waiting for that to settle. I, I'll name names. I have this thing called a garden with a y Do you know about this? Where you grow? It's a hydroponic thing for your home where you grow your own vegetables and fruits. It's an Instagram fell for Instagram again and, uh, <laugh>. And uh, it's so a hydroponic and it's, it's cool. It's got lights. And we've been growing lettuce in the, in the hall

Jason Snell (00:19:06):
<laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:19:07):
And, uh, and, uh, but it has to pair to your wifi. Why? Because who knows? Because everything has to pair to your wifi. Except it won't now, which means the lights aren't coming on. And I don't know, my, my, my vegetables are gonna die. And that's just very frustrating. Straighting. Anyway, so I ot they use the worst, cheapest possible chips that just don't pair to anything is the problem. And then they blame me. They say, well, you should restart your router. I said, I have 180 devices on this router, <laugh>, all of which are working fine. I don't think it's the router.

Alex Lindsay (00:19:38):
You know, you know, I, I did, I did get a hydroponic or something. My, my mother-in-law got us a hi. One of those hydroponic things with the light mm-hmm. <affirmative> that turns on and off. Yeah. I found that putting them in a pot by the window was ripping

Leo Laporte (00:19:50):
<laugh>. That's probably better. Like the sun is magic.

Alex Lindsay (00:19:53):
There was a little bit of back and forth. And then I was like, I'm gonna try the window. And it got really big really fast.

Leo Laporte (00:19:57):
I might have to move mine, uh, to the window. Come to think of it.

Jason Snell (00:20:00):
Yeah. We have an arrow garden, which is a similar thing. Yeah, yeah. Not, but not smart in any way. And other than having it turn off, its very bright light when we're like watching TV in the evening. Uh, yeah, we made, I had a salad the other day with lettuce from the arrow garden.

Leo Laporte (00:20:14):
Yeah. But do you have a time lapse of your, of your lettuce don't growing?

Jason Snell (00:20:18):
I don't, I d I

Leo Laporte (00:20:18):
Don't, do you have pictures? Right. You know, realtime pictures. See my vegetables? Can you see my vegetables?

Jason Snell (00:20:24):
Mm. Wow. <laugh> the kids move out. And

Leo Laporte (00:20:27):
When we were gone for three weeks, join vegetables when we were gone three weeks, uh, our 20 year old was monitoring the house. Mm-hmm. And Lisa says, you know, the, uh, the, the app says we need water. So he put a literally a cup of water in it. <laugh> the thing takes five gallons. <laugh>. Uh, when we got back, it was dry as a bone. There was a little bit of yellowing. I think I like your idea, Alex. Maybe, I don't know. We, we could I guess plant it outside and then the rain would water it and the could the sun would make it grow. Actually, one of the, I don't know about you guys. One of my experiences with this stuff, and Lisa agrees it doesn't have as much flavor as if it grew in dirt. Hmm. Yeah. Is that the case?

Jason Snell (00:21:06):
I don't, I haven't experienced that, but, oh, okay.

Leo Laporte (00:21:09):
Maybe I need more flavorful vegetables. Just

Jason Snell (00:21:11):
Pretend you're an astronaut <laugh>, you know, the go to Mars. Eat

Leo Laporte (00:21:14):
Potatoes

Alex Lindsay (00:21:16):
As much people listen to Mac Break going. What are they

Leo Laporte (00:21:17):
Talking about? Oh, nevermind.

Jason Snell (00:21:18):
I, we don't know either. Nevermind.

Leo Laporte (00:21:20):
Apple

Alex Lindsay (00:21:22):
Twig. Oh, we already have twig Oh, say this week in gardening. But it's already

Leo Laporte (00:21:24):
Taken. It's not taken. And I'm, you know, what I do now with this week in Google is I just stuff everything in there that has no other place. Just start doing an AI segment.

Jason Snell (00:21:32):
This is just like Google. Perfect.

Leo Laporte (00:21:34):
Yeah, it's Google. Yeah, exactly. That's exactly it. Apple to upgrade its watch operating system with new focus on widgets. Wait a minute, this is from Mark Germond. Haven't we been here before? This was the glances

Jason Snell (00:21:47):
Thing. It's a lot like the first. Yeah. Yeah. But the glances, I mean, again, everything in that first generation of watchOS was great.

Andy Ihnatko (00:21:53):
Yeah. Experimental. Yeah.

Jason Snell (00:21:54):
Yeah. But this is the, the idea here is that, um, widgets on iOS are actually already written using a system that could probably be just put on the watch. There's a lot of synergy between what's going on. I

Leo Laporte (00:22:05):
Like widgets on

Jason Snell (00:22:06):
IOS. Yeah, I do too. And the idea of getting more information on the watch screen that's not in an app, being able to sort of, they said Mark Gorman's report suggests it's gonna be a lot like the series, uh, watch face, where you'll have some cards that are basically these widgets. Mm-hmm. And you'll be able to scroll through them. And I think giving things to the, to the watch face easily and not having to go and dig through and launch an app on your watch, which absolutely is a good direction. I mean, who knows about the implementation

Leo Laporte (00:22:31):
Here? I miss Siri Watch Face. I kind of liked that. I like's still there. I want to get as much stuff on my watch as I can. Yeah. You know,

Andy Ihnatko (00:22:37):
I just, exactly. I have to say that that's, that was one of the most useful parts of the first iteration of Watch O West. I like, I like the idea of, you always have like a, the time in the corner of the screen no matter what's happening. But sometimes all I want to see is here. Please just keep, I just wanna post-it note that just tells me here is the names of the people that I'm meeting so I can keep glancing at it while I'm on the subway and remember how to greet the people when, when I'm in a certain mode. I just want this watch to contain a certain piece of realtime information that doesn't, like, as Jason says, doesn't require me to launch an app to get this going. Doesn't, uh, doesn't require me to, uh, set up a complication for this one watch phase for just one, this 1 45 minute period.

(00:23:18):
So I'm very, very excited to see how if, if this happens and they implement it really well, this could be a really, really great, uh, move forward. Al also, uh, I don't think I saw it in the show notes, but there's also, uh, there's also a rumor that, uh, uh, the next edition will also allow, will allow you to have Apple Health on, uh, on iPads, on other devices, on devices other than the iPhone. If that's true, that might imply that you can actually have, you can actually support an Apple watch without having necessarily owning an iPhone, which would be amazing for me. I've, I've, I've often complained that, gee, I got, I, I bought, I have an Apple, I have an Apple MacBook, I've got an Apple iPad. I've got two Apple iPads. I want to buy an Apple watch, but because I don't have an iPhone, I can, I don't get to, I don't get to play with the other kids. Uh, and but because if there were, if I had the ability to use, uh, use an AC actual Apple Watch, despite the fact that I've got, uh, an Android phone, I would be so into that ecosystem immediately.

Leo Laporte (00:24:14):
There was also a, uh, rumor, uh, with watch. This is all watch OS 10, the next watch os, which we'll find out about in about a month, uh, at wwdc. I think it's June 5th, the keynote. We'll be covering that live of course. Uh, as will you I'm sure. Jason. The colors

Jason Snell (00:24:29):
Six weeks away, hard to believe.

Leo Laporte (00:24:30):
Mm-hmm. It's not even that. Right. It's, uh, a little less now. Uh, we are May 2nd. So Yeah.

Jason Snell (00:24:36):
Five weeks away. Five weeks even. Harder to believe. Really? Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:24:38):
<laugh>,

Jason Snell (00:24:40):
Uh, amazing.

Leo Laporte (00:24:41):
And Apple Watch may work with multiple iPhones and iPads, which is interesting. Yeah, that's good. I'm not sure what is that, why?

Jason Snell (00:24:49):
Well, the, I mean, what Andy said is one example is if you can set it up with an iPad, which is just literally just put the watch app on the iPad. Yeah. And people do it because it's really integrated. The setup is really integrated with iOS and it does a lot of data goes back and forth. So it might be harder for them to do it with a Mac. They could, but it might be harder. But, but iPad OS is sitting right there. And if you're somebody like Andy who doesn't have an iPhone but does have an iPad, that's probably good enough, um, to get by and they just haven't done it. And I think their step one was letting you set up a kid's Apple watch without kids

Leo Laporte (00:25:23):
And seniors.

Jason Snell (00:25:23):
Yeah, yeah. Exactly. Where, where they don't have the iPhone there, somebody is setting up it up for them and the next phase and, you know, getting the app store to be independent and all of those sort of things. But one of the things that's still sitting out there is the fact that, as Andy put it, it, it is essentially a mandatory iPhone accessory. That's what it is. It can't, you can't use it if you don't have an iPhone. And so this would be a nice step, I think. And some people, like, I don't use my iPhone nearly as much as I use my iPad. So like for me, I, I'm always frustrated when Apple does things that are only on the iPhone because I, you know, sometimes my iPhone isn't around. It's, you know, in another room or I'm outside the house with just my cellular Apple watch.

Leo Laporte (00:26:05):
Good. I, you know, pay attention to the Apple Watch. It's a good thing. And we love it. And, uh, make, we'll call it the, get Andy on the Apple Watch ecosystem feature <laugh>, we'll call that. And

Jason Snell (00:26:16):
It's, you know, I think it's been around long enough now. It's coming up nine years that, um, it's time for a little bit of a rethink. I think they've learned a lot about how people use the watch now. And, and back eight years ago, we might not have been like, what, what do you mean de-emphasizing apps? Apps or the lifeblood of all computing platforms. And now we're like, you know, I use apps on my watch, but like, that's not where I live. I, I'm living at the, at the top level and, and we've learned a lot and Apple's learned a lot. And so it's time to put some of that into practice.

Andy Ihnatko (00:26:46):
Pl plus listen, don't overlook the fact that there's just nothing quite like the Apple Watch. Uh, on the Android, on the Android platform, the closest that you come is, uh, Samsung's, uh, Samsung, the Samsung gear watches. But you have, you can't use them without signing up for like a hundred different Samsung accounts, which is terrible. They're, they're, they're big and chunky. They're, they're like diver style watches. They're not like elegant, nice fashion watches. It's, uh, we, we've seen how Apple is willing to sell a, uh, a $30 air tag, uh, or a hundred dollars AirPods if it means, you know, having more money, selling more things to more people. My goodness. The things that they would, the, the, the volume that they would sell to, to the Android market if the, if Android users could actually use an Apple watch and like, and like Jason said, not nece not necessarily by creating a, a watch app for an for for Android, but simply by acknowledging that, gee, this is already a pretty much a standalone product as it is. I believe that we could, we could sign it up onto the network, uh, onto a wifi network just by itself. Or worse comes to worse, uh, have a, the same way that you, uh, sign onto a service on Apple tv where it just simply says, go to this URL <laugh>, go on on any web browser, type in this code. Uh, and then it'll communicate through the internet to this watch o over the wifi network. And then we'll set it up for you.

Leo Laporte (00:28:08):
Would you, if, let me think though, if you didn't have a phone setting up your watch, but an iPad setting up your watch, how would that work if you, I mean, you're not gonna take your iPad with you everywhere.

Jason Snell (00:28:21):
I, well, I mean, first off, they have a cellular model that is theoretically working standalone. And if you're on wifi and on a wifi network, you could theoretically talk to a data store, whether it's iCloud or even the cellular network to the wife, even back to your device. One of the, you know, but I do that. I go outside all the time with Without your phone. Without my phone. And it works fine. You can

Leo Laporte (00:28:41):
Receive calls. You can place

Jason Snell (00:28:43):
Calls. Yeah. There are certain apps that won't do it because they really want the iPhone to be there, but there are also lots where it works fine.

Leo Laporte (00:28:49):
Well, and, and those apps would have to fix themselves.

Jason Snell (00:28:50):
They they would, yes. They need to learn about what they've done. And think about that. Think about

Leo Laporte (00:28:55):
What

Jason Snell (00:28:55):
You've done. Sit in the corner. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:28:56):
Yep. Uh, speaking of air tags, apple and Google both have teamed up to w uh, work together to prevent lost item trackers from being used to track people without their permission. This is something that's been a little bit of an issue for, uh, apple. It's been an issue for tile. Google does not yet sell tags. Right. But there's been a strong rumor for a long time, Andy, you cover, uh, Android and material material, I guess that they're gonna do that. So maybe, maybe this is a sign that Google's gonna announce something at Google io.

Andy Ihnatko (00:29:25):
Yeah. And, and it's also, it is just long overdue. This is, this is a valuable market. This is a, this is a device that people want, but there's just no safe way to market this thing. I mean, uh, the

Leo Laporte (00:29:36):
Apple makes an Android app that works like about half the time and you have to know about it. It's, and you have to have it installed. <laugh>.

Andy Ihnatko (00:29:44):
Yeah. I mean it's, this is, this is both companies doing things. Particular Apple doing something that's very, very responsible. What they're proposing is that they're basically, they've already gotten together and proposed a specification that would be platform agnostic. It would just be a, a resource that anybody could put into anything. Uh, it's a, a proposed industry specification to help help combat misuse of Bluetooth location, device market tracking. Uh, and it's, it's, it's basically, uh, it, it basically means that no matter what your alert system is, it will work with any compatible devices,

Leo Laporte (00:30:14):
Samsung Tile or air tags or whatever Google might announce. And it's built into the os, iPhone and Android. And that, that's, uh, kind of what you want. So that if somebody's tracking you, if some, so just for people who haven't experienced this, I experience it all the time. It will pop a message saying there's an air tag following you around and it's not yours. Uh, you should know about this. Have you guys seen this? Oh, yeah.

Andy Ihnatko (00:30:39):
It would be interesting. I, I, I read it. Uh, uh, they, there's a, there, uh, some simultaneous press releases on, uh, Google and Apple's, uh, news sites. And neither of them answer a certain question. But whether or not this common specification on both platforms would also extend the find my network so that now every Android phone is also helping you locate, uh, locate the, find my devices, which would in itself be pretty darn interesting. Cuz if I could also locate a lost phone or a lost Chromebook based on, uh, the fact that someone with an iPhone has recently passed by wherever I left it behind, that would be pretty slick too. Um,

Alex Lindsay (00:31:17):
No, one, one of the things I'm, I'm kind of curious about though, is that what happens if someone steals something of yours that has that air tag? You don't necessarily wanna turn that off <laugh>. Like, you know, like they, you know, they, it's tracking them now because they stole your bag, or, or what do airlines do when they just decide, you know, they're gonna turn off people's air tags if they're, you know, like I put all my cases all now have air tags in them and, you know, give, I'm not super excited about the ideas of the airline or baggage or whatever deciding to turn off my air tags.

Leo Laporte (00:31:48):
How would they turn it off? You mean find them and take,

Alex Lindsay (00:31:50):
If it's, if it says that you're being tracked.

Leo Laporte (00:31:53):
Oh, they would see it.

Alex Lindsay (00:31:55):
They would see it and then they would like

Leo Laporte (00:31:57):
The airplane, put a little iPhone in the airplane. <laugh>, they could see all the air tags in the well

Alex Lindsay (00:32:02):
Or the airplane are all sitting there. They're all sitting in the bay when they go through. And, and, and I just, you know, there's a, so I, you know, I definitely see why you don't want to track people, but I think that what will end up happening is it'll affect a lot more people. We'll see, because I don't think that, I don't think that many people are tracking other people with their tags.

Leo Laporte (00:32:17):
Well, there are better ways to do

Alex Lindsay (00:32:18):
It. Probably the edge case. There's a lot of better ways to do it. Yeah. And so I think it's an edge case and I think when they solve that edge case, the, the less edge case is going to be valid reasons why there's a tracker that happens to be going along. Someone who took something from you or a baggage claim or something else and it gets turned off. Right. Um, you know, I think that that's gonna be a more likely thing to occur than, uh, then, then it's, then it, people actually tracking each

Leo Laporte (00:32:41):
Other. I'm actually surprised that, uh, airlines don't have Faraday cages in their, in their luggage compartments. Right. So, I mean, you don't want anything transmitting out of the luggage compartment. I bet they

Alex Lindsay (00:32:50):
Do. I don't You see it once it takes off, you don't really know it. I, yeah, so far I, my experience has been, once it takes off, it doesn't, you know, your phones aren't really getting anywhere. Right. They're just burning up battery trying to find something. Right. And so every once in a while you'll see it appear. But overall, um, uh, the, um, uh, but overall, I think that, you know, when we're doing it's mostly,

Leo Laporte (00:33:11):
It's mostly when your bags are on the ground that they might wanna, when I,

Alex Lindsay (00:33:14):
They might

Leo Laporte (00:33:14):
Want you not want you to know we've sent them on to Philadelphia <laugh>.

Alex Lindsay (00:33:17):
Well, like a good example is, uh, we, we gave it to a shipper who's a really good shipper. I'm not gonna name them. Yeah. Cuz we, we like using them. But, but you know, we have an expectation that, you know, I gave them 10 bags that had, you know, quarter million dollars of hardware in them. And I expect that to go to a warehouse. And when I looked at the, the, the trackers, I saw this little cloud that was at somebody's house,

Leo Laporte (00:33:35):
<laugh>, oh, that's not what you want. You know, and then,

Alex Lindsay (00:33:37):
And then it went down and it drops us off and, and then it, and that was fine. And then it, yeah. Then when they picked it up, they went to somebody's house again and then they went off. You know, but they obviously had spent the night at a house. Now maybe they put it in a garage. Maybe they, but it, I have to admit the, the shininess of that of that company. Yeah. Little, little worn off, you know. Cause I, I was expecting to go to some kind of secure facility.

Leo Laporte (00:33:58):
No, all the companies now do weird stuff like that. In fact, we had a, I saw a u p s van out in the lot pulled up next to a sedan and the guy was taking packages off the u p s truck and stuffing them into the sedan, like filling up the backseat. And I thought, should I call the cops on this? And then it turns out that what they do is they hire these freelance unformed people to do deliveries. Uh, and that's what's going on. They're, they're taking some offloading them. And maybe that guy decides to park his Buick in his garage overnight. Well, it was,

Alex Lindsay (00:34:26):
It was less expensive than sended by air. So I'm sure that they have a different way of doing it. But it was a guy, you know, it's a guy with his van. Yeah. And it's good. It's a nice van when it showed up and we filled it up with,

Leo Laporte (00:34:34):
Yeah. See, there you go. It was just some freelancer. Yeah,

Alex Lindsay (00:34:37):
Yeah,

Leo Laporte (00:34:37):
Yeah. Apple and Google said the features will be completed by the end of the year and implemented in future versions of iOS and Android. But this is the right direction. Anyway. It's kind of nice to see Apple and Google doing something together, hand in hand, arm and arm. Yes. This

Andy Ihnatko (00:34:51):
Is the, the, the last time we saw that, that Apple Google logo was of course, when they did Covid, uh, uh, covid, uh, the

Leo Laporte (00:34:57):
Covid thing. Yeah. And matter, right. Matter. The matter standard isn't the, aren't Apple and Google both in the matter. Yeah. I don't think they did it right. Press release

Andy Ihnatko (00:35:06):
For that. Oh, right. They're both, they're both, they're both on board. They didn't develop it together. Right. I mean, I'm looking at, I'm looking at the, the draft pur the draft, uh, specification here. And it really does seem very thorough about the difference between, uh, making sure b basically it, it controls like when the tracker should advertise its presence and when it should advertise its presence.

Leo Laporte (00:35:25):
Oh, that's good. Uh,

Andy Ihnatko (00:35:26):
Thought about it. When, when should be Yeah, exactly. So it, it basically goes from case to case to case to case between like, if someone has activated it saying that, Hey, this thing is lost, please, uh, please broadcast your location versus someone who's trying to track, uh, they know that I have an air tag inside my bag, and so they can track me by tracking my location, uh, via that air tracker. Or having a air, an air tag that doesn't belong to me, that's been slipped into my luggage or slipped into my car. It does seem to be very, very thorough. And there is a lot of, as you'd expect a lot of language about basically making sure that this doesn't screw up people's lives when they don't want it be, when they don't wanna be bothered by, uh, it, it doesn't protect it. Sorry about that. <laugh>. It doesn't prevent the feature from working as it's supposed to work also doesn't cause uh, problems for people who want this thing to remain silent.

Alex Lindsay (00:36:15):
I mean, I I I I definitely think that it'll be interesting to see how things like airlines use it because not only I, but other people have been able to tell the airline more accurately than it knows Yeah. Where our bags are <laugh>. Like, you know, we've gone, you know, like I, I've, I, FedEx couldn't find one of my bags and I was like, uh, it's in the LAX FedEx and the back corner. Yeah. That probably

Jason Snell (00:36:35):
Drives him crazy. Like,

Alex Lindsay (00:36:36):
Here is, you knows in the last little, like I know exactly where that every knows

Jason Snell (00:36:39):
Now. And I know there's at least one airline that sort of said, don't do it. It's like, okay, Luhan

Andy Ihnatko (00:36:44):
Briefly said that we were gonna

Jason Snell (00:36:45):
Ban it. Just don't do it. Well, what are you gonna do? And the same is true with this, which is what are you gonna do? You're not gonna, I mean Right. Everybody, they're, they're gonna know that they're being tracked. And I think a a any, uh, a delivery company's gonna know that they're being tracked. I, I, I think that that's okay. I would say though that the two things that are across purposes here do seem to be people who are trying to prevent thefts and people who are travi trying to prevent stalking, because those are similar profiles. So that's the tricky part. Um, we just had, there's, it's even in our show list, um, the mayor of New York City <laugh> stood up and said, we're gonna put air tags in people's cars and use 'em to stop car theft. It's like, what? Okay. But me also, yeah.

Andy Ihnatko (00:37:24):
Someone, someone someone donated, someone donated 500 air tags available for free to people, uh, if if to, to add to their cars and, and the police are actually also recommending air tags. It's a

Jason Snell (00:37:36):
Terrible idea.

Andy Ihnatko (00:37:38):
Or, yeah. This

Alex Lindsay (00:37:39):
Is, this is why we talk about people who run the government oftentimes are digital children <laugh>. And they don't understand there are so many better ways to do this. This is as bad as Adams. Like,

Jason Snell (00:37:47):
It's Eric Adams saying, uh,

Leo Laporte (00:37:50):
I'm gonna get take my salary in Bitcoin. Which by the way, he quickly changed his tuneup

Jason Snell (00:37:54):
<laugh>, a lot of, a lot of people I know refer to him as mayor. That guy now that guy, right? This is that. Yeah. It's that guy. Uh, but this is, yeah, this is such a weird thing. But I mean, again, I get the impulse. My, my son when he, you know, started go riding his bike to high school, I mounted an air tag, uh, in a, you know, undisclosed location, uh, in case it got stolen. Like I totally get it. Even though Apple says this is not for tracking stolen items, it's for tracking lost items. And I know they say that, but that is at cross purposes. If they make this really good so that you know immediately that you're being stalked, it also means that whoever stole your bike knows that they're being tracked. Right. And they can look for the tracker, look for the air tag and remove it. Yeah. And that's just how it is. I mean, you just have to deal with those two things being across purposes. And I, I think in the end, trying to protect people will probably win. And I think that's the, uh, right call.

Leo Laporte (00:38:45):
Uh, so the air techs, there's 500 of them. How many people in the Bronx? <laugh>? More than a million. Uh, but, uh, so 500 of you lucky people will get air tags. N Y P D, uh, Eric Adams said, the mayor said that guy will not track the air tags being given away. Instead, when owners realize their car is missing, they can notify police who will track the stolen, stolen vehicle with the owner's permission. How you gonna do that? You're gonna give you, I'll give you a log into my Apple account. I'm so not, uh, I think,

Jason Snell (00:39:17):
I think that may just be don't take the law into your own hands. Call the police. Well see,

Leo Laporte (00:39:21):
That's the real thing. That's the real risk is, okay, now I'm gonna add it to my fine mine. I'm gonna go track that guy down.

Jason Snell (00:39:26):
And that's dangerous.

Leo Laporte (00:39:27):
You don't want that. Yeah. Um, okay. Um,

Jason Snell (00:39:34):
Air tags is a technology that has turned out to not be as revolutionary as we maybe hope that it might be <laugh> in, in a way that, you know, some, some technologies do change the world, but air tags, I think, uh, maybe not one of them. Isn't

Leo Laporte (00:39:45):
There LoJack, there's some, there are ways to do this. That's what LoJack did, right? Yeah. Oh

Jason Snell (00:39:49):
Yeah. I mean, there are other tools for stalkers that are much more efficient than this. And

Leo Laporte (00:39:52):
You can buy a GPS for less than an air tag and

Jason Snell (00:39:55):
For cars. Yeah. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:39:56):
The 500 air tags are being provided by the Association for a better New York. Mm-hmm. <affirmative> or Abni, a nonprofit dedicated to the continuous growth and renewal of New York City's people's communities and businesses. Mm-hmm. <affirmative> the mayor urged all car owners to consider air tags for their vehicles. Oh, I mean, and the

Alex Lindsay (00:40:15):
Thing is, is that the things that have been more effective in cities that have decided to do this is to you go to you, you, you go, you take the cars that are most likely to be stolen. They know that statistically you take it to the locations that are most likely to be stolen. They know what that statistically is, and you start baiting it. You know, you start dropping bait and you have gps low checks, and then you don't do anything with it. You let it, you let it roam around. You let people steal it. You let them take them, you let them, you know, and what you do is you start building up a, you know, profile of the entire network and then you take down the entire network. Right. That's how, that's how that, that's

Leo Laporte (00:40:43):
Because it's not individuals stealing professional just chop shots. No, it's

Alex Lindsay (00:40:46):
A network. Yeah. And so you see, you know, and, and if you, you know, depending on what, how much data you have, you can attach their phone position to the right, to the tracker, then you follow as soon as, as soon as the phone is going the same direction as the car, as the tracker after it's been stolen, every phone that drives along in that thing becomes part of that net <laugh>, you know, that that, that they, that they pull in. And that at that point they're able to, you know, when you're wondering why they want all that metadata <laugh>, like it's because, you know, you start taking all that information and that information is not the, the metadata that NSA gets. That's just, that's just, uh, antenna and metadata. And, and so once you have all of that, that information, you can build a very complex web and, but they, they're choosing, you know, a lot of times they're choosing not to do that for a variety of reasons. But, but that is the, that's can be done. And that's how there are certain cities that have gotten rid of a lot of theft by letting it just run for six months, figuring out who is who and then just arresting.

Leo Laporte (00:41:43):
Yeah. That's the better way to do it. Yeah. Yeah. I watched The Wire. I know. Uh, you gotta roll up those networks. You gotta roll 'em up. Uh, apparently this is in response to the TikTok trend of stealing Kia's Hyundais because they're fairly easy to steal. And of course, Kia, uh, has responded by uh, adding, uh, software updates and uh, and lockout features and things like that. So maybe it's an

Alex Lindsay (00:42:07):
I see. Now I problem, I use air tags in my cars mostly to get back to why Apple.

Leo Laporte (00:42:12):
I know why you do. Cuz you lost your car.

Alex Lindsay (00:42:14):
Can't find my car. <laugh>. Like I get back and I, I go where, because I haven't traveled enough, my, that little part of my brain isn't working anymore. I'm like, I don't remember whether I was on level three or level four <laugh>. And so I, I know

Leo Laporte (00:42:24):
Why you do it. Super used, but actually, um,

Alex Lindsay (00:42:27):
I have no car that anyone would wanna steal. Like my car is like, I'm

Leo Laporte (00:42:30):
Thinking don't, don't, like, I feel like Apple Maps and Google Maps put a pin in where you park.

Jason Snell (00:42:36):
Yeah, they do. When you disconnect automatically if you're on Bluetooth and a car, um, and then you turn it off, it sees the Bluetooth disconnect and it drops essentially a special pin Yeah. To say your parked car is here. Although that doesn't necessarily help you on a multi-level part. I guess

Leo Laporte (00:42:48):
That's

Alex Lindsay (00:42:49):
The problem is the problem is that it shows me where it is, but it, I got this is, it's

Leo Laporte (00:42:53):
In this garage. You knew that?

Alex Lindsay (00:42:54):
Yeah, I did in sfo. I found, I knew where it was. Yeah. But I didn't know what, I couldn't remember what floor, so it, it was

Leo Laporte (00:43:00):
Okay. I've done the walk of shame where you go around with your clicker on every floor going, so here is it,

Jason Snell (00:43:05):
Here, here is a pro tip for everybody. When you park in a big parking lot, take a picture of it with your cell phone. I do. So that you can come back later and you know where it is. That's what I do. Yeah. Take

Alex Lindsay (00:43:13):
A picture of the, of the letter. Like

Jason Snell (00:43:15):
80 of the, of the pool that's got the letter on it. Exactly. Yeah, exactly.

Leo Laporte (00:43:18):
Pro tip. That's

Jason Snell (00:43:19):
That. A pro tip. Yeah. And if it, well, it, it, I mean I, I thought it was a pro tip 15 years ago and we're still here, so I guess it's still appropriate. Hasn't retired yet. And then the other thing is, if you've got a rental car, take a picture of the license plate so you can identify it so you know which car is

Leo Laporte (00:43:31):
Yours. Yeah, that's a

Jason Snell (00:43:32):
Great idea. These are, we have phone pocket that you should never get lost again. I

Alex Lindsay (00:43:36):
Thinks. I found that there are, for a while, GM only had 27 keys and I actually did successfully walk up to the wrong car. Oh no. Put my, my key in, open it up and it worked. And like I opened it up, sat in the car and said, I'm in the wrong car, <laugh>. Oh my God. I have no idea how I got here. And

Leo Laporte (00:43:52):
So that's not good. Holy cow. It is true that a half of my pictures now are of receipts of menus. Oh yeah. Yeah. Of cars license of

Jason Snell (00:44:01):
Nothing like iCloud shared photos to share your pictures of your license plate in that parking garage with your loved one.

Leo Laporte (00:44:07):
Google Photos has a nice feature where it looks for that stuff. And then, uh, says you wanna move this into archives. Good

Alex Lindsay (00:44:13):
Idea. You know, I used to have it on photos. I used to just share my, my photos with my Apple TV and then my, my wife and my kids could see what I was doing. Yeah. All over the world. Cause I'm traveling, I would take all these pictures and my wife finally said, you gotta stop doing it. I was like, did you don't like the photos? She's like, I'm just tired of looking at receipts. Like there's like receipts floating around on the day. On the, uh, on the, on the tv.

Leo Laporte (00:44:31):
Yeah. The last five pictures I've taken, one are of the menu, two, three are of computer screens, <laugh> and uh, and four of my lettuce. So

Alex Lindsay (00:44:40):
My last one is just the picture of the ethernet port. Me trying to figure out where in the facility I can get ethernet for the show.

Leo Laporte (00:44:45):
I have a lot of pictures of, uh, of the backs of TVs and of, you know, so what, you know, what model it is and stuff like that.

Jason Snell (00:44:52):
Oh yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:44:54):
But that's what, you know, thank goodness for the camera phone. And I have to say, I, uh, I did not miss, um, a nice camera on my, on our trip. I was able to do, get everything I wanted with the iPhone. Um, and it was convenient because the iPhone's doing gps, so I know exactly where the picture was. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, I was able to add it to, uh, day one. We talked about this before, but it's just, it's just nice that it's all, and you in, in wonder, have you built

Alex Lindsay (00:45:17):
Up the habit that you always wipe the lens? I wipe, wipe everything. You're about to take a photo that I care about you. You can always tell 'em about to Cause I wipe the lens. Yeah. I like, I wiped the lens. I wiped the lens. Cuz otherwise when someone sends me a misty photo, I'm always like that. Oh,

Leo Laporte (00:45:28):
It's greasy. I kind of think about, ooh, what's on there? And it does

Alex Lindsay (00:45:32):
That really fast. It like, it's, it's funny. It only takes a couple, like, put it in your pocket before you wipe the lens.

Leo Laporte (00:45:37):
Samsung Samsungs will tell you to wipe your lens. You

Jason Snell (00:45:40):
Need a microfiber lined pocket <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:45:43):
Oh, that's a good idea.

Andy Ihnatko (00:45:44):
Same, same thing. Same thing with Google's with the pixel phones. That will tell you that it appears that your, it appears that your lens is blurred.

Leo Laporte (00:45:50):
Oh, so it's an Android feature maybe? Yeah. That's nice. You know, you got schitz, you got schmutz on the lens.

Jason Snell (00:45:58):
Apple will have a little wind like wiper blade that extends out of the phone and, and then pulls back in our two D two style. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:46:06):
I just wanna warn you ahead of time, I'm not gonna go down, go down the path of what the iPhone fifteen's gonna look like or be like, or buttons, or no buttons or all that stuff round.

Alex Lindsay (00:46:15):
Okay. It's, it's round up

Leo Laporte (00:46:16):
Until, until we, until we really run outta news and then bets <laugh>, iPhone 15, the disc. We

Andy Ihnatko (00:46:21):
Gotta, we gotta, we gotta put some acorns away for the, for the long,

Leo Laporte (00:46:25):
Long winter. Stir away from some nuts.

Jason Snell (00:46:26):
You were gone. We were desperate. Okay. It's

Leo Laporte (00:46:28):
Pretty bad. We've <laugh> it. Get bad eating.

Jason Snell (00:46:31):
I have no regrets.

Leo Laporte (00:46:31):
Yeah, no regrets. <laugh> uh, ww d c cannot come soon enough. Okay. Then we will have ma much grist for the mill. Indeed. In fact, it might be worth $3,000 to buy that thing so that we could just talk about it for the next six months. Yeah,

Jason Snell (00:46:47):
But you're not gonna be able to buy it until probably the end

Alex Lindsay (00:46:49):
Of the year, I think. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:46:52):
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(00:51:00):
Uh, pH this is a I'll tell you what. Just go out and search for your name and you'll know why you need this. Delete me. Join delete me.com/twi. Offer code TWiT, please use that offer code too. So they know you, uh, you saw it on Mac Break Weekly. Uh, let's see here. Apple's going to redo its first Apple Store, ironically at the same time as their employees are about to <laugh> unionize <laugh>, maybe, I don't know if there's a, something going on there. Uh, the very first Apple store was outside Washington dc Towson's, Centen, Tyson's Center.

Jason Snell (00:51:35):
Yeah. Tyson.

Leo Laporte (00:51:36):
There's a Towsons. Maryland, but that's, this is Tyson's, Virginia. It's actually technically McLean,

Jason Snell (00:51:40):
Right? Towson is where the

Leo Laporte (00:51:41):
Union, that's where the union is.

Jason Snell (00:51:43):
Communication is in Tow

Leo Laporte (00:51:43):
Corner. Oh, okay. So, I'm sorry. I apologize. Tyson's Corner. We don't Tyson Center. We don't know if they're gonna unionize or not. That's Towson. I, I, that's my confusion. Not

Jason Snell (00:51:52):
Tyson and Towson.

Leo Laporte (00:51:53):
Thank you for tossing Tyson bringing that up. Apparently both Apple opened two stores in May of 2001 22 years ago. It's hard to

Jason Snell (00:52:01):
Believe. Yeah. Can

Leo Laporte (00:52:02):
You believe that one was in Glendale? But because the Virginia site is on the East Coast, it counts as the first

Jason Snell (00:52:08):
Yeah. This is a long, uh, debate. Actually. All the people in Glendale are like, no, no. Glendale Galleria is number one. Absolutely

Leo Laporte (00:52:15):
No. Three by three hours

Jason Snell (00:52:16):
By three hours. It wasn't, it was number two in Apple, you know, admitted as much in saying, I don't, they've probably done that before. Been saying this is store number one and it's gonna be redone now

Leo Laporte (00:52:25):
It's gonna be like jobs. And was, they're gonna call it store zero.

Jason Snell (00:52:27):
I, I remember, I mean, we, we had a freelancer in Glendale covering the opening of the Apple Store. Wow. For Back World. And I cannot believe that that was

Leo Laporte (00:52:34):
22, 23 years ago, years ago. Here's what it looks like right now. They've got it all boarded up cause it's in a mall and they've got a little sign that says hello. Period again. Period. The first ever Appro store opened 22 years ago at Tyson's Corner. Soon we look forward to welcoming you to this newly reimagined space. Ooh, wow.

Andy Ihnatko (00:52:58):
That's, that's gonna be interesting. I I, I actually visited, I was in, I was in the area on business and of course of all of all the things to visit, like in Maryland and near DC it's like, oh no, I wanna see store Apple store number one. And it's, it's very, very nice. But it's not terribly it, as it was, it wasn't terribly well lit. It was definitely like very old school. So I can imagine them putting like a lot more lighting in there, giving it the, giving it the modern touch. I was trying to look at those pictures though. I was trying to figure out, I've never seen that version of the Apple logo with the six colors vertically striped in three DMI as a 3D suite before. Has, has anybody else seen one?

Leo Laporte (00:53:37):
Huh? Hmm. Huh. Nope.

Jason Snell (00:53:42):
They've got the, uh, the, the invite for the wwdc for WWDC has a six color in a few different configurations, but I'm not sure in that one.

Leo Laporte (00:53:55):
Mm. You can go to the, uh, department map.store/time machine and download all of the historic pictures of the original, uh, apple stores. May 19th, 2001, 22 years ago, uh, that store opened, you know, uh, before that people probably forgot that you would go to a Best Buy and there'd be an Apple corner <laugh>, a fly specked, neglected Apple corner where some poor Apple employee had to stand and wait for people to come over. And, uh, apple was quite wise. They said, if we're gonna succeed in a Windows world, we're gonna have to have our own stores where we can really, uh, position our our products. And it worked. They,

Andy Ihnatko (00:54:40):
They, they weren't competing on commission. So as a result, the people who worked at those stores weren't really incentivized to even keep, not not only not incentivized to sell Max, but also just to keep the display models running. They would, they would just simply be dead screens. Yeah. So yeah, this is, they, they, they did such an amazing job of turning, uh, all each of these Apple, apple stores into an embassy of, you know, of, of the Apple faithful. Uh, and basically giving turn, turning one of the apple's biggest problems. Meaning where do you go to get these things serviced? Uh, where do you go to actually find one of these things for sale and working to one of these biggest advantages that, well, if it breaks or if you have any problems with it, or if you need instruction on how to use iMovie, you go to your mall <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:55:20):
Yeah.

Andy Ihnatko (00:55:21):
Which is probably for most people in the country, in the, in the, in this country, at least about a 20 minute drive away.

Alex Lindsay (00:55:26):
It's, it's been really powerful when you look at what Apple does with the, with their stores. You know, whether it's the classes, you know, basic instruction, you know, tech support as well as selling things. So there's a lot of flow. And I think a lot of other companies like Microsoft have had a hard time reproducing that, of having something there that, that, you know, they've tried and they just, it's just very hard to get that magic just right. Um, but you, you know, I often wander into Apple Stores for no reason. <laugh>. Like, I just, I'm just gonna wander in. I'm gonna play with a couple things I don't own and then I'm gonna wander out again. But when you look at the, uh, my kids go for their classes, the classes are unbelievable. Like, these aren't like little, like we're we made up a little class locally, it's like, here's how to do video and you're gonna watch a video of Zach King do something, and then someone who's been trained to teach you how to do the thing that Zach King did is now gonna walk through it with you.

(00:56:16):
And it's been, you know, obviously they've done it a thousand times and they probably practiced it a hundred times before they were allowed to do it in public. And so there's all these things that, you know, just really, really well Applesque designed pieces that keep people bringing, coming in. And, and I think that they've been great. I I, I kind of missed the theaters. A lot of the, there were theaters and a lot of them that when they got remodeled, they took a lot of the theaters out. We, we did a Mac break, I think, or at Le or TWiT in one in the theater in San Francisco. We did. Um, yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:56:43):
Uh, and I got all sweaty <laugh>. I have memories of that. I didn't even have pictures of that. I got all sweaty because I was the only, it was just me. I ran all the wires, all the cables and stuff. And we were sitting down there. It was great. Um, and we had a whole full crowd, uh, in the theater. It was really fun.

Alex Lindsay (00:57:00):
It was great. Cuz the Apple, the old San Francisco store was, um, literally across the block from our office. And so

Leo Laporte (00:57:06):
You were friends with Travis the manager?

Alex Lindsay (00:57:09):
Yeah, I spoke, I spoke well cause I spoke over there like once a month. Yeah. Cause like, you know, I'd be like, oh, it's time to walk over. I remember walk across

Leo Laporte (00:57:14):
And I remember sitting, uh, in Herba Buena Center during a keynote and you would text Travis, hold one of each for me, please. Yeah. <laugh>. It's good to have friends. You know, the, the, the,

Alex Lindsay (00:57:28):
You know, if it's, uh, it does, it does help. Yeah. But, but I think that the, I don't know if it was Travis. I think the, the, yeah, it was some, someone else there, some guy

Leo Laporte (00:57:35):
Trouble, but,

Alex Lindsay (00:57:35):
But it was, it was another person over there that was able to hold it.

Leo Laporte (00:57:38):
Things would, would, I don't know why the name Travis stuck in my memory and what it did. Yeah,

Jason Snell (00:57:42):
Exactly. I wanna shout out, um, to Michael Steber, who does a sub all about Apple retail called tabletops. Oh. Um, michael steber.sub.com. And, uh, he, I think he's the one who first noticed the Tysons Corner thing with the, with the Yeah. It's like little apple slices, Andy, like little, a little apple slices in the six Apple. Oh,

Leo Laporte (00:58:01):
It is weird. Yeah. That's on the, uh, that's actually on the thing that we were just describing. Yeah. Which is blocking off view of on the wall what they're gonna do.

Jason Snell (00:58:08):
Yeah. Um, but Michael is the one who he did, uh, you probably remember he did those, uh, those sort of 3D walkthroughs where you could see sort of original Apple stores and actually read the things on the shelves and all of that. And he's really proven to be, uh, a historian of Apple Store lore on top of everything else. It's just, I I think it's one of the great things about the internet that you find people who are super into a topic and, and can take it on. And it's rare to have them take it on and do it as well as Michael Sieber has done with his coverage of this stuff.

Leo Laporte (00:58:38):
This is actually, I like this weird slices. Uh, apple,

Alex Lindsay (00:58:42):
You know, Apple's gotten in the last probably five years, Apple's gotten a lot more creative about what they do with their logo at, for at, for a long time. It was like the logo is the logo, right. But even some of the pre-show that you've seen in keynotes where the logo's constantly changing, uh, shape and, and color and everything else, they've, they've definitely kind of played with, been a lot more playful with their brand than they have in the past. At

Jason Snell (00:59:03):
Their Brooklyn event where they, which was 2018, I think when they did the, uh, the iPad Pro in the MacBook, um, one, one MacBook there. Anyway, they, they handed out to everybody who attended, um, stickers. And they were all different, but they were all stickers designed by, I don't even know. I think they said who, um, yeah. And they're all the Apple logo, but with different designs on the logo. And I thought that is, I mean, first off, what a move to do that and to have the confidence that your logo can have anything on it as long as it's shaped properly, that not only can you put that out publicly and say, yes, this sticker is not a knockoff. Apple made these stickers and handed them out to members of the media Yeah. With their logo, with this weird design on it that came from some artist somewhere. Because they can, they just are not worried. They know it all means Apple. And that that's the power of that silhouette and also the confidence Apple has with their branding.

Leo Laporte (00:59:56):
This actually started with m MTV back in, uh, in the eighties when MTV got their logo designed. Uh, they got, they saw a bunch of different prototypes for it, and they, they told the design shop, Hey, you know what, let's use 'em all. Hmm. And that actually became a signature element of MTV was, you know, they would have all sorts of artists animations and animate these and do all sorts of crazy things with the logo. That was a brilliant move. And I think Bravo to Apple because, you know, Apple's so brand conscious and so protective of their brand. I'm sure their inclination is, oh, don't mess with the, the Apple. Well, most companies, most large companies, that's their inclination. Sure. They have Don't mess

Jason Snell (01:00:36):
With why, why mess with it. Right?

Leo Laporte (01:00:38):
Right. Yeah. Yeah. And you and yeah, and

Jason Snell (01:00:40):
I think Apple has raised right. They're, they're like so far above the bar now that they can, they're like, yeah, we do whatever. As long as it's the shape. Right. Everybody will get it. Everybody knows it. Right. And then, and then creativity is part of Apple's brand. So having it be, I mean, step one for Steve Jobs was to take the rainbow away, but then remember they were individual colors for a while that you could get even on people's business cards. People Oh yeah. Like choose you'd have a blue or which color they wanted. And, uh, and now they are, um, really leaning into just playing around with it and, and not being afraid of the rainbow too, which is somebody who named his site after the six color apple rainbow <laugh>. I love that. They keep bringing it back in playful ways.

Leo Laporte (01:01:18):
Yeah. You should really be the expert, the keeper of this.

Jason Snell (01:01:20):
I, I need to start a sub all about the Apple rainbow. Yeah. Well

Leo Laporte (01:01:24):
Follow, ask Michael how that go to

Jason Snell (01:01:25):
Six colors.com. It'll be fun. Yeah.

Andy Ihnatko (01:01:27):
Maybe, you know, you know, may maybe you should sue Apple and to own the trademark cuz

Jason Snell (01:01:31):
They see

Andy Ihnatko (01:01:32):
More use of the Rainbow logo than they have. Oh, oh, it's an abandon. I

Jason Snell (01:01:35):
Took it over.

Leo Laporte (01:01:36):
Nice to stir up the pot there, Mr. Wait, wait, wait. Mr. Knock, Mr.

Jason Snell (01:01:41):
Ai. Yeah. Good luck, <laugh>

Leo Laporte (01:01:45):
And yeah. Good plug for, uh, Michael Steber. Let's, let's plug it again. Michael Steber Dots a lot of

Jason Snell (01:01:49):
Good stuff there.

Leo Laporte (01:01:50):
If you, if you're for some reason fascinated by Apple stores, this is, this is the site for you. I mean, really? Yeah. Holy cow.

Andy Ihnatko (01:01:59):
Um, it is, by the way. It is. That is the, uh, apple store in Townsend, uh, uh, Maryland, uh, that voted to unionize. And there's a, there's an article in a local Baltimore paper about, uh, how the union is now saying that Apple's dragging its feet in negotiations, that they're not really, they, they, they, they're accusing Apple of not negotiating a good faith for a union contract. Oh. It,

Leo Laporte (01:02:19):
Uh, the N L R B already spanked Amazon and Apple for kind of bad faith in, uh, all of this stuff. Starbucks, this is, this has been fighting it too.

Andy Ihnatko (01:02:28):
Yeah. But this, this is a different thing. They actually, they actually voted to unionize. And so, which means that they, that they, apple and the Union now have a better a year to work out a union contract firsts workers. Uh, and if that, those negotiations fail, then a judge steps in to lead the negotiations. But they're basically, the union in, uh, is, uh, is now saying, uh, that, uh, contract talks with Apple had been quote, very, very slow unquote, they voted

Leo Laporte (01:02:53):
In ask the, uh, writer's Guild of America what to do, uh, about that. They, they've, they've gone at it and strike. Uh, and, uh, are you, uh, Alex, are there, are there pickets around the, uh, the house now? Or is it, uh, <laugh>?

Alex Lindsay (01:03:06):
Oh, no pickets. No

Leo Laporte (01:03:07):
Pickets. <laugh>. You're not, no, there's no pickets. Yeah. All the, uh, late night show. This, this happened in 2007, didn't it? There was a long writer's strike. All the, all the, uh, late night shows had to shut down. It was actually, we can credit the birth of reality tv Yeah. To the last guilds,

Alex Lindsay (01:03:23):
Wasn't

Leo Laporte (01:03:23):
It,

Alex Lindsay (01:03:23):
Was the

Andy Ihnatko (01:03:24):
Gross, not the last one. Explosion. Yeah. 1981. 1985. 1988 and 2007.

Alex Lindsay (01:03:31):
2007. Yeah. And, and, and really what happened was, is that the, at least when we were paying attention to that, uh, during the last writer's strike, is that if it goes on for a long time, you know, at, at the beginning, it creates a lot of disruption. If it goes on for a long time, then, then content creators or the the producers start to find other solutions. And so, you know, going in, it happened to be that, that what was available was unscripted content. And so they were able to, that ramped up and that, you know, changed the industry pretty dramatically. Wow. You know, um, you know, and, and so it was, and so we'll see what happens if this one takes a long time to get to. There's, um, there's probably gonna be new, new business opportunities for people to build, build other things that are non-scripted.

Leo Laporte (01:04:12):
Uh, yeah. Um, and AI is one of the issues the way Yeah. The writer's room is being treated is another one of the issues. And of course, I'm always, it's

Jason Snell (01:04:22):
Streaming dynamic is number one. Right. That's the real part. The way that compensation was defined for writing for television and film, does it fit was all about world. Yeah. It was all about traditional, uh, output. Right. It was all about, uh, network TV shows or, or a Saturday morning car kids cartoon show or a cable TV show. Right. And with streaming the money, all those streamers are terrified and they're cutting their budgets and all that. But the fact is they're very profitable. They're extremely profitable, and they've, they've slashed how many episodes are in a season. It's dramatically impacted the work of the writer. And the Writer's Guild is basically saying, uh, we need a contract that takes into account the success of streaming. And right now you've been getting away with not paying us and not staffing the writers' rooms and treating us like day laborers, uh, when we in fact need to be on the contract and we need to be there for a whole season instead of just the days we show up in the room. And all of this is, I mean, it's, this is gonna be, I think it's gonna be a really bad one because I think the writers have basically said, you've gotten away with, uh, profiting on some technological changes in our industry, and that needs to stop because we need to be cut in. And the, the producers are going to say, well, no, we would like to make lots of money <laugh>. Like, we wanna continue doing that. And, you know, I, I think it's gonna be ugly.

Leo Laporte (01:05:43):
Apple is one of the, um, uh, people, the signatories that is being picketed. Yep. Uh, apple tv. Um,

Jason Snell (01:05:51):
Sometimes in these cases you wind up having outliers. Apple and Amazon, I would watch them because Apple, sometimes what ends up happening is the companies that do not have the complete vested interest, like if you're a studio, are the ones who cut deals with different terms, with the, with the guild. And it ends up being a, a one, it can be a, a, a method of, uh, like a strategy, which is the, these guys will become the model and they'll say, yes, apple and Amazon will say yes. And then we really have more leverage with all the other, um, all the other studios. I'm not saying that'll happen here, but it's possible it will because Apple and Amazon just don't have the market dynamics that HBO O and Netflix have, because they're, they're not a solely an entertainment company. They've got all sorts of other revenue sources. They're playing on a different game. Yeah.

Andy Ihnatko (01:06:39):
Yeah. Remember This's, what happened with, uh, Letterman, uh, on, in 2007 where they, this show was dark for a while, and then the, his show reached a separate agreement with the wga, so that's, they can go

Jason Snell (01:06:50):
Back. That's, that's the perfect parallel. Right.

Andy Ihnatko (01:06:52):
And so, yeah. And so if Apple simply says, you know what? We don't, we don't really care about, we we're, we're not, we're not part of those guys. Like, Hey, wga, a why don't we hammer out in agreement just between you and us, that be, and that becomes a way that Apple gets back into the schedule, like becomes a way, and that becomes a model for, Hey, look, apple, apple as a group of producers seems to be okay with it. And like, and like Jason said, it's, it's, the, the problem here is that the traditional model has always been like the way the televisions have been for decades before streaming, where you're the, the writers and the producers and the show creators are accepting less money because they know that the payoff could be, Hey, look, if we get to a hundred episodes, this goes into syndication.

(01:07:29):
It winds up being sold all, all over the world to different markets. And this becomes, uh, something that, that we make money on for, for a decade or two to come with streaming, it's, no, we <laugh>, we, we, we get, we get, we get paid peanuts, and then this does not go into syndication. This basically becomes part of the Amazon library or becomes part of the, uh, of the, uh, of, of the Netflix streaming library. This doesn't become continually more valuable as it keeps getting sold to different and different markets. So they're basically, that's why they're saying that, Hey, look, this whole model has to change. Uh, and, and then, and AI is gonna be a big deal as well. Just the idea of there's already, there's already some talk about how they need to have a discussion about whether or not networks are able to basically use, uh, chat, you know, chat bots to create or basically enhance, uh, exist to replace people on the writing staff. And it's, I think Jason's right. I think this could be super, super

Leo Laporte (01:08:21):
Ugly. Adam Conniver, who was, uh, uh, in the W g A Adam Ruins, everything was, uh, one of his shows, uh, posted the offers and the counter offers, uh, in the ai, the W G A, the writer Guild proposed to regulate use of artificial intelligence on B covered projects. AI cannot write or rewrite literary material can't be used as source material, and b, a covered material can't be used to train ai, which is interesting to which, uh, the A M P T P, which is negotiating on behalf of the producers said, uh, what about an annual meeting to discuss advancements in technology? How would you feel about that? Adam says, an insulting counter just dripping with contempt. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, we could talk about it once a year. Um,

Jason Snell (01:09:11):
We'll teach you. I, I, and it really feels like, we'll, we'll, we'll teach you what's really possible there. We'll, we'll learn you up about, uh, this, you writers,

Leo Laporte (01:09:18):
I, I think writers should be worried. I mean, that's a reasonable thing for, uh, I mean, what they just described here, that would be terrible.

Jason Snell (01:09:23):
Also, imagine things like, oh, we just had the AI whip up some story ideas. Now, right Now, what do you to a script? Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:09:28):
Yeah. Give us a script.

Alex Lindsay (01:09:29):
Well, and, and, and you could definitely see, I mean, I, I did, I, I was, uh, my, my daughter had asked about the, the theory of special relativity. And I said, I told Chad G P t, I said, explain special relativity as if I was Richard Fineman talking to an 11 year old. I love it. And it started off with, okay, kiddo <laugh>,

(01:09:47):
Like, it just, he just immediately leaned into it. And I was like, wow. And, and I, as someone who, who read lectures on, you know, lectures on physics, right? When I was a kid, it, when it described it, it was, it sounded like it was the voice of Richard Fine. You know, like, it, it was written in that voice. And so I could see how when you're writing something, you could say, well, this is what I want to say, but rewrite that all in the voice of J f k or in the voice of this, a gangster. And it would just kind of refine that into a, into something. And, you know, I, I do, I can see why producers would resist that, because there's an opportunity there to, to possibly do things that are, you know, that that, cause there's a lot of times when you're watching a TV show and I'm like, they spent a lot of money, you know, on this TV show and the writing.

(01:10:32):
Sometimes, sometimes it's great, but not all the time. <laugh> like, a lot of times the, the, the dialogue is like, no one in that business would ever say that in that way. You know? And, and so you're like, and it's a writer that's writing outside of their core competency. They, they don't know what, how people would talk that way. And they didn't have time to go through that. And, and so I think that there is, um, you know, so I think that there's a, there are places where it could make a difference if we, if we, it's one thing to, it's, it's one thing to figure out what it should start to look like, but saying that we can't use it ever for, you know, anything that's there doesn't necessarily make a better product.

Leo Laporte (01:11:08):
I want our podcast, uh, writers, uh, <laugh> covered by the wga. A I mean, asking for a friend. We don't have writers, so we're safe. Uh, Emily St. James, who does write for podcasts did tweet. Thank you. Scooter X, that, uh, that's a common, uh, mistake to assume that, uh, the last writer strike started reality tv. She points out the apprentices older than the writer strike 2004. Mm-hmm. <affirmative> started actually even before that Big Brother, but wasn't, but I think it did accelerate, wasn't

Alex Lindsay (01:11:38):
It? It didn't start, wasn't definitely wasn't accelerated. It

Andy Ihnatko (01:11:40):
Wasn't That's incredible. Like, started by the writer strike

Leo Laporte (01:11:43):
Oh, in the, in like 1998 or whatever, in

Andy Ihnatko (01:11:45):
19 19 81.

Leo Laporte (01:11:47):
81. Yeah. Yeah.

Alex Lindsay (01:11:48):
I love that show. <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:11:49):
There was a huge

Alex Lindsay (01:11:51):
Fight back then. Remember back in the, then when we, when we, she says had one television and it was Little House that my, my sister wanted to watch Little House in the Prairie. But it was at the same time as, that's incredible. And it was, there was a lot of stress there. I had, I got, I put another antenna on the roof so that I could watch. That's

Jason Snell (01:12:05):
Incredible. And that's the origin story of Alex Lindsay. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:12:09):
He put an antenna on the roof.

Alex Lindsay (01:12:11):
Another

Leo Laporte (01:12:11):
One. Wow. So, yeah. Uh, I, you know, she says it's, it's just the big, uh, entertainment corporations want you to think that. Cuz that's the threat, right? Hey, we don't need writers. Yeah.

Jason Snell (01:12:22):
No. That, no, you're, when you argue that, that people just watch stuff that's not scripted, I mean, you're doing their work for them. Right. You do that. And the fact is that it's entertainment is a mix of stuff. But I've always admired, I remember back, Andy will remember this too, back in what, 87, 88 when they did the writer strike. And David Letterman and Johnny Carson both came back on the air and they wrote their own jokes. And the whole point was not to undermine the writers. The point was to show Yes. How they were without professional writers. And they didn't Hal Gurney's Network Time killers, which is a wonderful Exactly. Again, showing we could have written material here, but instead our director is going to do stupid things. And they were funny and brilliant, but it was satire because they were basically saying, look what life is like without professional writers. So let's not fool ourselves. You can't, AI's not gonna do it. Reality shows aren't gonna do it. They will do some things, but you need the professionals. They're the ones who make, they are the ones who write the words and come up with the scenarios for the TV shows you love. And again, and they should get paid.

Andy Ihnatko (01:13:19):
The Letterman Letterman show for the, I

Alex Lindsay (01:13:21):
Was just, I was gonna say, I don't think chat TV chat's gonna replace any writers. I'm just saying that the, the say that you can't use chat p t to try to find a voice for a specific character, you know, that that might make it, you know, that might be more

Leo Laporte (01:13:32):
Realistic. But I don't think the Writers Guild is saying, you can't, they're just saying we want to, we want some terms, some

Jason Snell (01:13:37):
Rules. We rules

Leo Laporte (01:13:38):
Be,

Andy Ihnatko (01:13:39):
But the, the danger, the danger is like you, you have a, you have a show like The Simpsons, which is in 34 Seasons. That means that you have 34 oh seasons worth of scripts of, of Homer Simpson dialogue. Yeah. Bart Simpson dialogue. Bart Simpson dialogue. Once you basically fine tune, uh, fine tune a chat model for here is ex here is exactly how, here's the home talks. Homer Simpson talks. Exactly. It's, it's, it's just, just like, uh, just like any conversation you have with, uh, with chat G P T is not something that you would put right into production and you just, it's, but it is a, you could get to a first draft really, really quickly. And so you get from having, hiring a, a, a writer's room of like eight or nine people to chat cheap, basically one, one head writer comes up with 10 Springboards chat. G p T gives you a rough outline that's assigned to one of four people. You know, and

Leo Laporte (01:14:25):
That's one of those or specific things that the W G A is negotiating is the, is using our writing as training. Right. For a chat. And boy, when you say it that way, you're absolutely right. Uh, that, that's, that's not a good use of that. Yeah. Well, we'll watch with interest. Uh, and you're right, apple may, maybe Apple will make a deal. Scooter X also sent me a link, uh, which I wish I had been able to go down and see this. Apple apparently does candlelight performances in the Apple Store. That is the old movie theater down in la. This one was, uh, April 30th sold out. Uh, and it looks beautiful. They put, they, I mean, they've done a tribute to Coldplay. These candlelight performances are gorgeous. And they put candles all around the, uh, the performers. They did the Four Seasons, they did a little Mozart on that clown knock music.

(01:15:20):
They did some Eleanor Rigby, a little Bohemian Rhapsody <laugh>, uh, box Cello Suite number one, the theme from the Game of Thrones, the theme from inception, the theme from Back to the Future, Destiny's Childs, say My name, Andy Hero by Taylor Swift. And then about damn time from Lizzo, I don't know how a cha I guess it's a chamber, chamber music, uh, group. I don't know how that would sound, but it might be cool. And then they close with, uh, Swan, like it's the orchid quartet. Man, I would've loved to have seen that. And good for Apple for, uh, for doing that. That was to celebrate release of classical Apple music. Classical. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>,

Andy Ihnatko (01:15:59):
One of the things I really appreciate about what Apple does with, uh, it's it's higher end stores, is that it takes these public spaces, like these huge banks and these huge like museums and these huge theaters. Those would be landmarks, uh, in any neighborhood or any city that would ordinarily be turned, that would be turned into condos or office spaces or turned down for what the other, and they're preserving it as a public space. Yeah. Look at this. It's an Apple store, but it's still a place where anybody can come in and, and enjoy this space. This is

Leo Laporte (01:16:27):
The Tower, the Tower Theater store. And they preserved it as a theater Yeah. As well as an Apple store. And man, I would've loved to have seen this, huh. Wow. Yeah. That's really, really cool. Um, Apple's uh, apple Pay was down briefly. Uh, in fact, all Apple Services from Apple Cash to Apple Card down briefly, uh, on, uh, let's see, uh, a coup a couple of days ago on Wednesday. Gosh, I hope that doesn't happen too often cuz I really depend on this. My, I you basically use Apple Pay for everything now. Everything's green right now on the, uh, system status page. But you see here, resolved issue, apple card, resolved dish, pursue Apple cash resolved issue Apple pay and wallets. So

Andy Ihnatko (01:17:15):
Imagine, imagine, imagine if like Bank of America or City Bank Yeah. Basically say, oh, uh, I know we're down. You wanted withdraw some money right now. Or I I know you're supposed to pay be paying a bill right now, but yeah, we're down, but hey, keep checking back. We'll, we'll probably be back up again in an

Jason Snell (01:17:29):
Hour or two. I mean, I've been to the ATM where it said, sorry, um, outta Money ATM is out of, uh, outta service. Right. And it's like, okay. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:17:36):
They, there used to be, gosh, does happen way back in the day. You'd go up to the ATM and they'd, somebody be pulling it out of the thing and they'd put a card there that says how a service, as they're restocking it. That doesn't happen anymore. But boy, I remember, remember those, maybe that's just, we

Alex Lindsay (01:17:53):
Had one, we had one across from my school where they, they, they came in with a forklift and they stole one they st used to.

Leo Laporte (01:17:58):
Oh

Alex Lindsay (01:17:58):
My God. Yeah. They like picked the whole thing up and threw it. <laugh>. <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:18:02):
That's pretty gutsy. I gotta That's good Spot.

Andy Ihnatko (01:18:06):
Deserves the win. They

Alex Lindsay (01:18:06):
Were really excited for about a day and a half. You shouldn't borrow your friend's truck when you do that. That's,

Leo Laporte (01:18:13):
That's Oh, really? They got caught. Okay, good. Yeah, they found,

Alex Lindsay (01:18:16):
He found blank slips. He saw the news, he saw blank slips of at, of, of an, from an Atam m or I an ATM in the

Leo Laporte (01:18:21):
Truck, uh,

Alex Lindsay (01:18:22):
In the truck in the behind the seat. They like shoved him back here. I guess a couple of 'em had gotten out dope. And he, he just called the police. He was like, dope. My friend, my friends borrow outta my truck. It's dent. It's dented dope. It's dented and there's blank. What dope ATMs. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:18:35):
Uh, Apple's, uh, savings account did quite well according to Forbes. Uh, in day one, nearly a, or first four days, nearly a billion dollars in deposits in day one. 440 million, I'm sorry, 400 million in deposits. I was one of them. Turn it on the minute I could. Uh,

Alex Lindsay (01:18:56):
Yeah, I think that Apple, what what they're doing really well is they're mixing ease of use and interface with a reasonable interest rate. And I think that the other folks that are doing this, they, there are people with higher interest rates, but they don't have the ease of use. And then almost, no, almost nobody has the same ease of use. And then, and, and so then they're competing only for percentages. And I don't think they're getting, you know, you know, it's, it's a good percentage. It's not the best percentage, but you'd really have to, it's

Leo Laporte (01:19:22):
Pretty close of the best. There're only a couple of banks. It's pretty close that give you better And, uh, it is, yeah. Convenience. Although I did see somebody probably working for a big bank, but <laugh>, let's say, well, it's way too easy to get the money out of the savings account. It's way too easy to spend it, you know, you should put it somewhere where you can't access it so easily. Like our bank <laugh>. Yeah.

Alex Lindsay (01:19:41):
Yeah, exactly.

Leo Laporte (01:19:42):
I think it's too convenient.

Alex Lindsay (01:19:44):
It should, this should frighten banks a lot, especially the ones like, like if you're in a big bank and you have a big reason to do it, but if you're a smaller bank and you're trying to do retail, uh, you know, um, savings accounts, it is, this is, you know, it it does, it doesn't affect everybody because not everybody can

Leo Laporte (01:19:59):
Open. You have to have an Apple card. An

Alex Lindsay (01:20:00):
Apple card, yeah. Apple card holder.

Leo Laporte (01:20:02):
Yeah. Yeah. And even then I, I have an Apple card. I had one for a long time, but even then I had to kind of go apply, but it was, it was pretty quick. I mean, I did it in, you know, one session. Uh, the nice thing is for Apple, and I guess for me too, because I get daily Apple Cash from my purchases every day, a couple of bucks going in there, it makes me want to buy more s stuff now, you know, when I get my bagel once a week, I buy it with an Apple car. When we go to the grocery store, I say, honey, I'll buy the groceries and I'll buy it with my Apple Watch. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, it's convenient for me. A little bit of money goes into that savings account. That's, that's kind of, uh, that's, that's smart on Apple's part that really makes the Apple Watch and the Apple phone very powerful.

Alex Lindsay (01:20:42):
Yeah. I was, go ahead, Andy <inaudible>. Oh, the, um, uh, I think that, um, you know, one of the things I was really thinking about related to Apple and also just related to a lot of other businesses is a lot of businesses you get into conversations of how do we get the consumer to do X, Y, and Z. Like, their whole thing is like, how do we funnel them in and get them to do what we want them to do? And I think Apple spends more time thinking about how do we surprise and delight them <laugh>, you know, and knowing that that will lead to things in the future that, that are, that are better. And I think that it's just a different mindset. And I think there's, Apple's not the only company that does that, but I think the companies that think about how do we make this a great experience as opposed to how do we get, how do we extract what we want out of the consumer, um, I think is, I think those are, those are two different mindsets and they both can yield the same thing. But a lot of times I think that the, the first mindset is a lot more effective.

Leo Laporte (01:21:38):
Uh, the, um, Forbes article points out that, uh, of course the savings account is through Goldman Sachs, which is Apple's partner in the Apple card as well. And Goldman Sachs has its own high yield savings account, uh, under its consumer brand, Marcus, but it's only 3.9%. So now Goldman remember, was complaining that they lost a billion dollars, uh, with the Apple card and all that stuff. They might, maybe they're hopping a little happier. Yeah. Now with that billion dollars coming back into their, uh, their fold, uh, according to that's that position. Yeah. Yeah. By the end of the launch week, 240,000 accounts had been opened. One source added, uh, that's 240,000 new customers for Goldman. Really, if you think about it, again, again, cost of acquisition of new cu new customers. Mm-hmm. <affirmative> is pretty good. Yeah. Those, those Goldman executives looking better.

Jason Snell (01:22:28):
Yeah. You just have to share your, you, you know, you have to subs your brand to Apple. I think that probably hurts, but you know, it's,

Leo Laporte (01:22:35):
But people know, think it says Goldman in a few places. It's not, you know, um, and with the fail failure of the first Republic, uh, this week, I'm sure there's a little chill going up and down the spine of smaller banks. Uh, chase is probably saying, why didn't we do that deal with Apple? What, what was, why, why did you say no to them?

Alex Lindsay (01:22:53):
Well, and you also have to put, put up with Apple's requests or their demands for what that looks like. But that, you know, didn't hurt at and t too much. Yeah. It's always They didn't like it.

Leo Laporte (01:23:02):
Yeah. Because they were, they, Verizon didn't wanna do it. They thought now they realize they meant they should have.

Alex Lindsay (01:23:07):
Yeah. I mean the, a lot of times a lot of these companies are being, again, they're not thinking, they're not customer focused. Right. You know, they're, they're very, like, there's like, how do we, like I just got, I got this, this package the other day. It was repackaged this a pro, uh, it's chlorine from my pool, same company, new brand. And it's just a little harder to open. Like, it's just a little harder to open it. And I know what they did. They found a cheaper way to make that bottle. Yeah. <laugh> like, you know, they rebranded it cheaper way. And I was like, they just, that that's not, that's not, they didn't look at like, how do we make it better? Yeah. We, they figured out how do we save literally probably a, a a a quarter of a penny on that, on that thing.

(01:23:43):
And the the funny thing is, is that I don't even know how much that chlorine costs <laugh>. I literally don't know if they just charged more and had added add the top work better. But I, you know, and I, you see that all the time with companies that they're, they're figuring out like a, like let's figure out how to shave a Quarter Cent offer. Let's figure out how to and I, and I think that, um, they think that that's the best way to run their business. And I think that a lot of times they're wrong. And

Leo Laporte (01:24:05):
I by the way, uh,

Alex Lindsay (01:24:06):
Include them that like, people will pay more if it's just great.

Leo Laporte (01:24:09):
We have now an episode of, uh, the Simpsons written by chat, G p t where Homer is invited to be a guest on the show. F Interior fade in Simpson's Living Room Day. Homer's lounging on the couch flipping through TV channels. Sighing,

Jason Snell (01:24:25):
Huh? Nothing good on TV today.

Leo Laporte (01:24:27):
Suddenly the phone rings. Homer picks it up. Hello.

Jason Snell (01:24:30):
Hi, is this Homer Simpson? Yes it is. This is Le LaPorte for Mac Break Weekly. Oh, I didn't know that was You should

Leo Laporte (01:24:35):
Do Homer.

Jason Snell (01:24:37):
We're make fans of our website a Homer Simpson show. You're kidding. Nope. We'd love to have you on our show as a guest. Oh my God. I can't believe it. When do you want me to come on Next week? We'll send a car to pick you up, the questions. This is the best day of my

Leo Laporte (01:24:51):
Life. Grinning ear to ear. Homer arrives at the studio in a fancy car. Wow.

Jason Snell (01:24:56):
You want to be Leo?

Leo Laporte (01:24:57):
Yeah, I'll be Leo now. He walks in the studio and is greeted by Leo Laport. Homer, it's great to meet you in person. We're so excited to have you on the show.

Jason Snell (01:25:04):
I'm excited to Leo. This is a dream come true. You're

Leo Laporte (01:25:07):
Much better, much better at Homer. Well, let's get started. We're gonna talk about the latest Apple products and news. Homer nods enthusiastically. So Homer, what's your favorite Apple product?

Jason Snell (01:25:17):
Oh, that's easy. It's my trusty iPhone. I use it for everything.

Leo Laporte (01:25:21):
Leo nods an agreement. <laugh>,

Jason Snell (01:25:23):
When, when this is animated, it's gonna be a

Leo Laporte (01:25:25):
Lot funnier. A lot funnier. And add the laugh track, if you would. And, uh, what do you think Homer of the new MacBook Pro?

Jason Snell (01:25:32):
It's amazing. I saw it on the Apple website and I really want one <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:25:37):
I think we all want one Homer. It's a great machine. They continue to talk about the latest Apple news and products of Homer sharing his opinion. Script passes

Jason Snell (01:25:45):
Out from Fordham at this point. God,

Leo Laporte (01:25:47):
God too. Simpson's living

Jason Snell (01:25:49):
Room striking writers are in a very good position right now. Uhhuh

Leo Laporte (01:25:53):
Homer is sitting on the couch of his family watching himself on tv.

Jason Snell (01:25:58):
Can you believe it? I was on Mac Break Weekly.

Leo Laporte (01:26:00):
We're so proud. We're so proud of you.

Jason Snell (01:26:02):
We're so proud of you. Humer <laugh>. Does this mean you're gonna switch to a MacBook Pro? Man, <laugh>, you can't do all the worst. I can't do all.

Leo Laporte (01:26:10):
What do you think you are

Jason Snell (01:26:11):
Hanks area? Never really. I wish son, but for now my iPhone will have to do <laugh>. Uh, uh, ai. Thank you. Ai. We support the writers here. Now you weren't,

Andy Ihnatko (01:26:26):
You, you weren't paying the $20 for the G P T four, were you?

Leo Laporte (01:26:29):
Uh, I don't know. Patrick, were you paying for G p T four on that one? I don't know. Patrick's tele handy, uh, <laugh>.

Jason Snell (01:26:36):
That one. The the Tell with AI written stuff is it's all like super enthusiastic and reads like it's pr talking points about literally anything. But we can

Leo Laporte (01:26:46):
Fix that.

Jason Snell (01:26:47):
Ah, we'll, we'll train a new mall. You know, Mayben a Yeah. Maybe we can,

Andy Ihnatko (01:26:49):
Maybe we, maybe we can solve a family guy. I don't think that would be out of place on a family.

Jason Snell (01:26:53):
No one would know. <laugh>, uh,

Leo Laporte (01:26:56):
We're gonna take a break. When we come back, we will talk about Apple's struggles with AI according to Wayne Ma writing for the, uh, information. Apple, uh, maybe not as well positioned as we might have thought, but first a word from our sponsor. When you see the, uh, studio, when you, when you see our shows, you probably noticed we are in the TWiT East Side Studios brought to you by a c i Learning. And you might say, well, who's ACI learning when they're at home? Well, you, I'm sure know the name it Pro It Pro TV was with us since their very inception last year. ACI Learning. And, uh, IT pro merged to form a new

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All of it. Pro uh, ACI learnings courses are chunked up into 20 to 30 minutes. So it's easy to take during a break during a lunch hour. It's easy to assign. And one of the team platform lets you do this. Assign just an individual, uh, episode of a course. Every one of these episodes has a full transcript. A lot of people like to read along. There's different kinds of learnings. People, people like to watch. Some people like to get hands on those practice labs help some people like to learn in person. And thanks to a c i learning. Now we've got 'em all This Thursday, not this Thursday. I guess it's a couple of weeks off Thursday, May 18th. Yeah, that's two weeks away. 2:00 PM Eastern the All Things cybersecurity webinar. Special guest, Naomi Buck Walter, she's the director of product security for Contrast Security and the founder and executive director of the Cybersecurity Gate Breakers Foundation.

(01:31:22):
Particularly of interest, if you're a woman, you want to get into cybersecurity. Naomi's got a lot of great advice and a lot of information. You'll learn how, what it takes to be a security architect. Guys too, of course, tips for advancing your cybersecurity career and how to bridge the knowledge gap in cybersecurity. That's free if you can't be there in person. It's nice to be there in person. Thursday, May 18th, 2:00 PM Eastern cuz then you can ask questions. But they, they'll make it available for watching later so you can, you can watch it later too. This is what's great about ACI learning, transforming how companies train and technology professionals learn to fuel the modern workforce for premium training at Audit IT and cybersecurity readiness. Visit the website, go dot aci learning.com/twit. Premium training, but not a premium cost. Go dot aci learning.com/twit. In fact, we're gonna make it even more affordable.

(01:32:15):
If you're an individual looking for a standard or premium membership, 30% off, just use the offer code TWiT 30, TWiT three go dot aci learning.com/twit. We thank you so much. We love it Pro. Love those guys, the founders. We are so happy for them when they joined with, uh, ACI Learning. We're happy to have ACI learning as studio sponsors and, uh, and they really support all of our shows. You help us though, if you, if you use that, uh, special code TWiT 30 for 30% off standard or premium, uh, individual training and of course go dot aci learning.com/twit. Thank you. ACI Learning. Thank you. Wayne Ma who's pretty well connected, I think he does a good job. He works for the, uh, information's. One of the reasons I spend a lot of money for an information account. <laugh>, uh, late last year, he writes a trio engineers who helped Apple modernize his search technology, began working on a large language model, the type of, uh, technology underlying chat G P T for Apple. There was only one problem. The engineers no longer work there. They left the company to work on the technology at Google. Oops. Uh, Shnivas Ave, Steven Baker, AAN Shk left Apple last fall cuz they thought, well, if we're gonna work on large language models, Google's the place to be.

(01:33:38):
Yikes. Google, uh, actually won 'em so badly. Uh, Wayne says that Sundar Pacha personally wooed them. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, but then again, Tim Cook tried to persuade him to stay. Must be nice.

Jason Snell (01:33:49):
I wa I, this is a fascinating story, and since you paid for the information, I can't wait for Uncle Leo to tell us more <laugh>, but, um, because

Leo Laporte (01:33:58):
I, they've, they've got a source, uh, two people who spoke, uh, to Vinca Tochar about it, so they got it from the

Jason Snell (01:34:04):
Horses. Oh, yeah. No, I, I, and this is, this is good stuff. I, I, um, my initial reaction to this story was, I totally understand why those guys would do that, because I feel like Apple, the story here is this push and pull between wanting to be out on the cutting edge and wanting to be seen as being out on the cutting edge. And Apple basically keeping everything inside the black box right. Until they announce something. And when you look at all the, all the missteps out there with AI stuff where it's been an embarrassment for whoever launches whatever model. In fact, the brilliant thing about inventing, uh, open AI is that it, you know, Microsoft can fund it, but it's not Microsoft who's, uh, chatbot is saying terrible things this ti this time. Previously it was this time it's not. And so if I was somebody working on this stuff inside Apple and was really excited and got told at every turn, well, we can't make it public. We can't do that. You, your work can't be public because it's gonna make things up and people want Siri to not make things up. I would think about going to Google. Yeah. Right. I would, I totally understand. It's also

Leo Laporte (01:35:01):
The check and, and maybe Google was willing to write a larger check. I mean, these guys Yep. I've heard stories. They're making more than a million a year. These guys are very horrible. Yeah. Uh, hot. Oh,

Jason Snell (01:35:12):
Sure. Hot commodity on,

Leo Laporte (01:35:14):
Of course, remember Apple did hire, uh, John Gire away from Google. Yes. He is the guy and he's still there. But Wayne writes, according to interviews with more than three dozen, Wayne's been busy. Mm. Three dozen former Apple employees who worked in its AI and machine learning groups, organizational dysfunction and a lack of ambition, have bogged down those efforts, including the work of the group responsible for Syria. At one point, uh, when they were working on the mixed reality headset, uh, Mike Rockwell expressed disappointment in the demonstrations that this is, again, Wayne's reporting, the Siri team created to showcase the voice assistant working with the headset. And even considered, maybe we should write our own voice commands, <laugh>. Oh, that's, yep. Ooh.

Jason Snell (01:36:02):
Ow. You can see it, right? I mean, I totally can see it. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:36:05):
He does say the headset team ultimately ditched that idea. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. Um, and Wayne does point out Apple is still the most valuable company in the world.

Jason Snell (01:36:13):
Well, and I'll, I'll say, I mean, I, I think there's a lot of good points and discussion here, but I will point out that as he points out, his source is people who left, right? Those are people who were probably not happy being at Apple and chose to go elsewhere. Um, his sources aren't the people who stayed at Apple and are working on this stuff now. So just take it with a grain of salt.

Leo Laporte (01:36:34):
But the people who stayed are never gonna talk.

Jason Snell (01:36:35):
Well, oh, no. I mean, you can't get, you can't get those people to talk. I get that. But I, I'm just saying, and the

Leo Laporte (01:36:40):
People who left, left for a reason, and this is what they're saying, and this

Jason Snell (01:36:43):
Is what's I'm saying that that's right. But you're only getting the people who left. And I, I think that, you know, I think it's always worth asking yourself, why are these people talking? And in this case, I think it's cuz they were frustrated and they quit <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:36:53):
Yeah. Yeah.

Jason Snell (01:36:55):
Well, or they're frus frustrated by the way it's structured. Or as, as we said earlier, frustrated by the fact that Apple keeps everything in a big box, a big black box. And nobody can look at it. Nobody can know what you're working on. And every one of their colleagues who's out at Open AI or at Google, or, you know, wherever they are, they are shipping stuff and it's really a hot category. And then you're working at Apple, and not only are they telling you sort of like no <laugh> to a lot of things, but you can't even admit to what you're doing. Like there are lots of reasons to not be there anymore.

Leo Laporte (01:37:26):
There's also the issue we've talked about many times, and Wayne brings this up a as well, of Apple being uncompromising on privacy, which to some degree hampers its ability. I mean, uh, chat GBTs getting in all sorts of trouble. Uh, you know, the Italian regulator shut 'em down for a few weeks because of the issue of privacy. Samsung has told it's, uh, employees, you can't use chat d p t because it might lea you might be leaking inadvertently private company information. That's a serious concern. And so Apple, you know, this is, this is, you know, a problem for Apple. They don't want to do that. I understand why, why I

Alex Lindsay (01:38:03):
Think the problem is, especially if you're a developer, I mean, if you're a researcher and you're excited about ai, the problem that you have is they're, the, the, the two things that oppose each other is doing the right thing all the time and developing some of these ai, these especially, uh, these large language models, um, because what makes them cool and what makes them super effective is breaking all kinds of rules. <laugh>, like, you know, it's, you know, and so they're, they're really effective because they just did it and they just threw it out there. You know, open AI made it really, really fun, and it creates a chat. G p T is a really fun, um, you know, thing that I use every day. And I know that it would be half as cool if they had tried to dot every I and cross every t.

(01:38:41):
And the problem is, is that if you're at Apple, they don't want to do anything that's gonna break any, you know, rules or, or, or hedge anything or hurt the brand or do anything else. And so as an AI researcher, you're gonna often feel like you're kind of tied, tied up. And I think that's gonna, that's a really hard place for a lot of those, uh, you know, AI researchers to be. And any of these models that are trying to do it the right way is that, you know, it's, well, there's the cool kids are over there and they're doing this crazy thing and everyone loves them, and we are stuck with this thing that isn't, isn't gonna work as well because we're doing the right thing. And that's, that's, I think it's a really hard place. It's a hard way to keep developers in the, in the fold

Leo Laporte (01:39:17):
According to the information. Uh, John Xandra, who they call jg, thank goodness, so I'm gonna call him that from now on. JG was hired because the Siri group in 2018 was in disarray, and he was brought in, uh, uh, to kind of, uh, reorganize it. He, this is Wayne Mah writing. He soon brought changes to Apple from his leadership style to policy shifts. People who worked with John and Andrea describe him as charismatic, though soft-spoken, a tinker in his spare time. One of his hobbies is dissembling atomic clocks. Hmm. Uh, with a sharp contrast to the type A personalities in Apple, senior ranks where it's common for executives to take over meetings and eviscerate rank and file employees who come unprepared according to former Siri, uh, employees. However, uh, he increased salaries, which had been lowered than those of rivals brought in many people he worked with at Google.

(01:40:15):
Um, he acqui helped acquire laser-like a startup, uh, which brought Veka, cherry Baker and Shula two Apple 155 million, uh, acquisition. Um, however, it sounds like he hasn't been able to keep the team on track on purpose. Maybe he's, I don't know, maybe he's thwarted, um, you know, by Apple zone upper management under Jenin and Andrea Apple, also quite other AR startups. However, founders and employees of these startups in several cases, including the one we just referred to, ended up leaving Apple, often departures occurred, oh, there's a smoking gun after their stock grants vested. Oh yeah, of course. Some of these people told the information. Another factor was that Apple was too slow to make decisions or too conservative in its approach to new AI technologies, such as, show me the lie, long lang large language models. Yeah. Yeah. Um, it's a good long article. Uh, you know, I, it's, and it's an interesting question. I understand Apple's reluctance to go a ho whole hog on a technology that is frankly, somewhat embarrassing right now for Microsoft and Google.

Andy Ihnatko (01:41:27):
Well, you can, we can't, we can't necessarily give, uh, apple the benefit of the doubt. There's one, that's one possibility that they're very, very, very cautious about doing the most safe and cautious thing, particularly as regards to individual privacy. It's possible that they're just gutless, it's possible. They just have no vision for this. It's possible that they're just not interested in this. And, uh, because, uh, the,

Leo Laporte (01:41:55):
The, I'll, I'll give you more, some more data from the Wayne Ma article. This is a little one more piece. Uh, and it kind of is interesting because remember we've talked before about how the design team at Apple seemed to have an unusual amount of clout around 2019 engineers working on the Siri feature. You remember when you asked Siri something, she says, here's what I found on the web. Uh, they were working on a feature that used material from the web to answer questions, but there was a clash over how accurate their responses needed to be before they could release the feature. The Siri design team wanted it to be perfect. The engineers said a 80% should be good enough. Engineers also spent months persuading Siri designers that not every one of its answers required human verification, a limitation that would make it impossible to scale up Siri.

(01:42:48):
A year later, the design team did back off the rule, but they had to back off before the engineers could, uh, could win that argument. The design team's high standards, frustrated some of Apple's machine learning engineers who argued, look, these models are bound to make mistakes. The only way to improve them, by the way, this is Microsoft and Google's philosophy, is to release 'em into the wild and tweak them gradually, that went against the culture of Apple's design teams known for telling engineers to wait several years to perfect a product before releasing it. It all makes sense.

Andy Ihnatko (01:43:23):
Yeah. I mean, the, but the other thing is that, like the Steve Jobs's famous pitch was never, you know, come his, his famous pitch was, you, you wanna join me and cha help change the world? Uh, it's never, you wanna join me and help work out some of the bugs we have in our US before Protocol Stack. And when you have someone who is at the edge of, uh, artificial intelligence research and you're, you're telling them that, Hey, this is the most exciting time for people who are in your line of work. We really want you to focus on palm rejection for the new iPad. Like, well, no, that's not gonna really interest them. That's not gonna intrigue them. And also, uh, the fact that the fact that they were, that, uh, they were able to to to leave so easily. I think that also speaks the fact that Google has been actually working on this for 3, 4, 5, close to 10 years.

(01:44:12):
The only reason why they're doing something as public as barred is because OpenAI sort of like forced their hand to at least have something out there that they're clearly ex, they're, they're labeling the hell of it as experimental. They're saying, you, you're helping us to develop this. We're not giving you a tool that's actually productive or trustworthy for every, for anything. They're annotating every, every step of the way. I mean, everyone's talking today about, uh, Jeffrey Hinton leaving Google and talking about his concerns about, uh, the czar of, uh, artificial intelligence at, uh, at Google and how he's leaving, basically, so he can speak o more openly about his concerns about the platform. But even he is saying that Google is being very, very cautious and being very, uh, as, as, uh, as, uh, responsible as can be, certainly more responsible as open ai. So, I mean, we can, there, the possible, the possible answer here is that Apple is being responsible and cautious, and they don't wanna release anything or even, uh, admit that they're working on something until they can show off something that's perfect.

(01:45:10):
But the other thing is that they just don't understand that this is not how large language models work. That's, this is not how the best of the best, uh, of the art of artificial intelligence is gonna work. I mean, today, uh, during the, during the show, uh, Google, uh, announced a, uh, an improvement they're making to, uh, Google photos where, uh, they're, they already have been kicking butt and automatically recognizing objects and photos and tagging things so that you can basically find anything with a keyword. Now they're basically adding, uh, a level of abstraction to your queries. So you can say, give me sort of summary looking pictures of water, or give me, give me vacationy sort of i items that are kind of melancholy in, in nature, which will help you f which help you find exactly what you're looking for when you don't know exactly what you're looking for.

(01:45:56):
This is an outreach of all the AI work that they've been doing for, again, 3, 4, 5 to 10 years. We're not seeing that from Apple. I mean, Siri, it's, it's, it's embarrassing. We all know how bad Siri is. Well, that it's, it's function. It's, it's basically, it's basically functional, but it doesn't really go on someplace, I would say. I mean, I'll, I'll, I'll close, I'll close, I'll close. I'll, I'll just close by saying that, like, who, if everyone who saw, uh, Ted lasso this week where there's a, of course Siri gets, gets a scene in which Nate like says, Hey, hey, Schlomo, how can you tell if a woman is really interested in you? Or if she's being nice? Then Siri says, you can't. And everybody who's used Siri say, that would not be what Siri would say. Siri would say, let me tell

Jason Snell (01:46:36):
You what I found on

Andy Ihnatko (01:46:37):
The web about, on the internet.

Jason Snell (01:46:38):
Yeah. Or, or they'd have one of the team of 20 writers doing, no, Andy, when you talk about, uh, something like Apple and AI and use photos as an example though, photos is actually an example of Apple using ai. Well, apple has used machine learning models for the last, like four or five years in the photos app on phone. And it does a pretty good job

Leo Laporte (01:46:54):
On

Jason Snell (01:46:54):
Device. It, it needs to be better in what, what Google is introducing today. Sounds really good. And it's like they up the stakes for what Apple needs to do, but that's been a place where Apple actually has used machine learning to the benefit. A lot of things involving iPhone photography, it's done that. The problem is that then meanwhile, Siri is sitting there with its 20 writers talk about a writer's strike Oh, to be on the staff for Siri. Woo.

Leo Laporte (01:47:17):
So they, so Siri uses humans to write its

Jason Snell (01:47:20):
Responses, I think, I think they look at the most common questions and they have humans writing templates and things for them. And I think that's part of the issue here. But this is, and this is what I wanted to say, is, is they are using it in certain places, but Siri, um, to get to Andy's point about, um, are they being conservative? Are they being scared? I think the answer is you have to, you have to ask them, uh, what happened to real artists ship? Like at some point, just like with this headset, at some point you just gotta get out there and you gotta see what happens. And are they behind or are they afraid? I wonder if their fear is as actually masking them being too far behind. That's a really good, because there is nothing stopping them other than maybe that it's bad from putting Siri two out there as a beta with a switch that's off by default. And then everybody can try it and we can learn and we can say, this was a stupid answer. Yeah. But they haven't let it out at all,

Leo Laporte (01:48:10):
Actually, and I'm saving you $400 here in this information article. There is that exact example. Jen, Andre, and, uh, Veka, Chachi, Siri X

Jason Snell (01:48:18):
Proposed, and Siri two

Leo Laporte (01:48:20):
Proposed creating a button that allowed users to report a concern or an issue with the content of an answer. Siri design team had rejected that because they wanted to maintain the image that Siri was all knowing.

Andy Ihnatko (01:48:33):
Yeah. Yep. Well, we, we, that, that bird has flown <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:48:38):
Yeah. We know that's not the case, don't we? Yes. And, and

Andy Ihnatko (01:48:40):
By and by the way, you're, you're right about, you're right about, uh, Siri, uh, people having, uh, writing responses for Siri. I actually had to try to, uh, try that question like the night that I, I watched Oh,

Leo Laporte (01:48:50):
Did you try it gave me,

Andy Ihnatko (01:48:51):
Yeah. And, and it, and it gave me that, and it gave me that lame, like vague thing. But then I just tried it today, <laugh>, and it says, oh, wonder kin, when will you ever learn <laugh>?

Leo Laporte (01:49:00):
You would say, that's clearly a human, right? Yeah. Yeah, that's exactly. It's clearly a,

Jason Snell (01:49:03):
He baked Ted las So they

Leo Laporte (01:49:04):
Got a writer's room for Siri. They do.

Jason Snell (01:49:06):
Wow. They do. Oh, to be a fly on the wall of the Siri writer's room. Do you think

Leo Laporte (01:49:10):
Some of the many people, Siri, I mean Apple has stolen from us, uh, are working in that writer's room, serenity called,

Alex Lindsay (01:49:17):
Who's

Andy Ihnatko (01:49:17):
Listen for

Leo Laporte (01:49:18):
That <laugh>,

Alex Lindsay (01:49:18):
Just wonder who sits around. Like, how do you, there's like eight responses to open the bomb Bombay door open the, uh, pod bay door. You the pod bay doors. Yeah. There's like eight different ones if you keep on asking Serial, keep on telling you. And I always, I always think about that, uh, as I wonder like, how do they decide what those were going to be, you know?

Leo Laporte (01:49:36):
But that's in a nutshell, that's exactly what we're talking about, which is they would prefer to have a clever, well-written canned response than actual AI in, in theory,

Jason Snell (01:49:47):
It's about control. Yes.

Andy Ihnatko (01:49:48):
And

Leo Laporte (01:49:49):
It's brand, it's it's brand reputation. And I understand that. Yeah.

Jason Snell (01:49:53):
Yeah. But they risk Google getting behind because of it. Like, I mean, that's, that's the, that's the conundrum here. That's why I think that you can really look at the story and take like 15 different things away from it. Because is it true that Apple is very conservative about this stuff? Yes. Are they right to be? Well, you could argue that they are, but at the same time, shouldn't they ship something? And if you're somebody who's working on AI inside Apple, is it the best place to be? If you want to be a star and get paid a lot of money? Probably not. If you wanna show off your work, probably not. Uh, it, it's all, I mean, if you're Tim Cook, do you say, I'm okay with releasing a new version of Siri that gets that, that hallucinates or that gets stuff wrong and is gonna make us the butt of jokes? Or would I rather just be behind? I can see it's not

Andy Ihnatko (01:50:35):
Documents. It's not just that. It's not just that. I mean, we we're, you can't, you, you, we can't hyper fixate on, uh, on, on chat G P T and chatbots. This is also large use of large language models is also stuff as stuff like what's coming to Microsoft office and, uh, and, uh, the Google work suite. Sure. Not saying that, Hey, here, here is 1000 elements here, one 1000 user responses, uh, to, uh, to a survey we did, uh, on San something. I want you to analyze each one of these thousand responses. And in the next cell of the spreadsheet, summarize whether this is positive or negative. I want you to look at, uh, everything that's in this mailbox and show me all of the, all of the emails in which, uh, that have to do with my schedule on, uh, on this specific project.

(01:51:18):
It really is about, uh, and Google has been prioritizing artificial intelligence for about 10 years now. So it's not just chatbots. It really is this idea of this large language mo these large language models that they're, they're, they can really bake into almost everything now. So it's not just as simple as, Hey, I recognize a cat in this picture. It really is that, okay, is the cat happy or sad? Is the cat, is it, is it someone who's chasing a cat? Is the cat in danger? Is this an old cat or a young cat? Uh, and <laugh> and, and describe this picture for me, uh, in, in one sentence or two. So these are, these are, it's basically integral features that could be used to enhance almost anything that you do on this device. And I just hope that as Mac users and as iPhone users and iPad users, we don't miss out on this sort of stuff.

Leo Laporte (01:52:00):
I think there's also a possibility that we might say in, in, in a year, oh, it's good. Apple didn't fall for that BS <laugh>. Right. Also, that was just a, that was just a game, a trick up, you know? And, uh,

Alex Lindsay (01:52:12):
Apple's and Apple has, has skipped some of those, you know, they've skipped over those. But it is also a different company than than the company that ran an ad that said, rip mix burn. Or, you know, like, you know, like it's the cs, you know, like it, you know, that was a different Say

Leo Laporte (01:52:24):
That again. Say what? Rick Nicks burn

Andy Ihnatko (01:52:28):
What? Rip mix. Burn

Jason Snell (01:52:30):
Burn. That was the rip burn you're gonna tell us to, to burn.

Leo Laporte (01:52:33):
That was the ad for, uh, the iPod, right. For

Jason Snell (01:52:36):
They were like, it was digital hub, uh, iTunes and burning and replaying and Yeah. It, it was, and it was, they were accused of that, of being, you know, piracy when they were saying something else. But it was a very bold move. Right. And I think that's Alex's point is now you're, you're, you're they, to be fair, Alex, they do have more to protect now.

Alex Lindsay (01:52:54):
Exactly. Exactly. No. And they had, they had to break into that market and they, and they did what they needed to do to do that. And here they're protecting their position and they have lots of partners and they have lots of things, and they have a brand to protect, and they have, you know, business models and their, their partners have business models. And so there's, it is just a much, much more complicated thing. I'm just saying that, that it is a, it, it, it's not that Apple never did that, it's just that they, they stopped doing that at some point, um, a decade ago.

Leo Laporte (01:53:19):
It's interesting. It's rip mix burn a, uh, ad. I think that's the Tower theater in Los Angeles. Oh, that Apple later turned into its, uh, into its, uh, store, isn't it? Doesn't it look that way? I'm looking at the old ad. This is from 2001. I think that's the tower theater. <laugh>, they assimilated it. Uh, it didn't help that they had a guy in a hoodie ripping, mixing and burning <laugh>. Yeah. But he's

Jason Snell (01:53:39):
Got, he's got Liz favorite on stage, right? He's, he's getting all his favorites together.

Leo Laporte (01:53:44):
We got the bulbs and the wall SCOs. I

Jason Snell (01:53:47):
Wonder, sometimes I wonder if it's Siri. I mean, apples first off, Siria doesn't even have a definition. Like it's whatever Apple says it is it like they shortcuts are Siri and, and the voice assistant is Siri. And the the intelligence that says you might be driving to this location is Siri. They've wrapped it in a bunch of things, even though so many of us think of it as the voice assistant. And as I said before, to Andy, like, Apple's got places where their machine learning stuff is actually very good, but it's not, it's not in all these other places. And it certainly doesn't seem to be anywhere attached to Siri. And I think we keep coming back to the fact that Siri doesn't work very well. They were ahead at the start, and then they fell behind. And it's inconsistent. And the one thing that I keep looking at in these chatbots is when you attach a chatbot to some good data sources and tell it to search for the answer, they actually don't do so much hallucinating.

(01:54:37):
They actually do a good job. And you think that would be great for Siri. And, and like, it, it's funny now that almost the failings of Siri have poisoned us to all the places where Apple actually, or, or is it that everybody else is like the head, head headset team and is like saying, we gotta work around Siri. Yeah. We wanna avoid Siri. Cuz Siri is a mess. Cuz like whoever's doing the photos app, that's that spent a lot of time Yeah. Um, training photos to use machine learning. But, um, then there's Siri and like the problem, the trouble with Siri, I guess the

Leo Laporte (01:55:07):
Trouble was, the

Alex Lindsay (01:55:08):
Trouble with Sir having, again, this is, I've worked in a lot of big companies over as a consultant, and this is a, a very common story, <laugh>. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:55:16):
Like, like this is

Alex Lindsay (01:55:17):
Like every big company, you know, and every medium size, every company sometimes may potentially, every company that has more than 30 or 40 employees has this thing where there's dysfunction and there's things and there's, yeah. There's, you know, things that are working, things that aren't working. There's a, there's some manager that's holding everything up. There's some team that does stupid things. There's, you know, and, and it's just, that's what happens when you get a bunch of human beings in a company that's trying to make money and trying to figure it all out. And so we can go into this, like, a lot of companies have dysfunctional when, when SIM says, oh, that company was dysfunctional, that team was, it was like, okay, well, well that does, they're our dysfunctional

Jason Snell (01:55:49):
Team. Yeah. It, it's also, I mean, yeah. Who, who, who knows what's going on here. It's hard to say what happens, but it's hard to be a change agent at a company. And yeah, John g Andrea is one of those people who I, I think was intended to be a change agent about Siri and about machine learning in general. But you know, Alex, you've probably seen this, I've certainly seen this. You get somebody brought in and they're like, I got big ideas. We're gonna make changes. We're gonna solve this. And then they say, okay, here are my ideas. They get hired, they get brought in, they say, here are my ideas, we're gonna change it. And they're like, idea one. And the people in charge are like, mm.

Leo Laporte (01:56:20):
Can't do that.

Jason Snell (01:56:21):
Do, it's worse than that. I did too. You, you can't do that. And it's like, well, why am I even here then? Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:56:25):
I'm, I'm gonna stop you right there, <laugh>. It's not gonna work yet. Exactly.

Alex Lindsay (01:56:29):
Well, well, the thing is, is that oftentimes it's not even that. It's people saying, yeah, that's a great idea. And then it gets under-resourced. It gets slowed down. Sure. And it get, that's the ones you have to even worse.

Leo Laporte (01:56:37):
People

Alex Lindsay (01:56:37):
Say, that's a great idea. Yeah. I'm behind it. And then, and then it just, there's like little things and, and you just get, you know, suddenly a year is going, I'll get

Jason Snell (01:56:43):
The two engineers for that great idea. Hmm.

Alex Lindsay (01:56:46):
Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Leo Laporte (01:56:46):
That's wonderful. Don't wanna work for big companies. And if you're, and really if you're in cutting edge stuff, it's a challenge because especially ai, you need resources to do it, but you don't wanna work for a big company because they're gonna get in the way. So, cause they're gonna

Jason Snell (01:57:00):
Wanna do what

Alex Lindsay (01:57:01):
They wanna Yeah. What's really fun is when you get a company that does have an effective team or does have a ha have, you know, they have a lot of resources and you can do crazy things. Yeah. You know, and, and you can, you know, so there have been moments, you know, that, that, you know, we've gotten to do really things that you could never do that are like, oh, we spent a half million dollars on that. It kind of worked. Okay, well let's write that down and let's not do that again. We'll, we'll, we'll do, we'll spend half

Leo Laporte (01:57:23):
It's exception. The proves the rule though, isn't it? I mean, those times are few and far between.

Alex Lindsay (01:57:27):
They are. If you, it's, it's usually when you're living somewhere in the front end of what they're trying to figure out. And you luck down

Leo Laporte (01:57:32):
Before they got, before, before the gatekeepers got there. <laugh> before the bean counters.

Alex Lindsay (01:57:37):
Yeah. And some figured that at some point someone comes in and says, wow, we're spending a lot of money on something that isn't working. And then they cut back. You know? But, but, but it's a great moment. Yeah. And I've been fortunate to be in a lot of those great moments and, and it's a good, it's a good place to be for a little while. Um, you know, and, and you just jump, you try to ride one set for to the next, you know, so

Leo Laporte (01:57:54):
Break out the rubber finger. We're number one. Well, we're number two a Microsoft's, uh, edge has now been surpassed by Apple Safari, uh, in desktop, uh, browser popularity, something to celebrate. Probably not, uh, <laugh>. Woo. And actually, this is a kind maybe more of a victory, both, uh, arm and, uh, and, and Microsoft are taking a look at the Apple M Series chips and saying, we better do some, play some catch up here. Apparently Microsoft is, uh, put, put some job listings up for people to do specialized arm-based, uh, chips for their hardware. Um, I'm sure looking at the efficiency, the

Alex Lindsay (01:58:37):
Part gonna take you, they have to look at the Apple chips. And I think the problem is, is that you also have to look at, you need to own the hard, you need to own the whole hardware subset. You know, the, the stack you need to un, you know, you need to build the, the, um, you know, the, the programming platform. You need to, there's a whole bunch of things that, that make the M one work better than a lot of other things in the, that is gonna be really complicated for people to reproduce behind,

Leo Laporte (01:59:01):
Need scenes, do app. Microsoft has really moved along with Windows on Arm, and I would say they're 80% of the way there. I mean, they've, you know, and, uh, so it's interesting. I mean, that's why they're probably starting to look at hardware at this point. They're, they're, they're, they've not been sitting still on this. Right.

Andy Ihnatko (01:59:16):
And, but one, but one of the problems is that they are, one of the problems is that they have 80% of the market, which means that they have to, they have to, they're only gonna hold onto 80% of the market if everybody who has every need for every type of computer can realize that and run Windows on it. So they can't, they can't do something like Apple's been able to do three times now, which is say, Hey, guess what? We're changing the entire platform. And now all developers are going to have to make sure that you, that you change your tune and do exactly what we say so that you're prepared for this change that we're doing in the next year or two windows. I mean, how long did it take to win for, for, for Microsoft to get people off of Windows three <laugh> Windows three Windows XP rather. I mean, this is, this is the, this is the difficulty they have. They can always, all they can do is add, instead of having four different distinct windows, uh, flavors and markets, they now will have a fifth one, maybe one that will be more power efficient, but they'll, they'll still have a fifth one.

Leo Laporte (02:00:09):
Apples quarterly results Thursday, firing up the, uh, six color graph generator. Indeed. Bank of America says, prepare for bad news. I'm sure Apple's published

Jason Snell (02:00:20):
Every Yeah, apple said that too. Uh, they're a lot. Yeah. It's gonna be, it's gonna be tough. The question is, how tough will it be? Tough in the sense of like, apple only made several billion dollars in profit, but not several Len team.

Leo Laporte (02:00:34):
Yeah. This may be Apple sandbagging because, uh, you know, Facebook had surprisingly good results. Amazon, Google, the results weren't horrible. Uh, and so, uh, in the, and you know, they've all been reporting in the last few weeks, so, uh, Microsoft had a very good quarter. So maybe Apple's just sandbagging. It's,

Jason Snell (02:00:51):
It's entirely possible. Yeah.

Andy Ihnatko (02:00:52):
And, and, and also we talked about, uh, the, uh, Google's quarterly results on the material podcast last week with Florence ion. And the thing, the thing is, like every, all the financial analysts are saying, oh, Google had a wonderful, wonderful quarterly earnings call. And when you look at the numbers and you look at the, an analysis, they're saying, we thought they would really suck instead only sucked.

Leo Laporte (02:01:12):
It's wonderful. Compared to what Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. So

Jason Snell (02:01:15):
Yeah. But after, after the Mac riding high for so long, and like, there's a feeling now that everybody did by those new Macs during the pandemic, and now you're feeling it where the, that not,

Leo Laporte (02:01:23):
So your, your predictions Mac sales gonna be, where will they, where will they be?

Jason Snell (02:01:28):
I mean, they'll be down, I don't know. I don't know about a number, but they'll be down year over year. And the iPhone, iPhone has nothing. iPhone will be down year over year. iPad.

Leo Laporte (02:01:35):
Yeah. But this is not a good quarter for iPhone anyway.

Jason Snell (02:01:38):
Yeah. I mean, it's not a great quarter for Apple anyway either. Yeah. And, and so it'll be down, but again, I, my prediction would be it'll be down and it'll, it might even be their worst quarter in several years and they'll still, you know, make a ton of money. It

Alex Lindsay (02:01:51):
It'll be, it'll be less insanely profitable, you know, like, like, you know, like, but, but that's, I mean, I think that's where Apple, it's, I will stay though working across a lot of companies and talking to a lot of companies and the, even the projects we see going by, I have never seen a corporate pullback like we're seeing right now. Yeah. Other than the covid, like it is I Oh, I know. We're

Leo Laporte (02:02:09):
Feeling it. Are you kidding? We've had cancellations across the board. Yeah.

Alex Lindsay (02:02:13):
I've never seen, uh, you know, and for me, because, because my job is countercyclical, everyone's asking how do we use virtual events to, we're we're canceling all these events for the summer and the fall. How do we use the event? How do we use, you know, virtual stuff? So that whole thing is coming back up again. Because, because they don't want to, you know, they're, they're canceling lots of events. That's what I noticed. You know, and, and they're pulling back and I've, I've, I don't, other than covid, I've never seen so many companies work. Yeah. So worried. And, and I don't, what's weird is that I don't see it like, you don't see it in the stock market. You don't see it on the day to day. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:02:43):
It's like, well, inflation's down the, you know, the market's doing well, why are you so worried? But they, there's a whole bunch of, they something somebody's maybe we don't know. It

Alex Lindsay (02:02:50):
Feels like they know something and, and we don't know what it is. And because I don't see it on the, on the surface other than seeing everybody canceling, laying off. Right. You know, cutting. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:03:00):
Look at all the layoffs this year. Yeah. I mean, more than a quarter of a million layoffs in the tech sector,

Alex Lindsay (02:03:04):
Usually that happens after the recession starts to come in, you know, not, you know, when maybe they're just skittish.

Jason Snell (02:03:10):
I, I've got my charts up here, so I'm gonna give you a prediction just cuz it's fun. Oh, good. How exciting. Uh, which is last year at this quarter they did 97.3 billion in revenue. Yeah. Um, but I'm gonna say, let's say 90, so it'll be actually up from two years ago, quarter, but down by 7 billion from, I gotta rate

Leo Laporte (02:03:32):
This down quarter.

Jason Snell (02:03:33):
So 90 nice round number for you. That'll be my prediction. And it'll be enough that people will freak out. But also if you look back to 2021, you'll realize it's more than they made. They, you, they just, it took, they took last year off in terms of this. So Yeah. We'll see

Leo Laporte (02:03:46):
90 B and that's revenue. Not obvious that

Jason Snell (02:03:48):
That's the revenue number, but Yeah. I mean, so a number like that is gonna give you what? It's gonna give you 20 billion in profit. <laugh>

Leo Laporte (02:03:56):
Seems good. Yeah.

Jason Snell (02:03:57):
I'll take it. Unless you're, unless you're a Wall Street, um, you know, an an analyst or an investor or somebody who's always concerned with the growth figures and nothing else. And I would argue that you shouldn't even probably listen to those people this time because everybody knows that this cycle is gonna pick up and that there're gonna be new iPhones in the fall. Yeah. And that Apple's still making a lot of money. And that there's still, if you look at their growth every time people have said, oh no, Apple's growth stalled. They have a new iPhone design and the kick, the, it kicks it off again. And

Leo Laporte (02:04:23):
You know what? If you're wrong, we'll get Mr. Snip, he snip in here, he'll fix it in post and then next week you'll look great.

Jason Snell (02:04:29):
Yeah, it's great. And also I'm not, um, I'm not here next week, so if I'm wrong, bye. Suckers. Where

Leo Laporte (02:04:34):
You going?

Jason Snell (02:04:35):
I'm just visiting my mom. Oh, that's right.

Leo Laporte (02:04:37):
Birthday. We talked about that. Yeah. We'll miss you next week, but, uh, we'll find somebody, uh, to fill your shoes. Um,

Jason Snell (02:04:43):
It's, I'm taking my shoes with me.

Leo Laporte (02:04:44):
Yeah, but you left a big dent in that chair, so maybe that's right. We could find somebody perfect to fit

Jason Snell (02:04:50):
<laugh>. Phil fit my dent. Go ahead. Dent.

Andy Ihnatko (02:04:53):
Someone, someone someone does. I'm sorry. Apple. Jason's chair.

Leo Laporte (02:04:56):
<laugh>. So

Andy Ihnatko (02:04:57):
Spackle, Jason's butt

Leo Laporte (02:04:58):
It nobody can's Right. Control this dent. I get a massive dent. I

Jason Snell (02:05:01):
Sat in it three weeks ago. Oh, did you?

Leo Laporte (02:05:03):
Yeah. Yeah. They let you

Jason Snell (02:05:04):
They let me sit in the captain's chair.

Leo Laporte (02:05:05):
No, uh, John, we gotta talk. Asked. There's no, uh,

Jason Snell (02:05:07):
I asked if it was allowed. They said yes.

Leo Laporte (02:05:10):
<laugh>. Okay, I guess I can live with it. Uh, we are gonna take a little, uh, break here and, uh, come back with your picks of the week. So if you would prepare those. My friends <inaudible> remind everybody the best place in the world to be the Club TWiT Discord. What a great hang. And all you gotta do is pay seven bucks a month. Oh yeah, sure. There are other benefits. Add free versions of all of our shows. Add free and tracker free. There's also, uh, the TWI plus feed, which has shows we don't put out anywhere else. Like the HandsOn Max Show with Micah Sergeant Hands on Windows with Paul Thoro entitled Lennox Show. The GIZ Fizz and Brand New Home Theater Geeks with Scott Wilkinson. Now how much would you pay? Well, it's still only seven bucks a month. Less at buck, less than a blue check on Twitter.

(02:06:00):
And you get so much more. We invite you to, uh, join Club TWiT. Oh. And there's the best part of all. You get that warm and fuzzy feeling knowing you are really helping us continue to produce great content and produce new content. We've launched a lot of shows now in the, uh, club, like this week in space, um, uh, that have gone out into the public. And we're very happy about that. Seven bucks a month, twit TV slash club twit. And I thank you in advance. Burke says You didn't sit in my chair. You sat in the backup Dr. Evil chair.

Jason Snell (02:06:30):
Hmm. <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (02:06:32):
There are two

Jason Snell (02:06:33):
<laugh>. Yeah, I see it. I I don't, I, okay, let's just That's

Leo Laporte (02:06:37):
Fine. You can sit in eight chair you want. Okay. You're always welcome. In fact, next time you're here we'll get the second chair and you could sit. Oh boy, how about

Jason Snell (02:06:44):
That? That's just gonna confuse people. <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (02:06:46):
There's two Dr. Evils. Jason, since you aren't gonna be here next week, give us a great pick of the week. What do you say?

Jason Snell (02:06:53):
Okay, I will. It is, uh, called Stop the Madness. It's a Safari extension. Uh, it'll run on Mac and iOS. I

Leo Laporte (02:07:00):
Like it already. I don't even know what the madness is. It it

Jason Snell (02:07:02):
Is from, uh, underpass Software. Uh, Jeffrey Johnson is the guy's name and it's, it's what doesn't it do it un unbreak webpages that are broken by dumb web developers. So let's say a website disables copy and paste. I hate

Leo Laporte (02:07:19):
That cuz then I can't use my password. Uh, management

Jason Snell (02:07:22):
Yeah. Or doesn't let you use contextual menus or does auto-playing video. You, you install Stop the Madness. And you don't get like one feature. It's, this is like a, what doesn't it do of browser extension? There are like 50 different check boxes of things. It does bypass link shorteners, hide banners, uh, protect the command, click Protect, drag and drop. And my feature that I, I wrote about last week on Six Colors that I love is there's also custom cns, css. So like I went to a website, uh, it might might have been nine to five Mac and they have a new feature, which is they put a comment from their forums in the story top comment from a comment, oh please. And I don't wanna see your comments. I don't care that it's top. I don't wanna see it. Well, all I did was, uh, right click Inspect Element and Safari got the CSS for it. And then you go into Stop the Madness and you say, top that CSS display, colon none. And it overrides their CSS and it goes away.

Leo Laporte (02:08:20):
So that's how this works with this. There's

Jason Snell (02:08:21):
Good actually so many things that it does, but yeah, like there's a website that I visit a lot that doesn't let me open in a new window. So Command Click doesn't open the link in a new window. Stop the madness fixes it. Nice. Now I can do that like I should have been able to do before. Um, it's just, if you've been annoyed by the web, it's 10 bucks, uh,

Leo Laporte (02:08:40):
Eight bucks for the, uh, mobile version. 10 bucks for the desktop version.

Jason Snell (02:08:43):
Oh yeah, that's fair. And um, and then also it does redirect management too. So if you've got like a, uh, a page that you always want to go to a different page, you can actually set in a pattern and it'll, it'll redirect your browser there. So I use that cuz I subscribe to one of our local newspapers and not the other one. But I always get links for the Mercury News. Right. And I have a rule that when I click on a Mercury News link, it opens in the Marin ij.

Leo Laporte (02:09:06):
I want the IJ baby.

Jason Snell (02:09:08):
So yeah. Stop the man. What doesn't it do

Leo Laporte (02:09:11):
That's really clever for, uh, by the way, not just Safari, but on the desktop Firefox, Chrome and Chromium. Yeah. So it doesn't, I've

Andy Ihnatko (02:09:19):
Been that for a long time. It's a great Oh, nice. It's

Leo Laporte (02:09:21):
A great tool. Jeff Johnson. 10 bucks on desktop, eight bucks on mobile. Stop.

Jason Snell (02:09:26):
Stop the madness. All one word. Which I love cuz that's madness in and of itself. <laugh>,

Leo Laporte (02:09:33):
Uh, Andy Ihnatko, are you gonna go to an estate sale in the near future?

Andy Ihnatko (02:09:38):
I've been to an estate sale. This is why I have this, this is why I bought this house. Where else

Leo Laporte (02:09:42):
Would you get a ship? In a bottle? There

Andy Ihnatko (02:09:44):
You go.

Jason Snell (02:09:46):
Is

Leo Laporte (02:09:46):
Anybody still making ships in a bottle?

Andy Ihnatko (02:09:49):
No. Apparently. Well, okay. Well apparently the, I don't know how well how long ago that dude, uh, uh, built this one, but, uh, yeah. But apparently it's a pretty old looking bottle. Yeah, it's an old looking bottle. Pretty old looking ship. It's a, it's a very lovely, it's

Leo Laporte (02:10:02):
Nicely done cuz it has water. I mean like some sort of cloudy substance frothy

Andy Ihnatko (02:10:07):
Fro frothy turbulence seas. Nice. It's a know, good name brand, 4.44 fifths of a quart bottle there with a, uh,

Leo Laporte (02:10:15):
Cork. It's got a

Andy Ihnatko (02:10:16):
Cork in it. What kind of cork it is. Yeah. But yeah, so yeah, so I went to an estate sale, uh, over over the weekend. This is the, the nice time. And how

Leo Laporte (02:10:22):
Do you find a estate sales near you?

Andy Ihnatko (02:10:25):
Well, I actually, I didn't, I was not interested at all until I found this website called the state sales.net, which is just, it was, it's, it's just an estate finder where you just, it's a great idea. Look

Leo Laporte (02:10:35):
In

Andy Ihnatko (02:10:35):
If your, here's your zip code and tell 'em like how far away are you willing to travel? And also do you are, do you wanna include auctions? Do you wanna include moving sales? Do you wanna include a whole bunch of other stuff? Uh, and then we'll just simply give you a list of everything that's happening. And some

Leo Laporte (02:10:49):
Of these are online, by the way. I notice which

Andy Ihnatko (02:10:51):
Some, some of these are, some of these are online, like some, some, it'll also include, again, if you include, if you include that checkbox, some of 'em will include like actual, like auction houses there.

Leo Laporte (02:10:58):
This chair you can have Jason, uh, next time you're here I'll get you this chair. Excellent. Just a lifetime of treasures <laugh>. Just tie that on. Yeah, slide it in here. Put Jason's chair on it on like a post notes and no one else sits in it here. This is a great site. I love this site.

Andy Ihnatko (02:11:12):
It's, and it's, it's really, really cool. You can al you can also, uh, you can also have it just basically email you alerts every time there's like a new listing, uh, for, for somewhere. It's, uh, they're about th actually this, the estate sales net just got bought by another company for like 40 million. Wow. Oh, it shows you how big they are and how successful they're there. There are a couple of, I'm sure there are a couple of other sites for this kind of thing, but it's the only one that I actually, uh, actually bothered with. And it, I'm not, it's not like I'm packing up the car every single weekend to, you know, stock my eBay store or anything like that. But if I find out that there's a decent estate sale, like within, within bike bike distance at my house. Yeah. I'm, I'm in there. Uh, because it's, you know, it's, uh, I I refer to it as, I think of it as burglary fantasy camp because <laugh>, you enter an unlocked door, you walk in, you open draw draws and closets, you take things, put 'em in your bag. Uh, you do have to pay off someone to at the door, you know, do not squeal on you. And usually it's a amount of money kind of commensurate with How much

Leo Laporte (02:12:09):
Was the ship in a bottle?

Andy Ihnatko (02:12:12):
This uh, actually I bought like a whole bag full of stuff for like 50 bucks. Nice. So this would be a whole b And the what I, what I like about estate sales that you do see like weird stuff, like odd things including like old computers, old books, old, old stuff like that. But also things like <laugh>, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not joking. Like, just like, uh, the estate sale was like on Friday morning, like on Wednesday I was thinking, I, I was, I was doing food shopping and I was in like the, that little housewares aisle on the, in the supermarket had one of those like fish spatulas. And I thought, oh yeah, get one of those. I've always wanted a fish spa. Yeah. But I, but I didn't get it. And then of course at the estate sale, like I'm rummaging through the kitchen drawers and Hey look, fish spatula. All right, here you go. I <laugh> it's, it's a perfectly good, perfectly new like fish spatula that cost me a fraction of $50 <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (02:12:59):
I am, uh, I am of an age now where I'm starting to think about what's gonna happen to all this crap we've collected in the studio when I kick. Right. And so imagine the estate sale that, uh, we'll have here. You might wanna run up and, uh, pick up something yourself. Jason don't like your fabulous, like a studio sale, especially sculpted chair, a studio sale. I'm looking,

Andy Ihnatko (02:13:20):
I'm looking for the giant cog. Like I'll put, I'll put money down the giant cog

Leo Laporte (02:13:24):
<laugh>. Uh, and some of these are online. So you, you know, here's one in Winter Park Florida where I can get for $30 a large jar of glass marbles. I mean, where else are you gonna get that?

Andy Ihnatko (02:13:34):
Yeah. You know, it's, I mean it's, it's, it's fun to just even just browse like, uh, and for, for, for, for everyone that I actually go to, they're probably like 30 or 40 that I'm just week to week to say, Hey. Oh wow, look, hey, antiques, memorabilia, comic books and a chanting ephemera. I wonder what I,

Leo Laporte (02:13:50):
I I think this is exciting. I like estate sales. Yeah. Lisa's gonna be very interested cuz she likes estate jewelry and, uh, you know, cla she has a number of very, uh, beautiful old broaches and things that she, uh, she's picked up. And I think this would be a lot of fun. Maybe for Mother's Day, it might not be too late for me to, uh, to, uh, gift her with a fine broach or a, or a chair with a especially sculpted bottom or a or you know what glass jar marbles perfect for Mother's Day is estate sales.net. Thank you Andy. You really, do you, is your house loaded with stuff? <laugh>?

Andy Ihnatko (02:14:27):
No, no, no. V12 to the m i t flea market. And I, I, I kind of like tapered off of things, but I do, but most of the, most of the good stuff in my house are stuff from like local like yard sales and estate sales. Yeah. Because, you know, they, it's, I, I'm, I'm lucky in that I am a moderately moderate to low income person who lives in like a seaside quaint village full of lots of people who have lots of money. And so oftentimes they're like, Ugh, well you know what, I, I have two, $500 queens in art, but I suppose I should get a third $500 in art. But now I have one 500 quiz in art that, ugh, it was five bucks, whatever, just get outta my house. And so oftentimes <laugh>, the nicest stuff are things like, for people with no sense of money anymore have said that <laugh>

Leo Laporte (02:15:15):
Outta my house. So when you go to a state sale, is it often in the house of the deceased?

Andy Ihnatko (02:15:20):
It's not, not, not necessarily the deceased in this, in this case, it was someone who, uh, retired had, oh my God. I, I, I wish I could tell you the story of this person because he had such an interesting, he's having such an interesting life, but he's now like 90 and he moved to, uh, be closer to his kids. Yeah. Uh, and so, so you want to get

Leo Laporte (02:15:37):
Rid of I I'm, I'm ready to do that. Get rid of a lot of stuff. All

Andy Ihnatko (02:15:40):
Right. Yeah. And so you, I wanna

Leo Laporte (02:15:41):
Move away from my kids, but it's, you know, similar, same thing. Similar premise. Yeah. Yeah.

Andy Ihnatko (02:15:45):
But yeah. And so, and so like most of the, the, they hired an estate, uh, sale company that after, after the family had basically taken, after he had moved everything that he wanted and all the family like got all the things that they wanted, an estate sale company came in, photographed what was left. This, and, and it's not like a fleet, it's not like a garage sale where there's tables really set up. It's pretty much literally, again, I'm not joking, like, oh, let's open up, open up this drawer. Hey look, here's all the utensils. Is

Leo Laporte (02:16:12):
There anything in the house you could take?

Andy Ihnatko (02:16:15):
Yeah, I mean, anything, anything

Leo Laporte (02:16:16):
That's, anything you see is available for

Andy Ihnatko (02:16:19):
Is for sale.

Leo Laporte (02:16:20):
This is kind of a relief to me. Cuz honestly, I'm, I'm kind of worried about what, what's gonna happen. We could just do that here. Yeah.

Andy Ihnatko (02:16:26):
Yeah. You know what, the last, the last, the last time I moved, I, I kind of did the exact same thing. Only it was, I'm going to move, I'm gonna pack everything that is that I want to keep, I'm gonna put into storage. Everything I wanna put into storage, I'm gonna give away the things I want to give away. The rest of it, I'm going to pay a nice couple of guys in a truck, a $1,200 to simply say everything that is remaining in this house, put it in your truck and get, take it elsewhere. Sell it, <laugh>, burn it, whatever you want to do, just get it out of the house for me. And they'll, they'll do that. You

Leo Laporte (02:16:55):
Never know what you're gonna get. For instance, here's some, uh, looks like pet food balls with the pet food still in it. So you're, you know, you're just, that's a <laugh> you get

Andy Ihnatko (02:17:04):
Again, that's a bonus's. The fascinating. That's the fascinating thing because in this, in this sale, like he was, he was ex-military and so he had a couple of of civil, he had a civil war like navy scabbard, uh Oh, that's cool. Cinema, whatever. And a couple of other cool things from like the Civil War that he collected, but also it's a good thing

Leo Laporte (02:17:19):
You weren't a ler. He might have chopped your head off. Yeah,

Andy Ihnatko (02:17:22):
Exactly. But, but, but, but also, like <laugh>, I I, as I'm looking at the pic, the, like the 60 pictures that are inside this gallery of, oh, here's what the, can you expect to find there. It's like, oh, would I, would I really go there and just buy, like, here are like all like those little plastic jars of spices that you accumulate over like 20 years. Like I, I'd would probably rather buy fresh spices. I don't Yeah. Just

Leo Laporte (02:17:42):
Buy Old Spice is not so good. Yeah, yeah. Uh, Mr. <laugh>, I'm just, I can't stop, I can't stop looking.

Andy Ihnatko (02:17:50):
I know, it's, it's very prossible. I'm looking

Leo Laporte (02:17:52):
At these people's house as they sell everything. Uh, you know, uh, like, I don't know if those women's feed are for sale, but, uh, this is really strange. Really. Alex, Lindsay, um, distract me quick <laugh> before I, before I buy something I don't really want,

Alex Lindsay (02:18:12):
Well, I bought something that I didn't, didn't I thought I would need and then didn't need for a long time and it just sat around in my garage. Yes. And, um, you know, at my garage someday we'll do a sale for my garage. There's, I I call it

Leo Laporte (02:18:25):
You have had sales and we have taken advantage of them. Yeah,

Andy Ihnatko (02:18:29):
Exactly. So I

Alex Lindsay (02:18:29):
Still have a lot of, so I call it kind of s splunking cuz there's a bunch of boxes and they're up in an attic and I kind of start pulling through them and I find all this stuff. And one of the things I knew that was sitting there somewhere was this ambi mic. This is a Sennheiser ambi mic that I had bought for some, uh, spherical project maybe 10 years ago. The

Leo Laporte (02:18:46):
Good news is the client bought it, but you've got it.

Alex Lindsay (02:18:50):
Well, I, uh, the, the, the client paid me to do a project and I knew I needed that mic and I bought it. Yeah. And then I, and then I used it for that project. Yeah. And then I, now it's

Leo Laporte (02:18:59):
Just sitting around, forgot

Alex Lindsay (02:18:59):
About it. Yeah. Sat sitting around and it sat around and I, it, it wasn't that successful in the project because the streaming platform didn't do it very well. And it was kind of like, oh, okay. Well those are early days. Anyway, we picked it. Yeah. Picked it back up again. Yeah. And, uh, and what we did at NA B was we took this, this, uh, this ambisonic mic. This is, this is used an ambisonic mic. So it has an array of mic microphones, four of 'em, and it ha it'll do four XLR outs and it's a, it's a specific pattern. Oh. And what we did is we plugged that into a, uh, a sound devices, Scorpio. And then, um, and then we went out of that int and embedded those into an s d I signal, put 'em into a live view and streamed it back to our office and with a live view.

(02:19:41):
And so what we did is we had this ambient mic in channels, you know, whatever, four through eight and two microphones, the people walking around, uh, n a b with the microphones. And the reason that I, I find that interesting. We're gonna talk more about it in office hours in the near future, but a lot of people, when I said I was gonna do that, thought I was crazy. You know, they thought that this was a nutty, you know, and I do a lot of nutty things, so it's reasonable to think that everybody <laugh>, but

Leo Laporte (02:20:05):
It's just Alex at it again. Yeah,

Alex Lindsay (02:20:08):
Yeah. But I had this idea like, what if we were able to capture the feel of being there, you know, not just the SM 50 eights with the, no, let's,

Leo Laporte (02:20:14):
Let's get the surround

Alex Lindsay (02:20:15):
Set phonics all the traditional, like how do we get the rest of it in there? And it worked stunningly well. Like it

Leo Laporte (02:20:20):
Was Now when you, did you have it so people were watching in a VR headset so that when they turn their head and stuff, or No,

Alex Lindsay (02:20:26):
You could, we could do that. We didn't. So what we did is we we're one of the, I don't know how many channels right now have 5.1, but our YouTube channel can do 5.1. And so what we did is we shot it in HDR 10 and 5.10 wow. Surround, so, so it was an HDR stream going through a live view. So live view, the 800 has, um, has the ability to do 10 bit. So we could, we were able to send back, uh, an HD R signal back to D back to San Rafael from, you know, from Las Vegas, and convert that, that, um, to, um, you know, an HDR 10 signal that goes to YouTube along with 5.1 audio. And again, it was one of those things that, that I felt, I had a hint that it would work really well. And it works exceptionally well.

(02:21:08):
It's just a test. We're not, it's not published right now, but, but we, um, but what we, what we found was, is that by having this ambient, the, the cool thing is we didn't have tons of mics. We had four, and it was this little thing and someone just walked behind it with a pole <laugh>. They just had a pole behind the, the thing and embed this in. But you really felt like you were there. You felt like you could hear the louder booth over and behind you and, and something else is there. But the mics, and what's cool about it is because we use that ambience separately, we could control how much of that background noise is there. So we could bring it all down a little bit. And the mic, the microphones that are being used, we're not using that for the people talking. We we're still talking into microphones. And so you could c you could control how much audience there was, you know, in those surround speakers. And it was, anyway, it, it, I I went from going, oh, ambisonic is pretty cool to, wow, this is really cool. And there's less expensive versions. This one's like $1,300. This is the one we used. There are more expensive versions. AK AKG just came out with an eight mic version of this. That is amazing. Um, zoom has a much less expensive version that's three or $400. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:22:11):
Zoom's kind of always done this, right, with multiple microphones painting.

Alex Lindsay (02:22:14):
Uh, they have multiple, but a X Y, this is a Zoom has a little one, a little ambisonic one that, that you can use. And the cool thing is, is you can take that ambisonic information and then decode it and put it back in as beds for other surround sound, things that are, that are out there. But it really creates the space in which something, even if your, your primary focus is just a microphone, uh, I was, I was kind of amazed at how immersive it felt. And so

Leo Laporte (02:22:39):
Could you use it like a handheld mic, uh, and talk

Alex Lindsay (02:22:42):
To me? Yeah. You wouldn't

Leo Laporte (02:22:43):
Wanna do that. You wouldn't wanna move it around. You wanna have it. No.

Alex Lindsay (02:22:45):
Cause it, yeah, you wanna, you want to have it be something that's grabbing all the environment. What you wanna do is have that walk around mic. That is still, because by having something like an SM 58 and having it have a lot of off access rejection, so it gets rid of all of that. Ah, you have, you have two pristine channels that you can put in the center channel and then you can mix it. And then you have all this other stuff that you can mix in to, to, to taste, you know, and, and figure out, you know, what makes sense, you know, for that experience. And it, it's, uh, you know, for those out there doing watch the show, I know, uh, the fair number of 'em, you know, there's a, there's definitely a group of Mac, Mac break, uh, folks that, uh, are in broadcast. It's worth looking at. I mean, it's really, look, you know, I know it sounds crazy to go past stereo and go into 5.1 and, but it's a, it's a really cool, uh, really

Leo Laporte (02:23:29):
Cool <crosstalk>. Well, it's interesting cause so, you know, years ago, eh, cuz the technology wasn't there, but it's there now and then and times have, and so this mic, I mean, Mike's don't change. So this,

Alex Lindsay (02:23:39):
I mean, the fact that I was doing this with a relatively, relatively simple rig. Yeah. And I, I think it was the first time anybody's done 5.1 from a show floor <laugh> live, so it's Yeah, yeah. Live, live. It was like a live stream from there's in APR five one. Were you

Leo Laporte (02:23:52):
Mixed with somebody mixing?

Alex Lindsay (02:23:54):
Yeah. So, well, the funny thing is, is that it was, so it was, it was pretty much straight channels into, uh, the live view and then it went back to San Rafael and um, Mickey Macur, who's in the Philippines, he's part of Office hours, he was actually running the software. So we were using um, uh, El acoustics Alisa Studio along with a, um, uh, a, um, and I can't think of the name of it right off the top of my head. A con something that'll interpret the ambisonic and feed it back in. So he's running the mix. So the mix was actually being done in San Rafael from the raw data. So there's the mic data and the Ambisonic data and

Leo Laporte (02:24:31):
Mickey's sitting there, the Philippines going like this. Well, birth,

Alex Lindsay (02:24:35):
He was swearing at us cuz Kevin and I were trying to figure something out. Of course, I didn't know what I was doing. And we, we, we, we tried to, we were testing it the day before and we screwed up all the channels. Oh. So it was, it was all screwed up for the first half hour and then he figured out what we did and tightened it all up and made it work. But it, so when it started working, it was, it was really, you know, um, really fun. And we're gonna be doing that within more of our coverage. I mean, my goal is by the fall, everything we cover will use 5.1, you know, like in the Amazon mic and everything else. And it's, it's, um,

Leo Laporte (02:25:03):
This is why you wanna watch Office Hours, office hours.global, cuz these guys are nuts. <laugh>. But, but there are nuts in an interesting way that, you know, could be very useful in 10, 15 years <laugh> when this, but it's no longer bleeding edge. Uh, they're, they're very, they're very well micd nuts. Yeah. Well, all kinds of nuts. I he's doing all kinds of crazy things. Office hours not global. Yeah.

Alex Lindsay (02:25:27):
Yeah. I mean, I think that we we're, we're constantly trying to figure out what's the next thing you know and how to, and how do you take, and the, and the advantage that we have is because we're doing a show every day, we're constantly like, well, we'll just keep pushing that edge until that edge becomes normal. Yeah. You know, until that, you know, until we're not thinking about it anymore. And, and, um, and we're, you know, hopefully moving the, moving the industry forward a little

Leo Laporte (02:25:45):
Bit. But, and don't forget, uh, gray Matter, that great podcast@graymatter.show that Alex does, uh, with Michael Krasney, uh, and great guests. Uh, Justine. I, Justine, uh,

Alex Lindsay (02:25:55):
This week she was on this Yeah, yeah, she's on this week. We dropped the, the interview. It was great Interview

Leo Laporte (02:26:00):
With Justin. Wow. Very cool. Very cool. And I, I, I'm presuming that you didn't write this blurb that Michael did when British novelist Robert Graves wrote, I Claudias about the fourth Roman Emperor <laugh>. He set the stage for our interview with Justina Zerick <laugh>. I can actually hear that in kras. He's voice.

Alex Lindsay (02:26:18):
Yeah. Yeah. He, he, he does great Inter He does great Opens though. Yeah. Like, like it's every time he introduces someone, it's like this mass. He's famous.

Leo Laporte (02:26:25):
Yeah.

Alex Lindsay (02:26:26):
Know.

Leo Laporte (02:26:26):
Yeah. And I want to hear the, I still haven't heard the Walter Merch one, but I'm dying to hear that one

Alex Lindsay (02:26:29):
As well. Every one of these is Yeah. Real, are really, you know, well done. Really good interviews. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:26:34):
That's, uh, great matter do show Office Hours is@officehours.global. And if you wanna hire this guy as many do to, uh, to be your guru for your next streaming event, nine Media for the Day Job. Thank you Alex.

Alex Lindsay (02:26:50):
Thank you.

Leo Laporte (02:26:51):
Andy Ihnatko, W G B H in Boston. Thursday.

Andy Ihnatko (02:26:56):
Thursday 1230. Go to WGBH news.org to listen to it live or later

Leo Laporte (02:27:01):
And at an state sale near you.

Andy Ihnatko (02:27:04):
<laugh>

Jason Snell (02:27:05):
Don't you never

Leo Laporte (02:27:05):
Know. Don't, don't fight him. The guy's tough. He's tough.

Jason Snell (02:27:08):
He throws an elbow if he needs to. Boom.

Leo Laporte (02:27:10):
Only,

Andy Ihnatko (02:27:10):
I'm just, I'm just saying those Johnny Mathis albums are mine. <laugh>

Jason Snell (02:27:14):
Chip in a bottle. It could be a weapon. You don't know. I

Andy Ihnatko (02:27:17):
Could do, I'll do, I'll do crazy things for Johnny Ma if

Leo Laporte (02:27:19):
I could put a ship in a bottle. Um, Mr. Jason Snell, have a great time with your

Jason Snell (02:27:26):
Mom. Thank you.

Leo Laporte (02:27:27):
I think it's a great thing you're doing for Mother's Day. She

Jason Snell (02:27:30):
Lives out in the middle of nowhere in Arizona. Great times hard to come by, but times will be at

Leo Laporte (02:27:35):
Middle of nowhere. Arizona's one of my favorite places. Yeah, yeah, that's right. You're gonna have a great time. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, we'll miss you next week, back the week after.

Jason Snell (02:27:42):
Back the week after. Okay.

Leo Laporte (02:27:44):
Uh, thank you for being here. Six colors.com. He will be, don't be, uh, charts, charts, charts. Don't be confused. He will be doing the Apple charts.

Jason Snell (02:27:52):
I'll even do the thing where after all the results are done, I will live stream it on YouTube and I will talk you through the charts.

Leo Laporte (02:27:58):
Remember 90 bill revenue prediction?

Jason Snell (02:28:00):
That's my prediction. Yep. I'll see. We'll

Leo Laporte (02:28:02):
See. He's getting, he's on the record for that. Yep. Uh, and so we'll watch that up. We'll watch the livestream. You find out more@sixcolors.com, all as podcaster. Sit six colors dot, uh, Jason, and, uh, you won't be here, but your name will be, uh, invoked many, many times next week. Yeah.

Jason Snell (02:28:17):
Get just, yes. You use my charts. We use

Leo Laporte (02:28:19):
Them

Jason Howell (02:28:20):
As

Jason Snell (02:28:21):
Needed

Leo Laporte (02:28:21):
Every week. We use them as indicated. I mean, every month, every quarter, every quarter. You know what, we use 'em whenever we feel That's right.

Jason Howell (02:28:27):
I don't know those colors. Those colors

Leo Laporte (02:28:28):
Are for everyone. <laugh> <laugh>, uh, we do Mac Break Weekly every Tuesday. 11:00 AM Pacific. 2:00 PM Eastern, 1800 utc. If you wanna join us, uh, live, you can. We stream live audio and video@live.twit.tv. If you're watching live, you might as well hang with some people who are also watching live. There's two places to do that. Of course, the IRC opened to all@irc.twi.tv. There's also the discord for our Club TWiT members after the fact on demand versions of the show are available at the website, twit tv slash mb w If you're there, you'll also see a link to our YouTube channel where you can watch every show. We put 'em all up there. Uh, you can also subscribe and we have links to various well known podcast catchers, but we also have an rss, uh, uh, link so you can use that for any podcaster. If you subscribe, you'll get it the minute it's available every Tuesday afternoon. We thank you all for being here. Hope you enjoyed the show and I hope we'll see you next week. But for now, I'm sorry to say you gotta get back to work. No more browsing estate sales because break time is over byebye.

Jason Howell (02:29:36):
It's midweek and you really wanna know even more about the world of technology.

Mikah Sargent (02:29:40):
So you should check out Tech News Weekly. The show where we talk to and about the people making and breaking the tech news.

Jason Howell (02:29:46):
It's the biggest news. We talk with the, uh, people writing the stories that you're probably reading. We also talk between ourselves about the stories that are getting us even more excited about Tech News this week.

Mikah Sargent (02:29:56):
So if you are excited, well then join us. Head to twit tv slash tnw to subscribe.