MacBreak Weekly 872, 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 Mac Break Weekly. Andy Alex, and yes, Jason are here because we are, of course, all waiting with baited breath to see what Apple will announce on Monday. Our spec, our final speculation coming up. And we'll talk about what words I'm gonna be looking for in the keynote. Then we'll talk about Jason Sudeikis and the end of Ted Lasso. Plus, your money's coming in, that 50 million butterfly keyboard settlement. Stay tuned back. Break Weeklys next podcasts you love from people you trust. This is twit is twi. This is Mac Break Weekly episode 872, recorded Tuesday, May 30th, 2023. Anatomically correct. Fossils. Listeners of this program, get an ad free version if they're members of Club twit. $7 a month gives you ad free versions of all of our shows. Plus membership in the club. Twit Discord, a great clubhouse for twit listeners. And finally, the twit plus feed with shows like Stacy's Book Club, the Untitled Lennox Show, the Gizz Fizz and more. Go to twit.tv/club twit and thanks for your support. It's time for Mac Break Weekly, the show. We cover all your Apple News. Joining us, ladies and gentlemen, the canonical panel. The panel of my dreams. Mr. Chase Snell from all six. Wake up. Leah,

Jason Snell (00:01:34):
Wake up. It's

Leo Laporte (00:01:35):
A dream. I'm dreaming. <Laugh>. Jason will not be here next week. I can't imagine. Why not?

Jason Snell (00:01:41):
I have been summoned to the mothership. What

Leo Laporte (00:01:43):
Are you talking about? He's been summoned to the mothership. You know, in another context that might mean these are the end of days for you, but yeah,

Jason Snell (00:01:50):
Put on your purple ponchos, everybody and the new pair of sneakers.

Leo Laporte (00:01:54):
<Laugh>. Get the Nikes out. We're going. It's, we're summon to the mothership Also, ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Andy and Iko from wg BH in Boston. Hello, Andrew. Hello. It, it's gonna be fun like on Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, like the week after the event to see which analysts and writers and podcasters have pinkeye. Cuz they're, they're all people who got to try like the same like VR headset. I think <laugh>. That's, that's gonna be my marker. It's the, you know what there's gonna be, there's gonna be a shortage of antibacterial wipes in Cupertino next week. <Laugh>. That's what I bring your, bring your own, bring your own or forgotten. That's my prognostication. And the OG breaker ladies, gentlemen. Alex Lindsay of Office hours.global. Hello, Alex.

Alex Lindsay (00:02:39):
I'm wondering, I'm wondering actually, what they actually do for that. You know, like, it, it's gonna be because it, you know that it'll be, someone had, there's probably meetings for the last six months on just that one thing is, is,

Leo Laporte (00:02:51):
Well, Jason probably knows from headphones like the max, the iPod Max Pro. Did they, did they wipe him down? <Laugh>?

Jason Snell (00:02:59):
Well, those we didn't get until they were out. Oh, okay. And what they, what they did is they gave you your review unit and had you take it out <laugh>. Yeah. Don't, they're like, it's just one's yours, which they can't do for this one. Yeah. But I imagine there, I mean, Andy was talking about the shortage of anti bacterial wipes and all that. I'd imagine there's shortage in the Cupertino area because they've all been purchased and are, or album maybe they designed their own. They're gonna be designed, they're gonna be bacterial, white polo, bro, maybe Apple or back into, yeah,

Andy Ihnatko (00:03:26):
I, I'm betting on some sort of like a toilet seat cover. Like you just get your own individual, like over your face before you put it

Jason Snell (00:03:32):
On. Right. It's, it's slightly sticky. So it sticks to your face and then you put it on and the crinkling ignore the crinkling. Okay. Jason Crinkling is not normal. Jason, make sure you

Andy Ihnatko (00:03:38):
Remember to take it off before you go on CNBC afterwards. And that'll

Leo Laporte (00:03:41):
Be great. And save it if Jason, if they do that.

Jason Snell (00:03:43):
Oh man, I beg you, I'm gonna put it in the hall of fame with those covid masks. Yeah. Like Covid masks.

Leo Laporte (00:03:48):
Yeah. Oh yeah. Those are nice. Do you have an

Jason Snell (00:03:50):
App? I'm apple of those. Yeah. I never got one. They're okay. These are at the Apple store's kinda paper. It's weird, but yeah, they are the ones at the Apple store.

Leo Laporte (00:03:58):
Did you save it in the pouch? We can't give you one. You can

Jason Snell (00:04:00):
Sell that on. I have one in the pouch and I have one knot in the pouch that I wore. I know it's not, that's your

Leo Laporte (00:04:04):
Retirement plan.

Jason Snell (00:04:06):
Yeah, I know. It's a shame. Oh, prepared for the next wave as a

Leo Laporte (00:04:10):
Podcaster, one must have a retirement plan. <Laugh> sock it away. You know what, I'm socking away and I have to thank Jameson for this, you know, the Steve Jobs archive. This is all online. This is make something wonderful. Steve Jobs in his own words. So Jameson, who I, I don't know, sent me this and I looked, and you can't buy it printed. It is, the contents are on the Steve Jobs archive, and they printed a few for special people, which Jameson must be.

Jason Snell (00:04:42):
It went to Apple employees and it also went to Pixar and all other Disney is my understanding employees. Oh, got it. So maybe he works at Disney then. Cause Bob Iger was, Bob Iger was really happy about. So yeah, I got from listener ym who works at a ABC sent me one. Oh, how nice. Which is awesome. But yeah, they're real, they're real rare and they're going on eBay and all of that. But if you've got a friend who works at a abc, you might be able to get there.

Leo Laporte (00:05:07):
Very expensive on on eBay if you, but I will never sell this some really wonderful, this is beautiful. I you could read it online, like I said, but there's some really great stuff in this. All of this was created by Lorraine Powell jobs his widow and close friends to kind of preserve Steve's legacy, you know, and it's interesting stuff like this. Do you have an over the shoulder or should I hold it up? Which, which would you like me to do? Hold right now. This is a a, a piece a a memo on a Pixar notepad. A little note says Steve, president Clinton is holding, is <laugh> is that one, and then Steve sitting under the Pixar lamp. I don't know if there's a a force perspective there, or if that actually is a giant Pixar lamp <laugh>. Oh,

Andy Ihnatko (00:05:51):
It, it is a giant Pixar lamp. Oh, Pixar Ball.

Leo Laporte (00:05:54):
Oh, wow. Wow. That's hysterical. I would, I would hope it wouldn't squish you. Here's here's Steve. Very happy with Minnie and Mickey. I wonder why. I wonder why. But, but my, one of my favorite parts is is a series of memos from Steve between Steve and Andy Grove. Did you read those? Anybody? Yeah. Yeah. They're really, oh, there we go. Now we have it. You know, I'll have to show it on the web though, because you can't, you can't really pick up the book. But it, it, it, it starts with an engineer from Intel. This is, while Steve's at Pixar. Lemme see if I can find it. Saying, Hey, we'd like to share information so we can make our Intel processors better. You guys really seem to know a lot. Oh, you have to. It's an e-reader book, or you could get it on Apple.

Jason Snell (00:06:48):
No, there's a web, there's a web version. It's a beautiful web version.

Leo Laporte (00:06:50):
Is there? Oh, yeah, there it is. Read now. Sorry. so the Intel engineer says, you know, Hey, I'd like to come over <laugh> and we can have a little meeting. You can tell me all the secret stuff you've learned about graphics, to which Steve says, you know, we, we put a lot of energy and time and money into that. How much are you gonna pay me? To, to which the engineer says, well, I, I was just thinking of an information exchange. I we're not gonna pay anything. Nevermind. And then Andy Grove, the chairman of Intel, sends a note to Steve saying, Hey, Steve, you know, when we got together I shared stuff with you. Maybe not as valuable as the graphics information that you've learned at Pixar, but, you know, I felt like the open exchange of information was kind of part of this, and that, you know, it seemed reasonable that, you know, you would, you would participate. There's Steve outside the I B M offices giving him the finger in 1983, not a good move. And <laugh>. And and then Steve says, and this is what's amazing. I was wrong. He says, you're right. You're absolutely right. I've changed my position 180 degrees, and he ends up saying, come on over, engineer. Let's talk Really, really an amazing exchange and a different kind of, Steve, to be honest, I didn't, you don't expect him to say, I I was wrong. I'm gonna change my position 180 degrees.

Jason Snell (00:08:25):
This is a story you hear from the people who work with him closely, though. Yeah. Is that he would be vociferously on one side of an issue, but the moment you convinced him that you were right, he would be vociferously on the other side of the issue as if he thought of it himself. In fact. Yeah. but like, I think, and they wanna reinforce that, and the Steve Jobs archive, that's what they're trying to do, is bring out this, these sort of documents that yeah. Reinforce that aspect of Steve Jobs, that once he got convinced that he was wrong, he didn't hold onto it. And it is, I mean, we can talk about all sorts of weird traits that Steve Jobs had, and the ones that might not make you wanna work with him, but this is a really good trait of his, which is the moment he was convinced he was wrong, he just let it go and said, okay, I was wrong. And so many people never do that.

Andy Ihnatko (00:09:09):
Yeah. There was a famous, there was a really great story and one of the anniversaries of the original Mac launch, they had like the entire, like Mac team. I think this thing thing, I think this, this was outta Mac hack a long, long time ago, but Bill Atkinson told us to tell, tell a story about Steve. Like, well, you know, it's we're we're pinching pennies trying to like, get all these graphics primitives. He's the guy who did all the graphics routines for the original Mac Os and the original Rams. Like, we, we just couldn't, we just desperate to get all this code deve. And then Steve comes in my office and says, we should have rounded rectangles as a, as a type. And I said, well, that's a waste of time, this waste. And then he took me on a, took me on a walk around the, around the neighborhood and pointed out license plates and traffic signs and billboards and all the places where they're rounded rectangles in nature. And then I've know, and he convinced me that, you know what, we absolutely have to do that. And then there's a bow warm like applause. Oh, that's, you know, that was Steve. That was Steve. And I forget who else, who, who was on the panel who said, yeah, what, what you don't know is that I, I used that exact same walk to give Steve of that like just two days earlier. <Laugh>.

Jason Snell (00:10:10):
That's

Andy Ihnatko (00:10:10):
Great. Hey, he took, he he absorbed the

Leo Laporte (00:10:13):
Lesson

Andy Ihnatko (00:10:14):
Exactly.

Leo Laporte (00:10:15):
And he took it in and then regurgitated it. It is really a wonderful book. The print version is not out, but you can download it. It is free on Apple Books. It's a free on the Libby app if you have a participating library, or you can just download it from the site or even read it on the site. It's really cool, I have to say. And I, Jameson, I don't know you, but I love you, man. Thank you for sending me my own copy of this. That's, it's really, it's cool to have it in book form. Really, really neat. I know.

Andy Ihnatko (00:10:49):
I hope I I hope they've released like at least a paperback version of it, because there's something tangible Yeah. About paper that it's, it's when, when people when when, when people go to a library, they see things on the shelf when people go into your house, you know, you know guests over, when you have family members in there, they see something they can take down off of a shelf. I, I, I think it's an important enough book that I hope that that it becomes a paperback. I would, I would, I would easily pay money for this.

Leo Laporte (00:11:15):
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I guess you could download it and, and print it at Lulu or somewhere and get a pretty close Fixime. I'm sure this was That's true. Just in time printed. Jamon does rub a little salt in the wound. His note saying Love twit and all your shows, windows Weekly is by far my favorite. You're really knocked it outta the park, bringing Richard. And he's great. I love the cohesion You three have together and laugh so hard at all. Paul's woody humor, he doesn't mention Mack Break Weekly at all. Maybe he was trying to get rid of this book. I think maybe that's the, that's the truth. I don't want this. I'm

Jason Snell (00:11:47):
A Windows guy. Neck Break Weekly listeners are not giving that book away. That's

Andy Ihnatko (00:11:51):
Exactly right.

Leo Laporte (00:11:52):
You know what? That exactly right. And I don't blame you. I don't blame you. Alright. You all act as if we are for sure gonna see a nerd helmet to use Joanna St. Stern's. Lovely. Colloquialism on Monday you know, Glen Fleischman has been to offering bets saying we may see it, but they'll never offer it for sale in 2023. Said not this year. What do you guys think, Jason? You, you feel like you will be wearing a nerd helmet next week this time?

Jason Snell (00:12:27):
Yeah, I mean, I think that it's happening because I think fundamentally, if everybody believed it was happening and it wasn't happening, apple would have leaked it somewhere to diminish expectations. And Apple is not doing that.

Leo Laporte (00:12:37):
I think we'd see a Wall Street Journal article saying, yeah, yeah, exactly. They got it wrong. Everybody got it wrong.

Jason Snell (00:12:42):
Yeah. According to people familiar with the matter. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And instead, I, I do think Glen has a sh an outside shot at being right in the sense that this sounds like a product that is not gonna be ready until the fall or, you know, late fall. And at once you're in late fall, you're in December. And, you know, well, we always back when I did a space podcast, we always used to say, end of year is next year, like later this year is next year. It could be. That's the case with the headset too. But I think it's, they're going to announce something. The question is just sort of what the ship date is and, and will they even say by the end of the year or will they say later or coming soon, or something vague like that. And also the price is the same thing. I don't think personally, I don't think they're gonna announce a price because they don't need to. Cuz it's nowhere near shipping. Yeah.

Andy Ihnatko (00:13:28):
Yeah. And the people and the people who want this are gonna spend whatever they gotta spend for it. They know it's not a consumer item. And then, and if there's, I mean, all these little trickling pizzas bits of information that we would expect to be hearing or right about now or last week about about confirming that this something is happening has happened. Like, for instance, the a a lot of writers and bloggers who talk specifically and exclusively about AR and VR have received invites to the event. Yeah. That's pretty much a slam dunk.

Alex Lindsay (00:13:56):
Yeah. Yeah. And, and I think that, you know, the public version of this is probably late 2024, like the, you know, like 20, late 20, 24, early 20, 25 more

Leo Laporte (00:14:04):
Than a year from now.

Alex Lindsay (00:14:06):
Yeah. So when we're talking about they're releasing something, he may be right though. They're not gonna release a commercial version, but they're gonna release a developer version and then developer version will probably ship before this end of this year, spring of next year. They want people to you know, and so, but I think that it's, it is but I, I think that the commercial version is still a solid 12 to 18, maybe 24 months out. And they're, but they need people to build content. They need people to build content. They need people to understand it. They need to have people digging into it. And so I think that if they can sell a couple million units and get that, that really key gamma testing, beta testing, gamma testing out there, and give the developers time to make sure that this is a crisp platform.

(00:14:45):
What, what really has damaged these platforms in the past is publicly rel public releases without great content. You know, you put 'em on, you get, you get to play Robo Recall for, you know, three hours. And and then what do you do after that? You know? And every, and almost everything else after that is kind of dorky, you know? And so, so I think that, I think that they're gonna come out, I think we're gonna see a lot of content and a lot of partners out of the gate. They're gonna tell, they're gonna show everybody, Hey, look at all these people that are already using it. You don't wanna be left behind. Buy the developer one and start making content for it because this is the next thing you know. And I think that that's where they're gonna probably jump into it, but they're gonna give the developers a solid year and a half to, to work on

Leo Laporte (00:15:25):
It. All right. Apple historians, is there precedent for this? Has Apple ever released something that early and said, you can't buy? It's, we want developers to try it, use it, develop for it, and we'll see you in a year and a half.

Alex Lindsay (00:15:38):
I don't know if there's ever been a precedent for, for this level

Leo Laporte (00:15:42):
Of Jason. What?

Jason Snell (00:15:43):
Well, I mean, not, Alex is saying that for this level, and I think he's right there, but Apple has released several times a developer kit. They did it for Apple Silicon, right? They did it for Intel. There was the transition kit. It was actually like a, a a Mac Pro case that had or that had, and that was

Leo Laporte (00:15:59):
Before they were selling.

Jason Snell (00:16:01):
And before they were selling Intel, Intel for Max. And before they were selling Apple silicon, they had it for developers. The difference this time is this product, by all accounts, is a product that anybody will be able to buy. And so when Alex describes it as being a developer kit, I don't think it will be phrased that way. I think that I, I, I don't honestly don't think Apple is wired that way to say this is just for developers. I think they hope that some early explorers will also buy it, but I do think it'll probably be a defacto development kit. Yeah, absolutely. Because it's so

Leo Laporte (00:16:32):
Expensive. Here's from Scooter X, the Wikipedia article on the de developer transition kit, the name of two prototype MAC computers made available to software developers in the transition to Intel and then, and then in the transition to Apple silicone. So yeah, so in 2005 at WW d c Jobs said, this is a development platform only. This is not a product that will never be shipped as a product. Yeah. They,

Jason Snell (00:17:01):
They made you, made you send them back, they made,

Leo Laporte (00:17:03):
It's just for you guys to get certain, you know, I can actually, you'll have to return them by the end of 2006. We don't want them floating around out there. These are not products. I can see those exact words coming out of Tim Cook's mouth or whoever for this headset. So that's what, I guess that's the only disagreement here. That's kind of Glen's feeling is, is like me that well, they're gonna, I would say Apple will say, this is not what the product's gonna look like. This is, there won't be a battery in your pocket. This is not the consumer product. This is a breadboard for people who wanna learn about X R O S and wanna develop for it. And we'll see you in a couple of years with an actual consumer product. Yeah, that makes sense. Actually. I, I, I think a lot of that makes

Andy Ihnatko (00:17:48):
Sense. If you go to the point of they want to be able to simply correct correctly, they want to be able to dismiss a lot of questions about usability and about its convenience as a consumer product. One of them being that, oh my God, apple would never have an external battery pack. Well, apple did that. This isn't a consumer thing. This is to get this thing out the door. I think it'll be a lot more polished than than like a Breadboard Pro prototype or anything like that. Well,

Leo Laporte (00:18:13):
They've been making them, I mean, according to all the sources, including Mark Gurman and Digit Times and Ming Chio, they've been building them. Yeah. And, and they've been buying screens from Samsung or Sony and, you know, they've been actually making 'em. Yeah.

Jason Snell (00:18:26):
Honestly,

Andy Ihnatko (00:18:27):
I'm sure I'm certain that they already, just very quickly, I'm, I'm certain that they already have some in the field. I'm sure that they have some trusted developers Yeah. Who already have them so that during this presentation next week, they can, they can do the, the almost traditional. And now we, we, we we, we gave, we gave some hardware to our friends at some, some something and like to invite them on just to show, to show you what they were able to accomplish in such a, in such a quick turnaround. Yeah. It'd be demos. Then they can say. Yeah. Right. So

Leo Laporte (00:18:53):
That's, by the way, the other problem with selling these, which Microsoft learned and meta learned, is it's really impossible to demo 'em, you know, because it's an experience. It's not on, you can't see it on a 2D screen.

Jason Snell (00:19:04):
Hard to imagine how this goes in an Apple store too. Right. And

Leo Laporte (00:19:07):
Microsoft, Microsoft had hollowlens in the mic when they had stores in the Microsoft stores and said, come on in. They were in the back and they invited everybody to try 'em. Cuz it's the only thing you can

Jason Snell (00:19:16):
Do. Yeah. Yeah. You have to do it. But it's gonna be hard. But I, I think we are arguing in some ways over a marketing point, because I think the price, if it's a $3,000 product, it's gonna limit who buys it, regardless of whether they call it a developer product or not. There is no evidence, I thought for a long time that they'd just call this a developer preview. Right. there's no evidence that they're gonna do that. I think they know there are enough people out there who will buy it, regardless of it being a 1.0 piece of hardware with very little software for it for $3,000 because they just want to have it. And so I think that that's the thing where they're gonna, my suspicion is they're going to say it is for early adopters and developers, but they're not gonna do the thing where they say it's just for developers and you have to return it to us or anything like that. I think they're just gonna sell 'em.

Alex Lindsay (00:20:01):
I don't think you're gonna have to return it, but I do think that they, they may require you to be a developer. You have to remember there's 30 million developers, registered developers for an Apple. So there's still a pretty big market for them just to sell it into that market. Actually, 99, they may, you <laugh> you may have to put your $99 into to buy it or whatever. They may, may, may make you jump over that hump more for optics than anything else. They don't want another a hundred dollars. They just want the optics of this is the developer version. Yeah. You buy the developer version, you're free to buy this device. And, and people who are gonna pay $3,000 will pay $3,100 without any real, real issue there. I think that the I do think that they'll make, they'll sell as many as they can make just among, and there'll be a lot of people that buy them and leave 'em in the box. Like they're just gonna leave 'em shrink wrapped <laugh> in the box. These are, these are gonna be the collector versions of these. I I bet you a hundred to 500,000 will just go into people's like, just like, just one. I just want one stuck in there because this is gonna be, I think that, you know, people are going to be pretty excited about it. It'll either be a epic failure or an epic but, you know, both Jason and I still have our cubes. I have my cube right there. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>.

Leo Laporte (00:21:03):
I had a cube I foolishly gave away. I wish I

Alex Lindsay (00:21:06):
Still had that. So anyway, so, so, you know, look, we all, even if it doesn't work out perfectly we all, we all like to keep 'em around. So, so the so I think that it's gonna be I I I I, I do think that th this is, I think they'll show hundreds, hundreds of peop hundreds of partners, not like 10 partners or five partners. They're gonna show. A lot of partners don't have

Leo Laporte (00:21:27):
A screen with a lot of logos.

Alex Lindsay (00:21:31):
Well, they, I think they're gonna show a lot of actual use cases. They won't show hundreds of use cases. So

Leo Laporte (00:21:35):
Mark Herman tweeted show a lot of things two weeks ago that Judeo Kojima who created Metal Gear solid and Death Stranding was spotted at Apple Park. He also, I've also seen rumors and he mentions that No Man's Sky for the Mac, which was announced last year, but has not come out. There's some thinking, maybe no man's Sky v there is a VR version on the PC side might come out with this. I tell you what, if I could play metal gear, if I could be a mech <laugh> in in one of these, I might wear a nerd helmet. I might, you know, they'd have to solve the movement issue though. That's the problem. Yeah. Yeah.

Andy Ihnatko (00:22:11):
I, I don't know though. It's just games cost so much money to develop. Are you gonna really put the resources into targeted towards, of really evolving sort

Leo Laporte (00:22:21):
Of small Well, you don't know. This is the problem. No one knows what this market is. Yeah, you're right. So I think Apple will show productivity. Microsoft has, has shifted a productivity. I don't know if that was the right thing to do. As, as Meta by the way. Yeah. Remember they might show, show they might show gaming Gaming's the only thing that's done well so far.

Alex Lindsay (00:22:39):
Well, and remember that Apple has our Apple arcade. They can fund their own games without breaking any, any of their own internal rules about what they give money to and what they don't. They can just say, we're gonna have someone develop this game and put it into, and, you know, put it into the arcade as well. So Apple Arcade can be something that they can take the risk away from developers to, to develop for. So it could be, I

Leo Laporte (00:22:59):
Expect to do it, you know, who believes Apple's gonna release a headset Meta. They <laugh> this week. They put out the Oculus three just to say, wait a minute. Hold, hold, hold, hold, hold on there <laugh>.

Jason Snell (00:23:09):
Yeah, hold on. Yeah, they got it to Mark Germond, who doesn't say where he got it, but it's very clear he got it from Meta.

Leo Laporte (00:23:14):
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. this week I got, I go, mark, you've had a day to fix that. Come on. I go hands. Oh, maybe he means, I go, I get it. I go hands on with Meta yet to be announced. Quest three and explain how it may be the biggest challengers to Apple's headset. They're talking about how thin and light the Quest three is, not what we're hearing about the Apple nerd helmet. Well, it's all

Andy Ihnatko (00:23:40):
Well, yeah, also remember that they, the Quest two exists,

Leo Laporte (00:23:43):
<Laugh>. Yeah. I mean, they've been, I have a Quest Pro. No, I was not overwhelmed by it. It wasn't worth the 1600 bucks. Yeah. I paid for it. It's still not worth a thousand bucks. They're charging these days for it. I, yeah, I know. That's,

Andy Ihnatko (00:23:54):
That's, that's why I've seen, I've already seen some like maybe clickbait coverage and hot takes saying, oh, well there, the real things is from Apple is gonna come until 2024, but when it does, Apple's gonna run the table. They're gonna, they're gonna own this, this category. And that's, that's very, that's very possible given that they given how given that how much trust they've built up with people buying Apple products, maybe even spending the lecture for Apple products and how good their developer channel is. But nonetheless, all of that is, is is based on the idea that Apple has a specific vision that is going to be flexible enough to cover anything anybody wants to do with it. It's possible that Meta or some other co some other producer that we haven't even heard of yet is gonna not not be the 90% of the marketplace, but be really, really successful against Apple by virtue of the fact that, look, we're not gonna handcuff you. We're not gonna, we're not gonna make sure that, oh, well it has, you have to use iCloud for, for syncing. Well, but I don't, my, my app doesn't use files. Well, you still have to use iCloud for file syncing or else we won't approve you. So, so there's still a lot of variables coming in here.

Leo Laporte (00:24:59):
One thing that's interesting at least when I read between the lines of gin's post is the focus on mixed reality. He, he talks about the video pass through performance. He says it will be close to that of the Apple device, which will have about a dozen cameras. More and more we're moving away from this virtual reality world to an augmented or mixed reality world where you can see what's going on around you. And it seems like both meta and Apple, from what we've heard, pure, pure rumors in both cases are now starting to focus more on that. Does that make sense? Is that a little bit of a pivot?

Jason Snell (00:25:41):
I feel like the rumor that they had the equivalent of the digital crown that they were gonna put on this thing to let you dial it between reality, augmented reality, and virtual reality. That, that that was always part of their, their idea here. That, you know, you can almost hear Johnny, ive saying, but we don't want them to feel cut off from the world. Right. And you can do a lot of things that are, the example I always give is that table tennis game, and I think I gave it here last week, that I play like to play ping pong on the Quest two. It's great, but it's in a, it's, I'm completely cut off because it's in a virtual space. And the idea that I could flip a switch and on the quest too, the quality of the cameras outside is, are terrible. But on a good one where I could put that virtual ping pong table in reality so that I could still see if my dog comes in or a cat comes in Uhhuh or my wife goes to the door and is like, what are you doing? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, I think that that's way better. Honestly, not for all uses, but just the idea that you have sort of this two context switchable switchable thing so that you aren't completely cut off from the world while interacting with, I should

Leo Laporte (00:26:42):
Also, that that solves a very big problem with vr, which is the nausea problem. If you can see the real world, you don't get nauseated as quickly.

Alex Lindsay (00:26:51):
Well, the, it might you know, or if as long as it represents it in, because you're not looking at the real world, you're looking at video. It'll

Leo Laporte (00:26:57):
Be worse if late. Yeah. If your head moves and then a second later, the complicated, the video moves, that's not gonna work. It has to be Right. Very instantaneous. Or you will, or

Alex Lindsay (00:27:06):
You barf for sure. The other thing yes. Is that you could, that, when you talk about the table tennis, the other thing that they showed last year was all the collision service issues that collisions collision service processes. So you take your phone, wave it around, there's no reason why this device, as you start to wa as you, as soon as you put it on, it'll I'm sure have lidar and everything else. They can build collision surfaces out of everything around you. So you could be, you could be, it's not just that. You could be, you could be playing in the environment, it looks like the environment, but be invisibly. You could be firing things and ducking behind your, you know, like imagine playing, you know, shooting like laser tag or something with your friends and you could hide behind the couch. Like, you know, like, you know that that's there. So, so it gives you a lot of really interesting opportunities. Most of the sea sickness actually really doesn't come from vr, it comes from the frame rate. So this gets back into why the frame rate has to be higher, higher range. Some Disney used to have this, they have had a test in, in, in Orlando, they'd bring poor college students in and they would turn the frame rate down to see when they, when they blew up <laugh>.

(00:28:07):
Cause they're trying to figure out what's the minimum frame rate. It turns out it's between 12 and 18 frames. If you're 12 near 12 frames, you're a fighter pilot and you're 18, you're kind, you're 16 frames or second and you're kind of average. And and that somewhere there, you, you, you, you, you, you blow chunks. And so <laugh> by the

Leo Laporte (00:28:23):
Way, I I contend that it is not merely frame rate. That's what I think all the headset manufacturers say. It's latency. It is the easiest thing for them to fix. It's not just latency. It's, it's not, it's the discrepancy between the f you know, two di two kinds of focus. The, the, what your inner ear is saying of what your eyes are saying. It's, it's that, but also the inner ear. Also the fact that your eyes are focused on a nearfield object, but your head is looking at things at a distant object. And that, yeah. Mismatch is very hard to solve. Cuz those screens are right here. And I, and I think that that's, that's what Walt, was it Walter Merch? Somebody pointed this out and I I think that that's perhaps more intractable. That's why they don't mention that. When,

Alex Lindsay (00:29:04):
When, when we, when we worked on that in the lab a lot of it had to do with the fact that the, the latency is what maybe say seasick, the what you're talking about gay people, headaches, <laugh>. So, so, so it was a different, different thing. You know, like, so, so the, the, the, the close frame is some people get headaches from be looking at that really there <laugh>. But the, the seasickness seemed to be very related to inner ear, inner ear positions because they're in, in, in, for, for a million years for a million years. If you, if your inner ear didn't agree with your eyes, you were being poisoned. You know, like you were, you know, and so that was the So we're, we're kinda, I just, I just

Leo Laporte (00:29:39):
Every see the more, the

Andy Ihnatko (00:29:40):
More I talk and think about about AR and vr, the more I realize how basic a lot of these problems are. <Laugh> Yeah. Where there's, there's, there's probably this little like tote board, like in every lab saying, okay, <laugh>, are they getting headaches? Yes. No. Are they getting, are they vomiting? Yes. No. Are they peeing themselves? Ah, damn it. We still gotta say, we gotta say that. So here's a,

Alex Lindsay (00:29:58):
Here's a crazy one. People with with blue eyes have different, have respond to the screens differently than brown eyes. And so it's a funny, it No, it's, it's true. It's, it's, yeah, I believe you. And, and so we, we, you have different, different, more problems with people with blue eyes and clear eyes, like really bright blue or eyes have more problems with the sets than, than than brown eyes. It's no one talks about that either. Yeah,

Andy Ihnatko (00:30:20):
No, there's a great thing thing, and, and you, and you, and you still have a problem of, you have no peripheral vision. So there's always going to be the question of mm-hmm. There's so many fundamental questions that can on are only gonna be answered once we have these out there with the understanding that, look, we, we have, we don't know how to make this. You can help us make it if you want to have this really great game platform, but also tell us like, what's making you nauseous. I mean, on the, we still, one of the basic questions that we, we still have to ask is that like when we're wearing these kind of devices let's, let's, let's, let's get augmented reality off the table. Let's, we're not talking about like glasses with clear lenses and wave guides that you can actually really for real see the, the, the world around you.

(00:31:02):
Is it more appropriate to voluntarily say, Hey, I'm putting on these goggles and therefore I'm entering an artificial environment with some awareness of the outside, so they don't like put my, put my fist through or through a wall unless I intend to do so? Or are we looking at an environment where this is going to be alongside what I do? So I'm gonna have cameras that, let me see the person who's sitting across the table, but we're both looking at this model that's on the physical table in front of us. These are things that we have haven't figured out. And a lot of this is gonna be how we decide things as as a society that when we have laptop, when the conferences started and meetings started incorporating, like laptops from laptops now have like all day battery. So of course people are gonna have their laptops with them.

(00:31:45):
We kind of adjusted society to realize that, okay, I have a computer in front of me, but that doesn't mean I'm not paying attention. I'm just simply referring to notes so that I can re so I can answer questions for you or take notes as we go. So it's still, it is still a face-to-face meeting, not through this technology. How are we gonna, how are we gonna adjust to these goggles? Are we going to be interacting with each other or are we gonna be interacting through the technology? This is what's gonna be fascinating by the next couple years.

Alex Lindsay (00:32:09):
And, and I do think that if you look at, you know, apple I think gave us some, some hints to this. If you go to the Apple store that's right outside the spaceship, they've got this thing of the, of Apple campus, you know, where you can look through an iPad and you can look at it and adds all this extra data to it. So it's a very basic framework that they add everything on top of it. And so you could see how, and they have a bunch of iPads going around the outside edge <laugh>, I would, I would not be surprised. I wouldn't say that I guarantee it, but I would not be surprised if the next demo of that is you put headsets on and you look at it and you just see it, you know? Yeah. And, and you can interact with it.

(00:32:44):
Being able to grab onto your hands is really important. I mean, I was in, SGI had a test to this, I don't know, 25 years ago, where you could go like this, you could put your hands out and go, I wanna sphere this big <laugh>, you know, and it just appear, you know, and or you'd say sphere. Like it wasn't, you couldn't say it right. I couldn't, but, but the, but it would pop up and you could just scale it and you could do all the things. You, you, and that was 25 years ago. And, but, you know, I don't know, a probably a 20 million facility <laugh>, you know, things do that. But

Andy Ihnatko (00:33:12):
I'll, I'll just say that the one thing that I'm really looking forward to seeing Apple dos, I don't really care so much about the hardware. I'm sure it's gonna be fine. I don't know about entertainment or productivity. The one business technology that I think that Apple can do a really wonderful thing with is is simply hand tracking. So that I no longer have, you don't have to have to have any kind of con control in your hand, nor nor would, would I want to, that can pick up objects and just gesture and be as, make 3D gestures as important as the mouse was earlier on. But even then, now that I say that out loud, how do you make virtual reality usable by everybody? Not just people who have full dexterity, but their hands. So, God, there's so many unanswered questions here.

Alex Lindsay (00:33:53):
Oh, and I, and I, and I do think we're on our way to, when you put the g you put the goggles on whatever they're gonna call 'em, and you are Tony Stark at some point, you know, like, give me this rotate. The surround could be in a better movie, <laugh>. But, but I'm just saying that, that it's that you're, I'm sorry you have a Iron Man. Kind of like that's what you want to, that's how you want to interact with things as you're trying to think through them. And, you know, being able to just kind of pull things apart and look at them. It does make a difference. Like when you can pull something apart and look at it. And I think that, you know, I could see <laugh>, I know it, I know it will look goofy, but I can see ake giving me something.

(00:34:29):
I put the goggles on and it says, okay, pick that up next and now, now do this. And, and, and they can put on the, on the little digital thing now with half, half the swearing <laugh>, not, not, not, not on none of the swearing, but just half of the swearing that that's required to put together in a Kia furniture, you know? But you could have a lot of instructions on how to do things and working with folks about it. I, I think it's gonna be, again, I think Apple has done if, if, if Apple, and, you know, they may fail, but if they fail, it's dead. They'll

Andy Ihnatko (00:34:58):
Fail. Well, they'll,

Alex Lindsay (00:34:59):
You didn't, if they, if

Andy Ihnatko (00:35:00):
They can't make it work.

Alex Lindsay (00:35:01):
After I was showing U S D Z, we were talking about U S D Z in office hours this morning, and I was showing stuff, then I suddenly realized that we made that three years ago. Like you, you know, that was three years ago. And that was still like, you know, apple, that was u us you know, doing 3D models inside motion inside of, you know, like rotating em around there. You know, you can open a U S D Z model right now in, you can download a, a 3D model from the Smithsonian and open it in preview, and you have since 2020. So this is how long that runway has been to land this. And I think that, you know, I mean, apple, I think was, this is almost a 10 year project. If they, if, and you know, they're, they've lined up a, as many ducks as you can line up without coming out of the gate <laugh>. Like, like I don't think that there's any, so if they can't figure it out, no one can, and we can all give up and go move on.

Jason Snell (00:35:49):
We talk about mark Zuckerberg and like he and, and Tim Cook and Apple and Facebook, and do not track app tracking, transparency, all these ways that they're battling and they're potentially battling here. But I would submit to you, nobody wants the Apple headset to succeed more than Mark Zuckerberg <laugh> because it validates his strategy and it validates this category. And I really, I agree with Alex completely. If apple belly flops, it kills the category, maybe it'll come back in 10 or 15 years, but it will, it will, it will murder it dead because no one will invest if Apple can't make it work. Nobody is gonna invest in anyone else trying. And,

Alex Lindsay (00:36:27):
And the, and the, and the crazy thing is, is that, that Facebook may just stop making headsets. Like they're not a hardware company, you know, and Yeah. Not a very good hardware company, <laugh>. And so, so the thing is, is that, is that nothing that they've done has been particularly successful when it comes to hardware. And so, you know, this may be they were working on, working on working out, now it's on the Apple headset, and they're like, Hey, why don't we just use, why don't we just give up and use that?

Andy Ihnatko (00:36:47):
Yeah. Yep. This could mean this, this could be the, a new message pad where those of us who are into technology were like, oh my God, this is groundbreaking. Oh my God, this is what the next generation computer computers can be. But then it was, it was fell flat because of a, they couldn't make a case for general use out of it. The, the general consumers b the components that they needed to make this really, really work well, the display technology, the, the battery technology, the wireless technology wasn't there yet. And the infrastructure wasn't there yet. So it's possible that Apple is really jumping early, that they, they, they're, they're squandering a chance to be to absolutely run the table again like in eight years because they're trying to get this happening like a year from now. And just like ju just like, you know, you can't say the word Google glass without the connotation of a loser. We don't want the, that same connotation to have to this like early hardware.

Leo Laporte (00:37:37):
I do wanna point out though, and we talked about this on Sunday on Twitter, the, and I own three message pads, <laugh> that yes, the Newton, I guess you could say was a, was an unqualified flop, but because of it, apple formed arm, the microprocessor company, they later sold off their steak and did basic and stuff that they needed to create 10 years later the iPhone. And, and it might, this might actually be a very, I think it's a very apt analogy that that, that this could be the Newton of VR and we may be 10 years off from what we all really want, which is augmented reality spectacles, you know, glasses that you can wear on your head without, but if

Andy Ihnatko (00:38:20):
We, but if we contin I'm sorry, go ahead. No, if, and if we, if we, if we continue the analogy, realized that the Newton was a big success for Handspring, it was a really big success for Paul. Yeah, it was, it was because it showed, it showed a bunch of good ideas. Yeah. Yeah. And then, and then Paul said, well, what if we sold a, sold this for just for half the price and made it small and actually possible. Was

Leo Laporte (00:38:40):
The John the Baptist of computers

Andy Ihnatko (00:38:43):
<Laugh> and wound not be headed

Leo Laporte (00:38:45):
The Exactly. Exactly. but yeah, I mean, you nailed it, I think. And so that's not a bad, well, I guess from a business point of view, it's not a great place to be, but on the other hand,

Andy Ihnatko (00:38:56):
To help other people

Leo Laporte (00:38:57):
Make, but Apple has enough money in the bank to survive 10 years and, and triumph.

Alex Lindsay (00:39:03):
But I, I do think that it comes down to the prop, the performance. And I think that as you read a lot of the behind the scenes of the ups and downs of some people wanting to be more wearable and at less performance, I think the design team wanted it to be more wearable and not worry about the performance as much as some of the other teams. And I'm, I hope that they, I hope that the, the perform performance team, team won because Yeah. Yeah, because you gotta, I mean, I, I think that it's, it's a really steep hill. If that frame rate is under 96 frames a second, and it's a really steep hill. If the, if the resolution is under six 6K per eye, like that's, those are the, I think those are, those are, you know, par for. I mean that, that's that, you know, table stakes, you know, for, for what they have to do. And if they don't do that, it gets really hard because it just doesn't feel, it doesn't feel well. It doesn't, there's all, a lot of the problems start going away with higher frame rate and higher resolution. Like it's just, and, and it's just a matter of the, it's, and it is a really hard thing. Like frame, frame frame rate is not an easy problem because is there

Leo Laporte (00:40:01):
Any commercial,

Alex Lindsay (00:40:02):
So much data headset

Leo Laporte (00:40:03):
That met that meets those goals? Now

Alex Lindsay (00:40:06):
There's no commercial headset that does that right

Leo Laporte (00:40:08):
Now. So it's your contention. The reason VR has failed up to now,

Alex Lindsay (00:40:12):
One of the reasons

Leo Laporte (00:40:13):
Is that

Alex Lindsay (00:40:14):
One of the reasons, one of the reasons is low frame rate and low and and lower frame rate and lower resolution is a big piece of the puzzle. It is.

Leo Laporte (00:40:22):
You're looking, people still get sick if the frame rate's high and the risk.

Alex Lindsay (00:40:26):
Some people are always gonna get sick. So there's some people are just, they have a much more sensitive inner ear and they get sick when, what percentage you get sick when you get on, on a boat. I've seen,

Leo Laporte (00:40:34):
Yeah. So the Air Force said it's 11% of of the population simulator sickness. I just saw an NIH study that said it's about 49%.

Alex Lindsay (00:40:43):
Yeah, we, I think that, I think that in the stuff that we were working on a couple years ago, it was, it was about 10%. Well, what's

Leo Laporte (00:40:49):
Acceptable though, guarantee 10% of your, if you can, you have a consumer product that makes 10% of the buyers

Alex Lindsay (00:40:55):
Sick. Yeah. Oh yeah. You can. Yeah, a hundred percent. Oh, yeah. Yeah. No one thinks that that's a stopper. Hyper

Andy Ihnatko (00:41:00):
Corn syrup,

Alex Lindsay (00:41:01):
<Laugh>. Yeah. I mean, you know, it's

Leo Laporte (00:41:03):
The epicc of headsets.

Alex Lindsay (00:41:05):
<Laugh>. Yeah. I mean, there's a short time 10, 10%. It wouldn't be that, wouldn't that, that's not the speed bump. Here's my prediction. Early adoption or anything

Leo Laporte (00:41:12):
Else. Here's my prediction. This is a flop, but Apple will snatch victory from the jaws of the nerd helmet years from now, because it will be much like the Newton doing the groundwork for something that eventually will really be great. But it is years off because the technology's not there yet.

Alex Lindsay (00:41:30):
Well, I don't think they're gonna have a, I I think, I think them releasing a product will be years off, like, like a com a commercial product is, is I think 18 to 24 months away.

Leo Laporte (00:41:38):
Even then it's too soon. I don't think we're gonna have the breakthroughs that we need to get it down to a small enough size to solve the issues. Maybe we will we'll see in a week. But go ahead, Amy. Yeah,

Andy Ihnatko (00:41:49):
I I, I agree with you. I don't, I don't think it's gonna flop. I think it's gonna have to, I think it's gonna be a success by what Apple chooses to define as a success for this product. The thing is, in addition to what we've been saying about how Apple has 182 billion in cash according to the last quarterly report they, and they can, they can let, they can afford this, this absolutely, they can keep this going. But the, but the other advantage that this product category, category has is that if it doesn't, if it doesn't do anything with consumers, they can still eek out a victory by saying, Hey, this is, this is not ne, this unit is not necessarily making us a whole lot of money, but it is. But our, our friends in the military, our friends in medicine, our friends in training and education all love this. And that's what, that's, by the way,

Leo Laporte (00:42:33):
Microsoft did didn't save HoloLens. Well, they're still, the Army spent a billion dollars on HoloLens then canceled the contract.

Andy Ihnatko (00:42:41):
Yeah. But that, but that, that also shows you how good that kind of business is. They get to keep getting paid for. That's true. Contract. They got the

Leo Laporte (00:42:47):
Billion to improve it. Yeah. Yep. So I think you watch very carefully the language that Apple uses on Monday, because I, I expect Apple to really downplay this. You agree, Jason?

Jason Snell (00:43:02):
I, I mean, watch the language, watch the narrative being built here for sure. Because those are gonna be the key issues is, and then they'll tell us a lot about what Apple thinks this product is going to do and when it's gonna do and who it's gonna do it for, and how they feel about their prospects. That's all gonna come down in the details of how the story is told, what they emphasize, who they emphasize. Emphasize that it's for when it's supposedly coming out. Are they gonna say that this is the beginning? Are they gonna, like, I, I think one of the real questions is, are they gonna kind of break with tradition and say we're this is the first in a line of products and sort of promise that there will be more to come down the line that's more affordable. All of these things are kind of up in the air, but I think this is a huge messaging cha challenge for them.

Leo Laporte (00:43:42):
I think they really downplay it. They say this is a developer tool. It's not, the final product's not gonna be anything like this. This is, so we can get this in the hands of developers. They can learn about XR os the operating system. They can learn how to code for it. They can start developing games, games, take four or five years, they can start working on products for it. But we see this as the first step in a very long journey. And this is not the final product. Not even close. Yeah. I I, yeah. I hope they say that. Cuz I think that's the only right thing to say at this point.

Andy Ihnatko (00:44:16):
Yeah. I mean, PI piggybacking on something that Alex said earlier, I like the idea of a, of Apple saying, Hey, this is just, this is we're only opening this for developers right now. So basic people who have a hundred bucks to spend and can fill out a form. But the idea is that if they can create this perception of limited access, it, it solves it, it addresses a whole lot of vectors that they have to solve. And then later on they can say, Hey, we've are the response to the, the, the response and the progress we've had on development of, of Abscess, great. We've decided that we're gonna open up a waiting list for ordinary people like you and me to go buy these things. So basically they have, they, they'll make a a, a very ample initial run when they sell out of those. If it looks like they can sell more, they can say, Hey, guess what we've, this is moving much more, much faster than we thought it was gonna be. Here's another VR event to show off show off a new portal that we have to demonstrate VR apps. And now we're going, we're for the, if you wanna spend the exact same price as developers, you no longer have to spend the hundred dollars entry fee, the hundred dollars tip to the concierge to get in.

Alex Lindsay (00:45:17):
And, and I don't know whether Apple's gonna, if, if Apple is gonna be as aggressive as Epic and which <laugh> Epic may get aggressive on its own of taking advantage of the headset. But, but the but I think that th that one of the things that Epic has done that's incredibly successful has been the mega grants. The mega grants. Yeah. I mean, people, epic and, and Unity were like in Neck and Neck, and no one knew which one was which. And Epic released at the Meg, the mega grants, and everyone just forgot Unity existed. <Laugh>, like in, in the developer world. Well, apple, like, it

Andy Ihnatko (00:45:47):
Was like Apple, like Unity, or will

Alex Lindsay (00:45:48):
It be they should Unity for the Well, no, I don't, I think they're gonna build their own platform. I think that if they would've bought Unity, they would've bought it already. And the problem is, is it's too big. Like Unity is like an, I think it's an 18 billion or 15 billion. They need a

Andy Ihnatko (00:46:00):
Unity for mixed reality.

Alex Lindsay (00:46:02):
Yep. But I think Apple, I think Apple when, when Epic went sideways, I think that, I think I, I, I betcha Apple looked at Unity and thought about it. And I think that the problem is, is Unity, you know, has a incredible amount of technology, but also a fair amount of technical debt, right? And so, and in both Unity and Unreal having a lot of technical debt. So if you're building something this important to your pipeline, and, and I think that what Epic, cuz Epic, apple, apple was showing Epic at every keynote before they got into the lawsuit. You know, every keynote at that, someone from Unreal would come up and talk about and show us something that was cool and AR and everything else. And then that, that all died. And I think that the lesson for Apple to walk away from related to that was we probably shouldn't put eggs into somebody else's basket.

(00:46:46):
<Laugh>, you know, and, and so, so I have a feeling that you know, if you look at the development that Apple's done around games, around a level of detail calculations around a lot of things that are there, they've already shown those in the developer conferences the last couple years. I don't think that you'd build those if you think that you're gonna, I don't think you build that if you're, if you are thinking of, of really handing it off to somebody else. I think they're gonna have their own internal development tools. I think that, I still think that final cut in motion are probably gonna be part of those development tools for video-based kind of things. I think that, you know, they've, they've bought into that a while ago and we've got, you know, we've seen tools, you know, added to those. We'll see what happens when it actually happens.

(00:47:23):
And maybe they've given up on it, but I, but they put a lot of VR tools into it. We have to remember that they bought Next vr. So they've got a lot of things around around video development that's there. So, so I think that I think Apple's gonna probably try to manage their own their own destiny, so to speak with that. And that's, that's a hard road in a lot of ways because, you know, years of development give you years of tools, you know, so it's, it's expensive. But I do think that the mega grants of getting people, getting developers out there saying, Hey, we're developing this right now. If you've got an idea, we've got money. You know, like, like, you know, like, we've got money to have you help us figure out what the next thing is. And we're gonna spend, you know, like I think the mega grants are like a hundred million dollars a year.

(00:48:04):
Apple could easily, it would be a, a, a rounding error for Apple to say, we're gonna, we're gonna seed the seed the market with a billion dollars a year of funding for people. And, and what the meg, what really works with the mega grants is that there's no strings attached. They just give you the money. <Laugh>, like you, you write them a proposal and they just, they just write you a check. I know a lot of people that have been pretty successful. I haven't done it, but I keep on thinking about it. But, but the but they just give you, give you the money to work with, and they're not asking for a percentage of your company. They're not asking. So it really is a great, great opportunity. And so I think that if, if Apple did a billion dollars a year of seed funding that was public, like that, they get everybody thinking about it.

(00:48:42):
And so then have all these developers with developer kits with a very focused, like, I could actually get money to hold me over for a year to work on this, you know, and to, and to figure those things out. And it would, it, I think it would, it would benefit Apple a lot. So suppose they should have done with iBooks. They could afford not, not talked to Pearson, they shouldn't have talked to Pearson. They should have just Yeah, right. Given book developers, if they had given a billion dollars in TW 2010 to iBooks or whatever, it would've, we, we would not have regular books in the way that we think of them right now.

Andy Ihnatko (00:49:11):
Yeah. And and they also have a suite of apps that they can start, they can use as a bed to explain, Hey, we not, this is not just gonna be a game platform <laugh>. If you wanna, if you want it as a game platform, go to our, go to our Apple arcade where we've, we've funded a whole bunch of games, but it'd be interesting to see how they decide to get their chat app converted to vr, but also how do they get pages, how they get sheets how they get Keynote for, for heaven's sake.

Alex Lindsay (00:49:35):
I think that 3D U S D Z and Keynote is pro in the short term, is probably more exciting than, than the headset. And the reason for that is, is that, you know, there's so many of us that do presentations and we have to throw we find a photo. And what I do a lot of times is I get 3D models of stuff. I take it into preview because I can open up a U U S D Z model in preview, rotate it to the angle that I needed in, and then hit save <laugh>, and then I put it into Keynote. That's crazy. You know? And so the thing is, is that you could be putting it in and as you do the presentation, you can have things animated. You can have you, but even if they're not animated, even if they're just all still, it just means that you can choose the position and lighting of your object with a little drop shadow and everything else sitting inside your keynote.

(00:50:17):
It's gonna revolutionize, you know, that. But the biggest thing is, is that the size of the keynote market will create a huge demand for, for clip art. So 3D clip art that's useful in the headset, that's useful in ar it's useful in motion and everything else. Suddenly everyone's buying up, you know, at, at, at, at a hundred dollars a u a hundred dollars per model, or $50 a model. You sell a certain number if you have a collection of, of, of 25 models for 10 bucks that are like classroom models and, and anatomy models and Sure. You know, all of those things, you could see a lot of people buying a lot of models.

Andy Ihnatko (00:50:51):
Yeah. But that it also points out the it's not an elephant in the room, but it's something that's gonna have an impact on all this. And when we talk about what is the wave of the future, obviously it seems to be a fight between and big companies between ar, vr and generative AI chatbots. And so on the other side of the coin, you've got Microsoft and Google demonstrating their AI upgrades to their own presentation apps that say, Hey, you want a piece of art? Tell us what you want. We'll, we'll generate it for you. In addition to stuff like the problem with generating a presentation in augmented reality is that everybody has to have that kind of hardware. Whereas given that this is the communication tool for pretty much every meeting and every project worldwide, the ability to say, Hey, look, I'm just gonna give you some loose notes.

(00:51:35):
Can you turn this into a slide deck? At least the first, yeah. The first draft of a slide deck for me. So the, so as we go on, it's, again, another part of this, I keep saying this is gonna be the, this is one of the most interesting couple of years I've, I I will, I will live through the, the, the idea of Apples apple saying, Hey, we put all this energy into augmented reality, cuz that's gonna be the next, oh, okay. We don't think that's gonna be as big, but I, we think we can at least catch up in time if they,

Alex Lindsay (00:52:00):
I, I, I will say that, I mean, I, I already, when I do slide decks, all of my illustrations are all mid journey at this point. Yeah. So I'm, I'm really, really good at using Mid Journey for all my slide decks, all my little examples and funny images and everything else are all generated at Mid Journey. But I will say it's like negotiating with your, your your nephew that who's on mushrooms, and you're going, so I want, I want this. And he goes, you mean this? And you're like, no, not that, not that I want this. And you're like, you mean this? No, no, not that. Like, if

Andy Ihnatko (00:52:28):
You think outside the box, we like to maybe a little closer to the box, get closer to the box, we'll tell you when to get a little,

Alex Lindsay (00:52:33):
Your nephew on LSD is like super creative and super cool.

Andy Ihnatko (00:52:36):
I love that energy, energy

Alex Lindsay (00:52:37):
Kid <laugh>. But, but he just, but you have to keep on asking him questions for a little while before you get something pops out the other end. And then sometimes you ask it and you're like, oh, that's perfect. You know, and <laugh> and anyway, so, so anyway, so it's, it's so I think that the, that's the challenge with, with Genitive AI right now. But I do think that, you know, we're, I think you're gonna, I think you are gonna get to a point even with Apple where you say, you know, it may not be, there's gender Ray ai, but there's also like, I'm building out this thing and give me a chair here. You know, give me a thing here and that can, and you know, sure. And maybe a bunch of chairs pop up and I can discuss it with, with the system and throw those in. It may not be, it's creating something out of nothing, but it's saying, would you like any of these Ikea chairs? Oh yeah,

Andy Ihnatko (00:53:19):
I'll take that. Alex, you think people buy a lot of furniture all the time? Because that is, I

Leo Laporte (00:53:24):
You what a cheap pressure. I don't think that's,

Alex Lindsay (00:53:27):
It's the hardest thing to buy. Oh,

Leo Laporte (00:53:29):
That's fine. But I, you know, that'ss a terrible example. Cuz how often do people use those?

Alex Lindsay (00:53:33):
No, no, I'm not talking about that. I'm not talking about buying it. I'm talking about just using it in your de demonstration. So you wanna fill out a room, you should need chairs and you throw stuff in and bring, so like for instance,

Leo Laporte (00:53:42):
It'll be great. It's easier come up.

Alex Lindsay (00:53:43):
No, no. So

Leo Laporte (00:53:44):
A great way to generate em

Alex Lindsay (00:53:46):
<Laugh>. But the, the, the, the thing is, is that, like for instance Keif Flow makes lights, makes the lights that you're under that's giving you that highlight that you don't like. The, am I wrong? All these lights is, it's fine. It doesn't look any different than it has ever.

Leo Laporte (00:54:00):
I know. I just noticed it. That's all.

Alex Lindsay (00:54:02):
So the so the so Keif Flow makes all these things. And what they did is they, they, they put their lights into Sketch Up. I don't know if they did it or somebody else. I think I'm pretty sure the company did it. Like somebody, the company modeled them all and added all the behaviors and did all the other things that were necessary so that you could take full advantage of Keif Flow's, lights inside of SketchUp. And then we all used them, we all used those lights because those are the easiest ones to add to our, to our preview for showing a client what we were doing. And then once the client said, yeah, we wanna do that project, well, we just all rented or bought Pina Flos because we had, because it was easier to do. So. So what I'm talking about is being able to add all these objects to it that are hundreds or thousands of objects that you can add in. And if you like it, at some point you're just previewing things. You're building virtual worlds. But instead of building them with generic generic furniture, like my, my daughter does interior, well she did, she's, she's pasted Roblox now. She's, she's, she's not into Minecraft, <laugh>. And but in Roblox, she was buying, you know, all this furniture. And I was like, I can't believe that furniture companies aren't like just dumping Roblox with their furniture for people's houses so that kids get used to looking at their furniture rather than somebody else's furniture. So

Leo Laporte (00:55:13):
Jason, are you gonna spend the night, are you gonna go, I don't know, you can't tell me any of this, but just if you could, you're going Monday to Apple Park, you're gonna be there at the event, at the keynote. Yes. You can't tell. Yeah, I'll be there. You can. And then are you getting a hotel room? And this is a secret. No, I'll be there. You'll be there. And then you're gonna come back the next day.

Leo Laporte (00:55:33):
I know you're not gonna be here. I've been, I've been told to be present Monday and Tuesday

Alex Lindsay (00:55:37):
For

Leo Laporte (00:55:37):
Whatever you, for whatever you're doing. And I don't you what that is. They just say no, they

Alex Lindsay (00:55:39):
Don't, they don't tell

Leo Laporte (00:55:40):
Be here things like that. You'll, well, they could say, you will want to be here and that would be enough probably. I mean, they may have said that, but I mean, it's either way. I you're gonna be there, <laugh> if there's things happening, I'm gonna be there. The

Andy Ihnatko (00:55:51):
New, the new MacBook Air comes in a, in a shade of gray that Jason, you have to see to believe. See, you won't believe you're gonna want to be there on Tuesday.

Leo Laporte (00:55:58):
So. That's right. Jason will not be here next week, nor will be he be here for our coverage. But Micah and I will be doing the keynote coverage and we will be watching very carefully for the language and the wording. And that's one reason you might wanna watch that coverage as opposed to just watching the keynote by itself. We're gonna really look deeply at what, what they're saying about these products. 10:00 AM Pacific, that's 1:00 PM Eastern on Monday a week from yesterday on June 5th for the Apple keynote. We might, I've done last year. I kind of stuck around for the developer the State of the Union keynote the next, that afternoon. I may or may not, depending on how I feel. Yeah, sometimes it's interesting. Usual.

Andy Ihnatko (00:56:40):
Usually some of the fun is, oh, apple didn't announce something, but, oh, look at what they're talking about in the, in the, in the, in the user sessions and in the state of the state of the Union. But now it's like, what could they not be talking about <laugh>? That will be, that would be more interesting than the key than the highlight <laugh>. Will, will they put it the star? Will they, will they put it at the start? Will they put it? I bet they, I bet it comes at the end because if they really are like introducing a few new Max, like they're, no one's gonna pay attention afterward. Everyone's gonna be <laugh>. You, you don't, you don't put Diana Ross like at the start of the show. You put her at the end of the show or else, otherwise no one's gonna stand and no one's gonna hang around to see the comic. They

Leo Laporte (00:57:14):
Always the rumors start to heat up roundabout. Now Saturday, mark Germond tweeted Apple will start accepting trade-ins of the Mac Studio, the 13 inch M two MacBook Air and the 13 inch M two MacBook Pro on June 5th. Read into that, as you will. He says, I'm ex I will, I will <laugh> I am expecting I'll,

Jason Snell (00:57:37):
I don't think it's, I don't think it's anything, but it's meaningless. I mean,

Leo Laporte (00:57:39):
Write nothing into it.

Jason Snell (00:57:41):
They, they don't always coincide with product launches. Right. And it may just be that that's a banner day for Apple, and so they're gonna hit the reset button on that day. Like Andy said, I don't know why you would trickle out a few Macs just before announcing your brand new platform, right? Like that's a weird choice to, to dilute the message in when you could just wait a couple of weeks and get everybody to focus on it. So do

Leo Laporte (00:58:05):
You think that they will say nothing about anything except the nerd element?

Jason Snell (00:58:10):
No. Oh no. It'll be a wwc keynote. Right. So they're gonna talk about the new versions of the all the operating systems. Oh, that's right.

Leo Laporte (00:58:15):
For sure. Ios

Jason Snell (00:58:16):
That that'll all be there. Although I think that's why the mc West State of the Union, or the the platform State of the Union is what it is called now might be more interesting than usual because I wonder if they're just not gonna have enough time

Leo Laporte (00:58:28):
Push that stuff over to there to,

Jason Snell (00:58:29):
To put a lot of detail about what's happening in all the different new OS versions come to fall which a lot of us really care about. So I, I wouldn't be surprised about that. I would be, I I I'm gonna say it, I would be legitimately surprised if they basically blow a Mac launch by announcing it at the beginning of an event where everybody's just gonna be talking about the headset. Like why would you Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:58:53):
Don't even bother.

Jason Snell (00:58:54):
Just do it then. Yeah. Unless, unless it, the headset is, I mean, one possibility just kind of brainstorming here is that the headset, they're taking their foot off the gas of the headset and they're really gonna make it a developer preview. And they're gonna just do a little tiny bit and they know when they launch it later, they'll talk about it more. They, there could be reasons that they want to kinda like try to de-emphasize it, but I think that they're kidding themselves if, if they're trying that. Yeah. Because the fact is, if they do anything about the, the headset is the headline. The headset is the subhead. The headset is the first 20 paragraphs. The headset is the sidebar article. The headset is the third article. Right. Like, so if you're don't introduce a Mac <laugh> on Monday, just don't do it. Cuz nobody's gonna care.

Andy Ihnatko (00:59:37):
Yeah. We're not gonna hear much about the new Apple Flagship store in South Attleboro, Massachusetts. It's just, you know, you're gonna have to go to the website for that, frankly.

Leo Laporte (00:59:44):
<Laugh>. well maybe, you know what, now I'm thinking maybe we'll stick around and do the the State of the Union because that's are they gonna do this like they did last year? Jason? Do you know? I mean, what is it's, is it open to the It's not open.

Jason Snell (00:59:58):
It's not, it's a small invite only group of developers who've been told to come. And then members of the media and VIPs who've been told to come, we don't even know where we're going. Last year we didn't know that we were gonna be in the ring, but we actually were in the Cafe Max sort of pointed out of the ring. But in the ring building this year, we also don't know. I mean, I think there's a possibility it could be identical to last year and we'll all be in that Cafe Max space looking at a jumbotron, essentially playing. Were you inside the Cafe Max or were you outside in, in the yard? You Well, I was sort of right on the border because what it was, the front row were out in the sun, but there were, there were enough people there that you went all the way back and the cafe there, they opened, they opened the big, they opened the whole, it's open air.

(01:00:36):
So they opened the whole thing on the outside. So we were kind of like rolling back into the mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, the cafe. It's also possible that they'll do do it in the Steve Jobs theater. It's possible that they'll put the developers out at Cafe Max and they'll have the press go to the Steve Jobs theater, because if we're all just watching a video mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, they could split us up if they wanted to. That's the mystery. We don't know anything about that. But it's gonna be a small group. It'll be more like last year than, than any other year. Probably all pre-taped. You know, it's a small event. And and then the, the developers have also been told, and this was reported to make time on Tuesday for something. And the guess is that this headset is gonna take that much time to roll out to people. Because again, you can't really just put it on a table and say, everybody look, you've gotta cycle people through. So it may take days, or who knows, maybe we'll just all need Tuesday to pick up that 15 inch MacBook here. Maybe. <laugh>,

Leo Laporte (01:01:28):
Hold on. No, I think they're, I think it's, that's why I'm asking. I Yeah. Tuesday's the headset demo, isn't it? By the way, Alex, I think your l s d adult nephew did in fact design the homepage for WW d c. It's trippy. Cool man. To say the least. The melting apple. I think if you look at it on an iPhone there's a vr Am I right? There's a VR version of this, or No, there's

Jason Snell (01:01:56):
Usually an AR object that they put on these

Leo Laporte (01:01:59):
Ar not vr. Yeah. Mm-hmm. I don't know. I I, I don't know how I would make this happen. You gotta be

Jason Snell (01:02:04):
In Safari

Leo Laporte (01:02:05):
If you're Safari. Yeah. If,

Andy Ihnatko (01:02:08):
If you're a MacBook Display exhibits these tendencies, take it right back to the Apple Store for a free screen replacement within 18 months after the

Leo Laporte (01:02:15):
Purchase date. This it's trippy, man. <Laugh>. It's really it's really getting watch this, it,

Andy Ihnatko (01:02:21):
It doesn't look like a finger being squished into an LCD screen. That's what it looks like.

Leo Laporte (01:02:24):
Oh, yeah. Yeah. That's not good. Don't let that happen to your L C D.

Andy Ihnatko (01:02:31):
That what will everything will look like after spending at least two hours with a headset up. Yeah. Everything is just,

Leo Laporte (01:02:36):
What can we, what are they trying to say with this? I don't, I don't get it.

Andy Ihnatko (01:02:41):
We know how to make a, a cool Apple logo. We

Leo Laporte (01:02:43):
Could do a rock and roll light show. I feel like Jim Morrison should be on stage singing break on through to the other side.

Andy Ihnatko (01:02:54):
I, I honestly wish that the team that does these animations for the, for the keynotes and stuff like that, I wish they would make new screensavers because there's many tools. Oh,

Leo Laporte (01:03:01):
Wouldn't that be a great screen I've

Andy Ihnatko (01:03:02):
Seen of these things like that? I would love to see, I would

Leo Laporte (01:03:05):
That maybe that's what these are is the frustrated screensaver makers <laugh>. Yeah. They only get, you know, one screens saver every year. The

Andy Ihnatko (01:03:13):
Apple, they get their, sorry, go ahead. The

Leo Laporte (01:03:16):
The Swifties have received their passports to wwdc the Swift Student Challenge winners who are three of them, Marta Yemi and Osme. And a as usual, they all do you know, the show off what the, what these kids have, have done. Asme Jane found out her friend's uncle had to undergo brain surgery. She was a student at Medi Caps University in indoor India. So she sprang into action designing her winning Swift playground to track a user's eye movements as they try to follow a ball moving around the screen designed to help strengthen the eye muscles. I wonder if these are all gonna be kind of Hmm. That would sure be better if you could put a helmet on <laugh>. Here's a 21 year old Yemi Sison. He is a student at Kennesaw State University in Georgia. He designed a first person baseball game.

(01:04:20):
Hmm. I bet you all of these would look really good in a headset. <Laugh> Marie, I'm sorry. Marta. Michelle Caldo, 25 years old. She's pass fascinated with fossils. She's studying at the Apple Developer Academy in Naples. Nice. Is it Naples, Florida or Naples, Italy. <Laugh>. I think it's Naples, Italy that, no, I don't know. Yeah. University of Naples. Fred Rico. Duwe Coding helps me find new ways to express and share that message with others. Her playground is a memory game featuring anatomically cur, well, excuse me, I'm sorry. Kids anatomically correct. Pictures of dinosaur fossils. She drew them in procreate made all the more impressive because she'd only learned Swift in September.

Andy Ihnatko (01:05:07):
Yeah. Oh. So I, I, I like those three printers. The, sometimes when, when you have these, these programming contests, they want to get to the people that are like, oh, well, I got my PhD in 14, right? Eight, 14. My, my, my Swift F is about protein unfolding. Well, I, there's gi give give me like, someone who's has a good science head, a really good creative head, and one who just had, here is my, here is my quirk in things I'm really, really interested in. And I didn't, I I, I'm not the sort of person who would make a game based on fossils, but here we are because the cause of the power and the majesty of, of swift coating

Leo Laporte (01:05:40):
Anatomically correct. Fossils. I might add ag the the baseball game designer says he's eager to add ar kit in reality kit to his growing toolbox. I bet you are. I bet you are.

Andy Ihnatko (01:05:55):
I wonder if they're gonna get seated with hardware. Wouldn't that be fun? I, I wanna see some kids get these hope

Leo Laporte (01:06:00):
Yeah. Seats. Mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. I think that should be part of their prize. Yeah. Don't you? Yeah. Yes. Swift Student challenge winners will be at WWE C also apple has not yet dis announced the design winners, but they'll announce those on Monday too. Is that right? I think they do that every year. I think so. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'm really excited. Ial. Oh, what's this? <Laugh>? Oh, he's found the apple. It's floating over my head. Ah, ah,

Andy Ihnatko (01:06:30):
Does indigestion keep you up at night? <Laugh>? Yep. It's new strawberry flavor.

Leo Laporte (01:06:37):
That's cool. Anthony Nielsen has put that on his iPhone and is now projecting, you know,

Andy Ihnatko (01:06:42):
The, the melting out this thing of the jelly apple is known to be toxic to 83% of all land mammals.

Leo Laporte (01:06:49):
Yeah. Get it off of me. Thank you Anthony. Gary Vinegar well done. Very nice. Anthony Nielsen leaping into the fray. Anything else to say about my, I'm, like I said, I'm really excited. It's always cool when Apple has a keynote extra cool when Apple announces not just new products in an existing category, but new categories entirely. And yeah, this is, they haven't done that since the watch, I think. Right? This is, yeah. It's

Jason Snell (01:07:19):
Gonna be good. Gonna be entertaining and a lot of fodder for conversation,

Leo Laporte (01:07:23):
Regardless of, yeah. Thank God, because great deals about it. These shows are really getting scant <laugh>.

Andy Ihnatko (01:07:29):
Well, this is the time of year. Yeah. No,

Leo Laporte (01:07:31):
I'm kidding. Actually, we've had a good conversation. I'm gonna pause for a moment to let you gentlemen wet your whistles, if that's what you call 'em. But we'll be back with other stories. There's more in the Mac and Apple world. But first, a plea, a beg, a a a, a respectful ask. This show has no ads. The ad market, and I've talked to so many podcasters and so many big podcasting companies is struggling. Let's be honest. And I don't know why that is. Is it, is it recession? Is it post Covid Hangover? But companies are not buying podcasts ad like they used to. And when a show doesn't have any ads that means it's out of pocket for us. Unless we can convince you to help out a little bit. So I know, Hey, I know we're not Jerry's kids, but $7 a month keeps the lights on, keeps the shows flowing, keeps our team employed, keeps our hosts getting their stipends.

(01:08:40):
It's a little small amount to pay, but you get a great benefit, I think add free versions of all of our shows, plus shows we don't put out except to the club, like Hands On Macintosh with Micah Sergeant. We put out, you know, occasional episodes of that for the public to consume on our YouTube channel. But the full set of weekly shows is only available to club members. Same with Hands On Windows with Paul Throt. We brought back Scott Wilkinson's Home Theater Geeks a show again that we really loved doing, but couldn't afford to do until the Club came along. Plus great events going on in our discord. The Discord is the best social network ever. I just, I I I've become a Discord fan and we have events in the Discord. For instance, you can join us with the keynote in the livestream.

(01:09:28):
You can watch the Home Theater Geeks recordings. We've got a fireside chat coming up with Floss Weekly. Sean Powers, Stacey's Book Club is really a great book, right? John, you, you were really loving the Terra Formers. Anna Lee Neitz new book. We're gonna have a, a it looks like booze soaked inside Twit <laugh> next month. <Laugh> and a fireside chat with Rod Pile. Rod Pile's a great example of what the club hath wr We wouldn't have this weekend space. We launched it, so to speak, in the club because it was a brand new show and we knew there'd be, you know, no audience yet. No advertisers yet to support it. But as it grew in the club and it grew its audience, Terry Malik, the, the editor-in-chief of space.com, rod Pile, editor-in-chief of the National Space Society's publication really do a great job.

(01:10:20):
They grew the audience, they grew the advertisers. We were able to put it out in the public. And again, that's thanks to the club. So if you, if you are at all interested you could find out all the pricing details on the page. I put one thing though, please tell your wife if you buy it, <laugh>, we got a charge back the other day cuz the guy subscribed to the club. I think he bought the $84 full year package, right? And without telling his wife, and the wife issued a chargeback, disputed it, and we had to give him the money back, and then we got a ding from Stripe. It, it's become a whole hassle. So please <laugh>, don't surprise your spouse with this purchase <laugh>, unless it's a gift. But chargebacks really are can be a problem. We don't want too many of those. So only if you know, this is, I I really want this TWIT TV slash club Twitter. It really does help us out. Seven bucks a month, 84 bucks a year. There's family plans, discounted family plans. There's also <laugh>, it's two. There's also corporate plans. We actually have a num, quite a few corporate members, which we thank you for that Twit TV slash club twit please.

Andy Ihnatko (01:11:32):
Communication is is so important in our relationship.

Leo Laporte (01:11:34):
Yep. Tell your spouse. It was a funny story. I mean, it is a funny story. I feel bad for both parties, but it's, you know, it's a lot of work. And the chargeback is is apparently a very bad thing. I don't know. I think we have enough chargebacks now that they're, we're starting to get, you know, the, the stink eye <laugh> from a member full in the stripe. Stripe does the transactions. Twit TV slash club twit because cuz Andy, Andy needs new shoes, right?

Andy Ihnatko (01:12:06):
Actually, actually I do. I'm barefoot. I'm, I'm doing this without shoes. I'm, I'm shoeless Andy during the show,

Leo Laporte (01:12:12):
Apple is shutting down. I don't know if this is good or bad. I, I asked around, I don't know. Apple is shutting down my photo stream. Next month you're supposed to use iCloud photos instead. I, I don't, I dimly remember this thing called my photo stream. It would allow you to kind of upstream as many as a thousand photos, but they had to be within the last 30 days. And they, you know, the new ones would replace the old ones. And I guess people use iCloud photos anyway, apple is gonna say tell you if you are using my photo stream, that, that you can no longer upload to my photo stream on June 26th. Images will remain in iCloud as usual for 30 days. And then on j I guess July 26th. Bye-Bye. Nice photo stream. Did anybody use this?

Jason Snell (01:12:57):
Yeah, this was, this is their cloud photo solution for many years until they came up with iCloud photo library, which itself was a long time ago. Now that was, that was like seven or eight years ago. So yeah, it used to be, this was how it worked is that a rolling 30 days of your photos were available on all your devices so that you could see them or share them or copy them over, like, copy them off your iPhone and put them on your Mac via photo stream. You could do it that way. But that's, that's what it was. And one Cy Cloud photo library came out. And now that they've got library sharing on top of that, but like, this is just, yeah, this is a cloud surface whose time has passed.

Leo Laporte (01:13:35):
There's no functionality that you're losing by losing my photo stream. Is that right?

Andy Ihnatko (01:13:39):
Yeah. And and Apple has always has already said that if you have any photos in that system, it's already, it's already on other devices in another Apple system. So it's not as though if you, if you, if it's something that you thought that, oh wow, that came out roughly when like my second daughter was born. Are there baby pictures that I haven't backed up yet? If, if you did anything with them in photo stream, it's, it's already an i photo in iCloud. That's

Leo Laporte (01:14:01):
Actually really important cuz you don't want people to lose images. I have seen some people complain that, oh, it's gonna use more bandwidth. I can't afford the bandwidth for iCloud. I don't if that makes, even makes any sense. I don't think it's gonna use more bandwidths, but I guess maybe they didn't wanna pay for iCloud because they don't have enough bandwidth to use it fully. Something like that. I don't know. If you don't pay for iCloud, what happens

Jason Snell (01:14:24):
Then? You need to sync your photos by attaching it to, to the computer, your computer and syncing the photos that way. That's just how you have to do it. If you don't want to use the cloud, okay. Either, either a corded connection or you could just airdrop them or something

Leo Laporte (01:14:37):
Like that. Get them onto the computer though. Before the shutdown in July, Apple's 50 million butterfly keyboard settlement has finally, finally been approved. You know, what was holding it up? So there was a class action lawsuit. 86,000 people had repairs on their butterfly keyboard. So they're in the class, they're gonna get some money. But there were a few people who said, well this is only open to people who paid for repairs. I just want money for having to use that thing. <Laugh>.

Andy Ihnatko (01:15:16):
Yep.

Leo Laporte (01:15:17):
I just, just gimme money cuz I had to use the butterfly keyboard. The judge give,

Andy Ihnatko (01:15:21):
Give me one, give me one 20th of a cent for every typo I made because of that keyboard.

Leo Laporte (01:15:26):
Six objectors offered arguments saying the settlement wasn't fair to MacBook owners who'd never repaired their fail to keyboards and therefore didn't get any cash. Or that the $125 offered to those who only had to pay for one replacement wasn't enough to cover the cost repairs. Remember Joanna Stern, I think had to repair her butterfly keyboard multiple times. The judge said, no, no, it's insufficient to say you just want more money. <Laugh> <laugh>,

Andy Ihnatko (01:15:54):
It's, we all want more money. We all want it more

Leo Laporte (01:15:56):
Money. That doesn't really narrow it down enough. So there this, the settlement's gonna go out. And the 86,000 people who filed their claims months ago July,

Alex Lindsay (01:16:08):
Dipped a little ladle into the cash flow for about a second <laugh>. Oh, they just went, okay,

Leo Laporte (01:16:14):
Okay, let's, you, you may get as much as $395 back to cover your repair costs, but you have to submit, you know, the proof of repair costs and all that stuff. Apple settlement does not include an admission of wrongdoing. What? Butterfly keyboard. <Laugh>. There's no, what? No, what are you talking about? We love that butterfly keyboard.

Andy Ihnatko (01:16:31):
I thought, I thought you said in the keynote that customers love the new keyboard, they <laugh> and you're just, and you're just doing things to make them love it even more when you change the whole thing. This

Leo Laporte (01:16:39):
This is a dopey story, but it's a story and we gotta use all the ones we can get <laugh> Apple sued by actor Brent Sexton because they made it, they wanted him to get a Covid vaccine and he said, I can't because I've got too many platelets. And as a result they fired him from an upcoming Apple TV series called Manhunt. He was going to play President Andrew Johnson. So it's kind of appropriate that he didn't want to get a vaccine. I don't think Andrew Jackson or Johnson would've won it. Appropriate Appropriates being a jerk. Yeah. Yeah. <Laugh>. He wouldn't have wanted it either. He had a doc, a note from a doctor, the actors filing a disability discrimination lawsuit in Superior Court saying, you can't fire me for not taking a vaccine that my doctor says I shouldn't get. And you know, actually he has too few platelets. Did I say too many? Here's too few platelets. It's easy to confuse the two. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> apple apparently still said, you gotta get the vaccine. I would think the production company is probably who's at fault. It's not Apple here, right? I mean, Apple's funding this Alex Apple doesn't actually is act as the production company for any of these. Do they?

Alex Lindsay (01:17:46):
Well, I mean, most of the production companies though, had had you know, a mixture through throughout Covid. There were a series of, of testing procedures. And whether you were Vaxxed or not, well didn't, it wasn't required except for when the production, when the, the production company or the owner of the production company decided that this is the way it needs to be.

Leo Laporte (01:18:06):
So it's the production company, not in most

Alex Lindsay (01:18:07):
Productions. In most productions. You were getting PS when you, every day when you walked in that

Leo Laporte (01:18:12):
Listen, said, I'm willing to pay. I'm and the union's willing to pay for testing and I will be test.

Alex Lindsay (01:18:16):
And that happened almost. Yeah. You get tested every day. I mean, during the heaviest time you would get tested every single day. And for PCR and and it was just, you just walk in. But they had a, they got, they got to a point at the, at the first first couple of productions was a little rough. Everyone was trying to figure out what was going on. By, you know, a month or two into it, they had, you know, gotten it kind of sorted out. And it was, it was good money for the people who were doing it. And I think the PS are like 1 75 a piece or something like that. Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, that's what they were charging. It was costing Malala. So it was good, it was good business while it lasted. I had one of my former employees was a Covid officer, so, so she, she, she, she was busy doing this and

Leo Laporte (01:18:55):
Having had three Ps in my life. I hope I never have to do that again. The

Alex Lindsay (01:19:00):
Reefer production. Yeah. Like it was, I mean, you know, the very first one I was like, oh my gosh, I can't believe I'm doing this. And by the, you know, a month into it of doing these production after production,

Leo Laporte (01:19:09):
Just stop making your eyes water.

Alex Lindsay (01:19:12):
Totally. No, no. You just, you just lean up. You just go like, lean your head up and me, man. And you lean your head back down, you're like, yeah, you just sit down and you just sit down and just lean your head up and do it and you get used to it. And so get used to that.

Leo Laporte (01:19:21):
So

Alex Lindsay (01:19:21):
Thank, but it didn't really matter. I mean, I don't think they were really worried about they were worried about people getting covid. Like they, they just, they wanted to make sure that no one was on set with Covid. And the PCR is the most sensitive. And then, you know, by within six months we were mostly doing Yeah. Antigen. Like, it was like antigen. And if you test positive on antigen, you'll get PCR r tests, but the antigen was a lot cheaper. And, you know, that kinda stuff. It

Leo Laporte (01:19:43):
Actually turns out that no

Alex Lindsay (01:19:45):
One cared after that.

Leo Laporte (01:19:47):
The writer's strike is gonna do a lot more harm to production than COVID did. I think we what, how many months in? Pretty messy. How long's it gonna last? It's they're just, it's gonna last

Alex Lindsay (01:19:58):
Forever.

Leo Laporte (01:19:58):
Too much movement. Yeah.

Alex Lindsay (01:20:00):
It's probably gonna last forever. Because they, they want things that are not possible. So like, you know, until they, until they decide that they're not gonna, they're not gonna do the things that they're doing, they're not gonna do they,

Leo Laporte (01:20:08):
The writers, are they the producers,

Alex Lindsay (01:20:09):
Writers? The writers are not, the writers can't, they're not, the producers aren't gonna, aren't gonna cape on that. Alex are,

Leo Laporte (01:20:14):
You're, you're wearing your producer hat right now.

Alex Lindsay (01:20:16):
I'm just saying I'm not, I'm not wearing any hat. I'm just saying, I'm just being real like, like, you know,

Leo Laporte (01:20:20):
Not gonna give,

Alex Lindsay (01:20:22):
The producers aren't gonna give what they're asking because that would be suicide. And so, so the thing is, is that, is that the writers, you know, I, I don't, I'm not disagreeing with the writers. I'm, I think that they should, they should keep on fighting the good fight. I just don't think, I just, I'll be super surprised if they, I they'll get something out of it. That's what the

Jason Snell (01:20:37):
Negotiation is. That's

Alex Lindsay (01:20:38):
What a negotiation is.

Jason Snell (01:20:39):
Start in a position and then you have something willing to give.

Leo Laporte (01:20:43):
My my sense of it is that there's a few things like AI and stuff, but really the real concern is the writer's agreement, which predates streaming doesn't include sufficient compensation for streaming. Is that

Alex Lindsay (01:20:55):
Right? I just don't, I just don't know if, I just don't know if you're they're ever gonna be able to calculate. I guess the, the, the, the thing that I don't understand is how they're ever gonna be able to calculate royalties the way they did before. Right? Because people only watch little bits and pieces and it's all connected to a larger thing and it's really well, and

Leo Laporte (01:21:09):
Also streamers are losing money like crazy. It's not like, or are they? Yeah, it's funny because they're firing people and they're canceling shows, and yet they seem to be making profits. So I'm very,

Alex Lindsay (01:21:20):
I'm about losing money, but I just, I'm just saying that, that the problem is, is that they're, the person isn't buying. They're not, they're no longer going to that show. Like they're no longer going to that thing. And it's, it's You mean that

Leo Laporte (01:21:30):
Network, that streamer? They're not saying No,

Alex Lindsay (01:21:32):
No, they're no longer going to that. They're, they're, they're going, they're watching x number of minutes of this. And, and I guess you could try to figure that out. That'll unwrap into such a mess. I'm,

Jason Snell (01:21:40):
I'm certain they could try to figure, I mean, Netflix knows, right? The, the streamers have data about all of that. And I bet you they could do it. But, and, and maybe that's the path forward here. But you're, you know, the bottom line is, as Andy said all the writer deals were basically made on a scenario where you had reruns on TV and stuff like that. And, and that the value was spread over time. And now a lot of times the value is only concentrated on the streamer. And there's very little, here's the thing that people don't know. There's very little disclosure of data, of proprietary streaming data, right? To people on the creative side, from people on the pro produc production side or the streamer side. And this is part of the issue is they can't, creative professionals in Hollywood don't even have a way to judge their worth, right?

(01:22:25):
Because the, the, the stats. So when you're trying to negotiate your next deal, you don't have your, your, your deal like detailing whether you were a hit at Netflix. Cuz Netflix doesn't tell you except the barest limited amount that Netflix wants to tell you. So that, that is the nut they're trying to crack. And I agree. I think a lot of this stuff is gonna fall by the wayside for them to just try to come up with a framework that means that, like if you're writing for a TV show on Netflix and it does three seasons and then it's on Netflix for another 10 years or whatever it is, that you get compensated in a way that you used to, it's not the same, but like, in a way that makes sense, like the old rerun system

Alex Lindsay (01:23:04):
Made sense because that system is, is basically

Andy Ihnatko (01:23:07):
Dead. There. There, there are a whole bunch of lists of of, of things going on. One, one of them is that, that it's, it's not so much that they want more money, but their position, or at least their negotiating position, is that a lot of the deals that the union agreed to are based on the fact that, okay, I'm, we're gonna accept less money upfront because we are gonna be making, you're going, you're gonna give us a lot more, more money in the future. Not anticipating that. In, in addition to everything that that Jason said, that you've, what you've written is exclusive to Netflix or Disney. They ran it for one season. They're things are kind of tight. So they, they're not only not picking up for a second season, but they're also dropping it off the channel. There's no place you can buy it on physical media, no place You can buy it on iTunes or whatever.

(01:23:48):
And so now that's just simply an absolute dead source of revenue. They're, they're also, they're also arguing about what are called, what I found out called mini, mini rooms, mini Writers rooms, where instead of having a team of people who are hired for an entire development cycle to develop the, the entire show, the entire, the Bible and the entire first season, it's like you basically get a few people in for guess what? You get two, you get an entire weekend to break all of the stories for this entire thing with a minimal number of people. And so we're a very tiny amount of money and no security. So basically they're, they're, they're trying to turn this into a more of a gig economy than a, like treating writers like professionals whose work is, is worth being able to <laugh> pretend to own a home to, to basically to to, to live and eat and that sort of stuff.

Alex Lindsay (01:24:33):
And of course, and of course everyone below the line is like, welcome to our world. Right? You know, like, like, like literally like the thing is someone grew grips. I spent the last 25 years under on Below the line. And, and so the thing is, is that what the writers are fighting for is what we don't ever, you know, we, we, we, we accept less knowing that we're not gonna get anything in the future. And, and, and there's no residual residuals for for there's no residuals. I think. Yeah. I I worked on Star Wars for three years. I haven't seen a check.

Leo Laporte (01:24:57):
Right? Right. So, so,

Alex Lindsay (01:24:58):
So anyway, so, so I I think that writers are

Leo Laporte (01:25:01):
Pretty darn important though. I mean, not that lighting gaffers aren't, but

Alex Lindsay (01:25:05):
Hey, I, the queenship was pretty important. Okay. You're

Leo Laporte (01:25:07):
Right. You're right. But, but I, I don't, I mean, there's no, I should, no one craft is more important than the other. I guess actors of course get the lions share of revenue.

Alex Lindsay (01:25:17):
No, you get, you know, I, I, I think anyone should get whatever, whatever they can, whatever numbers they have, they should, they should get what they get. If we had, if we were able to do that, we would do, I could tell

Leo Laporte (01:25:25):
You who isn't, who doesn't deserve the money they're getting. It's the executives, you know? And I think that's fair to say. We want a little more of that trickle down here. Yeah. We're making, and we're writing this stuff.

Andy Ihnatko (01:25:36):
Well, and we're, we're happy. We're hap very happy to learn that Matt Graig like is a half a billionaire at this point because he created this, he did it absolute. Yeah. Fire hose of money for Fox. And so therefore he should also be, have a half a billion dollars for having done this. And the sort of deal that Fox made with him at the, at the outset would never, they, they basically, he'd have like maybe, I don't know. Okay. I'm, I'm not gonna claim to have knowledge I don't have. But you could absolutely make sure that when the producers get together, they point at that and say, we must never let that happen again. Where a, a creator of all people gets to become a wealthy people and gets to join my, my my country club. What do

Leo Laporte (01:26:15):
We as, as, as consumers of this stuff get, we get kind of half-assed, poorly ridden stuff. Reality. We

Andy Ihnatko (01:26:22):
Get another season of Amazing Race. A lot of that. Yeah. You get reality. You get some reality stuff. And

Leo Laporte (01:26:26):
Podcasts. Lots of podcasts.

Andy Ihnatko (01:26:28):
Oh no, that's the <laugh>. Don't, don't do that. Talk about Below the Line <laugh>.

Alex Lindsay (01:26:34):
It's it's, it's actually, it's probably actually pretty good podcasts. It's good for YouTubers, it's good for cre the creators. Yeah. you know, cuz if if it really runs dry the behaviors will start to change again. And so the Yeah. You know, that's what, that's what we've seen in the past. So it just depends on how long. The last one was a huge boom for reality tv. It wasn't the, it started reality tv. Reality TV was a nation market that that was that was the thing that they could, that could jump to. And then it took over a big chunk of stuff. The, the, the benefactors of this right now are, are overseas productions creators. You know, those types of things are all things that are, are gonna benefit from, from a very long strike. You know, it

Leo Laporte (01:27:12):
Should be a good time to start your TikTok channel is what you're saying. Yeah. Get going, get going. Actually, I was interested you know vice, which just recently declared Chapter 11, one of the things that was the nail in the coffin for Vice was the decision to do a lot of TV production. So I was very interested to see that The Verge is now starting a YouTube TV documentary production. I think

Alex Lindsay (01:27:36):
That the hard part is TV production and on and YouTube production are very different. They're different. And I think that that's the, they're very different from a cost perspective. TV is really expensive to, to produce for compared to this is cheap compared to YouTube. No, it's cheaper. Yeah. Like, I wouldn't say it's cheap, but you're not like relatively cheap. I, I used to, I used to be on a mailing list that would send you the, the pitches from all the production companies. And so you would say, Hey, we're looking for a new series for Epic and it's got 375,000 an episode, and this is what, and that was like a low budget 1, 370 5,000. All in, it's, it's this, it shouldn't have this kind of people. It should have these kind of people. And this is the kind of thing we want. And you would get one, you get like two or three, two or three of those a day, <laugh>. And, and then you got the real sense of how much all these, all those shows you watch on TV are somewhere quarter million or, or North.

Leo Laporte (01:28:25):
So here's the Verges I think first documentary, Apple's Secret Burial. I got all excited when I thought it was a documentary about Lisa. It's not, it's a documentary. What about what happened after Lisa was canceled? It's Subtitled Lisa, Steve Jobs Sabotage and Apple's Secret Burial. It's a half hour documentary. It's, it's, it's, I think it's, I didn't watch the whole thing, but it's, it's well produced. It's, it's definitely a YouTube style production, right? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> you know, no actors of course. Some interviews for sure. Look at that. Geneva typeface.

Alex Lindsay (01:29:06):
That's,

Leo Laporte (01:29:07):
That's history right there. <Laugh>. And then they're, and by the way, just if you're one of those people sending pitches to Alex, you might wanna note this in the comments. The Verge says, what other mysteries or forgotten stories should we look into <laugh>? So they, they apparently aren't getting that same male that you are, Alex.

Alex Lindsay (01:29:23):
Well, no, but this is a much different, again, it's a much different budget. I think that, I'll be honest, I think that a lot of YouTuber Stu stuff is, is now reaching a point where I consider it's probably, yeah, a huge chunk of what I watch is YouTube at this point. And if you look at, you're not

Leo Laporte (01:29:36):
Gonna see a six session

Alex Lindsay (01:29:37):
Versium barium, you're not

Leo Laporte (01:29:39):
Gonna see a succession of those books. You're not gonna, it's different kinds of, no, cuz that's what it is, is different.

Alex Lindsay (01:29:44):
It's a hundred thousand dollars a minute. Yeah. But those are,

Leo Laporte (01:29:46):
But those are the things writers write. You know what I'm saying? That's, that's where you have great writers and great actors. Is that, is that dead?

Alex Lindsay (01:29:56):
I think that there'll be less of it as we move forward. I mean, I think that that's, there's probably

Leo Laporte (01:30:00):
Less, there'll be more marvel on, on the one end. There'll be more M C U

Alex Lindsay (01:30:05):
I don't know. I don't think there will be Not even that. It's, it's, there's a lot of concern that that's not viable anymore. Like, it's not vi it's viable right now, but there's a concern that 10 years from now, no one's watching M C U because, or not no one, but they're not gonna see the numbers that they saw five years ago. Five years

Leo Laporte (01:30:21):
Ago probably. And it's expensive to make Peak marble. Yeah. Interesting. So, and, and the stuff in the middle, the Prestig, like HBO o is no longer right? It's, it's Max. So the Prestige productions those are probably, I mean,

Jason Snell (01:30:35):
HB, HBO O still exists not only on tv, but as a part of its it's a business inside Max. Yeah. It's one of the things. Yeah. And they have a budget and Casey Blas is still, who's the head of HBO o is still generating that high prestige content. And it's not, it's not going anywhere. But I think Alex is right that, that John Landgraf, who's been the head of FX for the last few years, he's considered kind of the mayor of television. He's been charting peak TV and we've reached it, right? Like the, clearly we have reached the most television that's ever gonna be produced in a year as original scripted content in American tv. It's over, right? It's coming down the other side. I don't think it's gonna go away, but yeah, we're not, we, we've, we're in a, in a contraction era now, not an inflation era.

Alex Lindsay (01:31:17):
Yeah. You're gonna see, you're still gonna see Superman, you're still gonna see, you know, iron, you know, not Ironman and

Jason Snell (01:31:22):
HBO

Alex Lindsay (01:31:22):
Stuff, you know, alternate and HBO stuff, something's not gonna go away. And like radio never went away. You know, we still, there's still still radios out there, but, but I think that the hard part is, is that if you, if I look at the behavior of my kids you know, they're, they're watching deep Library. I mean, they're watching stuff that hasn't, that's, that's 10 years old. 20 years old. And they're watching YouTube and they're playing games and creating their own stuff, and I just don't see, and they're friends when they come over, it's all the same. Like, you just see this, like, they're watching old Japanese animations and they're watching old films. My, my daughter's watching Gilmore Girls, you know? And so, so they're, you know, they're all watching these old, old films in these old shows. And very little interest in the newer ones. Like we, we occasionally get into the newer ones, but it's not, and I think that's the, that's a real challenge. Hope

Jason Snell (01:32:11):
The writers of Gilmore Girls are getting paid for that, by the way. That's, I know, right? That's the, I'm still getting paid for it. What are the residuals for that? Cuz that's the kind of stuff that they, Amy Sherman Palladino should be getting a lot of money for that, for your, your daughter watching Gilmore Girls. Absolutely. <laugh>, exactly.

Leo Laporte (01:32:24):
Where does she watch it? I guess Depends if she's watching it streaming, then they're not. Right.

Alex Lindsay (01:32:28):
She watches it on Netflix. Netflix. So they're, I don't know if they're getting, so,

Jason Snell (01:32:31):
No, I

Alex Lindsay (01:32:32):
Think they are.

Jason Snell (01:32:33):
They

Alex Lindsay (01:32:33):
Made a deal

Leo Laporte (01:32:34):
At some point,

Jason Snell (01:32:34):
But it's, it's probably a really bad rate, right? Yeah.

Alex Lindsay (01:32:37):
Right. Yeah. But it's, yeah, she watches it, I think, on Netflixing. So it's, it's, I think that it's gonna be but I, I do think that there's, the, the interest in narrative is, is, you know, it's, it's just hard to write. Here's what I would say is the, there's a lot of great writers that are way better than anything than I would ever do. It's just hard to write good stuff on a consistent basis. And I think that it's expensive. There's not that many, there's, well, it's expensive and it's also just really hard to come up with a story and, you know, and I think that

Leo Laporte (01:33:02):
Somebody like Jesse Armstrong is expensive, I would

Alex Lindsay (01:33:05):
Imagine. Yeah. And I find myself, you know yeah, I was noticing it yesterday. I was just noticing how I, there lot, there's a lot, there's a lot of crutches that are used when you're doing a lot of narrative. And, and I think I, I, maybe it's only cuz I know know what they are, that I sit there and just go, oh really? Yes, it's cheesy

Jason Snell (01:33:21):
<Laugh>. That's how you're gonna do that. Yes. You know, 90, 90% of everything is garbage. I would say that, I think that at peak TV we did end up with more good TV as well. That's great. As that TV I think that it does scale. And I think what we saw is that when they had to cl like look in the couch cushions to find creators who otherwise didn't get, wouldn't get their show green lit. Some of those shows were brilliant and some of them were awful. Right. And that's just how it goes. Those, there will be fewer opportunities for that. But my, I mean, my daughter and, and my son both are, you know, they, they are not both born in the 21st century. Right. They are not not interested in scripted tv. They are absolutely. They use Netflix. They my son is always asking me for like the H B O max password and all of those things, right. That it's just mixed in with a whole bunch of other stuff, which is Alex's point. It's part of a, when we were kids, it was just TV and occasionally a movie on the weekend. And now TV's not gonna go away. Movies aren't gonna go away, but they do have to fight with video games and YouTube and podcasts and who knows what else.

Alex Lindsay (01:34:16):
Well, and I think that one of the things that I remember having a conversation about copyright when I was working at Sony. This is a long time ago, about why, you know, why are we having copyright lasts for so long? It was a discussion. And they said, well if, if copyright, if everything was available to everyone all the time, and people could just keep on building on the past, they wouldn't listen to the present. And, and it was just an interesting thing that I didn't really understand 30 years ago when I was having the conversation, but it makes more sense now, is that when all of this content is available all at the same time, it used to be when we watched tv, it was just the stuff that came out that was new, that was there and there was all this new stuff. But the problem now is, is that everything for the last 50 years is on, on something somewhere that we're not paying very much for. And you know, I think that again, you can fall into some really good written stuff that's from the seventies and the eighties and the nineties. And, and I think that that is a, I think that's, that's has a lot of downward pressure on new narrative, which I think people are having trouble turning over, turning the corner on.

Andy Ihnatko (01:35:13):
That's a, well, that's what's supposed to happen. You know, I just, I just rediscovered prey's honor like the, that Jack Nicholson movie from 19 85 19, which I'd complete. I I didn't see Bec at the time cause I was a teenager and I'd completely forgotten about, but it just came back to my attention. And like, it's a great movie and it's better than like most of the movies I've seen, like with the past year or two. And it's, that's realize that the, the, the, the transformative thing about copyright is that it's supposed to encourage the distribution of content. Not limited. It's the idea that this is why it's just so frustrating that so many media companies have gotten so many extensions to, to copyright. And that's so

Alex Lindsay (01:35:50):
No, no, no. Not, not so many media companies, well, Disney,

Andy Ihnatko (01:35:53):
I'm sorry, Disney, yes. Thank you very much. <Laugh>. But, but, but yeah, but I mean, yeah, but the, the, the fact, the fact that Disney

Leo Laporte (01:35:59):
Carried water for all the rest of 'em, let's put it that

Alex Lindsay (01:36:01):
Way, everybody else, but let's, no one else has the, has the, has the, has the the, the, the weight. I mean, it's, it's all to protect the mouse, which it's just switch is slowly sliding away, by the way.

Leo Laporte (01:36:12):
Yeah. Is it cuz Sunny Bono's no longer with us or what they they, they did not renew it again

Alex Lindsay (01:36:17):
Because of Florida. Florida it's, it's, it's because of Florida. They can't get, they can't turn the corner now. Oh, interesting. No, yeah. It's, it's the fight the fight of Florida because Steamboat Willys get the Republican votes and they can't

Leo Laporte (01:36:27):
Steamboat Willie's in the public domain now and next year Mickey will officially be a public domain. Right. At least

Andy Ihnatko (01:36:33):
That, that that version of it Yeah, that

Alex Lindsay (01:36:35):
Version. Yeah, that's, I'm saying. But it's, yeah, that's, that's the only silver lining of that fight was, is that we might get copper. Copper might, might slide forward <laugh>,

Andy Ihnatko (01:36:43):
But that's pe but that's, that's, that's also part of the problem. Like as, as I was saying earlier, now you have series that are brilliant series, but the Netflix again, never makes it available to iTunes or to the Play store, never releases it on physical media. And so when they take it off of their streaming server, it simply disappears forever. And that actually there's, there's always been sort of a gray area where I don't, I don't support piracy, but there's some areas in which if the alternative is that this story dies, that I, I think that the person who is, who is capturing that stream and posting it in places where it can be safer for gener generations isn't doing something that's a hundred percent bad. So it's, it, it, it, as, as I'm, as I'm fond of saying, so many of these questions only get to come up.

(01:37:31):
Like now that we have technology that can actually pres make it easy to make a, a 1974 mid-range made for TV movie available to everybody everywhere, all at once, at no cost. That's not a question we had to answer before, but now that it is, it's like, okay, have you abandoned this property because you clearly don't care about it? Can you now basically just, just like, if don't take care of a, of a piece of real estate for X number of years, it is considered abandoned. And the person who is mowing the law and the person who is, I mean like putting out the fires there, they can say, well, guess what? This belongs to me now. Or it belongs to the public now.

Alex Lindsay (01:38:06):
I mean, like, I mean we were talking about this earlier, but you know, it's wonderful life on, we only know that it's wonderful Life exists because it ran, it, it it's wasn't renewed. Yeah. It went, it dropped into the public domain and, and, and then suddenly it was

Leo Laporte (01:38:18):
It's not anymore by the way. Don't, don't catch. Let's

Alex Lindsay (01:38:20):
Wait. Movie when it was

Leo Laporte (01:38:21):
Yeah. You don't see it anymore. <Laugh> thanks I to Brewster Kale and the internet archive because they're doing Exactly. Yes. Hundred percent. What a huge public boom. This has become

Andy Ihnatko (01:38:34):
A, a double digit. A a double digit percentage of my video watching is now through the internet archive. Now that I've realized, like what you can find there, not even necessarily by just taking a slog through the entire library, but just simply random keyword search. What, what what what doesn't seem to be within copyright that stars Mickey Rooney. He's like, oh, wow. This is his, his name wasn't Mickey. He was, he, he legally changed his parents. His mother legally changed his name because he was such a success in a series of like short subjects based on the tune of real trolley. Oh. So this is him before he like lost his life. <Laugh> bio to, to MGM success. This is interesting.

Leo Laporte (01:39:11):
They're starting to save, I'm looking in the movie Moving Image archive. They're starting to save a lot of TikTok videos too. They are if not nothing, if not ecumenical so good. I mean, it's really kind of amazing. The here's the classic TV section. They have 6,648 classic TV episodes.

Andy Ihnatko (01:39:30):
You, you have so many, so many people who just, you know, the people like me who like would just like record four hours of TV for whatever reason. And now like they discover it in a box and they just digitize it and simply upload it to the internet archive. And it's not just that, okay, I get to see an episode of Happy Days followed by an episode of Laverne and Shirley, but also to see the commercials, also to see the news teasers for the 10 o'clock or 11 o'clock news. It's an interesting

Leo Laporte (01:39:54):
Development. May not be perfect reproduction, but if you wanna see a 1993 episode of Beavis and Butthead, Hey <laugh>, at least you can, right? Yeah. Cool.

Alex Lindsay (01:40:06):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:40:07):
Cool. You saying play it? No, I'm not a really play it. No, no, no, no. This is a VHS tape. Just as you said that somebody uploaded not only Bevis and Butthead, but the real world. Nickelodeon, Renon Stimpy misspelled and various eighties commercial and news. Nice.

Jason Snell (01:40:28):
Yeah. I had, I had a tape for years because until it came out on d v D of Max Headroom from abc, which was one of my favorite shows of all time. Yeah. Yeah. And it's, and it still holds up, oh my God. Issues that we're still dealing with today that they talked about back then. And I usually would ca the commercials out and I'm, but I, but on one episode I must have been gone or something. And so there are eighties commercials in their natural habitat. That's awesome. And it's amazing. I wish I had kept them all. Cuz those old commercials and stuff, old news breaks are, are just the best. So yeah, max, he, it's on DVD V now. And you can get buy 'em on iTunes, but there was a time when it was just a VHS tape Yeah. In my vcr Yeah.

Andy Ihnatko (01:41:07):
20 minutes into the future <laugh>. Yeah. Matt Furor is a hell of an actor.

Jason Snell (01:41:11):
Seriously. For people who, tech people who haven't seen it. It was on tech TV for a while, in fact. Yeah. it is like, it's, it's all the issues. Well, look

Leo Laporte (01:41:19):
How young Amanda pays.

Andy Ihnatko (01:41:20):
Holy cow. None of it. Not, not only, not only that, but it's, see, seeing the future of of Edison Carter is a freelance journalist with a camera that can simply broadcast from wherever he is to the entire world.

Jason Snell (01:41:32):
No, he's, he's a live streamer, essentially. You got that right. There's, there's we,

Andy Ihnatko (01:41:36):
We gotta make a pellet.

Jason Snell (01:41:37):
There's all the privacy issues we've got about the internet. I mean, the internet, a friend of mine Monty Ashley, who I did a podcast about Max Hedron with for the incomparable a couple weeks ago, he said tv just one. You're watching Max, max headroom think of TV as the metaphor for the internet. Yeah. Because that's what it is. It's not, they call it tv, but it's the internet is what they're really talking about. Amazing. And yeah, just if you dig Place, network.

Leo Laporte (01:41:59):
It's commercial here. They didn't have ads either. That's good to know. <Laugh>, you show that. Well,

Jason Snell (01:42:04):
The ads, the plot of the show is that the ads kill people. So that's

Leo Laporte (01:42:08):
Blips. Oh, that's right.

Jason Snell (01:42:09):
And we have blips today too. Yeah. Yeah. Watch any baseball game and you'll see them Love it.

Leo Laporte (01:42:15):
Let's see, what else? <Laugh>. Hey,

Andy Ihnatko (01:42:24):
It's cool if, if, if Beavis and Butthead was the price we had to pay for King of the Hill, I'm all for it. I know, right? I agree. My

Leo Laporte (01:42:29):
Judge. I agree. I agree. I agree. The final episode of Ted Lasso Wednesday.

Jason Snell (01:42:36):
Yep.

Leo Laporte (01:42:36):
Maybe not the end of the series you write, but almost season

Jason Snell (01:42:39):
Finale.

Leo Laporte (01:42:40):
So almost certainly the end of Jason Sudeikis. Really? You think?

Andy Ihnatko (01:42:44):
Well, cause he's not, is he? I think he's already said that he's out after the third season. There is, there's been no news about a renewal for season four, but there's plenty of room for the series to continue. So who knows? Could be the series finale. Who knows

Jason Snell (01:42:56):
That that's, I mean, apple labels it as a season finale. And there was always, they, they shifted gears about a year ago and stopped talking about it being a three season show and started talking about how the plan for the original story ends after three seasons, which is a quite a hedge, right. Of like, well, they might maybe do something more. But the truth is, and you see this art imitating life and life imitating art. Jason Sudeikis during the shooting of the first season, I believe, got a divorce. He's got kids. They're back in the us he's in the UK for seven months shooting Ted Lasso. And you can see that I, I think this is not a spoiling, this is, this is speculation. It sure feels like Ted Lasso is very sad about being away from his kid. And it wouldn't surprise me if that the resolution of the show is that he goes back at home, goes home.

(01:43:39):
And that would be direct with Jason Sudeikis, who I think just does not want to be in the uk. There have been some reports about that, that said the proverbial truck of money, apple will back up to anybody's house to keep the Ted Lasso magic going. I want, one of the reasons they haven't announced anything, and maybe now the writer strike Will, will change this a little bit too, but I always assume that the resolution of Ted Lasso would, would then lead to the question of would there be more Ted Lasso? Would there be a spinoff? What would happen next? And I, I was always expecting that Apple would make an announcement like the week after the last episode of Ted Lasso or maybe the Monday after about those spinoffs and all that. Like, can they, can they back up some money to Oh, wouldn't that

Leo Laporte (01:44:21):
Be a good time to do that? Yeah.

Jason Snell (01:44:24):
Right. Yeah, but I, but it may not be the end of Ted Lasso. It may be that Ted Lasso becomes a different show, or it may follow Ted back to the States and, and somebody else does a show with AFC Richmond and they keep going. Or maybe it's the end. But again, I i given that it is Apple's by far highest visibility thing on Apple TV plus, and they are the company with the most cash of anyone in the tens of billions, like 50 billion in cash. Hard to imagine that we've seen the last of these characters. Yeah,

Alex Lindsay (01:44:55):
I, the only thing I'll say is that, is that I, you know, I I really respected, there was an interview that I saw with Jerry Seinfeld recently, I don't know how old it is. I might have been really old, but he said he got offered 150 million to do another, just one more season of Seinfeld. And he was just like, no, no. He wanted to leave it the, where it was like, he's like, I wanna leave it when it's at the top. He has so much

Leo Laporte (01:45:15):
Money. He, he doesn't leave. He

Jason Snell (01:45:16):
Did nine seasons. I will point out nine. Yeah,

Alex Lindsay (01:45:19):
He did. He did. But I'm just saying that there's a certain level of, if you don't know as soon, like it, it rarely works when you take out the main Sometimes it does, but if Sadus isn't in it, I don't, I don't,

Leo Laporte (01:45:27):
Oh, even the office sucked after Corll left. I mean, I'm sorry.

Jason Snell (01:45:30):
It's very much, it, it is the most ensemble of ensemble shows. If there's any show that could get away with it staying in England without Ted Lasso himself, I think maybe that show could do it because they have like 15 other characters. They could follow too many. If you ask me, do

Leo Laporte (01:45:43):
You follow Jason back to the States

Jason Snell (01:45:46):
Or why not Both if you're Apple and you've got 40 billion in Cash. Cash. But I, I appreciate what Alex is saying. There are real creative issues here too. And I think the fascinating thing to watch is what happens when you've got a company with all the money who basically says to a bunch of creative people, would you like all the money and what the creative people do? Because I think the beauty of it is if you're Jerry Seinfeld and you can say, you know what, I'm done. This is it. And maybe that's the answer there. I'll point out Brett Goldstein, who is Roy Kent, he is the co-executive producer and creator of a different Apple TV show shrinking with Jason, another Jason Jason Siegel and Harrison Ford. Jason Ford. And that's a great show. And that's, that's already like Bre Goldstein already has another gig there as a writer.

(01:46:29):
So like, in some ways the money truck has already backed up to his house. But I'm just saying, I I wonder about the push and pull of art and commerce Yeah. And whether those producers feel that there's more there. And it's not always about one person. Right. Like Jason Sudeikis might say I'm over it, but it it's literally all the actor he actors, he's been working all the writers, he's been working with the crew that he put together for this show. And you do see that sometimes where the star is like really reluctant to have the 50 other people he's working with for the last three years lose their jobs because that's point he wants to be done. Yeah. Does he not

Andy Ihnatko (01:47:03):
Own the ip? Didn't he create the character or No, no. And NBC Sports created the ip. He they, okay. They created the character for a bunch of promos. Believe it for the nfl. I remember that. And

Jason Snell (01:47:14):
No, no. For Premier League Football, actually it was, that was the Fish Outta Water thing. Was that Oh, okay. It was, he he he got it. You're understand. You're right. But yeah, it's weird too because they came up with a character years before, but when they sold it to n b nbc, essentially they sold that concept, him and Brenda Hunt. And so then N b NBC licenses it to Warner Brothers. Who puts it on Apple? It's a whole, everybody what a story. Look, everybody wants to make more money here. Yeah. Except maybe Jason Sudeikis.

Andy Ihnatko (01:47:39):
Right. Apple is billing it. I'm looking as the season finale, not finale series

Alex Lindsay (01:47:43):
Finale.

Andy Ihnatko (01:47:44):
So that's, that's telling Right. Believe. And a lot of those,

Alex Lindsay (01:47:49):
A lot of what you look about, but I don't know what happened with this one, but a lot of times it's a, it's a production company internal that doesn't believe in something. And then they go, well, let's see if we can sell it. You know, like, we're not gonna put it on our own. Like Fox Fox developed the Waki or the the Waking Dead, is that right? Walking, walking Dead. Dead. Right. I want the Walking Dead. They do Wake up. They developed it, but they're only walking. No, it's, it's the Walking Dead. Yeah. and boy Developed, developed it the this much worse, bad night. They were like, oh, I don't know if we can sell this. So they sold it to tmc <laugh>. Yeah. So not it's a tmc amc or amc. I'm gonna miss all these.

Andy Ihnatko (01:48:25):
All I'm saying is that if we get to the, if, if Jason STAs leaves without getting a sh without getting a good shot of Coach Lasso doing the Cabbage Patch, like we saw like in a, like a v a phone video in the episode one. Yep. I think that, I think that we can say that we've been cheated as an audience.

Jason Snell (01:48:41):
<Laugh> bring it full circle. Yes. I'll point out that Apple also owns the rights to mls. Yeah. So like, Ted Lasso becomes an MLS coach back in America. I don't know. Or,

Andy Ihnatko (01:48:54):
Or again, with a, with, if the, just, just like you've been saying, if the money is good enough, they can say Well, yeah, yeah. If, if it is true that you don't wanna be living seven months in London, what if we create duplicate sets like around in a warehouse near your, off, near where you live, and that we'll have a, we'll have a storyline for Ted that requires a lot of green screen work and a lot of this office work and a lot of other characters fly other actors flying to you. But if we can get you into a, into at least five or six episodes out of the season,

Jason Snell (01:49:23):
You're not wrong. <Laugh> you

Andy Ihnatko (01:49:25):
Not wrong. Oh, I, I can still see your eyebrows. Lemme put some more money on the stack here. Once

Jason Snell (01:49:29):
That beep sound, it's the truck backing up. Beep beep. That's right. You're right, you're right. They could absolutely do that. Where they say, we, we'll minimize your location shooting and you'll only be in a handful of episodes and We'll, yeah. Right. Like did they, did

Alex Lindsay (01:49:41):
They do they did

Andy Ihnatko (01:49:42):
I do that with Roy Sche and like the, he, he, he, he was in that se quests submarine and he hated it cuz it was turning to crap. So they wrote a storyline for him where Yes. Like he, he get, he gets sick and so he gets to do all of his scenes from a hospital bed, like all in like one week.

Alex Lindsay (01:49:56):
<Laugh> True. I did, I did a, I did a movie where we couldn't get the two lead actors together for about half the movie. And so we ended up, we were shooting on green screen and we would shoot them with their double next to them. And so they would interact with their double and we just made sure they didn't overlap, you know, like with their hands or whatever it was, these scenes Oh, all the over the shoulders were over the, with the double we had one where they were both in Santa Monica and neither of them were in Santa Monica. And, and so, and like, we shot, literally, we shot them two weeks apart from each other in Japan and then put them into Santa Monica and had them talking back and forth. And so, you know, it's not you. That was, and that was a solid 15 years ago. <Laugh>. So 15 year old technology.

Jason Snell (01:50:35):
Well, they just, they just did that with the Good wife, right. Where two of the character to the actors refused to be on set with each other. Oh yes. So they would just Oh gosh. Record them separately and put them together and Yeah. Like it can be done. So, so I mean, again, we just have to, how much money is in the truck backing up to

Alex Lindsay (01:50:52):
Jason's. I like the MLS theory though. I like, I like the idea of, of him just going back to LA and running a, you know, and doing a, having an MLS team. Yeah. Is that

Leo Laporte (01:51:00):
Kansas City tie in? Yeah. Yeah.

Alex Lindsay (01:51:03):
And then you could shoot behind the scenes of the sets and you could put 'em into your, into your vr and then we tie the whole thing here. That's

Jason Snell (01:51:09):
Right. And then he's the actual coach because Apple says, we want our, our character to be the actual coach of, of Austin fc please. And they're like, okay. I mean, you basically, how can it

Leo Laporte (01:51:18):
Go wrong? More money for sure. Yeah.

Alex Lindsay (01:51:21):
We'll out, we'll outbid the Saudis and you'll have messy, we'll just, we'll just, you know, you can't, you, it's got a couple years left, so we'll give you messy. And, and, and, and

Leo Laporte (01:51:30):
That's hysterical.

Andy Ihnatko (01:51:31):
See how this turns out. Oh. And on top of everything I just remembered that starting in June, according according to Mark Irman the, all the official, like Nike, like top end Richmond Richmond's soccer gear is gonna be available on the online Apple Store. Yes. So you can order the, the official like hundred dollars like banter team shirt there.

Jason Snell (01:51:51):
That's right.

Leo Laporte (01:51:52):
Let us pause for station identification. And when we come back, your picks of the week, my friends, as Mac Break Weekly continues a reminder, we will be here on Monday 10:00 AM Pacific two 1:00 PM Eastern Time 1700 U T C to cover the Apple livestream from ww d c. And we're all very excited to see what will transpire there. I'll be joined by Micah Sergeant right here at this table. So tune in on Monday and then next Tuesday we'll be back with Mac Break weekly. Jason won't be here, but we'll f we'll be able to talk about, I guess, whatever it is they announced. Alex, Lindsay, your picks of the week.

Alex Lindsay (01:52:37):
So we had this company on about, about on office hours, I think last, not last week, but the week before is called. And they, they make a program called Phase Plant. And now fa it's, it's not Phase Plant, it's a great name. It's a company called Kelo Hearts. Kelo Hearts. And they're out of, they're out of out of Sweden. So of course it's, it's part of the Swedish audio music, you know mafia, I think. But but the it is, it is just one of the most amazing pieces of software that I've seen. <Laugh>. I mean, it's just like for audio, it's, it's audio, but what it is is a generator and it gives you almost unlimited ability to tie. So they were building all these plugins for the last decade and they, this plugin does this, and this does modulation, and this doesn't affect, but you can tie any output to almost any input.

(01:53:25):
So you can say, attenuate this with this and tie this into this, and you can create a, you know, this, this applies to, you know, and you can keep on stacking these pieces up and then just tie and just looping them all together to build really complex you know, sounds it can be music it can be the sound effects. What got me to bring them onto our, onto office hours was they, someone put up something on Twitter where they had a helicopter take off. Like literally it sounds like a helicopter starting up and, and taking off. And they were doing it all inside the synthesizer. And, and so I was like, I gotta have these guys on. And so, so we, we brought 'em on really great demo. And and it's just a really, it's, it, it basically, you can build almost anything inside of it.

(01:54:08):
And they've got some great examples. It's, it's not very expensive, $199 for the buyout, or you can pay 10 bucks a month. So they give you both options. And the interesting thing is, is that the when you, I really like this business model, if you, it's kind of like a buy a rent to buy. So if you, if you do the membership, you actually get, you're building up the ability to buy it from them. You know, so if you, if you keep using it and you get more features and so on and so forth. Anyway, I think it's a, it's a really cool app. It's definitely worth checking out. So

Leo Laporte (01:54:39):
It's like lease to own if you pay 10 bucks a month and then eventually you own the whole thing <laugh>.

Alex Lindsay (01:54:44):
Yeah. Eventually it costs like some little amount to turn it over or something like that. And so it's, that's cool. You get more features if you, if you, if you rent it actually, but if you buy it, you can buy it. So some people want to own it outright especially if you just know how to use the app. But they have tons and tons of samples where, where people that they've worked with, they've either commissioned it or they've gotten them from them, or the people have built them there and they call

Leo Laporte (01:55:04):
Those the content banks.

Alex Lindsay (01:55:06):
Yeah, content banks. And, and it's just, but it'll be a whole thing that's been built for you to kind of dig through, like, how did they do this? And I don't understand what happened here. And, and and the, the stuff is really, you know, it's really complex. I mean, this is a is this for

Leo Laporte (01:55:22):
Musicians for, it's both filmmakers,

Alex Lindsay (01:55:25):
Musicians. I think it's for people who do sound effects. There's a lot of sound effects stuff you could do, but there's a ton of, like, a lot of electronica I think was is more, it's probably less of a less of a device for someone who wants to do acoustic. Of course

Leo Laporte (01:55:39):
It's more EDM

Alex Lindsay (01:55:40):
Focused. Kind of edm, yeah. More, more EDM stuff as well. But it's but you can, but you can tie those all back to keyboards and you know, a lot of other things. But you're building all of those things from scratch, you know, all these sounds. And and it's just a, it's, I I'm still kind of a, there's, I don't, I, I don't get that many apps where I just go, holy smokes. Like this breaks, this hurts my head thinking about it. <Laugh>. so

Leo Laporte (01:56:08):
There, you, there's en it's just kind of a, a endless synthesizer

Alex Lindsay (01:56:13):
Kind. It is, but it's but, but but without a lot of

Leo Laporte (01:56:19):
So the these are are pretty

Alex Lindsay (01:56:20):
Realistic, not a lot of rails. Oh yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:56:23):
Yeah. So there's those loops or are those synthesized?

Alex Lindsay (01:56:26):
It can be, it can be synthesized, it can be virtual instruments. It, you know, it still supports all of those things. So you can Interesting. You can build them with, with what they have there, but you can also grab onto them and apply a bunch of effects to them. And boy, it's

Leo Laporte (01:56:38):
A good time to be a creator. I gotta say <laugh> pretty amazing. Now you said you interviewed him, it's not on office hours though, or is it, where did you do this?

Alex Lindsay (01:56:46):
It's, it's, it's, it's on

Leo Laporte (01:56:47):
Office hours. It's not, it's not on the office hours page.

Alex Lindsay (01:56:49):
Yeah. it's probably, cuz it's, it wasn't this week. It was,

Leo Laporte (01:56:52):
Oh

Alex Lindsay (01:56:53):
Yeah, I think it was two weeks ago. Oh yeah, it was, it's there. So, okay. If you go to the YouTube page, you'll, you'll find it. But it's, it was, it's not, yeah, it's not as recent. But it is it's a really amazing from

Leo Laporte (01:57:06):
Kilohertz,

Alex Lindsay (01:57:06):
We had a great interview. Kilohertz is the company and phase plan is save,

Leo Laporte (01:57:10):
I have no use for it and I'm tempted 10 bucks a month. Why not

Alex Lindsay (01:57:14):
10 bucks a month? Try it.

Leo Laporte (01:57:15):
Just play with it. It might be just fun to play with, right? Yeah. Ah,

Andy Ihnatko (01:57:20):
I wish there were an option to give them like $2 just to reward them for that name. That is a

Leo Laporte (01:57:24):
Crazy I know. It's the best name, isn't it? Yeah, exactly. And it, and it runs on Mac pc, iPad. What does it run? I,

Alex Lindsay (01:57:32):
I think it, you know, I only paid attention to the fact that it runs on a Mac. So <laugh> It may, it may run on a, that's

Leo Laporte (01:57:37):
All it matters.

Alex Lindsay (01:57:38):
I didn't

Leo Laporte (01:57:39):
This is Mac great. As long as it runs on my Mac, I d

Alex Lindsay (01:57:41):
Know for sure. Yeah, it'll run. I can tell you it runs on a Mac and they say it runs on, you know, runs a lot faster on the,

Leo Laporte (01:57:46):
You know, when I get that 15 inch inch M two MacBook Air, I think it's gonna be perfect for that.

Alex Lindsay (01:57:51):
<Laugh>. Yeah, that's really cool.

Leo Laporte (01:57:54):
Phase plant from kilo hearts.com. Andy and Naco Pick of the week.

Andy Ihnatko (01:58:00):
I love my play date by panic, like that little in hill, like, I'm still still using it all the time. It hasn't stayed in the drawer. One of my favorite games, probably my f absolute favorite game for it has just been poured over for the iPhone. It's a game called, it's a puzzle game called Generations. And it is exactly my kind of game. It's a, it's an interesting sort of dyna interesting sort of mechanic where you have this wall <laugh> in which you're supposed to ha hang like photos of your family. And it's a, when you match three of them, it's, it's basically each generation. You have babies, toddlers, children, teenagers, adults and and elderly people. And when you have three of these pictures of the same generation together, they collapse to form like the next generation. So when you get three Todd, three infants in a row, they like merge together and become one picture of of a toddler.

(01:58:49):
And so you have a limited number of space. And so what I love about it is that it's not one of those endless, like match three puzzles. It's not, it isn't like anything like a match three puzzle you've probably seen. It's it's, it ends because there's a limited number of wall space. Once the, once you filled the last square, you're done. The game is over, you get a scroll you, you gotta a score. So it's not like one of those things where you wind up with getting in this sort of mental fugue state of dopamine and it's three hours later and you've done nothing and you've, you're really not happy about it. It's fun. It's really is mentally engaging. There are no ads, there are no in-app purchases. No nothing. It's five bucks and you own it. And it is, it's my perfect like 5, 10, 15, 20 minutes of diversion while waiting for a bus or something. I love it. Just

Leo Laporte (01:59:31):
Bought it. Scenic roots or route. Where do they say route and where do they say root is? Route A southern thing. I don't know. Anyway, scenic routes. Generations. Do you say route or root? You say root. I say root. Scenic. I say root. Yeah. We're New England as of course we say root. What do you say Jason? Wor the lemons need them. <Laugh> denied

Jason Snell (01:59:54):
Sometimes route. I feel like they're, I don't say route. Ruder. I say router. So router.

Leo Laporte (01:59:58):
I don't know. Yeah, I know. Isn't that weird?

Jason Snell (02:00:01):
Weird. It is weird. But my, my mother says warsh.

Leo Laporte (02:00:04):
Yeah, mine says warsh too. And I don't know where that comes from. She says in Washington DC Hang out the warsh. It's like, who are you talking? Yeah. Where

Jason Snell (02:00:12):
Did you get that need washed? Need washed.

Leo Laporte (02:00:15):
Let's,

Jason Snell (02:00:16):
Can I,

Andy Ihnatko (02:00:16):
Can I say that my current, my current fascination when I'm watching YouTube videos are the people who put a, in the word button, they put an audible pause between the two Ts

Leo Laporte (02:00:26):
Button. Like

Andy Ihnatko (02:00:26):
It's button, button button. A lot of people say button, button button, button,

Leo Laporte (02:00:30):
Button. And I,

Andy Ihnatko (02:00:31):
I don't think think's wrong. It's just an interesting, I just say

Leo Laporte (02:00:34):
Button.

Jason Snell (02:00:34):
Button isn't, don't do New Yorkers say button.

Leo Laporte (02:00:37):
Button. <laugh> button. It's a Long Island. I think it must say button. I think that's a

Andy Ihnatko (02:00:40):
Button. Cockney chimney sweeps you're talking about here.

Jason Snell (02:00:42):
Hello. Button button button. Me Tims

Leo Laporte (02:00:45):
Button. Well, Ross made buttons. Well, let's put a button in it and get Jason Snells pick it a week.

Jason Snell (02:00:53):
All right. All right. All right. <Laugh>, I went McConaughey there. I don't know what happened. Ah,

Leo Laporte (02:00:59):
Okay. Eventually

Andy Ihnatko (02:01:00):
All roads lead to McConaughy

Leo Laporte (02:01:01):
All Roads.

Jason Snell (02:01:01):
Lead disclaimer here this is a former sponsor of Six Colors, but I, it doesn't matter cuz I love them and they're not paying me to say this. And we love

Leo Laporte (02:01:08):
Them hij too. And they never sponsored a thing on our network. So

Jason Snell (02:01:11):
They audio hijack from Ro MEbA version 4.2 came out this week. It is the ultimate Mac sound recording and routing tool. I use it for all of my podcasts. They added a wonderful new feature this week, which is a recording block that does speech de noise. So if you're doing something and you want to just sort of pull the noise out, it will do that automatically for you. And just more broadly, this is just an excuse to talk about Audio Hijack. It is so amazing what it can do. It will record from individual apps. It will route them, you can route recordings from different apps together and microphones and route them to new outputs and inputs and live streams. And you can stream to YouTube, you can stream to Icecast, which is what I do for a lot of my podcast streams. It will, it's just, it'll do anything you want.

(02:02:02):
It's an easy sort of drag and drop interface. It's got a huge stack of effects that you can put on things you can record. For example, for podcasts, I'll record my audio and the audio I'm getting on Zoom plus I'll l I'll route them into a single file that's a low bit rate MP3 that I can post to my members on my podcast network and all happens with One Button once I set that up button. Once you set that up, you just press the button and it does all of those things. It's recording multiple streams in different file encodings. It can do, you know, take things down to mono or moose or EQ them or like anything you wanna do. I I do not go a day without using Audio Hijack. And if you do audio on your Mac, I it is well worth it. And then today's update just adds like a handful more. There's a parametric eq, there's the Voicey noise that uses machine learning to do the denoising on the fly. Like, there's always more stuff in there. It's really remarkable and all in it. What I think is actually a very intuitive user interface, because it's all these little squares that are connected to other little squares that go where you want them to

Andy Ihnatko (02:03:08):
Go. It's a, it's a beautiful, beautiful app and as you're, as you're talking the audio, like actually pulses in the little lines you've connected between the two so you know that there's audio going through that little circuit you've made. But what what I love about it is that it's one of those great values and software where there are a lot of apps that are just, Hey, look, we, you can record stuff off of Safari, or hey, you can record between two p two microphones or u sb This is no matter what you want to record in whatever situation, it'll let you, you, it's, you can do it. And it's easy to figure out. Like when I, when I'm normally recording my Google podcast, it's usually I have to record lo my local audio. I have to record backup audio of both our combined conversation with my partner and, and a backup of my partner's conversation in case her in case her audio goes bad.

(02:03:54):
And so, and that was easy to put together. Yeah. And then when, then when it's like, oh, actually a couple weeks ago I needed to, I wanted to play some audio from from from a web browser as we're having this conversation. And it's very easy. Okay, just drop in this as a source, add the pipeline here so that now it goes to this recording, but not, so I'm recording like four things at the same time, but each of them is different parts combined together. And what I'm saying is that no matter what you want to do, you can have a, it will give you a solution to it. It's that flexible love. Yeah.

Jason Snell (02:04:22):
In fact, one of my favorite uses of it is in a multi microphone recording, you don't always have like great confidence in, like, I, I've got a a, an interface with four microphones attached to it, but like, I want all the recordings separate. I did this back at, we set up our podcast studio and I, I wanted to create a big red button. People could push button <laugh> in order to record all the microphones. And I didn't want them to have to say file names. I didn't wanna add inputs into Logic or GarageBand. I didn't want any of that. I literally wanted them to have a button to push. And that was an audio hijack session that just had each of the microphones that was in the studio recording to a file that was saving to the right place. And it didn't matter if you had two people or three people or four people, it would just record everything and you could sort it out later. And like, that's the power and simplicity of something like Audio Hijack.

Alex Lindsay (02:05:09):
And the only warning I have is that you're gonna go to buy it and you're gonna see it by itself. Then you're gonna see it bundled with Loopback. Just buy the bundle. Ju you

Jason Snell (02:05:18):
Should buy it. Yeah, just buy the Yeah, the, you're right. Loopback is the other part of this, which is it creates virtual inputs and outputs on your Mac. And with those two things, everything I do is possible with live streaming and all of that, because that's the missing piece in Audio Hijack is, is Loop Back. I have this, actually, here's a, a Discord thing that I do. I stream a podcast that I do for six Colors members to Discord. And we were like really frustrated with how audio stages work in Discord. And I realized all I need to do is set my microphone in Discord to be loop back and have audio hijacks output of our conversation that I'm recording to post later. Also go to Loopback. And that's it. At that point, both of our voices just go into their Dan Morin doesn't need to connect to Discord and get his microphone input right? Like we, we just forget it. Just use Loopback and Audio Hijack and they work well together. So thank you for mentioning it, Alex.

Alex Lindsay (02:06:12):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Like we have so many copies of both

Jason Snell (02:06:15):
Of those. It's, I know so

Alex Lindsay (02:06:16):
Many thanks and so across, just, just keep on adding them to computers and so on and so forth. But the, the thing we learned was we bought, we were buying mostly loopback, but then we just eventually needed hijack for something. And so, and, and it's just, they are core apps. I mean, these are apps that you have to own if you're doing podcasting, audio, that type of thing. If you're doing it by yourself, I, if you have a big production, we might have a bunch of hardware, but if you're doing what we do, so Key.

Jason Snell (02:06:41):
Yeah. Yeah. And I checked the statute of limitations. This was more I think Renee might have suggested it more than a year ago, or Andy suggested it more than a year ago. It's like, you know, we take turns, mw picks.com, like you wait a year and then you're like, yeah, we, there was an update. We can talk about it. Oh, this is no,

Leo Laporte (02:06:55):
Because it just came out with the update. So that's, you know. Yeah. Although I do note that on their page is thanks Mac Break Weekly for saying it is the one of the greatest macapp ever highest recommendation, one of the greatest pieces of Max software that's ever been written. That sounds like Andy maybe saying that. I don't know, <laugh>, I don't know. Anyway, version 4.2, I don't hide my love under a bushel <laugh>. No you don't. Version 4.2 is out audio hijacked from Rogue Ameba. Everyone agrees it's the best. And you know, if we had Audio Hijack running right now, we could remove the sound of that jackhammer coming from next door.

Jason Snell (02:07:29):
Ah, that's what that is. I thought it was just a power cord from the guitar that somebody's

Leo Laporte (02:07:35):
Place. It does. I'm I'm using the synthesizer right now to simulate Good. To

Andy Ihnatko (02:07:40):
Just, just make sure it wasn't me. <Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (02:07:42):
It's not, it's not you, it's not enough.

Andy Ihnatko (02:07:44):
I could do anything because somebody who's burly enough to operate a a jackhammer is not someone I can stand

Leo Laporte (02:07:49):
Up to.

Jason Snell (02:07:49):
Shouldn't have had that burrito.

Leo Laporte (02:07:52):
It's like they're like waited until the, oh God. I just, I don't know. Thank you everybody for being here. Thank you so much to Alex Lindsay. Office hours.global, always something good going on there. And of course you can hire alex@zeroninezero.media. Great to see you, Alex, Andy and Naco, when are you gonna be on GBH Next

Andy Ihnatko (02:08:17):
Thursday at 1230. 12:30 PM Go to WGBH news.org. Listen to it live or

Leo Laporte (02:08:23):
Later. Thank you. It's great to see you. And of course, Jason Snell six colors.com/jason. He does so many things, so many, many things

Jason Snell (02:08:32):
That links to most of them at six colors. So you can get the Marin and Leo might, I recommend the Speech Deno plugin for audio attack

Leo Laporte (02:08:39):
<Laugh> and we'll take a eh out, eh,

Jason Snell (02:08:42):
Could be

Leo Laporte (02:08:43):
Oh Lord <laugh>. We do Back Break Weekly every Tuesday. Every Tuesday from 11. Where's

Jason Snell (02:08:53):
The hypno code? <Laugh>

Leo Laporte (02:08:56):
On that would be 2:00 PM Eastern 1800 utc. You can watch us do it live. Live audio and video streams are at live dot twit tv after the fact. Ond demand versions of the show at twit.tv/mb w There's a YouTube channel dedicated to devoted, entirely owned by Mac Break Weekly. There's also, of course, your favorite podcast player, which almost certainly has Mac Break Weekly available for subscription. It will cost you nothing and yet will deliver so much goodness. Thank you all for being here. Now get back to work cuz break. Time is over. Bye-Bye.

Jason Howell (02:09:33):
It's midweek and you really wanna know even more about the world of technology.

Mikah Sargent (02:09:37):
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 (02:09:43):
It's the biggest news. We talk with the 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.

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