MacBreak Weekly 889 Transcript

0:00:00 - Leo Laporte
It's time for MacBreak Weekly. The gang is here Alex Lindsay, Andy Ihnatko, Jason Snell. Apple Caves to China. Tim says we work in China not because they're cheap, but because they're better than anybody else. And did you buy the original $17,000 Gold Apple Watch? Oh, I got some bad news for you. It's all coming up. Next, on MacBreak Weekly. This is MacBreak Weekly, episode 889, recorded Tuesday, october 3rd 2023. International oranges.

This episode of MacBreak Weekly is brought to you by Melissa. More than 10,000 clients worldwide rely on Melissa for full spectrum data quality and ID verification software. Make sure your customer contact data is up to date this holiday season. Get started today with 1000 records. Claim for free at melissa.com/twit 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 Stacey's Book Club, the Untitled Linux show, the GizFiz and more. Go to twittv slash Club Twit and thanks for your support. It's time for MacBreak Weekly, the show. We cover all the latest Apple news with Alex Lindsey from Office hours.global. Hello Alex. Andy Ihnatko from WGBH in Boston. Hello Andrew. And Jason Snell from sixcolors.com.

0:01:56 - Jason Snell
Just hands. It's good to be here.

0:01:58 - Andy Ihnatko
Wait, don't do that. You're running Sonoma. Who knows what kind of like digital, like sparkle effects are going to be. Cueing the camera to the trigger, that's a good point.

0:02:08 - Jason Snell
Yeah, absolutely right. Don't do that. They need to add that. They need to add the jazz hands to the many other features that are available in the.

0:02:16 - Andy Ihnatko
I might have them turned off now it suddenly switches to like high spotlight, smoky room sort of lighting, just like you know Bob Fosse and Cabaret.

0:02:27 - Leo Laporte
I just got back from the reason I want I think we got to make John maybe we could do this A tunnel with lights that the panelists can run out of to the music. Y'all ready for this?

0:02:42 - Jason Snell
There, look, that's it. That's it.

0:02:44 - Leo Laporte
That's my friend from the University of California, in San Diego, at Color Forward Jason Snell, jason Snellosius.

0:02:52 - Jason Snell
Hello Jason, my Roman Empire name. You know I was thinking about the Roman Empire the other day. No, I wasn't, I really wasn't. No, no, I was.

0:03:00 - Leo Laporte
That's true. Hey, I want to say thank you, alex, because, alex, very kindly, we're in Green Bay all week. Thank you, by the way, to Micah for filling in last week For Michael's 21st birthday. He's a Packers fan, which is so weird. At the age of three, he decided he hated the 49ers and he was a Packers fan and asserting his independence at an early age. So we went to Green Bay, which was an amazing experience. But, alex, I got a text. We're walking, we're doing a segue to a ring, and I got a text from Alex. He says you know, you could see the trucks, that 30s and a half football people are there. And I said, yeah, so thanks for setting that up with Brad, and was it home?

0:03:40 - Alex Lindsay
Oh well, brad, who's? I'm bow, bow and that's it. Bow and Brad, yeah, and yeah, yeah, yeah, it was, it was. It was a pleasure. The, the, those guys come on office hours so they talk about some of the in fact I want to see.

0:03:52 - Leo Laporte
Brad did a whole thing on the trucks. He's the TD and gave us a tour. This is Amazon, so he said they spent. He's, I think, his phrase and I hope I don't get him in trouble with stupid money on this. This is, I think, alex, pretty much. You've seen many of these, but I think this is pretty much state of the art.

0:04:12 - Alex Lindsay
Well, it's a 2110 truck, I think so it's. It is a, yeah, state of the art truck. I mean, it's the, the two, the two that spend the most money on on football is Sunday night football and Thursday night football, and I think they're.

0:04:24 - Leo Laporte
Amazon had a ton of money and they wanted to show it off.

0:04:27 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, you also want to get. I mean for what they're trying to do. These guys are pushing the outer envelope of broadcasts right now.

0:04:32 - Leo Laporte
So he told me it's 1080p HDR that they're streaming. Here's the and these are, by the way, all HDR screens in the whole truck. He said when they first started started doing HDR, he had a little monitor, that he tiny little monitor, but now it's all HDR, unbelievable. So thank you for that. That was a thank you.

0:04:55 - Andy Ihnatko
Brad, I appreciate it. 50 of video trucks, yeah.

0:04:58 - Leo Laporte
This is just one of nine trucks that were there. They have a truck just for a pre-show and you know they have a. There's several graphics rooms because they're, of course, put in the yellow line in the field for the first down, but they're also doing the graphics. He said we have a new graphic, which I didn't see on the game I have to watch the game where they can float in advertisement in the middle of the field. He showed us that it's pretty amazing what they're doing in there. It's incredible.

0:05:24 - Alex Lindsay
So thank you yeah.

0:05:25 - Leo Laporte
It's a pleasure, and thanks to Brad for setting that up, because that was and to Bo what does Bo do Is?

0:05:33 - Alex Lindsay
he, he's in the trucks too, that fancy graphic that they put on top of the screen. That's what Bo worked on, okay.

0:05:43 - Leo Laporte
Incredible and we had a great time. And thank you for the mug. I got a Wisconsin mug from a. We had a meetup on Friday night with about 50 fans and it was so much fun seeing you all. Thank you, they're all fans of the of you guys particularly. A number of people said how much they liked MacBreak Weekly.

0:06:01 - Jason Snell
Did you have cheese curds?

0:06:03 - Leo Laporte
I did. I had cheese curds in a variety of fashions.

0:06:05 - Jason Snell
The first ones you like the white or the yellow better? That's the real question.

0:06:08 - Leo Laporte
Okay, can I just say plain old cheese curds are really just chunks of cheese. There's nothing special about these. They're pieces of cheese.

0:06:17 - Jason Snell
It's part of the cheese making process, so it's there they taste like never tried it out in. Wisconsin. They look like cheese, and then you bread and prime.

0:06:24 - Leo Laporte
It's like regular lumps of cheese, but the fried cheese curds now we're talking. So the place that we had the meetup, the Hinterlands Brewery across from Lambeau Field, has an excellent I thought fried cheese curd, which is basically like a mozzarella stick. But this big, yeah, that's it.

0:06:46 - Jason Snell
That's.

0:06:46 - Leo Laporte
Wisconsin. Yeah, I brought some of. I actually had a macaroni and cheese flavored brat.

0:06:52 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, I gave I once. I once gave a talk in Wisconsin and the group like took me up to dinner like the night before and it lived up to every prejudice I had about what if someone was trying, if someone, if people from Wisconsin are trying to impress you about Wisconsin cuisine, like oh my goodness, it was delicious, it was wonderful and medically contraindicated in the most lovely way.

0:07:19 - Jason Snell
Yeah, lisa and I came back and brought a cow and you're good for the day, lisa and I came back and said can we have a salad?

0:07:25 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, we want a salad. Please Salad Anybody.

0:07:28 - Andy Ihnatko
Gee salad, Well, and then I'm not, I'm not joking like. And then like oh well, oh so, is there any dressing? Yeah, it's that pitcher on the left. Okay, we are here at Barty.

0:07:41 - Leo Laporte
We had an excellent steak at the Vincel and Barty steakhouse we had. We had a lot of fun and it's one of the reasons they eat a lot of cheese and brats is because it can get pretty darn cold. The coldest NFL game of all time was played in Lambeau Field the frozen tundra they call it and it was, I think, the ice bowl. The ice bowl. You know about it. I think it was 13 below or something. I don't know. It was 18 below.

0:08:04 - Andy Ihnatko
It was really cold but but we were invited back to go see exactly I always wanted to see Lambeau Field.

0:08:13 - Leo Laporte
I mean, and the story is really cool because it is community, it's it's not a big company that owns it, it's owned by the, the town of Green Bay, the people of Green Bay, the team and the field, and I think that's really cool and there is definitely love, love for Green Bay in that, for the Packers in that town. It's pretty. Anyway, thank you everybody for putting up with me being gone for a week. I'm glad I'm back and I brought you all cheese. No wait, cheese.

0:08:39 - Andy Ihnatko
You know.

0:08:39 - Leo Laporte
You know, when I was in Providence it was all Duncan and crab cakes or clam cakes. So I can't, I can't really, I don't know. I can't really complain. My native food is not much different. So did you get the Jason? Did you get there? A couple of hours ago, apple put out the developer beta for the Apple watch and it now has the little tap Right.

0:09:01 - Jason Snell
So this is 10.1 watchOS and double tap. Let me see if I can do it here. Double tap will do I have to unlock my? I might need to unlock, I don't know this is a feature no one's going to ever use.

0:09:13 - Leo Laporte
Just came out yeah.

0:09:15 - Jason Snell
I don't agree. I think it's not the, not the biggest. Now I'm failing to do it.

0:09:19 - Leo Laporte
Oh, come on, it's the problem right there, I can do it Well holding it in, oh well that's because you're holding it funny. Yeah, you got to be looking at it and double tap.

0:09:28 - Jason Snell
Yeah.

0:09:29 - Leo Laporte
And what does it do? When you double tap, it shows your notifications.

0:09:32 - Jason Snell
So I did it there. So basically, it's a developer beta now, hopefully public beta soon by the end of the month. I think they're trying to get out 10.1 for everybody. It's for only the new, the new watch, the newest watch, which is the series eight, I think right, and it is what I think is clever about it. I mean, it'll scroll through your widgets on your on your watch face, but the big thing is it will hit the default button, although right now it sounds like it's only on Apple stock apps, but essentially it's a nice little feature.

Essentially, this is the thing where what happens when your hands are full and your timer goes off and you're cooking and you're like ah, ah, and honestly I think what a lot of people do is they tab it with their nose. You know they're like nose tapping to get it, to get it like stop vibrating my wrist. And now you just do a double tap, like with your, with your hand, okay, and it does the default gesture. So it will say you know, if the default gesture in that point is stop, it will stop. If it starts, it will start Like really, that's just what it is.

It is going to give you the default, except on the watch face where it will scroll through your widgets. And yeah, it's really just meant to be there for situations where you can't take, you know, stick your arm out and take your hand from the other other arm and do tappy, tappy stuff because your your hands are full. It's a little feature. It's cute. It's an interesting idea. It came out of the accessibility system. It seems like they maybe have tuned it a little bit better in this version that's going to be coming out, but it's early days.

0:11:03 - Leo Laporte
yet had you tried the accessibility version of this? Because that's the real question is what's new and why can't you do it in an older watch?

0:11:11 - Jason Snell
So long ago now that I can't recall or compare. But the beauty is that my regular watch is a Series 6. So I should be able to, you know, turn that on and do some real comparisons about, like, how much better is it? Because, yeah, if you've got an older watch, you can go to accessibility and you can actually turn this feature on. It's just Apple says they're doing more machine learning stuff using the neural engine. That's finally on the Apple watch. It didn't used to be, but yeah, there's a real question about whether it's that much more effective than, uh then, the one that was in accessibility settings a couple of years ago.

0:11:43 - Leo Laporte
That's not the only beta that came out today. Also, beta four, a Vision OS, was shipped to developers, which sounds like with the you know fourth edition that they're probably getting fairly close. A German says it may be, you know, January or February, maybe very early next year, that the Vision Pro is released. You think.

0:12:04 - Jason Snell
Tim Cook said in one of his. I think he, tim Cook, did his European vacation thing again. He didn't go to Oktoberfest with Eddie Cue this time, which is good. I think they're probably you know like never again.

That's too much partying for me, but he did it. One of his stops say they're still on track for early next year and they haven't slid from that at all and it's been you know however many months now and they're pretty much sticking to that. So it sounds like I'd heard that the hardware was mostly done like quite a while ago. I think that they're trying to probably trying to build up supply because we know that the number of screens that Sony can supply them is very small. So they're probably trying to build up supply for launch. But the software is where they're still progressing. So another beta developers love to see that because they got to try to, you know, get their apps to understand how their apps are going to run on this thing in a dance, with most of them not having hardware.

0:12:58 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, there's another story about the. If there were rumors before about having sort of a vision pro junior, that those are now like non-operative Right, and also that the next version is going to be out not until 2027. So that's those far reaching rumors, but we'll take any scraps at this point.

0:13:16 - Leo Laporte
What's weird is that we have still not seen Tim Cougar any Apple executive wearing it. Oh well, he claims he wears it every day. Use it every day. He describes this. This is an interview with the independent he watched all of Ted Lasso's last season, yeah.

He described. That's just like brutal. He asked me, but okay, he describes his first experience with Apple's forthcoming vision pro headset as an aha moment in an interview with the independent mixed reality device he claims has the potential to show in an entirely new era of computing having a problem. Blah, blah, blah.

0:13:50 - Jason Snell
He means of course the Swedish rock band aha, singers of take on me. Take on Sun, always shines on TV.

0:14:00 - Andy Ihnatko
Everywhere you look, everything looks like it's a pencil sketch. It's one of the proactive features of the vision.

0:14:06 - Jason Snell
Somebody should make the aha app for a vision pro. I like that Tim Cook is using it Right. Like I feel like, as a guy who is famously not the product guy, like I feel like Tim Cook really does try to use all of Apple's products and have a perspective on them as they're being developed. This is super important for him. So that fact that he's in there and when they're in meetings they can't you can't BS him, because he's used the product and he knows exactly what the issues are I like that. I like to know that, again, he's not going to be a Steve Jobs kind of a product leader, but you know he also is the CEO and he needs to understand what's going on with that. I think that is a good. I think that's a good thing.

And to Andy's point, yeah, I wonder if the some of the early days of vision pro story is going to be. They just can't make very many of them. This is cutting edge tech to the point where the, even the second one, which will have even more cutting edge tech, is not going to be able to be released for years because they're just they just can't do it and that the low end one. Remember we had this conversation back in June which was sort of like how do you make a low end thing of the cutting Like? Aren't you saying like this, is it? This is like below this bar, we won't go. And then two years later you come out with one that is below the bar and it sounds like maybe the answer is they can't and they're not going to try, at least yet.

0:15:24 - Alex Lindsay
For a thing and the other thing is is that you know in the first you're paying for the R&D or to some degree the R&D when you buy the first ones.

So you know the low end one might be the same specs that we see right now and just that there's another high end one that the specs get a little better. You know, because I think that you know we are on our way to 8K 120,. You know, and and and as we, you know we're not there yet but we're probably before the end of the decade we'll be having headsets coming out at 8K 120, because that's really at about 6K, 6k, 100 or 120, you know, somewhere in that range. It really turns into a different experience and this will get the furthest along that anyone's gotten. But I think that you know there's been production folks that have talked about, you know, the, the target being 8K 120 for some of the productions that they're working on, and so you know they're, they're, they're hoping to deliver to the headset and even though they're going to step those down for the current headset, it does feel like 8K 120 is the target somewhere in the future.

0:16:24 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, but that's not the problem that they have to solve, isn't it? I mean it's. They can, they can basically they can start making like 8K 120 headsets much, much better resolution, much, much better frame rate, much, much better reaction time. It will be a much, much better version of a product that most people maybe don't want, don't need and don't care about. It's.

This is why this story is just always going to be so interesting as we try to figure out who wants it, how much are people willing to pay for it, and how many of those people are out there. Am I? I mean, I was having a talk with somebody about the, about the retro slash, retro influence game consoles, and we're talking about the play date, about how, yeah, the play date has quote only unquote sold, sold 50,000 at this point. But that was enough for for panic to consider just success. It had goals for it that we're not. We're going to displace Nintendo, we're going to displace Xbox, we're going to displace anybody.

It's like, no, we're going to do this one thing and we feel as though there's a group of people that are really interested in this and we're going to serve those people. And so maybe part of I'm not sure that's. We'd call that a strategy. But maybe part of the numbers that Apple is crunching is saying look, if we can find 400,000 people that are really interested in this, that'll sustain us until for the next 10 years, until we figure it out, or enough people who don't have the sort of institutional, cultural, generational knowledge to really be interested in this for them to age into the system. So there's so many questions about this and that's again that's why I find this so interesting.

0:17:55 - Alex Lindsay
I think the numbers are probably a little bigger than 400,000.

0:17:58 - Andy Ihnatko
Well, no, I'm just, I'm totally going to make it.

0:18:00 - Alex Lindsay
Right. So I mean, I think for two years or three years, but I mean I think that you get millions, yeah, yeah, I mean I think you get. I mean I think that I think they'll make as much. I think that, as I've always said, they'll, they'll sell as many as they can make for quite some time, you know, and then it'll be limited to how much they can make. But I think that that they.

I think that there's a pretty a lot of people buying pretty expensive phones from Apple. Now they have the market to do that, where you know that there's people that are willing to stretch a bit to buy, to buy other things, especially if it's again, if it's compelling enough, and I think that the MLS stuff impacts that. The F1 stuff that's being impacts that. I think that, you know, live sports is a really interesting model for them, you know, and and sports in general as well as, again, I think, a lot of, there's a lot of interactive tools that I think are going to be, I mean, stuff that we've done R&D on for the last 10 years and what we were held back by was resolution and frame rate. So so when you see it at that high resolution and frame rate. It's a different experience than what we've seen with any headsets that are currently publicly available.

0:19:00 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, I mean, we've, we've. We've had really good long conversations about this. I don't we don't need to have another long wind reactions, most of the stuff, but basically I come back to the idea of oh, but I can't. I can't really compare it to the phone, because you're talking about people who, who grew up with phones, who have phones, who have lots of options for phones, have phones that aren't as good as the 1200 or $1,500 phone. They're contemplating at the top of the line, apple, but we're still talking about hey, I've already established a need for a phone. Wouldn't be great if my phone were even better as a phone as my old phone is? Even if I have to spend $1,500 for this new phone, I've got $1,500 and I'll spend it for that new phone. You don't have people saying, my God, my, my augmented reality goggles, I. I've had them for years. I've grown up with them, but I've always thought they weren't good enough. So I can't wait to upgrade for these 3000.

No, you're still trying to onboard people onto an idea, and that's where the that's where the big question mark is. Again, I'm not predicting doom. I'm saying that I, I honestly what you've. Even when Tim Cook says that, oh, this was an aha moment.

I'm like, okay, there are a lot of ways to call an aha moment, such as that this is potential in 10 years or is this? Wow, this is the thing, we've cracked it, we've solved the problem. I mean, remember that. I am suddenly remembering the time when I think it was it was even in Walter Isaacson's book, where the they have this quote from the story about Steve Jobs saying oh, we can't wait to show you like another executive or another, like person in the industry, I can't wait to show you what we've done with like streaming boxes on TVs. We've cracked the problem of TVs, and if they did, then they certainly decided not to put it to market, because what they've put on the market is again a very good streaming box, of which we've seen many, many kinds before they. So if that was the aha moment, maybe we might have another aha moment like that.

0:20:50 - Leo Laporte
I have to say, after Walter Isaacson's Elon Musk book and the a number of obvious inaccuracies and flaws in that book, I'm a little now I'm looking back at the jobs book thinking, you know, did Steve say that we don't know? I mean, this is the problem with Walter Isaacson. I'm sorry, that was yeah we're learning.

0:21:09 - Andy Ihnatko
we're learning stuff because this is the second time in a row he's had a book where he has had access to living people like the people he is actually biography about, whereas when he wrote about, like Benjamin Franklin, he had 200 years worth of his, his, his historical research and documentation to fall back on say, oh, I just uncovered this quote that said that he said this. Now let me look up 200 years of historical research on this to find out what the context of that was, what other people who might have been in the room said about that, whereas Elon Musk says this great, I'm going to write this down. I didn't really understand it, but I'm putting it into print.

0:21:44 - Leo Laporte
Really good take down, actually on the on the verge about the issues and really the problem in a nutshell is when you are interviewing somebody living and you take them as the sole source for this biography, without doing a lot of bad checking or checking other resources and so forth, you're going to make mistakes, as Isaacson did with Musk and, I'm wondering, with jobs as well. He had a lot of time with jobs as he was very ill but no corroborating evidence. I mean, no one else was there.

0:22:15 - Andy Ihnatko
when Joss says we've licked it so so yeah, was it the verge that that made this very, very good point, that saying that, well, he, I, maybe, maybe Elon Musk, actually said that to Isaacson. But you have to understand that Elon Musk says a lot of things, such as when he was saying, but hey, I'm taking the company public at 420 bucks per share, and all these other things, where he said things that just the little bird inside his head had got access to his mouth, even when his companies.

0:22:41 - Jason Snell
Even when his companies end up doing the thing, they never do it the way he says, as somebody who has covered in the podcast about space stuff, like SpaceX, like he said, oh, we'll have people in in orbit in two years, Well, it was 10 years. When he's like, oh, we're going to put Starship up next month and it was like, well, they're still working on that and we're going to send people to Mars in three years. And like the guy can't stop, put you know, saying things that are obviously untrue. And if you're there as a stenographer and you're like, oh, yes, very good sir, yes, very good sir, it's a, it's a bad look, I will say there were plenty of people, especially in the Apple community, who were deeply skeptical of the contents of his Steve Jobs biography at the time. I recall John Saracusa did, I think, two episodes of his podcast at the time hypercritical about it.

The first one called the wrong guy and he's saying Isaacson was the wrong guy to write that book that he didn't really get it and he didn't really get the subject matter, and that is part of the problem with Isaacson is that he doesn't really understand the details of the technology industry and so he's got kind of a you know, okay, I'll go along with that and not really kind of like digging in. And I'm not sure John Saracusa's desired Steve Jobs biography would be one anyone wants to read. And Isaacson has been successful as a kind of like it's in selling books, but he's a real problematic writer.

0:24:02 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, credit to Elizabeth Lopato, at the verge, who you know brought this up with lots of examples how the Elon Musk biography exposes Walter Isaacson, and I think that this is really the case. I mean, you know, let's face it, Steve Jobs is also a pretty good marketer. I don't think he lied as vigorously as Elon Musk does or as unrestrainedly, but you know, we've licked it doesn't, in the long run obviously doesn't mean they've come up with some sort of TV solution.

I don't in other words, I don't want anybody to think you know, somewhere in the labs in Apple they've got the perfect TV. Why aren't they releasing it?

0:24:40 - Jason Snell
I suspect that their strategy was based on making deals with the entertainment companies to integrate into an integrated guide and thing like the TV app. I think is what he was talking about, by the way, and I think that what happened was they cracked it and said in the sense of saying, oh, this will be great, and then what happened is a lot of the partners that they needed to say yes to sharing data with them said no, that's interesting, and so they can't.

0:25:04 - Alex Lindsay
You can't do it Well, and the TV app is pretty good. If you didn't have all those subscriptions, that didn't go anywhere. Like you know, I'm just, I just don't subscribe to a lot of them, but otherwise you kind of see everything that you want. You're kind of there and I would stay there, but then I hit something and it goes oh, you got to go to Hulu, which I don't have the description for, and I'm like, okay, that noise the hell out of me.

0:25:20 - Leo Laporte
Well, and Netflix has refused to allow their content to be searched. That's the one thing you'd really want to be Top-est one, yeah and so, yes, that's probably how they haven't licked it, or they licked it and tasted a little sour, so anyway.

0:25:33 - Jason Snell
Well, I think they said cracked it, so it's more like think of it as a nut. And they just they couldn't open the shell all the way, so there's just like little pieces of shell everywhere, and it's just not not an egg.

0:25:46 - Alex Lindsay
Ooh I mean part of it is also just even the freedom that a lot of people have within their apps to do, you know, to rebuild the interface, as a user gets frustrated because you know the Apple ones work pretty well. And then you go to, you know, go to different interfaces and you're just like people made up a bunch of stuff that doesn't Let me ask you because I noticed I frequently I use the Apple TV every day I'm.

0:26:08 - Leo Laporte
I frequently exit out of the Apple TV app into just the the icons so that I can. Yeah, you do too, right, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean if it were if the app were perfect, you wouldn't ever leave it, and there's some things that are great, like up next is great, except it doesn't include Netflix. It doesn't include all the things I'm.

0:26:25 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, the the. The big problem for me is that I don't subscribe to most of the services and so I need it to. I need it to not show me anything that I'm not subscribed to. Yeah, if it did that, I'd probably stand it all the time it's. Apple has this thing where they want you to keep on like it's. The same problem that they have with Apple news is that I block some things because I'm just tired of what, looking at them, that's not information I'm interested in. And then they keep on. They put a big hole in my Apple news that says you would see this and here's the, even the headline if you, if you hadn't, if you hadn't blocked it, and I'm just like, okay if I block it.

0:27:00 - Leo Laporte
I don't want to want to exist anymore.

0:27:02 - Alex Lindsay
You know, but obviously there's some kind of deal or advertising whatever that we can't, you know, we can't turn it off, and that kind of feels the same way with Apple TV. So Apple news and Apple TV suffer from the same thing, which is that there's still stuff there that I can't get to or that I don't want to. You know, like I want to just have I. If there was a setting that just said only show me things that I have subscriptions for, absolutely, I stay in the Apple TV app all the time.

0:27:25 - Jason Snell
I mean part of the idea here is it's a hard problem. It's not as simple as that, because there are use cases where you hear about a show or a movie and you want to know, and if you don't find it, you're like frustrated, right. You're like wait a?

second, surely it exists somewhere. So there are certain cases where you do want to see it, but certainly there are other cases where you want to be like, like don't show me or suppress these things because I don't want to see them, and that is a. That's a challenge. I also use the Apple TV all the time. I use Upnext, which actually has suppressed my viewing of Netflix because it's not in there, and I'd be like right, sex education just came out on Netflix. I should go watch that, because it just doesn't ever show up there. I think it's good, but like it's broken. In all of these ways that could be addressed, but some of them require partners to like Netflix won't play ball, and that's just it's. It's broken. But I agree with Alex I I subscribed to literally everything, so it's not a problem for me. But, yeah, you should be able to have a way of saying like please stop offering me things that are on Hulu. I'm not paying for Hulu.

0:28:26 - Alex Lindsay
Right, and I'm, and you know, and I'm, I always subscribe to a handful of things, and I already still think that there's too many of them that I'm probably going to unsubscribe from, from more of them, just because I've got so much content that I don't know what to do with and so so I don't. So I think that that becomes more of an issue for me as well.

0:28:41 - Andy Ihnatko
So one of the problems could be that if Apple is actually taking ad revenue money from Hulu saying, hey, promote the new season, the new season of Bob's burgers, like well, I don't care that you don't subscribe to Hulu, we need that 80 cents, come on. Yeah, that's what we're re-selling.

0:28:57 - Jason Snell
They resell some of those subscriptions too, right, so they there's a benefit there that you can immediately pay and sign up for it within Apple TV channels, and so that's the, that's the marketing aspect of it, and I mean, again, I can accept some level of that that there needs to be a balance and understanding and too often not just Apple, but like everywhere you get that point where nobody's saying, oh, but our users are frustrated by this. They're like too bad, Show it to them anyway. Like I am a Paramount plus subscriber and and pay for the no ad version and it doesn't matter. There is an unskippable pre-roll, it's a promo for some of their other stuff, but it's unskippable before every show that I watch and like, guys, what am I paying you for? Let me skip it.

0:29:38 - Leo Laporte
If I want, it's not your promo, but let me skip it. If I want. This is the world we live in. That's why I don't use a fire TV, because it's an incessant promotional vehicle for selling your stuff, and here I am on my Apple TV, and I'm not interested in messy, I don't want to see major league soccer, but that's the full screen promo on Apple TV before you get to anything else.

0:29:59 - Alex Lindsay
So I mean that the, the things that are. You know the. What I do like is you get, you jump to an Apple app and it goes, you know, start showing you the promo, but I get the skip button, almost you know, immediately. You know like it's like, do you want to skip this? I'm like, yeah, I don't want to watch that, and so that works well. I do think that, um, it drives me crazy about some of these apps. Like, the thing is is everyone does something a little different with their apps. Like, number one is play. Play a preview with audio. While I'm trying to figure out what I want to watch and I don't want to use your service anymore, like I just I'm just immediately like I don't want to do this anymore because you're playing, I just don't want to be surprised Apple doesn't turn on the audio.

0:30:36 - Leo Laporte
Apple doesn't do that, but Netflix does. I think there's a setting in Netflix, by the way, to turn those off.

0:30:42 - Alex Lindsay
I thought I turned it off and it was off for a while and then turned back on again. I'll take a look at it and then, and then HBO Max does this accordion thing where when I select on things, they open up and it may.

0:30:51 - Leo Laporte
oh, that drives me crazy. I don't want that.

0:30:54 - Alex Lindsay
Why am I myself running really fast?

0:30:56 - Leo Laporte
through the.

0:30:56 - Alex Lindsay
I don't want to dwell because I don't want it to open up again and I'm just like whoever thought of this. I just would love to talk to them just in a closed room for like a minute.

0:31:06 - Leo Laporte
Well, with a bat. This is Corey Dros and shitification. This is when they stop doing what's best for the customer because they're going to make more money. If they do what's best for their partners or their own business, I don't even know. I just think that that's everywhere.

0:31:20 - Alex Lindsay
It's everywhere. That thought it was cool. No, no, no, I disagree. It's to make more money.

0:31:24 - Leo Laporte
The accordion thing that opens up? Yes, it's to get you to watch that crap and it drives me up. I agree with you. It's bad design, but I don't think people care so much about what you think, or I think they're not looking at how customers are being judged on their conversion rate Exactly, and that means it doesn't like rate.

0:31:42 - Jason Snell
This is this is where we're out of balance now, and a lot of companies are out of balances. You need to balance your desires with the user's desires and, and what we've seen is instead, with now an increasingly you know everything's in a software stack is this idea that you just don't ask them or don't give them an option. And it's not even like I'm less offended by a thing that offers me a thing I don't want and says don't show this to me again or there's a setting to turn it off. But a lot of these things, like the Paramount thing, like you show me your promo, like, and if your promo intrigues me, I'll watch it, but like let me say no. And a lot of these. You know companies, you know there's a meeting somewhere where they're like let's let them say no. And and some executive is like no we cannot give them a choice?

0:32:24 - Leo Laporte
They've got to buy major league soccer and they hate it.

0:32:28 - Alex Lindsay
So let's just not ask them to do not track. Everyone, everyone's upset that that apple put a do not track in. It's like I should have been able to choice. You know to choose and I choose.

0:32:38 - Leo Laporte
So major league soccer has been huge for apple. They tried to get Sunday ticket from the NFL could got outbid by Google. The strong rumor now is that they're going to offer $2 billion for formula one, which is currently owned by ESPN in the US, but by sky everywhere else, and I think they're trying to get away from sky. Right, they want international. Sky is one of the holders.

0:33:04 - Alex Lindsay
So sky is one of the holders, but there's many different holders and what apple wants to do over five years is slowly take over all of it, just take over one section of time as the contracts, and they just don't get renewed. And they get, they go to apple and then they'll have two years. It's like a seven year deal with a five year ramp up and they have two years where they have exclusive, you know, control over that and that I will say that for racing fans I'm not as big of a racing fan, but for racing fans the amount of content that that show creates is stunning. I mean, they have, they have cameras on every car. They've got, you know, cameras on every curve. They've got all the stuff. There's so many places there's opportunities for innovation that they already do. I mean F1 does a lot of its own innovation. It's a very, very innovative because they've owned that production for so long. They have these huge containers that come in that all just hook up together and they've got these massive pipes that send.

0:34:02 - Leo Laporte
that's the truck I want to see, alex, if you can get me in there, I'm going to be in Vegas for in November for the second to last F1 race. So I subscribed to F1 TV. They do it themselves. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that even the feed you get on ESPN or Sky is generated by F1, which by the way, is owned by Liberty Media.

It's owned by an American cable company, of all things. So this is my, this is my F1 interface and I can watch not only old races, but when I'm watching a race, I can. I can actually see the driver's point of view. I can change from, I can look at the timing screen.

0:34:42 - Alex Lindsay
I mean, I don't know how popular or unpopular this will be, but imagine having a 180 camera attached to an F1 racer that when you jump into it for your vision pro, you're like sitting on the car.

0:34:54 - Leo Laporte
One of the best shots right now is if there's an exciting overtake, I will switch to the driver's camera. And they have cameras not only in the helmet, but they have side camera. They just added side cameras and it's. It's really great. You really are in the cockpit and, yeah, imagine a 360. So you could look in the mirrors, or 180, just just so you could just 180 of just feeling like you're everything's going by you.

0:35:18 - Alex Lindsay
I think it would be unbelievable. It would be stunning.

0:35:21 - Leo Laporte
So this is a rumor entirely. This is from Sports Illustrated. A couple of days ago, rumblings of a major shakeup in the formula and broadcasting sphere surfaced.

0:35:30 - Alex Lindsay
Apple makes eye watering bid $2 billion dollars a year, Otherwise known as they flicked a couple of dollars on the off.

0:35:40 - Leo Laporte
the outside of their roll just went like here, and this is probably because they're looking at how MLS has done for them, right?

0:35:47 - Alex Lindsay
Well and again, there's a lot of opportunities for them to do. There's there's a thing about the track that makes it more controllable and all the telemetry that's coming out of the cars, that when you're talking about AR, when you're talking about interactive, when you're talking about, you know, the headset, when you're talking about a lot of things, there's many, many places to put stuff. Like, for instance, you could have a track that sits next to you and your VR thing and you could look over and see where all the cars are, like in real time.

0:36:10 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, but we kind of hope that would happen with MLS. It hasn't yet, but I guess more and more well that stuff will happen, more and more.

0:36:16 - Alex Lindsay
Number one is it takes more time, and number two is you don't have telemetry on every person you know in F1, you have telemetry. You have their exact position.

0:36:23 - Leo Laporte
It's a highly one of the things that got me into it, of course, was watching that Netflix drive to survive, which got a lot of Americans into Formula One, and because of that access, because of the you know, seeing everything, it is a fantastic television sport. They are also Apple's rumored to be going after English Premier League soccer as well, which is the kind of, I think, the big football channel. But $2 billion, according to Sports Illustrated, is roughly twice as much as Formula One gets for all global rights. Now Apple doubled what they're getting and said no.

0:36:59 - Jason Snell
I think it's instructive here that they're going for international rights right they?

0:37:02 - Leo Laporte
want it all I think.

0:37:03 - Jason Snell
Apple's ideal is they want it all and I don't know what the contracts are like. The story makes it sound like they want to buy. Basically, make a deal now, a handshake deal.

that leads to a contract. That is going to be like. As all of these roll out, we are going to assume them in every market by market. Now, a lot of these TV deals that's not how it works. You get a negotiation period with the existing rights holder. So there's a question here about like can Apple make this deal, or does Apple have to buy the rights this year and buy the rights next year in these other countries and buy the rights next year in these other countries or not? And Sky you know Sky is what Are they? They owned by Disney, now by Comcast? Now I forget that also is owned by a big American conglomerate. Are they going to want to spend on those rights? But, like Apple's game here is, it's a lot easier if it's global, because Apple is global.

0:37:52 - Leo Laporte
Comcast- Services are global. Comcast owns Sky it's owned by Comcast. Now, wow, I didn't even know that.

0:37:56 - Jason Snell
So this question is is it's all part of the Rupert Murdoch divestiture, various things? So I think that Formula One works for Apple in the sense that it's an international sport, it appeals all over the world, it races all over the world and then on top of that, if you can get the rights everywhere in the world, it's a unified product. That is like Apple would much prefer to offer that single product everywhere, as opposed to saying, oh well, we've got the Premier League, but only in these markets. Right, they would like to say we've got the Premier League everywhere, and that I. So it's interesting to see they've got the majorly baseball deal. I mean, that's a little different, but the MLS deal is also worldwide because nobody else cared, but now maybe some people care.

0:38:41 - Leo Laporte
Well, that's what's interesting. But F1, this sounds like Apple Liberty. Brian Roberts, liberty Media, which is, you know, he's one of the big cable guys in the US, bought them in 2017, probably for a song, and then watch as it has become huge in the US. It is a huge market.

0:38:58 - Alex Lindsay
There are now three races in the US Miami, austin and Las Vegas is the new and the and the amount of the expense of bringing it to someone like the oh, they're repaving Las Vegas.

Yeah, holy cow, yeah, yeah, it's so. And I think that, again, for Apple, this is and this is where things get very complicated. And you know Amazon to some degree, but Apple more than anyone else, they just have they're not playing the same game as all the other media partners and they can and they have the money to do it and they and this is where you know, I think you're going to continue to see you know Apple and Amazon specifically, I think compete. It gets to a point where they're the only ones that can compete because they don't have to make money off of the media Like that they're. They have a much more, it's more of a Kaiser's, so to say, model. You know where they always, you know they always make more money on it than it was, than the job was worth, because they're they're making it in a bunch of different areas, their angles. You know it's it's. Are you buying Apple TVs or you're buying, if there's special things for the headset or the phone or the? You know all these other things.

And again, the MLS thing. I think all they had to prove in the first year which is that I think this is the first year is that they're a good steward Like that. They didn't break anything, you know. They just get it off the ground. But I think that I think that you're going to see them continue to go after these sports. I mean, obviously, what they want is Premier Soccer League, nfl, you know, nba, you know. They'll keep on going after as many of these as they can go for and they can. Just, they have the. They can outbid everyone if they choose to, you know, and that's the. That's the hard. The hard thing is that they're not. There's not really any competition. It's them deciding where, where to say uncle, from Apple's point of view is this just a?

0:40:40 - Leo Laporte
it's just a profit deal? I mean, they pay $2 billion a year, but they get that much more in subscriptions to Apple TV. Or are there other motivations?

0:40:49 - Jason Snell
Well, first off, I doubt that the deal because it's not what any other Apple deal has been so far. I doubt that the deal is straight up 2 billion. I think it's much more likely that what it is is. You know you will take a share of what we sell for our package and that we estimate that we'll all add up to 2 billion, but only this smaller amount is guaranteed, maybe 1 billion or 1.2 billion or who knows what it is. Oh, and keep in mind that's yeah, that's going to escalate because that's the worldwide figure and the worldwide rates aren't available right now. They're. It's going to take five years if they go down that route.

But in their PAC 12 negotiations, in their MLS deal they have. They want partners who are going to share in the success. But at the end of the day, right, a billion dollars seems like a lot of money a year and it is. But if there's anybody for whom it's pocket change, it's Apple and they get to be like. They think and I think, rightly so that live sports is actually one of those places where our fractured, broken entertainment system will always have value, because people want to watch them. They can't defer them, they want to watch them live and that technology can really help the experience of live sports.

0:41:59 - Leo Laporte
So I don't know Live is a problem with Formula One because most of the races are in such distant time zones that it's six in the morning, at least here for a lot of those races. I wonder. Of course I don't, I just watch the.

0:42:13 - Alex Lindsay
I know a lot of folks are big fans of get up whenever they get up to watch Right and Apple's not just catering to the US market right.

0:42:21 - Jason Snell
Apple wants it to be brought up to everybody.

0:42:23 - Leo Laporte
I mean the Vegas race. I just found out the times for the Vegas race that qualifying starts at midnight and the midnight again it's the international audience they're catering to at the US. It's very hot there midnight and then 10pm for the race the next day.

0:42:43 - Jason Snell
But we'll be staying up. It's very Vegas. It's very Vegas. We'll all be lit up that MSG sphere is going to.

0:42:49 - Andy Ihnatko
They're racing right around the sphere. That's going to be really interesting.

0:42:54 - Leo Laporte
I'm told that they will, as you know, those races, they have big screens everywhere, so that because if you're in the, if you're in the grandstands, the race consists of, but they, so they have big screens up and I'm told that the sphere will be actually one of the screens which would be well, I think it'll be.

0:43:13 - Alex Lindsay
I think people will be in the sphere and I also think that it's going to be really interesting to see that. I think on the outside you're going to have some sphere with a big eye. That's like watching cars go by. You think the eye will go, the giant eye will be like look at that and you know, and I think that that it's going to be. I will say that watching it in the sphere would be quite an experience.

0:43:32 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, did you see the YouTube concert videos from the sphere? Yeah, it looks amazing, so that it's a giant sphere which they've been building since, I think, 2019.

0:43:47 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, they got it installed in COVID. Yeah, that punched the price up a lot, because I think the original was a billion dollars. Yeah, I think it's my twice that. Yeah, like two and a half billion or two or three billion or something. Now it's a big.

0:43:59 - Leo Laporte
LED screen on the outside, but I didn't realize this. It's also a big LED screen on the inside and the first concert was U2 and it is. It's a residency. It's not just a concert, it's. They're there. Are they there for a while? Oh, okay.

0:44:16 - Alex Lindsay
Good, maybe I get to go. You have to build something that is so custom to, to what that sphere is that the amount of money spent on getting it ready to go is, you know, just takes some time. And the other, the thing that's really complicated about the sphere is the audio. Actually, I mean, there's many things that are very complicated. There's 1600 speakers, yeah, but one of them is that you know when LEDs are all really close together, where do you put the speakers? How do you have that sound go all around you? So figuring out how do you, how do you have the speakers and the LED and have all of that really be immersive is is a huge challenge. And and it's they have a little mini sphere in Burbank. If you right near the airport, like right near Burbank airport, I can see it out of my out of my hotel room. It was. There's like this tiny little little version of this that you can go in and it's for people, it's for them to show off what it can do in a miniature way.

0:45:11 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, Well, I you know we're going to be in Vegas for the Formula One race end of November. I would look at the space ship it's opening.

0:45:18 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, I tried to get tickets for the.

0:45:20 - Leo Laporte
U2 and my credit card said no crazy, are you insane? But I don't know. It looks like something to see, doesn't it.

0:45:29 - Andy Ihnatko
Wow, I'd love to see it too. Yeah, it was amazing, it was, it was the most, it was the one, a true one of a kind, unique audio visual presentation, and yet all of the concert footage, like from people in the all the concert footage is, essentially you get to see a thousand people holding up their cell phones, yeah, and it's like nothing, nothing, just getting a video of this insidious habit.

I know, but it looked amazing Like I can't like, for just for just looking at through YouTube, like I can't believe that you would not be so dazzled by what's you're seeing all around you that you would just. I'm going to just put down my phone for a while.

0:46:07 - Leo Laporte
Just enjoy it. Put your phone down, kids.

0:46:11 - Alex Lindsay
Well, this is the biggest show they have right now. Is, if you look at these videos that like it's like do the band need to be there? Like it's like the band is like this tiny?

0:46:19 - Leo Laporte
little dais in the middle. There they are, little, tiny little thing.

0:46:23 - Alex Lindsay
They're there at the bottom, so they're a little tiny.

0:46:25 - Andy Ihnatko
YouTube people. But they use that really really well Cause, of course, like modern, modern stadium shows, they always have, like they're performing in front of like big video screens so everybody can see what's going on through the live feed. But they found really interesting ways of integrating the band into that stuff that was projecting inside the dome. It's very like, like, like, like I had no idea why, why. Why is Bono on that big puck, like oh, it's a revolving platform, so that when he, when he's in the middle of the crosshairs of those four huge slabs of concrete that have peeled away, oh, they could see, they can see the back of him, and that's interesting. Yeah, it's pretty wild. How much time do they spend like fine tuning all this? This is it's not as though they can repurpose this elsewhere, and it's also like it's it's interesting to to wonder, like if they we've seen two of the hugest acts of the summer saying, hey, we're going to do a, we're going to release a concert film and try to score more money than in October. That way, how?

0:47:23 - Leo Laporte
are they?

0:47:23 - Andy Ihnatko
going to repurpose all this content for that kind of stuff, or does it even matter?

0:47:28 - Leo Laporte
Scott LV and our club Twitter, is going to be working at the sphere during the Formula One race, so I'm a little jealous, scott, that you're going to get to do that.

0:47:37 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, I mean this is all built for it. It takes months and months and months. I mean it's, it is the content you mean for? The content, but even, even a modern concert about a tour projection screens are not new.

0:47:48 - Leo Laporte
I mean, I remember seeing Roger. Waters the wall with you, john, and and he used those the whole backdrop is a screen and it's very realistic. What we saw that at the Olympics, where they're actually floating in the air and stuff. Well, is that different because it's 360?.

0:48:04 - Alex Lindsay
Oh yeah, it's really complicated, like what they're doing, there is you're, you're basically building all of that in in, you know, in a spherical projection, you know so you're, you have to look at it that way and you constantly have to check it against the screen itself, like what does it look? You know how does it look and how does it feel. And you have to sit in different seats and think about, like, okay, how does it look here versus there? You know there's, it's an immense, and you, you see, you get a sense of those kinds of things when you're doing.

0:48:29 - Leo Laporte
It Looks like Bono, is also kind of starstruck by it. He just stopped singing at one point distracted Whoa, that's cool man, that's really cool.

0:48:38 - Andy Ihnatko
And then he took out his own phone and started it. What a happy funny.

0:48:42 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, I'm here. I'm here. Yeah, again, like even a regular tour, like the Ares tour or something like that, that is, you know, months and months of planning, it's months and months of figuring out what will fit into a truck and then and then weeks and weeks of rehearsal before they they actually go on tour. So it's not that much different, except for this is very unique and you only use it once, and so that's why you have to do, you're basically doing the whole tour in one place which is great for the band, because they don't.

That's why everyone ends up at the residency is they get old enough and and they've done enough touring. They're like I'm going to make everybody come to me and I'm going to go back to the hotel and, you know, not have to like get on a tour bus again, and so they. So I think that it's, it's a. Really it'll be interesting to see. But yeah, the tour, the, on the other side of that, the, the movies are, you know, set out to make the Taylor Swift movie, I think is tracking for a hundred million dollars. Yeah, I mean, you know of revenue, so it's not bad, that's theaters only right.

That's well. I mean theaters first, theaters only you know the window closes right, although the windows have gotten like I don't know if you saw the shit impossible. The window is like 2025 or the end of 2024.

0:49:52 - Leo Laporte
Tom Cruise, really we'll see how that works for Tommy little Tommy. Yeah, exactly, we'll see. We'll see. I'm not going to a movie theater. For a while. I went to the IMAX Oppenheimer. I don't think I'll be going again for quite some time. I don't. I'm not going to see the Euras tour in a theater. I'll wait till it streams. By the way, tim Cook wasn't just there to promote the Vision Pro. He also was there to remind Europe.

People like the App Store and developers get paid a lot of money one trillion dollars in billings and sales annually, and one trillion dollars. That's one of the reasons Apple is a almost three trillion dollar company and, interestingly, we had a story a couple of days ago that Apple was not yet listed by the Chinese government as one of the compliant App Stores. They are now the other shoe dropped and Apple has said yeah, yeah, no, no, we're, we're, yeah. We are going to enforce the, the new check on apps that Beijing requires. If you are in the they announced that on Friday If you are in the App Store in China, you'll have to submit the internet content provider filing a registration system so the Chinese government can keep track of people and the apps they're selling. Huawei and Tencent have been doing that since 2017. Apple was not on that list a couple of days ago. They are now not much of a surprise, I guess I was kind of hoping they might hold out.

0:51:22 - Jason Snell
but if you listen to a lot of app developers, especially independent app developers we're not part of a giant huge money making concern they're.

I mean, we'll see what happens, but the general feeling is that this is the jig is up and by the middle of next year, whenever this comes into effect, you're going to see a lot of apps just not being sold in China anymore and that'll be the end of it, and that this is yet another example of the great firewall essentially saying you know, when using any digital device in China, it's not like using it anywhere else in the world.

And then, unless Apple has a trick up its sleeve because one of the things is you're supposed to have a publisher that's a Chinese company like, I suppose it's possible that Apple will try to grease the skids for its developers by maybe having a Chinese company that is the publisher that will like work to get those things official in China. But, failing that, what you're going to see is extremely high value developers, for whom you know Chinese revenue is imperative, go through all the steps, but your everyday, you know utilities and you know, and indie software and all the stuff that people like, and even some larger companies that are, you know, not really having good relationships with China. They're just going to all vanish from the app store in China. That's just how it's going to be.

0:52:40 - Andy Ihnatko
And that's going to include all the social media networks and messaging apps that are based outside of China that a lot of people inside China are getting access to through VPNs. So that's going to be another lifeline of communication outside of Chinese censorship that they'll now, like, no longer have access to, which is precisely why, like Apple's finally been saying, yeah, we, we, we, we find you, you. You finally made it to the top of our to-do list. We're going to have to fix this, aren't we? So go well.

0:53:09 - Leo Laporte
Let's take a break when we come back. Lots more to talk about, including my favorite California County, sonoma, where we live on your Macintosh. Our show today brought to you by Melissa, the address experts, the contact data quality experts. You know the holiday season is upon us. This holiday season, let Melissa help your business meet online shopping expectations, increase ROI, reduce waste and costs associated with lost and undeliverable packages and improve your customer's overall satisfaction. Well, that sounds good. How do we do that? Well, prepare now.

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Melissacom slash twit. M-e-l-i-s-s-a. Melissacom slash twit. We thank them so much. They've been a great supporter of MacBreak Weekly and all our shows for some time now. Thank you, melissa. Happy holidays. Can you believe we're talking about the holidays? It's the spooky season. We're in October. It's all downhill from here, kids. What else is going on in Apple News? We all got our Sonoma. I saw somebody complaining on Reddit. He got excited by the beautiful wallpapers 61 landscape wallp All these new wallpapers. They are not only beautiful, they're also movies in your screensavers. They're incredible and they're each let's just warn you around a gig. So a guy downloaded 61 gigs of Sonoma wallpapers and said help, what do I do now? Apple doesn't tell you how big it is, but you kind of know because it takes a while. Even on our fast connection it takes a while to download those wallpapers. I got all the Sonoma ones.

0:57:17 - Jason Snell
That's why Apple TV settings it was like how often do you want to download a new screensaver? And your choices were sort of like every day, every week. Cause they're, they're, they are huge but they're beautiful and then they use them as the backdrops, and it's that great effect where when you unlock, they kind of coast to a halt and then stop. And that's your backdrop.

0:57:37 - Leo Laporte
Just really, chefs kiss 61 landscapes, 30 cityscapes, 21 underwater, 22 earth, and then you can also shuffle aerials. I haven't tried that. That looks kind of cool. So you get different aerials and then it shuffles them or shuffle landscapes. This is like Apple all of a sudden saying okay, cause they've never really done anything really great with their wallpaper. This is fantastic.

0:58:05 - Andy Ihnatko
I particularly like it on the lock screen where I just I just upgraded on my, on my important Mac, like this morning and like when I finished rebooting, and so, oh, wow, I'm seeing this minimized like the log login screen.

0:58:18 - Leo Laporte
The log in buttons Instead of setting center, while my disembodied spirit is floating over over Sonoma. Yeah, isn't that great. Welcome to our county Walk towards the vineyards. So you're little down here, which is fine. That's all you need. You don't need a big picture of yourself and then you get this beautiful vineyards picture. We do live in a beautiful county. Sorry, it's not Marin. I'm sorry, Jason.

0:58:44 - Jason Snell
No, it's gorgeous. We were just up there. We went up on our anniversary. To where do we go, Napa?

0:58:51 - Leo Laporte
Caliserville, I think, oh, giserville, is beautiful, it's just, I mean it's just, it is spectacular.

0:58:56 - Jason Snell
I could see why Apple picked it for the for the other wine country.

0:59:00 - Leo Laporte
When they were at WWC saying the wine country, I thought, oh crap, it's going to be Napa, but no, it's our wine country, sonoma.

0:59:07 - Jason Snell
They'll do Napa Napa's there for next year, right Like Mac OS Napa next year.

0:59:11 - Alex Lindsay
I don't know, are they going to do two wine countries? Maybe they're going to go south or go to Bahoy.

0:59:15 - Jason Snell
I don't know, but they do that thing where they where. They're like Sierra, hi Sierra, and they're like, you know, yosemite and El Capitan, where they might be like we're going to do the little pairs of wine country before we move to you know where, to La Jolla or La Jolla.

0:59:30 - Andy Ihnatko
We got a while before they'll get to Sacramento, I'm imagining.

0:59:34 - Leo Laporte
Tuleri.

0:59:34 - Jason Snell
Cali. It's a big state.

0:59:35 - Leo Laporte
It's a big state.

0:59:36 - Andy Ihnatko
They're making a full way to Sacramento. For a long time, Mac OS Tenderloin.

0:59:39 - Alex Lindsay
No, no, no Mac OS. I'm just waiting for Mac OS Trucky.

0:59:45 - Leo Laporte
So do you do you now? Arial is still available, but do you need it now on your Mac, or can you just no? No, arial was taking the Apple TV beautiful screensavers and moving them to the Mac, but you don't need them anymore because you're getting all these Right. You've got all those and more. And more I like it.

1:00:04 - Jason Snell
They're just, they're big, but they're beautiful. Sure, locked You've been sure, locked, it happens.

1:00:10 - Leo Laporte
What else is new in Sonoma? Anything, I mean, that's the obvious one, because you see it right away. I like widgets. Anybody want to address that? Jason, I think I feel like you're not a fan.

1:00:24 - Jason Snell
I don't know, I think I ran I think I ran it about this last week. But yeah, I mean, my fundamental thing about widgets is I think they're fine, but I think that they're not as good on the Mac as they are on iOS, because the, you know, the Mac already has a dock and it has a menu bar. It's got most Macs or laptops. So you've got to, you know, move your things around to see them because they sit on the desktop. And having like an interactive widget on the background that you can use, it's great. But, like on the Mac, you just put the app back there and use the app and it's not a big deal. So it's just, it's less of a thing, but they're great and they've done a great job. I love the fact that you can run iPhone widgets on there, because there are a lot of apps that just don't work on the Mac.

1:01:02 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I moved my iPhone and it's infuriating.

1:01:04 - Jason Snell
They're like no, no, no, we don't want it to be on the Mac for no good reason, and now you can put their widget there from your iPhone and it updates live.

1:01:11 - Leo Laporte
I don't like is that they turn monochrome when they're not alive.

1:01:17 - Jason Snell
So it's like a post. You can turn that off.

1:01:18 - Leo Laporte
Oh, you can. Oh good, I'll turn that off.

1:01:21 - Jason Snell
In the docking desktop settings. You can choose it to be always monochrome or always colorful, or to switch when they're in the background. So so, yeah, you can make them all. You can have a beautiful color weather widget back there if you want, yeah.

1:01:34 - Leo Laporte
I mean it's nice to have a clock and I know it's, it's went. Microsoft Vista.

1:01:39 - Jason Snell
You just have it in the menu bar instead. Right Like, but different strokes or different folks.

1:01:43 - Leo Laporte
I know I like it, I likes it and we don't have a lot of. Does it use? It must use memory and CPUs. I mean, is it? Is it something you should be aware of? Should you limit how many you use? Do we know?

1:01:54 - Jason Snell
On today's computers. I don't think it matters. I think it's an accounting error, a rounding error at this point. Right, it's not like in the old days where you're like, oh no, my, I can't run that screensaver on my desktop. Do you remember that? Was that underwear? Was that called?

1:02:08 - Leo Laporte
That was the mistake.

1:02:09 - Jason Snell
That was the mistake on your desktop and it was like no, you can't do that. The screensaver can only run when you're not using your computer, otherwise your computer will be unusable. We're past that now.

1:02:20 - Leo Laporte
So in case you, in case you didn't figure it out. What you do is you go over to the widgets on the right the widget bar that's been there for a while on the right and go down to the bottom and edit widgets, and then you can drag those widgets and iPhone widgets too to your desktop or take them from there.

1:02:34 - Jason Snell
It's better. You right right click on the desktop and there's a ad widgets.

1:02:38 - Leo Laporte
That's what you do. I am so far behind on this stuff. Ad widgets.

1:02:41 - Jason Snell
Right click on the desktop and choose edit widgets and widget it up right, Like they just do it. They're all there.

1:02:48 - Leo Laporte
They're all there and they move around.

1:02:50 - Jason Snell
In fact, if you're saying to yourself, oh, I can't do that because I put a lot of crap out on my desktop and there's just like files everywhere and like don't worry about it, it's actually kind of great. Imagine that you're in a Godzilla movie and that your widget is Godzilla. You drag it around on your desktop and your files will flee the widget because it's got all this avoidance technology built into it, where the widgets will not ever cover up your files. They avoid each other, which is also a nice touch.

1:03:20 - Leo Laporte
Anything, what else in Sonoma that we is a lot of stuff under the hood. It seems like there's not a lot of changes.

1:03:28 - Andy Ihnatko
Well, one thing that I've been playing I started using this morning I finally have a reason to like really start to use Safari alongside Chrome, now that you can basically take any like web app and turn it into a dock item.

It's kind of because oftentimes the reason why I have like two dozen more tabs and windows open than I should is because I have like two dozen redundant instances of Reddit open. Or I've got like eight different instances of my mailbox open, my web mail, all this sort of stuff. The ability to just go to the file menu and say, add this website to the dock. It basically turns it into like an app, kind of like an applet. It's a self-contained like web view that contains just that web app, and so now you can actually you can use it in. You can use it in standard window management, you can use it in stage manager. It'll pass like notifications the way that notifications are normally handled. It's pretty good. It's hopefully it'll get me like to have a few fewer than a few, fewer than a hundred windows and tabs open in browsers at the same time and I'm a big fan of having subtle changes to the OS.

1:04:39 - Alex Lindsay
So there's been a couple OS changes where Apple adds a lot of things and then it really does take three or four months before they all settle into the place that they should be. And so I think that you know a couple cool little things here and there that I think that a lot of folks on in office hours I know are excited about, or playing with the cameras. You know the fact that it'll take over the camera, that goes into Zoom or into Teams and other things like that, and you can have reactions and and shorter depth of field and lots of other things that it seems to be doing pretty well. So I think that a lot of things it felt like this one was a lot less pizzazz and a lot more just under the hood, just a lot of things that make it run a little bit smoother and a little bit better, and I think that's a it's a great way to go.

1:05:19 - Leo Laporte
Yeah.

1:05:19 - Alex Lindsay
You know, for Apple.

1:05:20 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, we don't need. We don't need fantastic new few visual features and.

1:05:26 - Alex Lindsay
I mean, I don't expect to, I expect to not pay as much as I did the last time. Oh wait, I don't pay anything.

1:05:31 - Leo Laporte
So it's so yeah.

1:05:32 - Alex Lindsay
Do you remember? We have to pay for $129 or something yeah.

1:05:38 - Leo Laporte
I'm glad that's over, yeah.

1:05:40 - Alex Lindsay
Every time I get. When I get a Windows machine, I'm always like what I know we're talking about.

1:05:44 - Leo Laporte
why are we doing this? Why would you get a Windows machine? That's the question.

1:05:47 - Alex Lindsay
Oh, I get these little ones, these tiny little. I think there one laying around here somewhere, these, these tiny little ones.

1:05:53 - Leo Laporte
I guess they're fine, as long as you don't put them on the internet.

1:05:56 - Alex Lindsay
Well, and then you. Then they run an update and the next thing you know they don't everything you were working on, that's what I'm saying.

1:06:00 - Leo Laporte
I'm guessing it's fine, as long as you never let it connect.

1:06:04 - Alex Lindsay
They're $250 and I was like I mean Apple machine, you know, and I was like I don't know if I really want to use up a whole Mac mini for that, but I now I wish I had so yeah.

1:06:13 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, so that's it on Sonoma right. Nothing else to report. It's just good you can get it. It's a. It's a bit of a time consuming, as usual, as one would expect. Install Is it use up a lot more space. Is there any any other negatives that we've learned about?

1:06:31 - Jason Snell
It's gentle. I think check users want gentle. They don't want, like their Mac, to be exploded.

1:06:39 - Leo Laporte
Yeah.

1:06:39 - Jason Snell
They want it to be just there are probably reasons to do your updates.

1:06:45 - Leo Laporte
Apple has a couple of zero days. They patch with sevenoto and I'm going to presume that they've done that also in Sonoma. These are problems with WebKit right. Apple also says it's going to patch the overheating problem with the iPhone 15 Pro. Now, have you, any of you guys, experienced this? I haven't seen this at all, but I don't play Evil Dead on my phone either.

1:07:12 - Alex Lindsay
How many meta apps do you have on your phone? No, none.

1:07:16 - Leo Laporte
Yeah yeah, they said Instagram was one of the one of the problems and Uber.

1:07:20 - Alex Lindsay
I can tell you that my phone had became almost unnaturally long lasting All my phones. Since I stopped putting, I still have meta subscriptions.

It's not like I've unsubscribed or anything else it's sensible here, but I took them off my phone and, wow, does it last a long time. You know when I took them off and I think that I will bet that almost every person that's having a heat issue and a battery issue has a meta app somewhere on their app. I don't know what they're doing in the background, but they are doing a lot of stuff in the background, according to Apple recent updates to some third party apps on iOS 17,.

1:07:57 - Leo Laporte
Instagram, asphalt 9 and Uber overloaded the A17 Pro's CPU, causing the phone to get warmer than normal. Ham Warm Well, too hot to hold.

1:08:08 - Andy Ihnatko
I guess 110 degrees 100. Yeah, we're seeing a couple isolated reports about that. Last week we quickly commented on them, but it's hard to pin that down as an actual bug in the first few days of a release, when every phone is gonna spend, is gonna be overclocking itself just to process all the updates it's doing to begin with. So that's not unusual. Also, this is the time when I realize that the battery management and the heat management on the device isn't locked into hardware. It's something that they can fine tune and oftentimes they do fine tune it after they get reports from other people.

This seems to be something a little bit different because, for instance, Forbes who was it? Dan Fielin on Forbes got a call from Apple saying that yeah, it was a problem with those specific apps. But they also specifically said we have also found a bug in iOS 17 that is impacting some users and will be addressing the software update. So it wasn't just third-party apps, it wasn't just fine tuning the profile, it was also okay. There's a bug in iOS 17 that seems to be throttling the CPU when it shouldn't be doing so. But this is not to be unexpected so long as it doesn't turn out to be a hardware issue where they didn't put enough cooling around the die, and now that basically it's gonna, they're gonna have to swap out to a revision B in order to fix the problem.

1:09:28 - Jason Snell
Yeah, tsmc says it's not their chip and Apple says that the titanium is actually better at getting the heat out than their old system was and that this is all I mean it's.

Clearly it's actually not that far off from what we said last week, which is part of it, is all new iPhones run hot because they're doing huge amounts of indexing in the background, including scanning all your photos and all your files, and trying to do all this stuff to build up indexes that are cached and therefore are not transferred when you migrate, and so it has to do it all from scratch.

And then, on top of that, it sounds like there is something and it sounds like it's an interaction between something in iOS and certain apps that is a bad interaction that is causing over CPU usage, and the great example is the Instagram app, but like there are others with the Uber app, I think they said right, so like good news. Right, because it's a combination of some heat that you don't normally expect, because you don't change your phone to a new phone every day. It only happens the one time. And a bug in a new OS or a hardware version of a new OS, probably right, a quirk on this hardware that wasn't apparent on the existing hardware over the summer. That's gonna get patched, so it's a nothing basically.

1:10:42 - Andy Ihnatko
It's the difference between testing a thousand of these and now suddenly testing a million of these. That's when you really get the last of the bugs out. Well, good, okay, we might even see better battery life in the next few weeks after they, when they do incremental updates, as they figure out that again they're getting data back from these devices as you're using them. So if they're figuring out that I think that we were a little bit too conservative here. I think that we can a little bit too aggressive in letting things access the CPU. We can actually extend battery life by a little bit more by fine tuning these things.

1:11:15 - Leo Laporte
You're watching MacBreak Weekly Jason Snell, andy and Ico Alex Lindsey More in a minute, did you? You must have seen this. There's nothing to say about it but Wayne Ma's story, a hidden barcode in iPhone screens, so tiny you can't really spot it. Two tiny QR codes etched into the glass. One is the size of a grain of sand. It can only be seen with special equipment. The other, roughly says, wayne Ma, the size of a tip of a crayon, is laser printed on the reverse side of the glass, somewhere along its black border or bezel. Do not take your phone apart trying to find these. Why are they there?

1:11:54 - Andy Ihnatko
So that For a very Apple reason, because they weren't trusting the display manufacturers reports of what the reject rate was. So guess what? We're gonna actually go to the trouble of marking every single piece of glass so that we can actually track each piece of glass as it comes through the assembly line. So we will know which ones you're rejecting and which ones you're keeping, which ones are making it through. That is boy. You do a deal with Apple. There comes with money, it comes with prestige, it comes with millions and millions and millions of orders. But, oh boy, you will not get away with anything.

1:12:33 - Alex Lindsay
Well, I think it's also to look at batches so you can see like if we see something that's going through, I think it has a lot to do with quality control, of seeing that there's one supplier or one thing that Just like your tube of toothpaste.

1:12:44 - Leo Laporte
It says lot number 53. If it turns out there's arsenic in your toothpaste, then they know which lot to get rid of. Right, it's like that.

1:12:51 - Alex Lindsay
But I think some things may crack more. You know, and again Apple, when they take your phone back and say we'll give you a new phone, of course they're scanning. They can scan that glass and somebody's gonna you know, someone's gonna get a tabulated as to what they're, and probably they can do it when anytime you bring in something that's broken or not working correctly, they're gonna wanna look at that.

1:13:12 - Andy Ihnatko
And we think about it. If they do, if the Genius Bar does have scanners behind, that can actually. We're not talking about visible like barcodes, visible QR codes. We're talking about something where you would need special equipment.

They're tiny. Exactly that's how tiny it is. But if they do, but if that becomes standard equipment, now the Genius Bar has the ability to make sure that it knows that okay, you replace the screen with a screen that actually was supposed to be in a different lot. It did not ship with this device. Therefore, guess what we're gonna deny you? We're gonna deny you service on this because you used an unapproved part. It's, there's a lot of I don't know, I'm a worry war when it comes to things like this, but it's interesting. I'm sure that the primary reason is just simply flow control and inventory control, but there's once you put tags on every single individual part like that, you start to wonder okay, if Apple were evil, how would an evil person take advantage of this?

1:14:07 - Leo Laporte
According to Wayne Ma writing in the information, there were two manufacturers who make the glass for the phones Lens Technology, both Chinese, and Beale Crystal, and apparently Apple had trouble getting. He writes, lens and Beale had previously stymied Apple's efforts to learn the true rate of defects, which can raise the production costs. So Apple paid millions of dollars to install laser and scanning equipment at Lens and Beale factories. To add, I presume it's a serial code, it's not just the same code on all of them, and then they scan the glass at the end of the production process. They say by doing this they've really before the work.

Apple says Lens and Beale had to toss out as many as three out of every 10 pieces of iPhone cover glass because of defects. Now it's fallen to one in 10, so hundreds of millions of dollars in savings every year. It's fascinating and I imagine everybody in all the other new countries coming online making these things will probably have to do the same thing and Apple will probably do this on a lot more. I would expect they have a lot of clout to be able to say, hey, can we put these lasers in your factory? There's a lot.

1:15:23 - Jason Snell
I think the size of Apple goes uncommented on. Sometimes and I know we've talked about it here, which is good it's like the scale of everything Apple does, the money they have, the number of products they have to ship, leads them to make decisions that as an armchair quarterback back here we're like, well, surely they're not gonna install a laser system just to do inventory? And it's like, well at the scale, but just to track because the costs are unimaginable and just to track a little part like that. But I was like, well, no, that part at their scale costs so much that it's worth it to install the lasers or whatever in order to do like.

Thinking like Apple is not like thinking like even other companies because of the scale of especially the iPhone and if you talk to their competitors. I talked to somebody who works for a competitor of Apple a few weeks ago and they're like, oh boy, people are like, hey, can't we do it like Apple? And you're like, no, we cannot do it like Apple because we're buying 100,000 of these and they're buying 10 million of them. We can't be Apple and that's a great advantage of Apple. But it also leads to cases where they make decisions and you're like, really, and it's like, yeah, it makes sense for them, not anybody else, but for them it makes sense and a lot of these things that we use relatively seamlessly.

1:16:43 - Alex Lindsay
The scale is the only reason that it's even possible. Before the iPad came out, I had this idea of we should have an iPhone that's a lot bigger and people could use it for cooking and they could put it up. It was basically the size of an iPad and I had meetings with Nvidia and I had things about it, but everybody came back with these clumpy little weird things. Until I was talking to somebody that had used to work for Apple and they were like, why would you do that? And I was like, because it's gonna be really cool and people will want it. And he goes but what if Apple did something like that? And I said, but they're not doing something like that? And he goes but what if they did? And that was the Tim Cook and that wasn't as smart as it might have been. And I was like, and I will quit now because it's just at the scale. You can't even build these things at a scale that makes sense, tim.

1:17:29 - Leo Laporte
Cook was asked why Apple manufactures in China, and he said it's not the reason you think. So here's the quote. It's a confusion about China. This is a fortune magazine.

1:17:39 - Tim Cook
Let me at least give you my opinion. The popular conception is that companies come to China because of low labor cost. I'm not sure what part of China they go to, but the truth is China stopped being the low labor cost country many years ago and that is not the reason to come to China. From a supply point of view, the reason is because of the skill and the quantity of skill in one location and the type of skill it is.

1:18:16 - Leo Laporte
So I think that's interesting. I don't know if that's he's saying that. You know because, after all, 100% true. You think it's 100% true, yeah.

1:18:24 - Alex Lindsay
Oh yeah, I've talked to people who are working in manufacturing. We do not have there's no. What I was told was we could not build the skill set that China has in the United States at that scale If we focused only on that in all K through 12 for 10 years. We couldn't help with that many people that can do what they can do, like it's just. It is an entirely different scale and we've given up on most of that. We outsourced most of the machining, most of the assembly. We've outsourced all of that, and so those jobs don't exist anymore. And so now the skillsets don't exist anymore. You know, and it's just there's no. It takes years and years and years to get good at some of the things that are required for that process. So until you move to robotics I mean, that's what they did with the, you know, the Mac Pro for a while and unless you have robots that can do it, if you have people that can do it, it takes a long time to get to the skillsets that they need at that scale.

1:19:19 - Leo Laporte
And I would say that Tim Cook has the standing to talk about this. He's the guy who really did all this in China, right? I mean, when he this is whole career. This is what he does is logistics.

1:19:29 - Alex Lindsay
And you see them trying to get out of it. I mean, they're slowly ramping up in Vietnam and India and Brazil and you know they're there but that takes, you know they're. They have to bring that skill set up and that's going to take a decade. You know it's not going to be. You know it's not. They're doing it now but you know it's. That's the, you know that's the challenge.

1:19:47 - Leo Laporte
The Apple Epic lawsuit, the gift that just doesn't stop giving. Apple and Epic both went to the Supreme court last week. You may remember Epic sued Apple of because Epic, the maker of Fortnite, wanted to be able to have their own store. A lot of other people feel the same way than what Apple's 30% cut into their profits. The judge in that case ruled against Epic in almost every respect except for one. They said well, apple should perhaps let app developers point users to alternative payment methods. Apple has gone to the Supreme court to say, hey, can you take that back, that part? We don't like that part. Meanwhile, epic petitioned the Supreme court to review the part where they said app store policies don't violate any trust laws. Supreme court has not yet said they're going to review either case. As far as I know. I haven't seen anything since, but both companies were petitioning the Supreme court to review those cases.

1:20:51 - Alex Lindsay
I'd say there's 50, 50 chance that the Supreme court says we're just not going to get a little bit More than 50, 50,.

1:20:56 - Leo Laporte
I think they're just going to say yeah, no, that was that's done. Let's God hope they say that. I would like that to be over please thank you.

1:21:05 - Alex Lindsay
Well, it will be over. I mean, if they accepted it, it will be over. Yeah, it's over either way, Once they make the decision. Yeah, exactly.

1:21:11 - Leo Laporte
Mark Gurman says, apple thought about buying Bing and meanwhile kind of yeah, they thought about it.

1:21:23 - Andy Ihnatko
They had the idea what would happen if we were to buy Bing, and then they said oh no, it's a little like if a guy knocks on my door and says I'm selling encyclopedias.

1:21:32 - Jason Snell
did I think about buying them? Briefly, maybe I don't know.

1:21:35 - Leo Laporte
And you slammed the door in his face.

1:21:37 - Jason Snell
So it was really.

Microsoft wanted to. I mean because this portrays a scenario where Microsoft is the guy with a cardboard box with a surge engine and it's like listen, we got options here, you could buy it. And Apple's like man, I don't know about that. They're like how about we white label it so you can deny that it's even Bing, and it could just be like Apple search or whatever, but it's a really Bing. But don't tell anybody. It's Bing and Apple's like you know, google pays us a lot of money. Maybe we'll just stick with Google, but Microsoft, like clearly Sacha Nadella says they were motivated to make a deal with Apple because they're frustrated that they can't crack the iPhone because of Apple's relationship with Google.

1:22:15 - Leo Laporte
And it's hard to turn down whatever Google's paying them between eight and 15 billion a year of a significant portion of their services revenue. Frankly, yeah.

1:22:25 - Andy Ihnatko
And it was also like that was interesting part of the testimony where Microsoft was really really, really motivated to try to displace Google, so much so that they were making the case to the board that look, here is how much money we would have to fork over to in order to get this away from Google. We would have to lose an enormous amount of money every single year, but we think it might be worth it just to get our foot in the door with search. And the other side of the conversation with Apple was basically that they, eddy Q, was saying, in answer to many different forms of questioning from the US government, that, look, we never really considered seriously switching away from Google search because there's just nothing that does the job nearly as well. I believe that in 2016,. I still believe that right now.

As a matter of fact, there was another conversation that Microsoft had with Samsung on the same conversation, basically saying, hey, what would it take for us to become your default search engine on Samsung phones?

And that was even worse. That went down even worse because, again according to testimony from Microsoft, they got like back channel feedback from the negotiation team. Yeah, the CEO is way, way too polite to be direct about it, but we're really advising you never, ever, ever to suggest that ever, ever again, because that's a super hard no. So, yeah, there's a lot of information coming out about how that negotiations were and how, if there was any sort of mystery, there was never any mystery as to whether Apple's gonna renew that deal. There was just a question asked to how much more money were they gonna get out of Google, and Microsoft said that basically, the biggest problem was that there was no way that Bing could provide the sort of traffic that Google search was gonna provide for them and therefore that kind of revenue that's associated with that extra traffic they'd have to compensate for and again, they would be out of pocket by a skyrocketing amount of money.

1:24:29 - Leo Laporte
Nadella took the stand yesterday in the US versus Google trial and testified why Bing was so bad. I guess you could summarize it. Among other things, he said he was asked what it would mean to Microsoft if it were to have that deal with Apple. It would be a game changer. Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, said he said Microsoft was prepared to give Apple everything Google was gonna give them if they would just switch to Bing up to $15 billion a year. He said and this is what you were referring to, jason he was willing to hide the Bing brand in Apple's user search engines and respect Any of the company's privacy wishes. He did say, as we've said for a long time, default is the only thing that matters in terms of changing users' behavior. Google has said oh, it's easy to switch. Nadella said that's a bogus notion.

1:25:28 - Alex Lindsay
Well, even if you look at I mean, Apple Maps even went before it got good. It became very quickly. When it was default maps, it became very quickly 60% of the market. I don't know what it is now. I will say, after using it and because it's built in, you click on things and it just pops up and you get used to it, it's on my watch and you go back to Google Maps.

Yeah, and you go back to Google Maps and you're like, ah, like it doesn't, like it doesn't. I don't think, google, it might be a better map solution but just the convenience of it.

1:25:58 - Andy Ihnatko
And, by the way, when I use CarPlay.

1:26:00 - Leo Laporte
My Mustang is Ford has cleverly made it so that the Apple Maps information is on the center panel as well as on the screen on the right. When the US Department of Justice's attorney asked Satya Nadella has Microsoft tried to become Apple's default search engine? Yes, said Nadella. How'd it go? Not well, said Nadella. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

1:26:27 - Andy Ihnatko
It's been a hoot like reading this testimony, and we should also point out that a great percentage of the testimony that's being offered is under seal, that we're only hearing a part of it. There's some of the documents that came from the investigation. Some of the documents that were produced in evidence are available. A lot of them, however, are simply not because of trade secrets, and so what we are learning about these negotiations and also direct comments from ADQ about what Apple's feelings were, what their positions were.

The government kept trying to find a chink in that armor and trying to find a way to diffuse the idea that Google has its market dominance or has the position it has, because it has the best product and also because it is the best opportunity for Apple to make money and also to benefit its own products.

And every time they try to press that and he had really the right answer to them, for instance they're saying oh well, the smoking gun the dun dun dun was and here's your own like Apple internal slide deck that says about how Google's security and privacy are terrible and ours and Apple's are great. So why would you like even consider taking? Why would you subject your users to that? And he said well, that's why we have part of the deal is basically to include protections to make sure that, for instance, people don't have to be logged into a Google account in order to like use the Google search. We also put other like protections for user privacy inside there. On and on and on and on. It was a hard line of questioning for someone who's a fan of the Department of Justice, because it was just every bullet just ping, came off that armor like, just like it was nothing.

1:28:11 - Leo Laporte
Gherman's also said and I don't know how credible it is that Apple was thinking about launching its own search engine to compete with Google. Remember, apple did hire John Genendrea, who's running Apple's AI division from Google. But at Genendrea does have something to do with search. I have to say, given how lousy Apple's App Store search is, I'm not sure I want Apple to start doing a web search but they are doing it as part of Siri right.

When you do a Siri search, it searches the net as well, and so Apple does have a spider out there which is going through the internet.

1:28:47 - Alex Lindsay
The scale and the scale. Again. In the same way we talked about Apple having scale and building hardware devices, the scale of Google search and what it's capable of doing, and the amount of embedded data that they have, that they've already acquired over all of these years, and all of the behaviors that users have and everything else is incredibly hard to replace.

It's just and I think that Apple is reportedly spending billions of dollars on Siri and trying to make search better and trying to make all of those things machine learning and all these other things that are working, but anytime you see any real papers on how Google search works, it's like looking into the sun, Like you know, like it is really an incredible and it's what makes all the money. It's the last thing, though.

1:29:35 - Leo Laporte
I mean they have replaced Google in many respects. You just mentioned Maps. It's kind of the last bit of Google that is still on every iPhone. It does seem like that's something Apple might want to do is replace Google there too.

1:29:48 - Alex Lindsay
Maps are so simple compared to Google search, though.

1:29:51 - Leo Laporte
And Apple struggled with Maps, didn't they?

1:29:54 - Alex Lindsay
And Apple, you know, took a lot of hits for something that's 1% as complicated as Google search, you know, and at most. And so, because you're talking about a free, open range, I'm gonna ask you a question and you're gonna give me back useful answers is incredibly complicated compared to I might tell you what road you gotta go on, and so it is. I think that that's the problem that I think everybody has with Google and that's why people are talking about whether they wanna break them up. The question is, if you break up Google search, does that really improve the experience for the consumer in the same way that you know, because it's just gonna make bad search for a lot of people and that's not necessarily a good thing. So it's a really sticky thing, but I think that Apple is not gonna leave Google anytime soon because I think that they have other fish to fry and that fish is a really big one and really complicated to even try to get a fire under.

1:30:45 - Andy Ihnatko
Again, that was another one of AdQ's mantras, saying we felt as though Google search was the best option for our users when they were confronted with the fact well, gee, apple, here's all the questions that you ask a user sets up a brand new iPhone, why not also ask them which search engine do you want to be the default? Rather than choosing whether, than blessing, one is the default? The direct answer was look, boiled down to everyone's going to switch to? Is everyone's gonna choose Google search anyway? We'd try to be really, really careful and limit the amount of questions we ask a person when they're first setting it up. They tend to be absolutely essential questions.

We didn't regard this as an essential question. We felt that it would just prolong the procedure and also that we're I think they're almost a direct quote that we're just gonna be giving them a list of options of search engines that they've absolutely never heard of and they're just gonna pick Google search anyway. And so, unless there was something more damning in the sealed testimony, such as if he was asked hey, is part of your agreement with Google that you will not disparage, you will defend Google in court and you will do nothing to disparage them? That would have been an interesting question to ask and get answered, but for now it just seemed like a very plain spoken response that this is the best solution for us. It's the best solution for our users and that's why we're and we like the money as well yeah, I mean the money's good, yeah, sure.

That's why they call it money.

1:32:10 - Alex Lindsay
I don't know. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know if Apple would, even if they weren't getting paid for it, because of the services that they're trying to provide to the user. I don't even know if Google wasn't paying them. I mean, they might change if they weren't paying them, but I don't know if it's about the money, it really is about the user experience there. And again, when it comes down to selecting every person that you ever talk to work that works with Apple, that has had to build an app that works with them or whatever, will tell every button, every selection, every dropdown is a battle Like it is about. Like Apple wants to get rid of everything that requires any kind of like. I got another dropdown or another slider. I mean Apple doesn't want to see any. They start with zero and make you fight for every single one.

1:32:55 - Jason Snell
So, alex, I agree with you. I think there are two things going on here. Right, there's Apple looking after the user and saying our default should be the best search engine and I know that you know it's gonna be a controversial statement, I guess but, like, google's still the best search engine. I know there are other reasons to use other search engines. I have tried them. They are better than they used to be. There are arguments for them. I think that Google is the best search engine.

I think it's a reasonable argument to say the reason we pick Google is because they're the best experience for our customers. If you're Apple, right, I get that. However, it is also about the money, and not just in the sense that how do you say no to $9 billion? It's also about the money, because whoever does the search is building a business on search ads, right, like? That's bottom line Is there is money to be made in search and you can't partner with Google or Microsoft or whoever and say sure you go out with all of our search traffic and bring in you know, 20 billion a year and don't give any of it to us, right?

Apple's not gonna play that game. I do wonder if the reason they've got a search engine bubbling in the background is not only for like ancillary reasons, but because that is their ultimate walk away from Google. Solution is look, if we for some legal reason are not allowed to take a piece of the money from Google or have to go to a partner or whatever, we could just walk away and then we will make money off of it, because they'll totally put ads on the site. And remember, when Apple does advertising, it's first party they concern, which means it's clean as far as they're concerned, because all they're tracking is staying within Apple and yada, yada, yada right, and we've had that argument before. But that is a very Apple thing to do. Also, I assume that Apple gets paid for an affiliate fee for every search that happens. No matter what your default search engine is, right, I kind of assume that out of Safari, if you choose Bing those, there's a revenue, there's a revenue kickback for that too. It's just that the default is so powerful.

1:34:54 - Leo Laporte
And I'm like yes, we know that Mozilla gets 400 million a year.

1:34:58 - Jason Snell
That's basically how they're funded is by.

1:35:00 - Leo Laporte
Google search.

1:35:01 - Jason Snell
Yeah, exactly, I do wonder if the long the end version of this in some ways, that somebody somewhere mandates that Apple ask you what you want your search engine to be at some point, and the truth is everybody's gonna pick Google anyway, right, like it's very hard to say, hey, this superior product and that's dominant. And it's tough, right, because how do you, if you're such an Adela, you can feel his frustration at saying we have a good product and we can't get anybody to use it. It's ironic that the CEO of Microsoft is saying that, because we were all saying that about windows in the 90s. Why can't anybody use the Mac? Why are they using this inferior? But anyway, I feel for him, but that's how it is.

1:35:43 - Leo Laporte
If Apple had really wanted to get in search, I think they would have acquired, for instance, niva, which, believe it or not, I played for five bucks a month for it was a very good search and it was not Google or Bing. They could have bought Niva, probably for a song. They ended up selling and getting out of the search business because they couldn't compete against Google. I have found another one I'm using and paying for now, which is koggicom. I would submit that they're as good as Google. Give me a search, jason, let's see you can compare with your.

1:36:11 - Jason Snell
Google search. I'm not gonna do it. I don't know what that would be. I haven't tried Koggi because it is for pay, but I have tried them all and I end up switching back to Google. Because Google? Because especially with Google, you get the webpage search and the new search and the image search and it's all kind of like there and they're all very good.

1:36:28 - Leo Laporte
And then I go duck duck go. It's not free, which is the negative I don't like. Duck duck go. There is a lens they have. They just added AI. Summarization of content.

1:36:42 - Jason Snell
Now I should try them, but again, that's a. Okay, that's great. So there's a for pay, like that's an esoteric problem.

1:36:49 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's what Niva did too, and they failed. They pivoted.

1:36:53 - Alex Lindsay
I think the problem with the for pay is that you don't have as many users banging on it and the user interaction is so powerful in understanding how the algorithm should work that when you have a small group of users it's just very hard to compete over time with that process, and I think that that's the real challenge in it. And I think that Apple has been known to build lots of parallel projects that never come out. Final Cut was like a cute little thing to prove that QuickTime was. You could build an app on QuickTime. Avid freaked out and then Apple weaponized it Like. It was just like, you know, like, and it was. It was their, you know their pushback.

But there was rumors that there were a couple of people working on a Photoshop replacement because they couldn't get Adobe to keep moving forward and they were like, if they don't keep moving forward, we're gonna release something, and a bunch of those tools ended up in things like aperture and photos and everything else. But there was development always going on in the background, because a lot of these things take so many years. You don't wanna get caught in a turn where you now need to replace something. You don't have anything to replace it with. And so you know, in a company the size of Apple, it's easy to have 10 employees sitting there, or 100 employees, or 1,000 employees sitting there working on something. That's just in case.

1:38:07 - Jason Snell
Okay, Leo, I'm gonna take you up on this now. Coggy has a couple of pre-formatted search queries to try it out, and one of them is Best Headphones. And when I search Best Headphones on Google, you know what I get at the top I get RTINGS, I get TechRadar and I get Wire Cutter.

1:38:23 - Leo Laporte
RTINGS PC Magazine, ny Times, which is Wire Cutter.

1:38:27 - Jason Snell
Right. So what I get on Coggy is the gadget flow, and then some Reddit conversations, some shopping links, audiochecknet, a bunch of listicles.

1:38:39 - Leo Laporte
Well, you're not logged in because I'm not getting that QuietCodescom.

1:38:43 - Jason Snell
This is their sample example of a good search on Coggy, and it's not even close.

1:38:49 - Leo Laporte
I actually pretty much love the Coggy results I'm getting, but maybe I don't know, maybe and this is what they're showing off. Yeah, I know that's odd, isn't it? Yeah Right because I pay for it.

1:39:00 - Jason Snell
I want the Wire Cutter review up there, right? I absolutely want that in RTINGS. I actually only look at them for TVs, but I guess they do Headphone, Like that's a good answer. I'm getting those three answers.

1:39:12 - Leo Laporte
I'm getting RTINGS, pc Magazine and Wire Cutter is the top page.

1:39:16 - Jason Snell
On Coggy.

1:39:17 - Leo Laporte
On Coggy.

1:39:18 - Jason Snell
Because that's not on there on their pre-formatted, I'm logged in and then, furthermore, maybe it's not there at all.

1:39:22 - Leo Laporte
I get listicles, which is really great. That's a separate heading. You know, I get images, I get shopping links, but they're not to Google Shopping. I don't know. I've been using this. Now the big. You know what the big problem is. You can't just turn your search engine to Coggy. In most browsers you have to install a Coggy extension. This was Neva's problem too. Neither Firefox nor Safari let you just choose Coggy, because it's not. They don't want you to do that. So some of the fault flaw lies on the browser manufacturers as well, I think. Anyway, I'm so desperate to de-Google my life that I am willing to pay for this, and we shall see. They even have their own browser, which is based on WebKit, on macOS, called Orion.

1:40:14 - Alex Lindsay
I think that's the challenge for A lot of people related to Apple is a lot of Apple users aren't desperate to do anything.

1:40:23 - Leo Laporte
They just wanted to work. Nobody, nobody. They wanted to be in the background.

1:40:26 - Alex Lindsay
They just wanted to open it up and they just want to open up the thing and have it do the thing and then they move on and do the rest of their life. I think that they're definitely not looking for that solution. I think that makes it hard for anything to break in to that process.

1:40:38 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, apple has a need for two search engines. They need a search engine that works on device to find stuff that is on device and to fuel the shlomo searches and stuff like that, and they need Google search. So the first one is they can develop and house. The second one they're going to need Google for.

And if they were to, if things were to go completely south for Google in this case and they were forced to not charge, not make it worth Apple's while, to give up what they have to give up in order to make Google search a default, I think that Apple would just get out the checkbook. I don't think that they would be. I mean, it's just like you said, alex. I mean this is the reason why Google search works so well is that they've been working on this since 2006. You can't just simply start a space program from two rocks and a bunch of sticks. You can buy a space program and then build up from there and that'll give you that'll at least make up for the first seven years you needed. But there's just no way to actually do it and.

I'm just not. I'm just not. I'm just. I'm hoping that the Department of Justice is going to make the case that there was something more to more to this case than Google is just simply way too successful and for that reason we need to make sure that they are not as successful as they are right now, like when the next Nick in the next couple of years they get to the, the DOJ gets to sue them for antitrust regarding their ad business, in which, oh my God, they should, they should, google should outfit everybody with with fireproof underwear, because they are going to be tied to a stake and without much, much, much, many options to go there.

But here I'm just not seeing anything from this testimony and the line of prosecution that says that much more than it's unfair, that this is such a big, successful and popular service that it's really impossible to compete with. But them's the facts. I mean the most, the most damning thing that that Google has in their defenses. Well, we give people and all the instances in which we give people options, people just shoot the. The only thing they use Bing search for is how do I download and install Chrome and how do I? How do I change the default search engine and Bing search to to Google search, and that is the most. Well, if you want more evidence that this is what people want, you're not going to get better evidence than that.

1:42:53 - Alex Lindsay
And the biggest thing that's happened to Bing in the last you know, I don't know five years has been chat GPT. You know I have a lot of friends that are like suddenly using Bing because they've got access to chat GPT for through Bing. So I think that that's been the the best thing currently, until until Bard, of course, picks up speed.

1:43:11 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, Because, because, even, because, even there I mean Google, as they're very proud of, as they will relentlessly remind us, like the research paper that kind of kicked off LLMs is something that was produced mostly by Google research, but and this is something that they have been developing so that they can understand search engine search queries better, understand context of what people are asking and also understand the context of the pages that they are indexing and trying to serve back to people much better. So I think that even there, it's not so much of a head start so much as a everyone was waiting for the starting gun, Everyone was, everyone was concerned about getting sued.

1:43:49 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, exactly, and and and. The thing is is that now the lawsuits are out there. If the lawsuits go through, you know, if they win, then then everyone. I don't know what that's going to happen. But if they lose, if these lawsuits against a lot of these AI things lose, then you're going to really see the space race Like it's. I think everyone's still like half in half there. They're trying to compete but not overextend themselves until they see how it sorts out in the in the court. But if they, if these lawsuits that are attacking for copyright and everything else fail, then we're going to see the real money start to roll into the system and then that that becomes almost impossible.

1:44:21 - Andy Ihnatko
And that's when we see the next much, what maybe should be the next round of antitrust in terms of technology, which is that how much of an advantage does Amazon have, how much of an advantage do Microsoft and Google have by virtue of the fact that they have all of these cloud computing resources? They have the ability I mean Google could certainly if, if they were forced to create a brand to basically restart their, their LLMs, from scratch, restart their chatbots from scratch and proving that we're only training it on public domain info and stuff we have bought licenses to. Also, we wired it up with new fundamental algorithms so that we can remove, we can make it forget stuff that it should not know about. On and on and on. They have enough compute power that they could do that task. I mean it would. It would upend the environment yet again with all the, with all the heat it's generating in order to do that.

But they could do that, whereas open source communities cannot do that. Researchers cannot really do that, unless they're being bankrolled by a nation state. So this is the. This is what. This is the sort of stuff that I'm really concerned about. But the power of immense, immense, immense cloud computing farms basically centralizes computing power inside three already very, very huge corporations and two others, and this just doesn't make it easy for independence to get off the ground.

1:45:36 - Leo Laporte
So clearly you guys don't care about the concerns of little people. For instance, who's going to repair Beyonce's gold Apple watch now that it's obsolete?

1:45:47 - Andy Ihnatko
She's, she's queen bae. She taps her hands and it wouldn't. It wouldn't, dare not work once it's on her wrist, can you?

1:45:53 - Leo Laporte
imagine if you bought which I'm sure queen bee did not, or Kanye or any of the other people wearing the gold Apple watches If you had bought that beautiful Apple watch for $17,000, finding out from Apple that you're no longer not only no longer going to get updates, but you can't get battery fixes, you can't get any hardware fixes. Apple has deprecated, obsolete the $17,000 Apple watch edition.

1:46:20 - Andy Ihnatko
No, the people, the people I feel sorry for, are their personal assistants, because all they're going to say is back up, my watch doesn't work anymore. Go get it fixed. So, yeah, darling, of what my, my, my holiness. Unfortunately, the company that made it doesn't provide any more software for it and that just gets this icy glare and says my previous assistant would have already had this fixed.

1:46:45 - Leo Laporte
This is the Apple edition watch. Gold on the wrist of Carl Lagerfeld. Notice he actually never bothered to set it up. It's just doing that little cloud there and waiting for somebody to pair a phone. Collar Carl Lagerfeld was notoriously an Android user.

1:47:02 - Andy Ihnatko
I don't know he's sending his heartbeat to Anna Wintour. That's pretty much all he had to do before.

1:47:08 - Leo Laporte
That is just wild, that he never it just. You got to be careful what you hold up these days, because people will zoom in and pixel beep, like Linda Yaccarino, the CEO of X, who didn't in fact have the X app on her phone.

1:47:21 - Jason Snell
Yeah.

1:47:22 - Leo Laporte
Um, you know some people? Oh well, some people. You can now add PayPal and Venmo to your Apple wallet. Everything should just live in the Apple wallet from now on. I had my game tickets to the Packers game on the Apple wallet. I had my plane tickets on the Apple wallet and nowadays, with Ticketmaster and others, the plane you still have to use the QR code, but a lot of them are just using RFID, I guess, or Bluetooth, because there's no QR code. You just hold your phone up to the ticket taker and she says come on in. So I'm liking that. Anyway, PayPal and Venmo. According to PayPal made the announcement, just add debit or credit card option and you can scan your PayPal or Venmo credit or debit card into the details manually. Now, this is for the credit cards, I guess, or the debit cards, not for Venmo. The app, yeah.

1:48:17 - Andy Ihnatko
That's, that's the wallets becoming the most one of the six, one of the six most important apps, like on any phone, like just the ability, even even in the, now that they have the ability, to simply say oh well, here is simply a loyalty card or a library card or anything that has a barcode with it. I will let you just scan it and then I will simply let you use this analog card like it's digital. That's just like, oh, my goodness, like I, it's like I kind of wonder why I carry a wallet anymore. I, I, it was, it was, it was incredible, I did, I needed to. It took me two and a half months to deplete the hundred dollars in cash that I put into that wallet, the physical cash that I put in that wallet, like a couple months ago, and I didn't. I was like dumbfounded that, oh, that's right, when, where do I go to get cash?

1:49:01 - Leo Laporte
I actually forgot where 18 is on its way out. Nowhere in the Packer complex would they take cash. It was all touchless and they said if you have cash here, by giving to this machine and it will give you a credit card you can use, otherwise you ain't getting a hot dog. I think that's a future. I think we're getting that way dramatically, yeah.

1:49:24 - Andy Ihnatko
I literally only have. I literally only only have cash in my wallet for when I go to yard sales and estate sales and when, like I'm at, I'm in Chinatown, I'm buying stuff at a bakery and they only take cash. For some magical reason, my barber shop.

1:49:39 - Leo Laporte
I just went to the barber, cash only. I said can I, can I Venmo you? No, no, cash only.

1:49:45 - Andy Ihnatko
So give my, give my respect to the, to the Chattaglia family I don't remember loyal or grateful for this haircut.

1:49:52 - Leo Laporte
I do know that Linda Yacarita, while she doesn't have the X or Twitter app on her smartphone, does have the wallet front and center, although some said it was a little odd that she had Apple's settings app on her dock. You think that's odd?

1:50:06 - Jason Snell
No, that's something you go to a lot of opinions about where you put things they do, don't say on your home screen.

1:50:12 - Leo Laporte
They really do. She has, you know, phone, mail, safari and settings on her dock. I think that's. That's okay. Let me see what's on my dock. Oh, you wouldn't like what's on my dock.

1:50:23 - Jason Snell
Phone on your dock is a very much a. You're an old Gotta, have phone Gotta have really.

1:50:27 - Leo Laporte
No, that's old. Yeah, all the verge. Of editors, in response to Linda Yacarita, posted their home screen. I've got phone messages, google Fi messages, so I can get Android messages on my camera. What do you have on your dock? No phone, huh, I have. I have overcast. Okay, podcast that.

1:50:48 - Jason Snell
I have a phone which is an RSS reader Safari and Slack.

1:50:52 - Leo Laporte
That's weird, that's really weird. I think, so On your dock, huh.

1:50:56 - Jason Snell
I'm not. I'm not an old, I'm a young. I'm gonna have to rethink what's on my dock.

1:50:59 - Leo Laporte
What's on your dock, Alex?

1:51:00 - Jason Snell
Lindsey Put that, put that TikTok on there.

1:51:03 - Alex Lindsay
You know I haven't. I just, you know, since I just got the phone on Friday, I haven't really made any changes to it other than just adding some. The app. I do it very slowly, like I just kind of there's some point where I'll go okay, I'm gonna move a bunch of things around. Right now I just have literally what it came with was the phone, the Safari, the messages and music at the bottom. But I'll usually move those things around once I get going. They're usually all message message, different message things that I'm doing. So that's usually what finds its way there.

But I do this thing, weird thing where I don't, you know, I don't copy anything from one phone to the other. So I open it up and I just started installing things as I go oh, I need that, I need that, I need that, and I just slowly built, otherwise I'd end up with a phone that had way too many apps and so I kind of forced the apps to show themselves as needed and it's kind of like having like a little a gift from past me, like I go, oh, I'm gonna have to get that app. And I go, yeah, there's a little cloud thing. I already bought that one so I can download it. It's like thank you pass me.

I was so thoughtful of you to make that available for me so, but anyway, so that's that's how I kind of go through building up the phone again, but I'll. Usually it's a bunch of message apps on the bottom.

1:52:06 - Leo Laporte
Here's, here's. I'm just now. I'm really curious. Here's Alex Kranz of the Verge. He's got outlook on his doc. That's terrible, I'm gonna get rid of that. Here is Alice Allison. She's got mail. A lot of them have mail on there. I think this may be a work. Got the phone there, look at that?

1:52:23 - Jason Snell
Huh, she had the phone, she got the phone Phone app down the phone.

1:52:28 - Leo Laporte
Is that really an old thing, Cause? Yeah, there's this one.

1:52:30 - Jason Snell
this one has a phone. Oh yeah, yeah. A lot of the young people don't even have the phone app visible because they don't care, alex, he has a phone. And if somebody calls, it slides up and says would you like to answer? So you don't need the phone app for that either.

1:52:41 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah.

1:52:42 - Jason Snell
It's on my home screen, but I have to rethink.

1:52:44 - Andy Ihnatko
I have gray hair, or so I order pizza and sandwiches. Enough Like directly, directly to the restaurant, the neighborhood, that, yeah, that's that phone app is in the doc and it's not going to.

1:52:55 - Leo Laporte
I'm gonna say the majority of Verge editors have the phone app in their doc, so I think you are overruled, unless they're all ancient.

1:53:03 - Jason Snell
They're older than the people. Don't put the calendar in your doc.

1:53:06 - Leo Laporte
That's stupid. I'll say that it just uh. Also Messages for sure, right, all the messages apps.

1:53:11 - Jason Snell
It's relevant than it used to be right, because basically, what you're just talking about is what is convenient for me to tap to quickly get to, because you can search for any app and, like I don't even have a second page on my iPhone, I literally, if it's not on page one, I just search for it. So I have a very small number of apps because you can just go or a swipe to the next one and get app library and find them that way. So I it used to matter more than it does now.

1:53:39 - Andy Ihnatko
You know, I mean I, I, I swipe and it gives me over my most recent five apps and that's almost almost almost always relevant to what the reason why I wanted to launch something to begin with. I'm ashamed now that I have the phone, but the but the camera app is always lower right. It's like on every phone, every device that I have, it's always lower right, Okay.

1:53:55 - Leo Laporte
T4s, you are the loser. He's in our club to a discord. He's got nothing but little tiny folders in his, in his doc.

1:54:04 - Jason Snell
Use search or app library. Stop it, stop it.

1:54:08 - Andy Ihnatko
Hey, your phone is really simplifying your life. Congratulations.

1:54:11 - Jason Snell
Swipe those, swipe those all to page two and then edit and delete page two. Yeah, wow, trust me. Huh, I think I don't do it.

1:54:21 - Andy Ihnatko
I wonder. But I wonder, like now that you have like really good actionable like widgets, I wonder if like that's going to tempt you to like use page two for like a widget panel that if I slide to the right I will instantly get my no sap that I can action on.

1:54:32 - Jason Snell
Well you there's a widget panel to the left anyway, right, like that's always there, that's right, that's always been there, so you can put your widgets there for a quick view. And I do have a widget. I have a. I have a forecast widget at the top of my home screen. So I've got even fewer apps available, but it's enough, and those are the ones that I actually tap on day to day, and the rest of them I can just search for, it's fine.

1:54:54 - Andy Ihnatko
But like it's not like. But that's not like. But I know, I know I have Android, so I have been using widgets for longer. And also like the, the, the philosophy of what the home pages are very far for different. Like, when I'm in New York, I have like a pre canned like page that's always like one swipe from the top. That's always. Here's my calendar. Here are shortcuts to like a subway directions to where I'm staying, subway direct calendar appointment to where I'm, where I'm supposed to be, like basically, and like whatever pin notes I have for. Oh, here's the person you're talking to. Do not, do not call him Michael. His name is Mitchell. Do not call him Michael. His name is Mitchell.

1:55:27 - Jason Snell
So what you do in iOS is you've got you can check pages on and off, so you could actually build a New York page and then enable it when you're in New York and disable it when you're not, and that's how you do that in iOS.

1:55:37 - Andy Ihnatko
I do something similar here.

1:55:39 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, those are all such cool things that no one ever does because it's too complicated and forget about it. But I think I should do that. I'm going to know you made me really. I should be pretty high. I have to rethink my entire strategy of iPhone home screen.

1:55:52 - Andy Ihnatko
I'm going to, I will say, that my motive, my motivator, is always like what at what? Whenever I get annoyed by something, I try to pin that to a motivation to figuring out what do I not have correct, configured correctly, and how can I change it so that this is easier or more direct or it's not going to annoy me the next time. And that's why I have that shortcut to. Here is how to get from where you are to where you're staying in New York. Directions are complete and in immense, and also here is a direct link to a local PDF of the complete subway map, because I kept getting annoyed at oh damn it, and I don't have connectivity because I'm here in the subway station.

1:56:28 - Alex Lindsay
And I have to say, just like everybody else, I mean, after the first page I just search everything. They're all there. I have pages and pages and pages of apps, just that. I still go to find, you know, and I just scrub down and go carrot.

1:56:43 - Leo Laporte
Do you see the programmables? By the way, so many cases were designed before they knew what this silence switch would be. I have one of them. It's a case I buy every year. It's a wallet case from Davis case. It just has a cutout there which doesn't work because it's too deep and I and I. There needs to be a button.

1:57:03 - Jason Snell
I gotta be a button.

1:57:04 - Leo Laporte
Gotta be a button.

1:57:04 - Jason Snell
A lot of cases they were they were hedging because they weren't 100% sure that the reports about the action button are true, but if it's a cutout and not a button it's no good and some of the case makers I think at least one case maker basically said we're going to make it right, we're going to send you, we can send you a 3D printed button, or we can do an exchange, or we can, because it's not good enough if you've got a cutout for the action button.

1:57:25 - Leo Laporte
Damn it. So what do you use for your action button, since we're talking about docs, jason?

1:57:31 - Jason Snell
Oh, I have a shortcut that I, I'm, I'm still in the experimental phases, we all are. I've got a shortcut that, basically, when you press the action button, it it takes dictation and I say something and then it immediately adds that to my main reminder as text.

1:57:47 - Leo Laporte
As text. So do you have a shortcut that you did that, and I know that Frederico Vettici has written a shortcut that gives you two actions, because you shorten long press.

1:57:56 - Jason Snell
Yeah, Basically you do. You do it twice and it says if you press this the no, no, it's sort of like you do it and and kick it off, and then you do it again and kick it off again and it and the shortcut will look and say, oh, did you already just invoke me? It's a hack that he's trying. I think Apple is going to need to provide some more nuance with action button over time. But yeah, so that's what I'm trying to do is the idea that I push it. I like the dictation.

I say a thing that I need to do, or for me it's my story list, so it's like a story idea I had and then I just stopped talking and it immediately is added to my reminders list with a little dictation hashtag. So I know that it came from from dictation.

1:58:33 - Leo Laporte
For a long time. I did that one for a while From my watch with drafts. Yeah, I'd like to. That's a good idea. I'm going to play with that a little bit. I like that idea. Alex, do you use the actions button for anything?

1:58:46 - Alex Lindsay
I, I'm just using. I like Jason's idea better than mine. Mine is just. You know, like, as I said, my watch. When I walk into my office I hit my my action button and all my lights turn on for the broadcast. You know there's, we've seen you demon that that's really cool, yeah, it is?

it is remarkably not. There's something about it. I'm walking with my coffee from the kitchen and I just hit my watch and when I walk in, all the lights are on. And then the this is all I did with put put lights out on my phone. So when I walk out, I hit the button and all the lights turn off again. So I'm sorry, and then save us a lot of money and there's a lot of lights here and so. So anyway, I put it there, but I think that the I love the idea of I have an idea and I just want to push a button real quickly and say something. I think that that that's going to Jason, you want to share that shortcut.

1:59:28 - Leo Laporte
Is it a fiddle suitable for public consumption yet? Or?

1:59:32 - Jason Snell
yeah, I could share it. I was just going to take a screenshot of it because it's so simple. It's pretty simple. It's literally two steps.

1:59:38 - Leo Laporte
So you choose shortcut for the action button action.

1:59:42 - Jason Snell
How do you choose which?

1:59:43 - Leo Laporte
shortcut launches.

1:59:44 - Jason Snell
It's just it's in the settings you choose which shortcut to launch.

1:59:49 - Leo Laporte
So you have a shortcut and then the action one is take. Dictation text Okay.

1:59:54 - Jason Snell
And it's actually three. Because I have I have dictate text and then I have an if statement which basically says if the dictated text has any value, add it to my story list. Otherwise, if you don't say anything and just press done, it gives you an error. And so, by doing an if statement, it just doesn't do anything and doesn't yell at you. But that's about it.

2:00:16 - Alex Lindsay
And your list is in notes or is it somewhere else? Reminders and reminders.

2:00:21 - Jason Snell
Yeah, because I keep my sort of things that I need to deal with in a day-to-day basis, as well as any story idea that passes through my brain where I'm like, oh, that would be a good story.

2:00:32 - Leo Laporte
I get it in that list and then I can triage it from there, I do that on my watch and, like I said, I use drafts, but now I just use.

2:00:38 - Jason Snell
Yeah, Well, on the watch, I mean, and you could use Siri for this anyway. And so I end up saying hey, Shlomo, remind me to write a story about this thing.

2:00:49 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, remind me to go to work this thing that I do, that. I'm trying to figure out how to do it. This might help. So we do what we call RFIs for our shows, which are room for improvement, oh, which is basically complaints, and we do it for every show, like we and I'll sit there with a notes document before I put it into the docs, just write down everything that doesn't work.

And we don't write things that worked. We remember those, but it's everything down to, like the sandwiches were too cold, or this is the wrong kind of coffee, or this is all the way up to we need to know the router, or that graphic was pixelated, or this was we got something that was interlaced. So just this wide range of things. And I'm always trying to reduce the friction that it takes to say those things or not to say I don't think we want people saying them out loud, but to type them in because you want that to be super low friction, because it's a super important puzzle, you know, because you'll forget most of the things that went wrong in about 15 minutes, like you know, like the little things, and if you keep on trying to reduce those, you end up with better projects.

2:01:56 - Leo Laporte
It's very cool how I mean customize ability, especially for phone or watch. These are such personal items. You should like your toothbrush. It's nice that you can-.

2:02:08 - Jason Snell
Physical interaction has something magical about it too. Right that this is not the. You can say it to the air with a writing cantation and get it to do it, and it's not. You can unlock your device and then tap here and then go there, and all that there's something about. Just like you jam your meaty thumb on the side of your phone. And you say Diane, I'm entering Twin Peaks, damn good coffee. And then you let go and you're done, right. Like there's something powerful about that.

2:02:33 - Alex Lindsay
I have too many Apple devices. Maybe I'm doing something wrong, but I have too many Apple devices that say hey, shlomo, like they all gonna go, huh, they all will go and I don't know which one? Which one? What'd you say?

2:02:43 - Jason Snell
No, that's what they say. They're like yes, alex, yes, over here, over here.

2:02:46 - Alex Lindsay
Alex, and so you say you don't know which one. Like I've had ones where I'm trying to talk to the speaker and my phone is going crazy or my things, and I'm just like, okay, I just so. I tend to use the button, the other button on my power button or whatever on my phone all the time to do Shlomo, because I don't wanna, I'm tired of trying to tell it which one should be listening right now.

2:03:05 - Leo Laporte
Our crazy rumor of the week from Mac rumors. Appropriately. A verified source suggests that Apple will likely begin accepting new models for trade-in this month. Similar changes in June coincided with WWDC, when they started accepting trade-ins of the studio and the Air and the M2 MacBook Pro for credit towards new Apple purchases. Could we be seeing? It is October. Could we be seeing an M3 MacBook Pro in the next couple of weeks?

2:03:40 - Alex Lindsay
Thoughts the pattern would tell us that in October or November like late October, early November there'll be a release. I mean, that's the Apple's pattern, yeah.

2:03:53 - Andy Ihnatko
And this does sound like it would be a press release sort of thing, as opposed to an event. All I have to do is simply say here's a data sheet on the new M3, it's the same form factor. We haven't basically changed anything here, but here's the speed of the ports, et cetera. Yeah, so I don't just, I don't just be given that we're given that we're here.

2:04:07 - Jason Snell
There's a way to test, though, right Like if they have enough, they would do it and call it a virtual event. It's not that hard for them to do that, but it sounds like maybe there's not that much stuff and it might be as simple as saying, hey, m3, imac, and that's it.

2:04:23 - Alex Lindsay
I think if they do new devices, I think they would do maybe a virtual event. I think if they do, if they actually go to an M3, they're gonna wanna sell it Like, why is this a big? Could be wrong, but I think that that's still where you talk about. We now have eight more graphics processors and this much more RAM, and what we really wanna see is an AB1 encoder Maybe one. Decoders are fine, but we need somewhere. We need them to start putting encoders on the system.

2:04:49 - Andy Ihnatko
I don't know. See, this is 2023 is a much more efficient way of getting information like this out, like if all the advantages of an M3 MacBook are what we perceive them to be, what they would more like. It seems as though they could be more effective by giving them to people like you, alex, and having you basically give your experiences of. I have a need for a high performance. I'm doing lots of video stuff. I'm doing lots of computational stuff. Here is my review of the M3. As opposed to getting even a select 300 people into a room together and showing them a video, I don't think that they would do.

2:05:25 - Alex Lindsay
I mean, I'll be surprised if they bring people into the room. I think that they do that very selectively. I think that that is a huge thing, but for them to build a video about a video that looks like an announcement, that is about the thing. The number of views they get on those are just so. I mean just on the YouTube, numbers are so far into the millions. It's a pretty effective solution and I have to say that I really do. I watched a couple as recently as today, watched a couple of keynotes, but I only get about 15 minutes through them and I just think I think we're at the end of the keynote era like people actually standing live on stage, it's just truly painful to watch that's.

2:06:02 - Jason Snell
You know it's Apple's never gonna go back to that again, but I think that there's a gradation here. Right, there's the we tell you two weeks or a week, okay. First off, there's the iPhone event and the WWDC event, where you end up saying, two weeks out, please come to Cupertino. Then there's the video only event where, a week out, they say, hey, we're gonna do something next week, but it really is just a video that's streaming and we all find out together. And then there's the other one, which is we don't have enough to tell everybody and get them like super hyped up that we're dropping a video at 10 am because it's gonna be a 20 minute long video. And what they do then is they do a press release. They've got some people under embargo, a bunch of reviews come out and they drop their marketing video on their website and on YouTube. That is that 20 minute video that still allows them to make the case. Plus, they've made it to the Verge and you know John Gruber and whoever else.

And I think that what happens in a situation like this month is the question do they have enough that they need to do enough storytelling that they're gonna capture everybody for even an hour on a hyped up one week in advance. Or do they play the surprise game and say you know, it's just a new iMac, but also we're gonna talk about M3 and they furnished Johnny Sruji or one of the other chip people to the Verge and to MKBHD and whatever, and they roll it out that way and that's the third way, right, that's the next notch down. So when we say just a press release, you know it's not just a press release mostly anymore. It's this other kind of multimedia surprise presentation that they do, that the media. Usually they'll have complicit, right, well, that's probably loaded word, but like they'll have embargoed media who are breaking the news but it's under an embargo from Apple.

2:07:49 - Andy Ihnatko
People that they've reached out to and saying hi, I have information for you under embargo, except or no yes, except, can you be in Cupertino a week from Tuesday for personal briefing and receiving some hardware? Right, and I know that absolutely.

2:08:04 - Jason Snell
Or they. I mean they do a lot of stuff by WebEx too, so sometimes you'll get the briefing in advance or you'll get the computer ship to you or whatever. And like I've definitely been in those and it's fun because you're kind of people are coming to you for the news instead of going to Apple.

2:08:19 - Tim Cook
But they mix it up like that and that feels to me like a lot of stuff has dropped out.

2:08:24 - Jason Snell
Yeah, it feels to me like a lot of stuff has dropped out of October. There was a lot of feeling about iPads and iMacs and maybe MacBook Air, and my gut feeling is that maybe M3 supplies this new chip technology Are not far enough along for them to ship that many in volume. Right that they may start slow, and something like the iMac has been floating out there. So maybe the iMac is where they start and they hold the MacBook Air till next spring. Maybe the iPad there are some iPad models that change, but most of the big iPad model rumors are for next year. So it feels like maybe everything is just kind of getting slid back a little bit. But I would love to see remember they skipped the M2 generation for the iMac. It would be really nice Because a lot of people do want that iMac and it's a great design, but it's an M1 right now.

2:09:10 - Leo Laporte
So please, at least it just bought an. M1 24 inch iMac. I'm thinking that means there will be a new iMac.

2:09:16 - Jason Snell
There was definitely confirmed, that's just in.

2:09:21 - Andy Ihnatko
I'm really keen to see if they do a big update to the iPad mini, because it's been a while since. It's kind of like ripe for an update at this point and I think that it is ready for to take on. Oh God, I would not even apologize for having. I have a 12.9 inch M1 iPad Pro that I love and I use every single day. It's one of the most important computers and it works great for me, even though it's a couple years old.

I would not apologize to my internal accountant for buying an entire old, separate, brand new Mac mini because I have so many use cases for it. It's, if anything, the amount of time and the amount of things that I can do with my iPad Pro have demonstrated yeah, but what if you had that kind of, that same kind of power in something that you could put into like a winter coat pocket or something that would, as I like to say it, like my iPad Pro and the Magic Keyboard case? It will fit inside my satchel. Great, it works great. Wouldn't it be great, though, to have something that was so small that I don't know whether or not it's in my satchel I have to go and look because it's so small and light, and that would be very, very attractive to me.

2:10:28 - Leo Laporte
Let's take a little break when we come back your picks of the week. Prepare them, if you will. The first pick this week is that you yes, you join Club Twit. Now would be a good time. Thursday, john Scalzi will join us and Pro-Widder Community Manager will do a fireside chat with that great sci-fi author. And that's timely because Stacey's Book Club this year in November will be his book, the Kiju Preservation Society. So Scalzi fans, well, that's a good reason to join.

We're gonna do October 26th Micah Jason and I will do an escape room at the studio. They're gonna bring an escape room and a box here and you can watch us be frustrated, confused, bewildered, et cetera. These are events that we put together. Renee Richie joins us November 16th as a little enticement to spend a mere $7 a month to join the club. What do you get? Ad-free versions of all of our shows, special shows you don't put out anywhere else, like Hands on Mac with Micah Sargent, hands on Windows with Paul Therat, the Untitled Linux show, home Theater Geeks with Scott Wilkinson, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. All those events, plus access to our Discord, which is a whole heck of a lot of fun, a great place to hang. It's my favorite social media right now. All of that for $7 a month.

Yeah, twittv slash club twit. We're close to 8,000 members now, which is a little more than 1% of our audience. I'd love to get it to two, three, four, five percent of our audience. It would make a huge difference. Frankly, it's gonna be the difference between going forward introducing new shows or going forward cutting some shows, because I don't know why, but podcast advertising is slowly disappearing. Again, your help much appreciated. Thank you, twittv slash club twit. Let's get a pick from Mr Alex Lindsey. What do you say, alex?

2:12:29 - Alex Lindsay
Synaptic sent me these headsets and when I first put them on this is a ribbon headset oh, that's the best man, and it's only 200 bucks and I thought I was like, oh, I'll give it a shot. And I put them on and I was like they're not quite as loud as I expected. I was expecting to have a lot more loud. And the problem is I was like, well, I'll listen to them for a little while and I'm afraid that I've really gotten hooked on them. These are the SE ones and I find myself listening to music on them. The detail is a lot higher than what I all my other headsets and I didn't think.

I think, when people complained about the Apple headsets, I mean I listened to that one a lot the Over the Years, the Maxes. You're like, oh, it's a little muddy. And I'm like, oh, it's fine, everything else. Now, unfortunately, this one has made everything sound muddy, so there's a lot again. If you're looking for something really loud that you probably shouldn't be listening to at the loudness that you are listening to, that, I've been listening to it. It is.

It's Bluetooth as well, as it does have a powered. You know it's got I mean it's got a headphone jack in it as well. It does have a mic. I haven't tested the mic. I don't know why I would use a mic for this and but these are it's ribbon mics and, again, because of what it comes with, the detail is just kind of amazing for $200. And so I haven't.

Now, I admit I don't have any reference point to these, so I don't know what a $1,500, I mean, because most of the other ones are like $1,000, $1,200, $1,500. I don't know what the other ones sound like, but I will say it, for $200, these are probably the best headsets I've worn over the years to do that or bringing anything at $200, as far as clarity goes, so clarity and, you know, detail has been just really, and I just find myself working away with them on. So and again, at first I was like, oh, they're not as loud, but I realized that as I listened to them for a while what I was hearing was just a lot more that was in the music. So anyway, that's my pick. I like them more than I expected.

2:14:30 - Leo Laporte
So synaptic, s-i-n-e-a-p-t-i-c synaptic, synaptic, yeah. S-e-1 wireless headphones.

2:14:38 - Alex Lindsay
I like the little head.

2:14:40 - Leo Laporte
They sit really nicely.

2:14:42 - Alex Lindsay
Like my daughter was making fun of them. I was like, yeah, but they're so comfortable, like pretty much, actually that's a good design and they're really comfortable. So I, and again I was surprised at I was just. I was again surprised. I don't have any experience with ribbon headphones but and people told me, oh, it'll have a lot more detail, and I didn't wasn't clear that until I put the other ones on now I have trouble with the other ones.

2:15:04 - Leo Laporte
I know what you mean. I have a very expensive pair of Hi-Fi man headphones and really you can get really amazing headphones. Not on Bluetooth. It seems silly to use. You see, this with Bluetooth.

2:15:16 - Alex Lindsay
It's 5.3, it's you know, it's not, it's pretty, it's pretty good. Bluetooth it does. I mean I I Use them wired. I definitely have been seen mostly wired, so and but I will say that it's they I'm. The only concern I really have is, if I keep on listening to these, I'm gonna Spoiler yourself. Yeah, be really hard to listen to other headphones because everything sounds mushy.

2:15:39 - Leo Laporte
Mm-hmm, I know what you're talking about. Detail, baby, detail. Andy and I go pick of the week.

2:15:47 - Andy Ihnatko
Really cool, really fun, really free app for the iPad. Any iPad running iOS 17 that has USB-C port, which is pretty much all of them. The folks who make Halide, that really really great camera app, have created an app called Orion, which does nothing but turn your iPad into an HDMI monitor. So you plug in any like super cheap HDMI to USB-C dongle from Amazon they cost like 15 bucks. They actually give you a list of ones they've tried, they recommend, and you plug it in because the iOS 17 allows iPads to connect to like external cameras. They just whip this together in like a month and a half, chiefly because the blog post is great, they said.

We thought it'd be great to be able to like play our Nintendo Switch like on a big screen, like when we're traveling and use our iPads as screens. But it will work for like a for camera output, like if you're doing a camera preview. It'll work for video. It'll work for like streaming devices and it's absolutely free, for five bucks more. It'll give you a couple of extra goodies, like 4K upscaling and added brightness controls, because they again they make Halide, so they know exactly how to control the hardware. So it'll give you like brightness controls that you can't even access through, like the standard iPad controls. So if you want things to be extra dim or extra bright, it'll work. But man, it's just so much fun it is.

It's like I love this idea of people who know a lot about the hardware saying, gee, when it'd be cool to be able to do this and like, actually with iOS 17, that shouldn't be too hard. How hard could it be? And then they find out that no, it's not hard at all. As a matter of fact, we don't even have to charge for this, let's just give it away. And even the interface is really, really cool. It just it's not designed to be like pro level HDR for preview and image of capture and ProRes. It's like, if you it really tries to be hi, congratulations, you bought this display at a Black Friday sale. The interface is like real, like old school, like 2005, 2006, 2007. It's very, very retro, but it actually works and it really really works well.

It is a reason to like, when you travel, have one of these $15 dongles in your bag, because you never know when you're in a situation where having a bog standard HDMI display that's 12.9 inches and very high quality might get you out of a pickle we have. I mean, if you're using it, as you can already use it as an external display of sorts for your Fear MacBook, because of continuity and stuff like that. However, it won't work with laptops, won't work with streaming boxes. Again, you never know what it is where, not something that you need to have a special drive or installed or piece of software installed. Just have this app going and it will just, whatever it's connected to, will think this is just a bog, standard HDMI display. And again, it's free. So it's super, super fun. It's called Orion and it's from Lux.

2:18:40 - Leo Laporte
Luxcamera Jason Snell Pick of the Week.

2:18:45 - Jason Snell
All right, ios 17 on the iPhone, you get standby mode and especially if you've got an always on display iPhone, so an iPhone 14 or 15 Pro you can really use your iPhone as this status machine. It can show various widgets. There's two columns of widgets, or you can have a clock or whatever. But what it needs to be, your phone needs to be vertical and it needs to be charging or powered in order for it to go into standby mode. And I have. This summer I got this and it's been really great.

This is the Belkin 2-in-1 wireless charging stand. So it is a MagSafe. It's not a thing you stick a MagSafe puck in. It comes with a MagSafe already on it and you plug it in. So it will remember and it'll actually remember that you're attached to this one, because every MagSafe has a little ID so it can change what widgets show based on where it is and then what's at the bottom there. For me, that's it A real convenient place to put your AirPods in order to charge them. And this was designed for a pre-standby era where even on Belkin's website they show the phone being vertical. But guess what? You can have it be horizontal, then you can put your widgets on there.

I've got time and temp here, but you can really do anything and one of my favorite features of standby is that it knows when things are happening in your house.

Like, I used Siri to play music on a home pod in my living room and all of a sudden the iPhone changed to a now playing display showing me Alba Mart and some controls for the music that was playing over on the home pod, which immediately made me think Apple, please make a home pod with a screen. But it, like all the pieces are there Anyway. So this Belkin thing, it's 99 bucks. It includes I gotta say this again a MagSafe charger, so you're not like it's not that much of an upgrade over an actual MagSafe charger and you get a MagSafe charger and a second charging spot that is perfectly sized for AirPods and it works great with standby. It's a really nice combo from Belkin and I like mine and it's pretty solid and I keep it in my kitchen actually, and it's really nice to have my phone which is not laying flat when and the time widget. There is from Widgetsmith by David Smith.

2:21:08 - Leo Laporte
I gotta start playing with the settings.

2:21:11 - Jason Snell
Did not make a digital time.

2:21:12 - Leo Laporte
My standby is always red, so I gotta play with the settings Clearly.

2:21:16 - Jason Snell
I'm not paying attention. Yeah, it thinks you're sleeping all the time, I guess. Is that it? I think so, Although the clock the clock one. So okay, so.

2:21:25 - Leo Laporte
I like it that you can swipe through the widgets, which is really great.

2:21:28 - Jason Snell
And then there's the. If I go this way, there's photos. It's not gonna like that. And then there's the time, and then you can set the. You can set that time to be whatever color you want, and stuff too. So standby it's a really good feature, but you need something that will hold your iPhone vertically, or well oriented horizontally, but upright, and charging, and the answer is you pretty much need a MagSafe charger for that, and you don't have to. You could use, you could tape it up to your refrigerator and run a cable over there. I don't advise that. Instead, a nice stand like this one from Belkin.

2:22:00 - Leo Laporte
Lovely. Thank you, jason Snell Mac. No six colors stuck.

2:22:05 - Jason Snell
Six colors. Yes, those are colors.

2:22:09 - Leo Laporte
And there's a that stuck on my throat or Macworld, oh, my website check it out.

2:22:12 - Jason Snell
Yeah, check it out. I write every other week for Macworld too.

2:22:15 - Leo Laporte
It's from Macworld, still involved there, yeah, and of course the incomparable and all those great podcasts. If you go to sixcolorscom slash, Jason. There's a list. Any particular one you wanna plug today?

2:22:27 - Jason Snell
Oh, geez, oh, I don't know there's so many. Yeah, just check out. Upgrade again with Mike Hurley. It's fun. We have a good time talking about Apple stuff every Monday and you know he talked to me about more about Mac OS Sonoma this time and we learned about the three oranges, because it turns out international orange is not just one color. Are you getting it yet? It's three different colors and we still don't know which one of those colors is on the Apple Watch Ultra. That is I guess going to be left for follow up, but it turns out there are three.

2:23:03 - Leo Laporte
which ones on the Golden Gate Bridge? Do we know that?

2:23:06 - Jason Snell
That's the there are. Okay, leo, there are three different colors of international orange, one of which is Golden Gate Bridge. I'm not kidding.

2:23:13 - Leo Laporte
Okay, that's that. That's a good name.

2:23:15 - Jason Snell
There's engineering, Golden Gate Bridge. I mean, it's a list that doesn't even make sense. What's the third one called? But it's like yeah, aerospace, Aerospace, Golden Gate Bridge and engineering. That's not a list of common things, but those are the three oranges.

2:23:33 - Leo Laporte
So Well, thank you for that informative piece of news, and you can find out more.

2:23:39 - Jason Snell
So many oranges.

2:23:39 - Leo Laporte
At upgradeonrelayfm. Thank you, Jason Snell. Andy Anaco, every once in a while in WGBH. Do you know when your next appearance will be?

2:23:50 - Andy Ihnatko
I guess next Friday not this Friday, but next Friday go to WGBHnewsorg to listen to it live or later, or to listen to any of my previous appearances on Boston Public Radio talking about tech. It's gonna be actually, because it's on Friday, it's gonna be at the Boston Public Library, live in the studio. So if you're in Boston, grab yourself a coffee. Excuse me, buy yourself a coffee and don't grab it, they'll chase you At the cafe. You can grab it. They're actually.

They're actually well behind the counter if you would have to really earn it if you were to try to grab one of those or go to the YouTube channel like WGBHnews to watch it later.

2:24:23 - Leo Laporte
Thank you, andy. And of course, office Hours is the place to go if you wanna know everything there is to know about Everything there is to know. Officehoursglobal. Alex Lindsey is the name about town Mid Journey this episode today's episode.

2:24:39 - Alex Lindsay
We just talked about Mid Journey earlier this week and my good friend, ian McKague, who is an incredible artist, is gonna be on Grey Mattershow. So Grey Mattershow will have Ian on this Friday and we take live questions and we'll. But yeah, michael Krasny will be interviewing Ian and he's one of the best artists that I've ever worked with and so it's in end and just one of the funnest people to listen to. So stay tuned for that. That'll be coming out. We'll be recording Friday and it'll be coming out next week.

2:25:10 - Leo Laporte
Grey Mattershow for the Michael Krasny podcast that Alex puts together with some great people.

2:25:17 - Alex Lindsay
Thank you, Alex, his Rolodex is very deep.

2:25:20 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's really amazing. He actually knows Andy and Ico. Did you know that? That's amazing? Tiffany Schlein, I'd love to hear her. I got a lot to listen to. Frederick Van Johnson yay, and a whole lot more. We do this show every Tuesday, 11 am Pacific, 2 pm, eastern time, still 1800 UTC until after Halloween, and then we will move, fall back somewhere, but 1800 UTC right now at livetwittv. I say that so you can watch live. If you're watching live, hang in our discord with our other club, twit Stahlwerz you can discuss the show, and if you're not a member, clubtwittv Club twit after the fact, advertising based versions of the show, such as they are on the website twittvmbw. There's a YouTube channel that has even more ads on it, and you can also subscribe in your favorite podcast client and listen at your leisure. But however you listen, I hope you will each and every week. Thanks for joining us. We'll see you next time, but now I'm sad to say it's time to tell you to get back to work because break time is over. Bye-bye.

2:26:34 - Lou Maresca
Come join us on This Week in Enterprise Tech. Expert co-hosts and I talk about the enterprise world and we're joined by industry professionals and trailblazers like CEOs, cios, ctos. He shows every acronym role, plus IT pros and marketeers. We talk about technology, software plus services, security, you name it everything under the sun. You know what? I learned something each and every week and I bet you, you will too. So definitely join us and, of course, check out the twit.tv website and click on This Week in Enterprise Tech. Subscribe today.