MacBreak Weekly 890 Transcript
Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.
Leo Laporte (00:00:00):
It's time for Mac Break Weekly. Andy, Alex, and Jason are all here. We'll have Jason's review of the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max. We'll talk about the camera. A new review from Sebastian dewitt of haylight. What iOS 17.1 is going to do to the action button and why Tim Cook just cashed in a whole bunch of stock. It's all coming up next on Mac Break. Weekly
TWiT (00:00:26):
Podcasts you love from people you trust. This
Leo Laporte (00:00:31):
Is twit. This is Mac Break. Weekly episode 890. Recorded Tuesday, October 10th, 2023. 100 Chickens Mac Break Weekly is brought to you by my Leo. Mylio Photos is a smart and powerful system that lets you easily organize, edit, and manage years of important documents, photos, and videos in an offline library hosted on any device and it's free. Don't wait. Visit my leo.com/twi and by Zocdoc the free app where you can find and book appointments online with thousands of top rated patient reviewed physicians and specialists. Filter specifically for the ones who take your insurance are located near you and treat almost any condition. Go to zocdoc.com/mac break and download the zocdoc app for free and by ZipRecruiter, good news. If you're hiring, you've got help. ZipRecruiter, ZipRecruiter works for you to find great candidates fast. Its smart technology identifies qualified candidates for you and you can invite your top choices to apply. Try it for free at ziprecruiter.com/mac break. It's time for Mac Break Weekly, the show we cover the latest from Apple, of which there is nothing, but we will manufacture something as Andy and naco full well knows. Hello Andrew?
Andy Ihnatko (00:02:02):
Yeah, the suffix to the phrase, we have no news today. Is that okay? Everyone get ready for a three hour long show because we're just going to chat and have fun. Yeah,
Leo Laporte (00:02:10):
That's what happens.
Andy Ihnatko (00:02:12):
We don't need to rush to get to the next story.
Leo Laporte (00:02:14):
I can
Andy Ihnatko (00:02:14):
Tell you about this weird squirrel I saw the other day with half a tail
Leo Laporte (00:02:18):
Up. Next comic book chat. Jason Snell six colors.com. He has something to talk about his iOS, or sorry, his iPhone 15 review.
Jason Snell (00:02:27):
Yeah, it's a very late reviews happened. That's really great, Leo. There's always something to talk
Leo Laporte (00:02:31):
About
Jason Snell (00:02:32):
In the Apple world always, and if not, then we will make it something to talk about.
Leo Laporte (00:02:37):
We'll make things up and from office hours global. Alex Lindsay. Hello Alex.
Alex Lindsay (00:02:43):
Good morning.
Leo Laporte (00:02:44):
It's good
Andy Ihnatko (00:02:44):
To see
Leo Laporte (00:02:44):
You. Next week I will be doing the show from Moms basement. I have ordered a green screen so I could take a picture of mom's basement and not actually be in her basement, which will be nice. Okay. Going out to Rhode Island next week, a week to visit mom and I'll be doing that probably a little more. I'm going to set up, oh,
(00:03:04):
It was
Andy Ihnatko (00:03:04):
$30
Leo Laporte (00:03:05):
On Amazon. It's not a good
Andy Ihnatko (00:03:06):
Green screen.
Leo Laporte (00:03:09):
I'll show you just so you know, but I want to set up a little kind of permanent. It is, oh, it's a bout two. When the boutou goes on, the name goes on the, I just figured this would probably work for me. Just it has a stand. It has sea clamps in it. It's green, high quality polyester fiber material, not per underweight.
Alex Lindsay (00:03:37):
I have one if you want to test it.
Leo Laporte (00:03:38):
I have one too, but I don't want to carry it to Rhode Island. I have a very nice one from El Gado that's like they have in schools where you've open it up, but I'm not going to carry a 80 pound green screen through Rhode Island, so I'm shipping this two moms and I'll set it up and I'm going to leave it there along with a bunch of other stuff so that I don't have to
Alex Lindsay (00:03:59):
Yeah, that's my method.
Leo Laporte (00:04:00):
Yeah,
Alex Lindsay (00:04:01):
That's the Amazon just, I tell my mom, look, there's an office check.
Leo Laporte (00:04:05):
There's some boxes coming.
Alex Lindsay (00:04:07):
Bring it in and when I'm down there there, I'll unpack it. That was always my dream of, because when I go back and forth to Africa to our school, my dream was always to travel with a backpack. I got all my stuff in another place and I got to do it once and it was the most amazing thing ever. I don't need any, I have my clothes
Leo Laporte (00:04:25):
And
Alex Lindsay (00:04:25):
Everything is all on the other side. I had a room there and I had a little, my dresser there for a while and so I could just travel and I think I only did it actually once because I was always coming from somewhere else. It was like this is the life. It's just to be able to go to just travel all over the world in a backpack.
Leo Laporte (00:04:41):
Do you think I should add this to my kit? Because I think it might be handy if I want to disappear.
Alex Lindsay (00:04:46):
Oh yeah, a hundred percent. Yeah. I wouldn't even say that. That's a kind of should have that is must have $11 or 12. It's
Andy Ihnatko (00:04:54):
A green for those
Leo Laporte (00:04:55):
Who are listening
Andy Ihnatko (00:04:56):
Green gloves and a
Leo Laporte (00:04:56):
Green hood and then I could be the invisible man. It'd be,
Alex Lindsay (00:05:00):
I think you'll use the hood more than the gloves, but I think you should get both.
Leo Laporte (00:05:03):
Wouldn't that be funny? Alright, I'll send that to mom too. Bye now.
Andy Ihnatko (00:05:10):
Well, no, that's great because they'll solve so much trouble because when you're traveling, what if Mike or
Alex Lindsay (00:05:17):
Somebody
Andy Ihnatko (00:05:17):
Is guest hosting that way you can still travel and do the show, but they can superimpose the guest, guest host head on me.
Leo Laporte (00:05:24):
Oh, good thinking
Andy Ihnatko (00:05:26):
Will maintain the status quo
Leo Laporte (00:05:28):
Once you
Andy Ihnatko (00:05:28):
Have a procedure, once you have a protocol set, it's more expensive to revise the protocol than to simply
Alex Lindsay (00:05:34):
Make it work.
Leo Laporte (00:05:35):
Yeah. This will also make a good Halloween costume if I don't want to be seen.
Andy Ihnatko (00:05:40):
Yeah, it's every Halloween costume. That's
Leo Laporte (00:05:41):
Beautiful. I do have a serious question. I would very much like a 14 inch mini l e d m three MacBook Pro. Any shot that that's going to be coming out in the next couple of weeks?
Jason Snell (00:05:59):
MacBook Pro? No, no shot.
Leo Laporte (00:06:01):
No shot. Yeah.
Jason Snell (00:06:03):
No, because the M three will come out first.
Leo Laporte (00:06:06):
It's the pattern. Think the 13 inch will be, you think it'll be the 13 inch first?
Jason Snell (00:06:11):
Well, I mean I think the 13 inch MacBook Pro is always a question mark because nobody understands why that product
Leo Laporte (00:06:16):
Exists other than
Jason Snell (00:06:17):
Hit a point on a price list. I
Leo Laporte (00:06:18):
Don't want to buy it. Yeah.
Jason Snell (00:06:20):
But yeah, I mean the pattern thus far with two iterations in the Apple silicon era is you start with the M series, the M one, M two, M three, and then the Pro and Max and Ultra. If it exists, variations come several months later. So I think if we get any M three max this year at all, they'll just be bare M three and they would be sometime in the next month or so, but it's going to be like an iMac or a Mac Mini or a MacBook Air maybe, but I don't think there'll be pros until maybe mid next year spring, but maybe even later than that. Keep in mind too, they're coming from the TSMC three nanometer is what everybody expects. It'll be on the new process that the iPhone chips are on, and if that's the case, that's a new line and it's just getting up to speed and I think it's making as many iPhone chips as it can and maybe it's making as many m threes as it can, but to get to that next level where it's using a pro or a max feels like that's going to be down the road a little bit.
(00:07:18):
So I think you've got no chance of, sorry,
Leo Laporte (00:07:20):
Leo,
Jason Snell (00:07:21):
No chance of a new MacBook Pro
Leo Laporte (00:07:22):
This fall because everybody seemed to agree there would be no event, and I think at this point here we are October 10th, there's no way there's going to be an event, so maybe there'd be a slipped out press release of some kind. Do you think there'll be an iPad or what do you think that if there is a press release, and by the way, if they don't do it in the next two weeks, it's over until next year, right? I mean,
Jason Snell (00:07:45):
Well they've done things in November before really, but yeah, I think the sooner the better. Yeah, they would prefer not to, but it sometimes happens. That stuff is stacked up and they do things.
Leo Laporte (00:07:53):
Is there an issue you think with the yields and the three nanometer process and that's part of the reason? Who knows?
Alex Lindsay (00:07:59):
We dunno.
Leo Laporte (00:08:00):
No one, I mean
Jason Snell (00:08:01):
It's a new process. I wouldn't bet against it.
Alex Lindsay (00:08:04):
I mean one of the reasons things become cheaper later is because all those issues are gone, but we eat a lot of those in the cost. When people say, oh, well this is how much it costs, what they're not taking into account when they do a tear down and say this is what this item costs at retail or whatever, or this is what all these parts cost. They don't take into account how many they're sending back. I think that the numbers were something like they were sending 40% of the touch pads back when they first did it, so there's a lot of loss as they get off the ground and then it starts to normalize and then we pay less for the lower quality or the older ones because of that.
Leo Laporte (00:08:44):
So I still don't know what the guidance is. Will there be a press release this month and
Andy Ihnatko (00:08:54):
What would it
Jason Snell (00:08:56):
Oh, well, I think M three Mac is a possibility, but it's probably going to be super exciting like an iMac. The iMac hasn't been updated since M one. MacBook Air got an update fairly recently, so year, if
Andy Ihnatko (00:09:08):
I had to
Jason Snell (00:09:09):
Guess, I guess that would be early next year. The
Andy Ihnatko (00:09:12):
14 and 16 inch were this year as well, right? They were in January.
Jason Snell (00:09:16):
Oh yeah. Yeah,
Andy Ihnatko (00:09:17):
So there's no reason to update those yet.
Jason Snell (00:09:19):
So like iMac, maybe M three for the Christmas season and then there are talks about iPads, but again it might just be update the iPad mini update, the iPad air or something like that, not the iPad Pros. Those are also sort of not rumored until next year
Alex Lindsay (00:09:35):
And I think that last year, I can't remember, it was the end of last year, at the beginning of this year they did a release where there was no fanfare, but there was a video. So they released not just a press release, but they released a whole video that promoted it that was 15 minutes long or whatever, and then they moved on and it was effective.
Jason Snell (00:09:54):
It just wasn't tune in live at 10:00 AM in order to see it. Right. They just
Alex Lindsay (00:09:59):
Posted
Jason Snell (00:09:59):
It. They did a drop of, it's no longer just a press release drop. It could be a video drop at the same time, which is what they like to do
Alex Lindsay (00:10:07):
And it really could be something I think that they won't, unless they're doing a press event, they probably won't do a live activation, although they could easily just push out a live stream that has no stage without press or anything else. But I think that they don't want to do that because I think that it would have people not know what they're going to get. They can't announce we're doing a live event and then they just play out a live video and then move on. I don't think they were able to do that during Covid. I don't think they'd get away with it. Now you end up with less people showing up for the actual live event. So I think there's probably delineation there where it says we're just going to release videos for things that we don't have a full quote. I think they want to keep that rare is my guess, because there is a power for them to go, even if it's only all prerecorded, there's a power to going live so that everyone talks about it at the same time. It becomes more of an event than just posting it, but they seem to get a couple views no matter what.
Andy Ihnatko (00:10:59):
Okay. I'm not waiting 17
Alex Lindsay (00:11:02):
By the way. 1117 will be the last
Andy Ihnatko (00:11:05):
That's think
Alex Lindsay (00:11:06):
The last chance we would see.
Andy Ihnatko (00:11:08):
I don't think they've
Alex Lindsay (00:11:08):
Ever done anything in December. They've done stuff in November, but I don't think they do anything in December.
Andy Ihnatko (00:11:12):
Usually 1117. Oh, okay.
Alex Lindsay (00:11:14):
1117 I think is the last day.
Andy Ihnatko (00:11:17):
The other question is like what do they have to gain by launching something in October or November this year? It's mostly the reason would be that they already have a lot of their lineup or their targets set for 2024 and they don't want to collide with it. If they're just doing a tuneup of the iMac. Why would you want to have that effect, the release of the, take some of the drama away from the release of the Vision Pro and May as well just, I wouldn't say you want to dump it in October, November, but this is the sort of thing where you can just sort of slide it under the mat and hey, those
Alex Lindsay (00:11:53):
Of you who care about an M three powered Mac
Leo Laporte (00:11:58):
Mini
Alex Lindsay (00:11:58):
Here it is.
Jason Snell (00:11:59):
Well,
Alex Lindsay (00:12:00):
Sometimes it comes down to quarterly result management. If they're doing really well at the beginning, at the first half of the quarter and they go, oh, I think we're going to do fine going through it, then they may push it off because they can use it somewhere else. Whereas if they feel like they'd like to push, make sure that this quarter does particularly well, Jason's probably more of an expert at that. I know other companies do that. They definitely decide on release dates based on how they're doing in the first half of the quarter. They have something they have done and they could announce it at the middle of one quarter or the beginning of the next quarter. And that date has to do with how well they think they're doing financially because you don't want to use up more powder than you need to for the report.
Jason Snell (00:12:34):
Yeah, holiday quarter is, there are a lot of iPhone sales, so that swamps everything else. But if they have, I really think of it as is there a product out there that we think we like to sell at the holidays that's a little too old? I think that's question one. And the iMac absolutely qualifies. It did not get an M two integration at all.
Leo Laporte (00:12:54):
And the iPad Mini, right. That would
Jason Snell (00:12:56):
Be, and the iPad Mini is another one. Perfect.
Leo Laporte (00:12:58):
Stocking stuffer. Exactly. Stocking
Jason Snell (00:13:00):
Stuffer. So I think you look at those and you're like, okay, that might be a reason to do it. And then with the M three, I also wonder if the Apple's most popular computer is the MacBook Air. So M three, if we're talking about a new production line and a new chip and it's all a new process and all of it is new, maybe you start with a computer that is not your big seller because you're just not going to be able to have enough of MacBook, air chips, but maybe at iMac we can do that volume now because trying to build up to the point where they can sell as many MacBook Airs as they can. I
Leo Laporte (00:13:38):
Bet there's a pent up demand for iMac though, for higher end iMac.
Jason Snell (00:13:43):
I mean, well, I think just in general, it's a desktop, right? So it's not going to be the bestseller and they have four different desktops now, which is more than they've had in a while, so it's a little bit less of that, but the fact is there is a solid iMac market out there and they haven't serviced it since that original M one iMac. So there's something there. It's not something to get super excited about, but there's something,
Leo Laporte (00:14:05):
I used to be the best seller, but I guess that was back in the desktop era, right? And it's now definitely era.
Jason Snell (00:14:10):
Yeah. I mean three quarters of the max, they sell our laptops at this point, right? Somewhere between two thirds and three quarters. They don't report it anymore, but it was headed that direction. The last time they were reported volumes was it was three quarters of sales and now you've got the iMac and the Mini and the Studio and the Pro. So there's a lot. It's a slice of that when they next to last or last Intel models came out. I actually talked to the product marketing manager for the iMac for a while at their launch event and she made it clear that there is a real iMac market and because the Mac,
Leo Laporte (00:14:44):
The iPhone's computers in all the Hyatt business centers, you got to, well,
Jason Snell (00:14:47):
Honestly, it's funny. That is what it's like hotel lobbies and public places and there are some families that want to have a shared computer space. They've got little kids and they don't want to have a bunch of laptops around for everybody, but they'll buy one computer for the house it another company would consider it a major market. It's a lot of money. It's just in the grand scheme of Apple. It's not, but this might be an opportunity for them to, again, it's just been languishing. It got that big update with the M one with the colors and all that, and then since then nothing. So it's a good time. They should do it. I say
Andy Ihnatko (00:15:26):
I agree now please
Jason Snell (00:15:28):
That
Andy Ihnatko (00:15:30):
I would love to see a new mini
Jason Snell (00:15:32):
Do it.
Andy Ihnatko (00:15:32):
Yeah,
Jason Snell (00:15:33):
Sure.
Andy Ihnatko (00:15:35):
There is a problem though that the old mini is perfectly fine. There's
Jason Snell (00:15:38):
Not. The problem with the mini, the problem with the mini is that the mini now comes in a Pro M two PRO configuration, so the mini probably wouldn't get updated until they've got an M three PRO chip so that they can put out both configurations. They don't do those separately. So I feel like what Max only make only use the base model and it's like, okay, it's the air and the iMac, right? I think that's it. That only let you use the base model and that 13 inch Pro, so those are the buddies. So are all the buddies going to go, or probably not. Maybe it's just the iMac. Maybe it's that MacBook Pro two that nobody cares about. I don't know.
Andy Ihnatko (00:16:21):
Google a little shot across the bow last week with their pixel announcement. They said seven years of security updates and OSS updates. We're going to support this phone for seven years. Now Apple doesn't say how long they're going to support stuff, but they just cut with iOS 17 cut off the iPhone eight and the 10 Ss I think.
Jason Snell (00:16:46):
No, the 10 Ss is still covered.
Andy Ihnatko (00:16:48):
10 SS is still covered. So that's five years. Is Apple challenged? Has Google thrown down the gauntlet? No, Google has fixed one of the biggest holes in robot. Yes. Yeah. A couple of years ago they said, oh, very big deal. If we have a really big deal, we're going to make sure that your phone will be supported for two years or three years for security updates. Meanwhile, Samsung was saying, yeah, WeDo that by one or two years. And that's always been one of the biggest fundamental problems with the pixels as a platform and actually with Android as a platform, not knowing how long you're going to get these updates for. That's, and I don't see it as a big challenge. I don't see it as a challenge because Apple, they have an established track record on this. I mean, they didn't have to make an announcement of here's how long we're going to support every single thing.
(00:17:44):
They basically made a covenant with all of its customers saying that we will support this hardware as long until the moment that Jesus calls your phone home. We will try to supply you with new updates for everything. Whereas I thought that this announcement was one of the most important and nicest things that was announced last week that well, okay, great. So not only do they realize that there's a problem, but either because of the way they designed the hardware now, the way they've spent five years redesigning how they can deploy and build and push out new updates for Android in general, they were able to make this promise. But so much of us, oh, well, it doesn't really mean anything. Or remember all the times that Google has canceled messaging platforms. I'm like, okay, but they've said explicitly that if you buy this phone, we will give you this thing That's part of the reason why you buy this phone if they back out of it. That's a legal issue. That's not just mud on your face about when your 18th different messaging platform suddenly goes to the land of ghosts and wins three months after you announce it.
Jason Snell (00:18:50):
Yeah, I agree. Although part of me wants to say that I would not set the odds very high. I mean maybe over 50%, but not much higher than that on the fact that at five years at Google might be like, actually, we're going to give you a coupon and toward a purchase of a new one. Or they're going to do the thing where they're like, I'll put it this way. I think they're really going to regret this
Leo Laporte (00:19:15):
And don't trust every Google either is kind of the subtext.
Jason Snell (00:19:18):
They may stick to it, they're going to regret it. They said that there will be software updates including features, but it doesn't mean it's all the features. And I could see it be a dwindling number of features. But you know what, Andy, you are absolutely right. I, as somebody who follows Apple stuff want to be up on Android. And so I would buy a Google, I would buy a Nexus basically back in the day before the pixels and two years later I couldn't use it to stay up to date on Android because they just threw that thing to the side of the road and they just kept on going. And that's the platform vendor saying,
Leo Laporte (00:19:52):
Forget
Jason Snell (00:19:53):
It, that phone is, and that's the worst. So seven years seems a little extreme to me, but maybe they're trying to make a point here, but it's great, right? Apple is essentially around five and we say five, but the fact is Apple sells older phones for a while, and so the window of OSS updates if you're buying last year's model this year for a discount is one year less. So I think Apple doesn't have a whole planned obsolescence thing here. I don't think that's happening. Apple stands by their phones for quite a while. I think it's good enough. I think most phones don't get used for seven years most. But my father-in-law was visiting this weekend and he's using an iPad. I don't think it's an iPad. It's like an iPad, fifth generation or something with a case. It's got a case on the front that looks like it's been through a war.
(00:20:40):
And it was really a moment of, I said, going to get a new iPad. He says, I was thinking of getting a new case, but this iPad is fine. No, exactly. I bought him a case immediately. I was like, where can I even find a case for that iPad? So saying seven years, I don't know how many of these things are even going to be in service in seven years. And I do think Google will probably say, wow, we overshot and kind of regret it. But the bigger point is not the seven years or the five years or whatever. It's that I, as somebody who bought Google phones in the past, felt incredibly frustrated by the fact that two years later the new OSS wouldn't run on them so bad. And I am so happy for them that they have said, no, we're not going to do that to you anymore because it's about time.
Alex Lindsay (00:21:22):
Well, hopefully they stick with it. I mean, the hard part is that it feels like outside of display, their ad business, everything's a hobby and it's just Apple talks about hobbies, but it feels like everything kind of stops and starts and everything else. And I think that's the biggest challenge for Google. I mean, I think YouTube is very stable. The ad business is very stable. The docs and mail system is very stable, but everything outside of those things, it's kind of like, well, we'll see while we go. Well, but I think that was the whole point of that seven
Leo Laporte (00:21:50):
Years was
Alex Lindsay (00:21:51):
To say, I know they say it, but they say a lot of things flag in the sand. I know. Trust them back to it in years. Yeah, I think that's the problem is we've been told we'll talk in 20, 40 or 30, whatever. It's
Andy Ihnatko (00:22:01):
Again, I do think anything can happen, but I think it's a bit of a leap to say, I was looking for the weasel language because one of the things they could have done, and maybe there is a little bit of weasel language here, because the thing Google about Android updates is that it's not all done on the Apple model. Where once a year we will give you the big dog and pony, boom, boom, boom, boom, Hey look, now this new, now you've got widget, but boom, boom, boom. Hey, now the camera has this new mode, but boom, boom, boom. No, a lot of it is Android 14 released alongside the flagship pixel phone. But a lot of it is can be actually deployed through the Google Play store. There are modules that it, it's not only being able to update the camera app or update the Maps app, it's also there's core elements of the Android system that no matter what phone you have, so long as it has a connection, the Android to the Play store, you can even have something that's running Android that's a year or two old that will still get brand new updates, brand new features, even though it's not compatible with Android 14.
(00:23:02):
So part of the weasel language could be that, oh, well no, no, you can't get the Android 17 will not work on this three-year-old or four-year-old pixel eight. However, you can still get that wonderful new functionality that we talked about during the keynote because it's part of a play store update that's a weasel term, but it also explains that this is why sometimes it's
Alex Lindsay (00:23:25):
An
Andy Ihnatko (00:23:25):
Apples to oranges sort of thing in
Alex Lindsay (00:23:27):
Terms of
Andy Ihnatko (00:23:28):
Updates. But back to the core thing that just like Jason, just like Jason said, that was always one of the things where you have, if someone is asking you a question because they're genuinely interested in maybe trying out Android, that's the one thing you have to bring up. And the one thing you have no answer for which that, well, they're only guaranteeing two years or maybe actually two and a half years of updates. Whereas with Apple, you have a good chance of having it long enough that you can pass it down to a family member or get something in the resale value for it. Because historically, by the time time something gets out
Leo Laporte (00:24:03):
Is
Andy Ihnatko (00:24:04):
Old enough that you want to replace it, it's been obsoleted by Google and nobody will buy it unless they know how to root it and install custom rams onto it.
Leo Laporte (00:24:15):
All the Apple people are going, Ooh, now I want to take a shower talking about Android. Well, you should be showering
Andy Ihnatko (00:24:21):
Apple
Leo Laporte (00:24:21):
People. What's wrong with you? Shower more often. You're not 14
Andy Ihnatko (00:24:24):
Years old
Leo Laporte (00:24:25):
Anymore. Clean it all. This body spray is not a shower. It's
Andy Ihnatko (00:24:28):
Covering up the spank with another spank.
Jason Snell (00:24:31):
Please, we beg you.
Leo Laporte (00:24:33):
Jason's iPhone 15 pro and Promax review is out on six colors, been out for a few days. Jeff
Jason Snell (00:24:40):
Just took me, well, it's that thing where you get, I'm not one of the people who's put under embargo. So I got the phone the day that I got the day before everybody else got it right, and I was traveling and you're at that moment where you're like, well, everybody who already has had it for a week has reviewed it, so that's not going to be good. I can't compete with them. And what else do I have to say? I just got it. So I decided basically to wait two weeks where I basically was miserable thinking, what the heck am I going to write about? And in the end, what you get is sort of like a series of small essays about what it is to use an iPhone 15 pro is basically what I had to choose to do. But so it's something we already talked about two weeks ago, but down,
Leo Laporte (00:25:18):
Where do you come down on the fine woven controversy?
Jason Snell (00:25:24):
I bought a new iPhone for my wife and she wanted that case and I warned her about it and she says that she likes it and that it's fine. It's read in the name, it's fine, it's fine. I think it's not leather and if for people who want leather, it's not that. I think there's a question of how customers will perceive it. I think it's a perfectly okay case. I think the question is that apple prices, will people be happy to
Leo Laporte (00:25:49):
Pay for it or not?
Jason Snell (00:25:50):
Is it a $60 case or not?
Leo Laporte (00:25:52):
I got one for Lisa, if
Jason Snell (00:25:53):
It's not,
Leo Laporte (00:25:53):
And she is very sensitive to tactile things. She gets chills when she touches it. It bugs her.
Jason Snell (00:26:03):
It's just, yeah, so she threw it back. D'S leather, it's got a different feel and it ain't leather. Substitute for leather. Yeah,
Andy Ihnatko (00:26:08):
In your family does fine me. The in my family fine means effed. Like we say, if you want to do something else, that's fine.
Leo Laporte (00:26:15):
Oh, that's fine,
Andy Ihnatko (00:26:17):
Fine, fine does not mean,
Leo Laporte (00:26:18):
So wait a minute. So in your family it's good, whatever and fine
Andy Ihnatko (00:26:23):
Good is okay. No whatever's below fine.
Leo Laporte (00:26:26):
Oh good, fine. Whatever is and whatever. It's
Jason Snell (00:26:29):
The whatever is
Andy Ihnatko (00:26:32):
Pointed at you praise,
Leo Laporte (00:26:33):
Good praise, it's good, fine, whatever. And my bad, how about that? Those are the four levels.
Andy Ihnatko (00:26:40):
I don't even know. My bad. I think my bad is above. That's
Leo Laporte (00:26:43):
You, right? That's on me. So the thing is that, but
Andy Ihnatko (00:26:47):
Fine is usually it means it's effed, it's just it's fine. Yeah, it's fine.
Leo Laporte (00:26:51):
It's fine. It'll be go, it'll fine. It's not good. It's fine.
Jason Snell (00:26:55):
I'm not mad. I'm just disappointed.
Leo Laporte (00:26:56):
Yeah, that's, I'm just
Andy Ihnatko (00:26:58):
Disappointed. That's
Leo Laporte (00:26:59):
It. That's it. You are not disappointed with the natural titanium, I gather.
Jason Snell (00:27:06):
It's pretty, I mean also it's pretty boring. It
Leo Laporte (00:27:10):
Couldn't be more boring. It's gray.
Jason Snell (00:27:12):
I think it's a nice shade. But yeah, I mean basically what I came down in my review was saying I like titanium. I think titanium is a nice metal. I think it looks good, especially in the natural. I love that it's lighter than stainless steel. I think the stainless steel frame was a mistake. I think that for the last whatever, 11, 12, 13, 14 generation where there was stainless on the pro phones and aluminum on the non-pro phones, I think the non-pro phones were clearly the better design all the way through adding stainless for shininess and bling, but having it add all of that weight, it was super unnecessary. So the titanium is great, right? It's great. And then there's the colors. And the colors are, as I've said here before, super disappointing, monochromatic and dull and boring. And the natural is kind of nice just because it feels like this phone is made of metal, which of course it is, but it's not offensive in any way. I just wish that they would let the fact that they're only color option is blue, which is just black with a slight blue tint. Essentially it's so the midnight MacBook air, it's sort of like it's got a color if you look real close in the right light, I just wish they would let somebody have a choice about I want a brighter, more interesting looking iPhone. And they don't, both models this year are not like that. So yes to titanium, and I'm just disappointed. Again, it's fine, it's fine. I'm not mad Apple, I'm just disappointed.
Leo Laporte (00:28:46):
It's fine. Please whatever
Jason Snell (00:28:48):
Make your colors more interesting, but at least it's not the stupid stainless steel that added weight for no real good reason.
Leo Laporte (00:28:55):
But
Andy Ihnatko (00:28:57):
It's difficult though because it's not just getting a color that people like, but it's also how is this color going to patina? Because it's not as though they're mixing food, coloring in with a batter to make it. It's always going to be a surface on top of whatever the metal is and as it wears down. And
Leo Laporte (00:29:14):
That can actually
Andy Ihnatko (00:29:15):
Be a very, very nice look. But other opinions could be, oh no, now it looks like it's worn and grubby. It makes me look like I can't afford to have a new phone every eight months
Jason Snell (00:29:22):
And I'm not a material scientist. I think I say that literally in the review. I say, I'm not a material scientist, but I know you can anodize titanium. They chose not to do that. And Anodization is a pretty rugged process for aluminum, and I believe it is for titanium as well. And the colors stay pretty well. They chose the vapor depositing approach instead, which they've used on the Apple watch before and I don't know, I don't know how rugged it's going to be. And Dan Morin my pal over at six colors. I mean he scuffed his and he had I think the black one and there's a big scuff mark with a lighter color underneath now. So I don't know whether the vapor, I can't speak to the issues around using anodization of titanium over vapor, depositing on titanium. I don't know. I'm sure that Apple talked about it, but in the end, I mean there's something, because the thing is maybe it wouldn't look great if it was a bright blue or something like that, but they're selling dark ones that can also wear and they're going to reveal a lighter color underneath. So I don't know. I'm just as pointed that for whatever reason they made decisions to the lead to the point that they're all kind of monoroy. Well, I
Alex Lindsay (00:30:30):
Don't know. I'd be curious. I'm sure Apple's never going to show us what the sales numbers are, but it also could be just related to the fact that I look at every time Apple releases something on the pro area in that area, I go, oh, those are great. Those are nice colors. And then I just buy the gray one. So I think there could be just a lot of, it may turn out that gray or different versions of gray is like 85, 90% of the
Leo Laporte (00:30:51):
Color can be polarizing. Some people love pink and some people hate it gray. Nobody loves gray. Well, wait a minute, I got a gray computer, I got a gray jacket. My car is gray. I guess I love gray. Gray is neutral. You can't go. They tell you when you're going to sell your house, don't paint it red. Be neutral with it, right?
Jason Snell (00:31:14):
People have opinions about red, people
Leo Laporte (00:31:16):
Have opinions,
Jason Snell (00:31:16):
They don't have opinions about gray. I'm saying saying
Alex Lindsay (00:31:18):
Choice,
Jason Snell (00:31:19):
Right? Wouldn't it be nice if there was some choice there? But actually, and this seems ridiculous, but I think it's true. When Apple did the blue and Y G three back in the nineties, everybody, all the pros complained they wanted a neutral colored
Leo Laporte (00:31:31):
Workstation.
Jason Snell (00:31:31):
And I feel like literally that was the lesson that Apple integrated into their soul at that moment, which is that
Leo Laporte (00:31:37):
Was the takeaway.
Jason Snell (00:31:38):
Only gray computers for the pros from now on,
Leo Laporte (00:31:42):
Only it's your fault, Alex, you're the 30% gray man,
Alex Lindsay (00:31:47):
18%. But
Jason Snell (00:31:50):
Alex,
Alex Lindsay (00:31:50):
I literally, when I go into an office, when we move into a new office, I just hand them a gray card and I go, I just needed the walls to look like this gray card. See, and that's for anybody who does color work is what you think pretty quickly. And then all of our apps are all gray and all of our, there's definitely a style there. Yeah, yeah. It's safe
Leo Laporte (00:32:13):
Titanium. It's interesting because titanium, I don't think that titanium is a big deal, but clearly Apple thinks it's a big deal and I can't decide whether it's because they don't really have much else to say or they think people will go, oh, titanium. And I've heard even people say, oh yeah, the titanium phone, it's sinking in.
Jason Snell (00:32:32):
It's branding. I think it's good branding. They did it already with that power book back in the day. It is a fun word. It's new, it's new material, and the fact is nerds can poo poo it and say, the only element that really matters is silicon and it's on the inside and the chips, so give me those chips. But the truth is it's a consumer good. Some people care about the finish and I mean, I just spent time complaining about colors. People complain about the finish or a particular metal and they like the idea of it. I think it does sell there. It maybe feels a little bit lighter. I think that's part of the message, but clearly all the marketing is just titanium. It came from space and now we made
Leo Laporte (00:33:14):
A phone
Jason Snell (00:33:14):
Out of it came
Leo Laporte (00:33:15):
From space and
Jason Snell (00:33:16):
It is marketing, but also what isn't?
Andy Ihnatko (00:33:19):
Well, yeah, because I hate to be the one to point this out, but we are in space right now. We're all from
Leo Laporte (00:33:24):
Space. We all came from space.
Jason Snell (00:33:25):
We also in space, this is true. Good point. We're
Andy Ihnatko (00:33:28):
Not from space. We're in space. We are
Jason Snell (00:33:29):
Space right now. Yeah, planet a planet is we are
Leo Laporte (00:33:32):
Stardust, we are golden in space.
Jason Snell (00:33:34):
Yet it's just true
Leo Laporte (00:33:36):
Action button is the other unique and different feature, and I think the jury's still out. Whether that was an improvement over the silence. Switch out of curiosity where I'm all in, where is your action button set? What is the action?
Jason Snell (00:33:51):
I think I said last week, I have a shortcut that does dictation
Leo Laporte (00:33:54):
In your list. Oh, that's right. You did say that list. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're still there,
Jason Snell (00:33:57):
But I'm all in on it because I feel like the number of wizards who could feel in their pocket exactly where the switch was positioned without flipping it back and forth to make sure is this tiny amount of people plus surely that I am not saying I'm the majority, but surely a lot of people are like me and they just left it in silent all the time. And
Leo Laporte (00:34:17):
That's the default, by the way,
Jason Snell (00:34:18):
Piece of hardware. Then
Leo Laporte (00:34:19):
If you don't change it, which probably 90% of people are not going to change it, then it is a silence button. I did what they did on iOS today where they made a shortcuts folder that opens up, so I have a few other actions. I like that. Yeah, it's a second step and one of them is set silent. One of them is dictate. I like your idea. I'm dictating to drafts. If I could dictate to my P K M S to loge, I would, and I think I can, but
Jason Snell (00:34:45):
Probably
Leo Laporte (00:34:45):
Apple Script is really strange
Jason Snell (00:34:48):
With a tricky shortcut. You could probably build a
Leo Laporte (00:34:51):
Thing
Jason Snell (00:34:51):
To send to their web
Leo Laporte (00:34:52):
Server. Yeah, I think I can do it because dictate to text, which is I guess what you're using,
Jason Snell (00:34:56):
And
Leo Laporte (00:34:56):
Then you can take the dictated text and append it to the Today's daily journal file because a plain text market file, it's just depending, the text is weird in Apple Script. It's not just opening a file and writing it. There's a couple of weird steps,
Jason Snell (00:35:15):
But then in shortcuts, you can do it. I have to learn. It's not too bad. It's not too bad. I have to learn mean I have opinions. That's why I wrote a review. But I feel like if everybody should do what they want and what makes them feel happy, however, I think what's great about the action button is that it's hardware and it can be muscle memory, and if it's hardware that just brings up a thing you have to look at and tap on the screen, that's not as good. What we can do in here, it's about hardware. That's why I think maybe the best application for most people of the action button is the camera thing. Because although everybody said, oh yeah, you can tap on the screen, you can swipe, you can do all those things. That muscle memory of taking it out of your pocket and pressing the button and the camera's there, and then you go click, click, click on that
Leo Laporte (00:35:52):
Button
Jason Snell (00:35:54):
Is it's all hardware. You don't have to think about any of the software. You're just using your phone as a camera at that point. I think that's really powerful. But all of these other things, I think the beauty in it is it's a button you can put your thumb on and just go, boom,
Leo Laporte (00:36:09):
A
Jason Snell (00:36:09):
Thing is going to happen on my iPhone. I think that's the power of the button.
Leo Laporte (00:36:11):
So I'm foolish to do that. The Hali, which is my favorite camera app, does have a hali action, so you can press it, long, press it, and then Hali launches, and then if you press it again, it chooses between different lenses, which is kind of slick. So apparently apps can be switch
Andy Ihnatko (00:36:30):
Action, switch aware
Leo Laporte (00:36:31):
Actor
Andy Ihnatko (00:36:31):
Button. It
Jason Snell (00:36:32):
Seems like the trick is if your action button is that app and you're in that app, the app knows to see it that you're in that app. So then it will do a thing that you determine to do in that app. So it's not quite like apps can take it over. It's more like the app knows they can see the action button. It's
Leo Laporte (00:36:55):
An event
Jason Snell (00:36:56):
Because it's the app that's the recipient of the action button. It knows that it got pushed again and can do something then.
Leo Laporte (00:37:03):
Interesting. Yeah. So I would love it to have a Pokemon Go. It would open Pokemon Go, and if I press it again, it catches a Pokemon. There you go. Now we're talking. That's what I call action.
Andy Ihnatko (00:37:15):
And also there are a bunch of people who use the Tesla app is taking advantage of it. So you can program the side button to basically be your car, your door, unlock the front unlock thing. Yeah, exactly. Even when I had a car, I wouldn't care. I have more important things to do that one programmable button than to unlock my car. But yeah, again, people want what they want and now they can have not what they want, but part of what they want.
Leo Laporte (00:37:38):
Soon you'll be able to have chat G P T, you can have it dictate to chat G P T, but soon you'll be able to have chat G P T respond. And so that might become the smart assistant button, which would be kind of, that's the problem is there's several things I would like to do. I can't decide. That's why I have a folder.
Andy Ihnatko (00:37:56):
It's weird. Somewhere in my archives, I still have my Amazon fire phone that Amazon did not want back after the review period. You keep
Leo Laporte (00:38:06):
That, Andy, it's our gift to you.
Andy Ihnatko (00:38:09):
It is not worth us spending $21 to have it shipped back to us. But there are so many
Leo Laporte (00:38:15):
Really neat
Andy Ihnatko (00:38:15):
Ideas in that keep coming back, and one of them was, Hey, there's a dedicated button that is just the, what is this button where if you press this button, whatever's on the screen, I don't think it was a sophisticated ai, but we will try to figure out what it is that you're looking at or what it is that this camera's pointing at, and it will explain it to you. And that's one of the most interesting things that Custom Button can do, particularly with chat G P T, particularly if there are more apps like Google Lens coming out there, because I got to tell you, this isn't the Android show, but one of the things I would love to see in iPhone, I'm basically, since this is on my mind because now that there's a brand new version of iOS, I'm back on iPhone for the next two or three weeks to get back Immersiveness, and one of the things that I miss is still the ability to swipe up and then simply say, whatever it is on this screen, help me with it.
(00:39:10):
And oh, there's a U R L that I can't highlight, but highlight that for me and then take that U R L or Hey, you see this address, map this address for me, or just tell me more about this picture. I think there's something more I want to know about it that's not in the article. And so yeah, that ability to simply say, not just in the domain of what you're looking at on the phone, but in the world to say that go way beyond, Hey, what does this restaurant sign say in a language I don't understand, but simply be able to say, Hey, what kind of a tree is this? Or Ooh, there's this weird bug I just saw in my house. What kind of a bug is this and should I encourage more of 'em to come in or should I try to herd them out? That sort of stuff. Yeah, there's a lot
Leo Laporte (00:39:55):
Of potential there, and I hope that
Andy Ihnatko (00:39:57):
With AI is entering its second phase where it's past the cool demo phase and now people are actually trying to ask, well, what does it actually do for me except for threaten my job? And this is one of the areas inside of mobile phone where it can absolutely be a big help to just about anybody.
Leo Laporte (00:40:16):
What are you putting your action button at?
Andy Ihnatko (00:40:20):
I'm leaning towards a shortcut right now. I've got it set up for basically what Jason has done, essentially capture ideas, capture information, and to basically put it inside notes or put it inside
Leo Laporte (00:40:35):
So it becomes a little personal voice recorder. I think that's kind of a nice way to do it, actually.
Andy Ihnatko (00:40:39):
Yeah, especially because when you have an idea in your head, you need zero distractions to make sure it doesn't get knocked out of your head before you wake up, wake up the phone, launch the app, create a new note, categorize it. I don't know what it
Leo Laporte (00:40:53):
Was.
Andy Ihnatko (00:40:54):
So the ability simply tap a button, speak and then go on with your life without even looking at the screen, that's a pretty big win.
Leo Laporte (00:40:59):
This is actually big for drafts because drafts lets you capture it and then later at a later time, maybe at the end of the day, decide what to do with it, where to put it, and that's kind of a nice
Jason Snell (00:41:09):
Way to do that. That's great. And I heard after we talked about this last week, I heard from some people who are like, well, why not just use Siri for that? And my answer is, first off, you have to make sure that the trigger works, right? And it's all what Andy said, which is it's more things that are in your way. And yeah, if I am out for a run, I will talk to Siri and tell it to remind me to, and then the name of an idea, which is a weird construction,
(00:41:32):
But as pointed out, the fewer steps in between you and your idea and getting it down the better. So the action button, all you do is press the button and say, write about this thing and let go and done, and it's transcribed, put in my case, it's in reminders in a very specific list, but it could be any app that supports shortcuts, and it's not that you can't do it some other way. It's what Andy said, which is if you can remove as many impediments between you and getting it down, you're less likely to forget it or mess it up, or just the act of having to think, how do I phrase this to get it to Siri can mess up your idea because your brain is processing it as like you're talking to another person and it's not grammatically correct what you have to say. And I find myself stumbling on this perfectly clear idea I had just because I had to say, Hey, dingus, remind me to, and then a story idea.
Andy Ihnatko (00:42:28):
Yeah, just to say nothing of the fact that the easier it is, the fewer steps there are, the more you'll actually start narrowing down ideas as opposed to, oh, I can't reach my phone right now. Okay, I'll remember to see, I'll remember that later. It really is the stupid ideas that you thought were not worth writing down that three days later when you go, okay, I need to write something, they go, oh, that's a great idea. Oh, it was like, really? What kind of a hat would a duck wear if it had to put the hat on itself? That really was a great idea. Like,
Leo Laporte (00:42:58):
Oh, no, seriously, seriously. Actually, it's a key part of the getting things done Methodology as well is to dump those ideas out as soon as possible into a trusted system, but
Andy Ihnatko (00:43:12):
Our
Leo Laporte (00:43:12):
Discord has figured out, by the way, what kind of hat a duck would wear if it could wear a hat.
Andy Ihnatko (00:43:18):
Okay, the sun. See, that is adorable. The thought was like, what if the duck had to put the hat on? Its, yeah,
Leo Laporte (00:43:26):
See, this had a human assistance and that's not, yeah,
Andy Ihnatko (00:43:29):
So it would have to be something where they have to be able to sort of duck underneath
Leo Laporte (00:43:33):
The hat.
Andy Ihnatko (00:43:34):
I'm thinking that would be, oh, I'm sorry again. No,
Leo Laporte (00:43:40):
Go tell your phone. Okay,
Andy Ihnatko (00:43:41):
Brilliant
Leo Laporte (00:43:41):
Ideas that get lost
Andy Ihnatko (00:43:42):
By the wayside, go tell your phone because
Leo Laporte (00:43:44):
I'm
Andy Ihnatko (00:43:44):
So genius that I don't even see them coming.
Leo Laporte (00:43:47):
I think the duck wouldn't want to duck under
Andy Ihnatko (00:43:50):
The hat, then it would look like a quack.
Leo Laporte (00:43:53):
We're going to, on that fine note, take a little break and when we come back, iOS 17 one, which is coming, does change a little
Andy Ihnatko (00:44:00):
Bit. The effort is appreciated. The effort is appreciated. There
Leo Laporte (00:44:05):
Are Alex Love. Fine. It was fine. This episode of Mac Frank Weekly is brought to you by my latest find, which is absolutely awesome. Myo, M Y L I O. They call it myo photos, but really it's not just for photos, it's for documents too. It's digital
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Download it for free my.com/twit. And if you do want to put it on, it supports all the clouds. It has an encryption feature, so you encrypt before you put it up on Google Drive or iCloud or OneDrive. And that's nice too because you know it's there, it's backed up, but no one can see it except you because it's strong encryption myo.com. I keep going on. I can do this ad for hours. There's so many features. Just try it. myo.com/twitter. It's a life saver. Scott and LV says, I love Myo. Thank you, Scott. In our discord. So apparently action button's going to get a new behavior in 17 one. Are you using 17 one yet, Mr. Snell? No,
Jason Snell (00:48:13):
No. I am enjoying my brief time not
Leo Laporte (00:48:16):
Using data without a beta. I know. I kind of like it. Yes, I kind of like it. Apple has, every time something goes wrong, your fault it. It's a tough time. It's a tough time. There is a public, I guess it's public. Maybe it's developers. Is it developers? Is there a public beta already? I think it is public because my phone, when I set it up said, do you want to stay in the beta channel? I said, no. So 17 one Wacho, S 10 Onet, v O s 17, one Mac OS 14.1, but nine to five Mac found something in the third beta, which just came out of iOS 17 one. Apple is tweaking the Apple action button on the iPhone 15 pro. It detects when the phone's in your pocket using the proximity sensors, and if it is, then you'll have to press the button longer to trigger the action. This is to keep it, I guess they found some people it was going off by accident in their pocket, so you have to press it a little bit longer. I
Alex Lindsay (00:49:17):
Feel like there's a lot of things that go on by accident in my pocket.
Leo Laporte (00:49:20):
I know
Alex Lindsay (00:49:22):
It's like it calls people, it does things. Really, I think Apple has leaned a little too far towards responsiveness where I find I look down, I've picked up my phone, and somehow I'm calling the last person I called. Do you think
Leo Laporte (00:49:35):
Turning off a random person do think SIR would help? Maybe not.
Jason Snell (00:49:40):
I don't
Alex Lindsay (00:49:40):
Think it's Siri that's doing it. I think it's some kind of, I'm touching some part of touches,
Leo Laporte (00:49:43):
Al Touches, but
Alex Lindsay (00:49:44):
It just feels like it's like I don't, and the other thing that I've noticed in 17 is that I don't trust it as much to say the right words. I'm typing. I feel like there's a lot, feel like I'm typing the same way, but I'm getting a lot more typos. It's attempt to write ahead of me is less successful than it was before, which seems like it's going backwards.
Jason Snell (00:50:11):
Well, there's two things. So they got the new language model in there, which should be better. It should be. But there's two things, right? There's a baked in model and then there's the learning your preferences. So some aspect of it might actually improve over time that it learns how you type and what you type and what words you use. And that is actually being used to supplement some of the changes that are going on. So it might get better over time or it might not. I found that it's better, but not as much better as I had hoped it would be when they announced it.
Leo Laporte (00:50:42):
You talked about in John Gruer, loved it using the new U w B feature to find your wife at a fair Oh
Jason Snell (00:50:50):
Yeah, that's right. Find my loved ones is a, yeah, so Ultra Wideband is a really great technology and it's a slow burn, right? Because it kind of needs to be everywhere. And there's going to come a moment, maybe later this decade where almost everything has a U W B chip of some kind in it. And what a lot of people dunno is that when Bluetooth is detecting proximity, it's doing it by basically a hack where it's looking at the strength of the radio signal and using it as a proxy for distance, which can lead to some problems like a signal booster from a restaurant out to the parking lot to make your car think that you have approached it and it unlocks the doors and then they can get in and drive it, right? U W B doesn't do any of that. U W B is precise three D positioning in space.
(00:51:35):
It can't be boosted like that and it leads to a whole bunch of interesting things, including in the future. Like your smart lock on your front door will know when you are walking up to your door and can unlock, but it'll also know when you're on the other side of it and you're near it. And right now with Bluetooth, you have to have all these weird hacks because sometimes you're near the door on the inside and it shouldn't unlock the door then it should only do it on the outside. Bluetooth doesn't know, so you have to have with a lot of smart locks with Bluetooth, you have to leave your house and then it arms and so then when it sees you again, then it unlocks the door, but then until you leave again, it doesn't do it. UWB solves all of that. You are going to eventually the dream of walking into a room and having the lights come on and stuff because it knows you're present, U W B will enable that what Apple has done with iOS 17 and with the new UWB chip that they're not calling the U two. No, we're not going to call it that. My review has 18 U two song title references in it because I just decided to, I'm like, why does it not have this? Why not? Anyway, but it does have this find my feature where if you're looking for somebody else with an iPhone 15 and my wife has an iPhone 15 and I lost her at the football game.
Leo Laporte (00:52:47):
You were at the Cal game? Yeah.
Jason Snell (00:52:49):
Yeah. I was going to the bathroom and she was going to the concessions and then we were going to meet here, but one person didn't hear it and so she texted, she's like, where are you? And I said, you must've walked right past me and I thought, oh, I can try this feature and it's really great. So you say this person is nearby, it knows from find my, it's already a find my person. Right? She's already in my find my list and I'm like, oh, she's really close and it switches into this precision finding mode that is a lot finding an air tag or something like that, and she got a little alert that said, Jason's looking for you.
Leo Laporte (00:53:20):
That's key by the way, is it's not just you looking for her, it tells her that you're using the find my to find
Jason Snell (00:53:26):
Her. Yeah. I think thats important and she can bring it up too because the goal there is that you're trying to find
Leo Laporte (00:53:32):
Each other. Yeah,
Jason Snell (00:53:35):
It was like, I'm going to go to the right and it's like she's 10 feet ahead
(00:53:40):
And then it's like, oh, and then we were there and I said, oh, that was fun, right? It was just a little thing, but I thought this is a really cool feature and it shows, it's finally one of these examples where you're like, oh, ultra wideband. This is why it's going to be really a game changer, but it's going to take a while and it's going to be a little subtle at first, but once we know that people and devices are exactly this point in space, it does allow stupid computers to do things that they can't do now. They just don't sense like humans do.
Alex Lindsay (00:54:11):
Yeah, and inside there's a big challenge where, so if you have, and we haven't really seen people take advantage of the ability to use either the tractors or other ultra wideband chip based systems to start figuring out exactly where you are. I mean, I think that Apple hasn't opened that up enough yet, but I think a lot of us see the possibility of once I get you inside a building, G P s is not particularly useful and the best I can do with Bluetooth is usually about three to five feet and some people would say 10 feet reliably. And so I've got this big space that I got to figure out, especially when it comes to ar, I got to figure out this big space that I can't quite get my arms around. And so if I can get you down to, I think that the ball that ultra wideband gets you down to is less than a foot in diameter.
(00:54:55):
Once I do that, that gives me a very small search area and if I use your phone, so if I point my phone out and I use that camera and I hash the location that I'm inside of, so I have key elements that are out there that I can look at, I can know exactly where you are to the millimeter to where your phone is, to the millimeter because as soon as I see a little bit of that, because right now a lot of the AR stuff, I mean we see this persistence that Apple's talked about in the past, but it still has to kind of figure out where you are in the world. If we know where you are in the world and then we add this last little bit of tracking, it means that we can paint the walls whatever we want. We can give you directions to the restaurant that you want to go to or to the restrooms or to whatever you want to do.
(00:55:41):
We can change the entire environment you're in and those are really powerful. With or without the vision stuff, just with your phone, they can give you an entirely different experience and where you can do things like you think of a Taylor Swift show or an Elton John show, being able to walk in and be in the lobby and know that there's an AR experience, you pick up your phone, you start looking around and you see someone playing or you see things happening all over it as you walk into something that you become part of and those things are, and once you have a scan of the venue or you've modeled it and put the correct hashes in, you could do that, but you need the ultra wideband to make it work. It's very, very hard to search a 10 foot and actually
Andy Ihnatko (00:56:25):
Have enough
Alex Lindsay (00:56:25):
Information to do it in a reliably quick way. This is instant,
Andy Ihnatko (00:56:32):
Jason, you put it exactly right. It's not the sort of thing that makes it to the top of the list in the event video, but it is such an enabling technology. The story that you told is exactly the sort of thing that makes people happy. They upgraded their phone, they didn't buy it for this feature, but once they realize that, oh wait, there is a solution for this and the solution really, really works well, that's when you realize that, oh, my old phone couldn't do that. I'm so happy that I stuck with the iPhone and bought an upgrade this year and the number of things that can be done with it, like proximity is an obnoxious and very, very coarse sort of thing for Bluetooth to read. It's no good for me to know that I was within proximity of this device or this person with this technology.
(00:57:24):
It can do things like, again, with the consent of everybody involved, no, I can actually tell the software harm can actually tell that No, you two actually walked to become close to each other. You were facing each other and you stayed facing each other for two or three feet apart for a good 15 to 20 minutes. It is therefore likely that you had a substantive conversation and therefore, if again, with permission of all involved, if you want to, if you're at a meeting or at a conference and you want to simply remember who was that person I talked to three weeks ago at that time we talked about this. They weren't supposed to talk to me about this, but they definitely said that. Yes, I know a lot about that and I'm vengeful, so yes, hit me up sometime later on that, oh yeah, that's the person I talked to, that sort of stuff. And yes, leave it to me to come up with a real really creepy surveillance sort of thing as opposed to I was separated from my loved one, but I like that much better, to be
Alex Lindsay (00:58:19):
Honest with
Jason Snell (00:58:20):
You. But okay, it's this idea that, I mean when I said the computers and our devices are dumb, I mean sensory wise they are dumb, right? They're good cameras, but they don't really know. And so we don't think about it a lot, but we've internalized this proxy of radio attenuation as location awareness in devices and it's not very good, and it's one of the reasons why a lot of times when we have to rely on that, we think this stupid thing doesn't know what it's doing is because it's, look it, it's actually very cleverly trying to say, oh, the Bluetooth radio signal is weaker, so it must be further away, but it's a hack. It's not made for it. Uwb is made for it. That was the whole point of it. And it does have, I'll give you another less creepy example maybe, which is there are a lot of cars that are pretty intelligent now, and sometimes you've got your key on your phone, it's all based on Bluetooth, but it's all going to U W B and for example, if you're getting in a car and your loved one is getting in the car with you in the two front seats and one of you opens the door before the other one, right now what most cars do is say whoever had the stronger Bluetooth signal when they open the door is the driver, and if it's got a self-adjusting seat or seats, it'll do all of that with U W B, it knows who's sitting in the
Leo Laporte (00:59:34):
Driver's seat
Jason Snell (00:59:36):
And who's in the passenger seat.
Leo Laporte (00:59:38):
That would be huge and
Jason Snell (00:59:38):
It can make judgments based on it, right? And it's a little thing, right? It's little.
Leo Laporte (00:59:42):
No, but Lisa always gets in the car first and the car's all set up wrong.
Jason Snell (00:59:46):
When I get it's set up first and with 17, one of the features in iOS 17 is if you walk up to a HomePod or something, it says, oh, you're by the HomePod. Would you like to transfer the music you're playing to the HomePod? Well, that's B. There's U W B in the home pod mini and the second generation home pod. And so your phone, if you've got a U W B chip in it, which is since the 12 or something, it knows that you're close to it. It isn't guessing based on Bluetooth that might be further away. It knows your right by the home pod and it makes a difference because suddenly your device that you think is so smart, but actually about location is really stupid.
Leo Laporte (01:00:23):
Suddenly, well, it's classic. It's smart. This is a classic complaint is Bluetooth, inadvertent Bluetooth handoffs. There was a guy on Reddit this morning who said, every time I pull into the garage, no, every time my wife pulls into the garage, I'm in the living room, my phone takes over on her car and she's suddenly hearing what I'm listening to
Jason Snell (01:00:40):
Leo. Every time my wife, usually she leaves in the morning, but sometimes she works a little bit later, she pulls out of the driveway while I'm sitting at my desk in the garage and my computer and all of my devices go into do not disturb
Leo Laporte (01:00:53):
Driving. That's not what
Jason Snell (01:00:56):
Is happening, but I'm just
Leo Laporte (01:00:58):
Close
Jason Snell (01:00:58):
Enough. Somehow we
Leo Laporte (01:00:59):
Got to fix this. Close
Jason Snell (01:01:00):
Enough.
Leo Laporte (01:01:00):
Yeah, maybe Uwb can fix this.
Jason Snell (01:01:02):
You're driving now I'm sitting in a Max studio people I'm not driving, but it doesn't know. It
Leo Laporte (01:01:09):
Just doesn't
Jason Snell (01:01:10):
Know.
Andy Ihnatko (01:01:11):
It's so great when you see a company like Apple who has the most creative and the most talented and smartest people, they get the top talent and yet either they or their management are so excited about a feature that they don't care that it doesn't work. Absolutely.
Leo Laporte (01:01:30):
That's
Andy Ihnatko (01:01:30):
Going to drive people nuts 5% of the time. Also, it's not 6% of the time, but when you
Leo Laporte (01:01:35):
Sell a billion devices 5% of the time adds up. No, no, no,
Andy Ihnatko (01:01:41):
But I'm saying that that's how we come to appreciate every single time the bane of all of our existences. I have the grave, grave made the grave error of using an iPad on a commuter rail train, a Ram track train, and it keeps asking me every five minutes, do you want to connect with this pair of headphones? I just saw, or I still remember, one of the funniest engineering fails that was totally, it was one of the first iPhones that I had. I had it in a car dock and it just kept screwing up in the most random and weird ways and I was getting more and more frustrated because it was, and of course you're driving, so I can't take my hands off the wheel. I was on the highway, I couldn't pull over, I also couldn't take the hands off the wheel. It just kept screwing up everything. And it wasn't until I got home and considered throwing it in a lake that I realized that, oh, it's the shake to undo feature that. So every time I hit a bump it was like, oh, just undo the last thing that happened, which is Oh, so you don't want to navigate anymore? Yes, I do. I'm in Massachusetts, they're potholes. Oh, that's funny. That
Leo Laporte (01:02:48):
Was enough to shake
Andy Ihnatko (01:02:49):
It, huh? Yeah, and it's tried to turn off shake to undo and suddenly it regained its senses. But yeah, so when you see something like a new Bluetooth that says actually all the stuff, I want to be able to unlock the door when I approach it, but it's going to screw up sometimes because we're just really trying to make this do something. It was real ask Bluetooth to connect to a pair of headphones because, oh my God, it is really good at that. Don't make me the basis of your whole security system about how I detect who you are and where you are. So yeah, it, it's just exciting when you see technology like this, particularly on a mobile, like I said before on a mobile device, it's part of it is it helps your interface with the entire world without blocking your continuity between your brain and the world. And so the ability to do this and basically take a lot cognitive load off your head is just such a breathtaking thing. You do. Another good thing, which I like, which
Leo Laporte (01:03:46):
Is
Andy Ihnatko (01:03:47):
You have an upgrade
Leo Laporte (01:03:48):
Diagnosis. I dunno, is this new to
Andy Ihnatko (01:03:50):
Your reviews?
Leo Laporte (01:03:51):
I
Andy Ihnatko (01:03:51):
Love
Jason Snell (01:03:51):
This. I used to write a second story that was sort of like, if you're upgrading from here's what you need, here's new. And I just decided at this point to just tack it onto the end of that story. So yeah, I did. How fast is this phone compared to the 14 PRO 13, pro 12, pro 11 Pro and also sort of in the text basically said, alright, if you're coming from the 11 Pro, you'll get these features plus everything that's in the next section. If you're coming from the 12 Pro, you'll get these features. And so the idea there is you're collecting up, if you're coming from the 12 pro, you're not just getting the 15 pro new features, you're getting all the new features in the 14 PRO and the 13 pro too. So I tried to stack it up a little bit because we as reviewers are really focused on what's nuisance last year, which is understandable and good and if you're going to write it one way, that's got to be the way it is. But the truth is, if you're coming from a three-year-old phone, what's new in the 15 is not what you want to read. You want to read what's new in the 14 and the 13 too.
Leo Laporte (01:04:52):
Sorry, I'm just looking at my phone so I can scan my,
Jason Snell (01:04:54):
Just taking a picture.
Andy Ihnatko (01:04:55):
Well,
Leo Laporte (01:04:56):
I'm
Andy Ihnatko (01:04:56):
Going to get my
Leo Laporte (01:04:57):
Driver's license in the phone.
Andy Ihnatko (01:04:58):
California finally
Leo Laporte (01:04:59):
Lets us to get our driver's license in our iPhone. Oh.
Jason Snell (01:05:07):
Oh, it's doing a little face verification there.
Andy Ihnatko (01:05:10):
It's pretty wild. Yeah, to see if I'm
Leo Laporte (01:05:10):
Alive. So
Andy Ihnatko (01:05:12):
Apparently a picture if you're a
Jason Snell (01:05:14):
Picture or not. Yep.
Leo Laporte (01:05:15):
I am alive. I don't know what all those flashing colors
Jason Snell (01:05:18):
Were. Yeah, when we went to New Zealand, the New Zealand Visa, that's what they did. It's the same technology. It's this prove that your face is not a picture being held up against the camera and stuff like that. I
Leo Laporte (01:05:28):
Guess that was what it was. Yeah,
Jason Snell (01:05:29):
You're
Andy Ihnatko (01:05:30):
A real person.
Leo Laporte (01:05:31):
What's nice is it uses the, it looked like it was using the depth scan in the iPhone's selfie cam, which was pretty cool. So this is another new feature, relatively new. It's been around. I said, Lisa, I can get my iPhone to have my app, my wallet, and she said, I did that weeks ago. Okay, well, I finally
Andy Ihnatko (01:05:50):
Saw it,
Leo Laporte (01:05:51):
But one thing I did notice when I get
Andy Ihnatko (01:05:52):
A new
Leo Laporte (01:05:53):
Phone, it doesn't carry over, so you got to redo it I guess with a new phone. I don't know if you know or care about that California is not doing what other states are doing. They have their own app, which is always a bad
Andy Ihnatko (01:06:06):
Idea.
Leo Laporte (01:06:07):
Come on. Oh
Andy Ihnatko (01:06:07):
God, yeah,
Leo Laporte (01:06:08):
Come on. You're not going to write an app as good as Apple. Come on. Don't even, even
Andy Ihnatko (01:06:12):
God. Not only that, but we talk about philosophically how corporations have the power of nations. It's like in this area, it's like I find myself explicitly asking myself the question, who do I trust with my personal information?
Leo Laporte (01:06:29):
Apple or
Andy Ihnatko (01:06:30):
My state
Leo Laporte (01:06:31):
Government or dmv? I
Andy Ihnatko (01:06:33):
Have written the M V T A this summer. I trust Apple with my personal information more than I trust my state government. And I think that that's the problem
Jason Snell (01:06:40):
Is every
Andy Ihnatko (01:06:41):
Time you sit
Jason Snell (01:06:41):
In the D M V, it
Andy Ihnatko (01:06:43):
Erodes
Leo Laporte (01:06:44):
Your confidence what you think is
Andy Ihnatko (01:06:45):
Possible here.
Leo Laporte (01:06:47):
Well, anyway, I'm giving them my image and we'll see. I guess a human then looks at it. You have to scan the front and the back of your card.
Jason Snell (01:06:56):
Human
Leo Laporte (01:06:57):
Looks at, yeah, it got to be approved looks and then it's going to be, and
Jason Snell (01:06:58):
Then you can use it in some very
Andy Ihnatko (01:07:00):
Places, airports.
Leo Laporte (01:07:01):
Yeah,
Andy Ihnatko (01:07:03):
I want to use it
Leo Laporte (01:07:05):
Next time I fly.
Andy Ihnatko (01:07:06):
Yeah, we're going to take
Leo Laporte (01:07:07):
A little break. There's another review that's worth paying attention to, came out Wednesday. Sebastian DeWitt's, view of the camera, the Hali guy, and he talks about some interesting points that I think we might be willing to mention. I also like to get your thoughts on the camera, but first a word from our sponsor. What a great show. It's always fun to join together. I look forward to Tuesdays because I'm going to see Jason and Andy and Alex, me too. We're going to get together, have a good time. Our show today brought to you by Zach. Doc, you know that feeling when you get the thing you've been looking for on the internet, the perfect thing. You spend hours researching. You read all the reviews, you make a pros and cons list. You finally get it right. You got the perfect one, the sparkly disco pants or the designer dog hoodie or whatever it is you're looking for.
(01:07:56):
Five stars arrives at 48 hours. Isn't it weird that we can do that for a disco pants, but we can't do it for a physician? Why is it you can get those things overnight, but if you want to see a good doctor, how do you know they're good? Where's the reviews? And it might take forever to get an appointment. This is why you want Zocdoc. It's an app you could put on your phone and it's good to have all the time a place to find and book great doctors who have amazing reviews, many of them available within 24 hours. You can filter it down by who takes your insurance, what their specialties are. It's not just MDs, it's chiropractors, it's dentists. It's a variety of disciplines. It is incredible. And by the way, it's free. Zocdoc is a free app where you can find amazing doctors and book appointments online.
(01:08:49):
We're talking about booking appointments with thousands of top rated patient reviewed doctors and specialists. You can filter specifically for those who take your insurance are located near you, who treat whatever condition you're looking for. Dermatologists, psychiatrist, eye doctor, ob, G Y N, they're all in there. Now I have to say there are also doctors have different styles and the reviews are really important. By the way, these are verified actual reviews from actual real patients. They're very careful about that, and so you can look at a doctor and say, well, that doctor's just right, but let me look at the reviews because there are different styles. Some doctors have this great bedside manner and are really good with patients. Some doctors are very focused and a lot of us geeks like this on facts and let me make the decision. I want all the facts. Sometimes some people, and many of us just want a doctor that just tells us the one thing to do.
(01:09:40):
I don't want to need to know all the different choices. That's too confusing. So this is how you find out if that doctor has a style you want as well. They take your insurance and they're the kind of doctor you're looking for. The average wait for a doctor booked on Zocdoc between 24 and 48 hours. That's all. In fact, in some cases you can even get same day appointments, so if you're not feeling well, you don't want to wait. That's a nice thing to have. Once you find the doc, you want book 'em immediately with just a few app taps. No more waiting awkwardly on old with a receptionist. Can you tell me exactly what the skin condition is? Please go to zocdoc.com/mac break and download the app for free. I know you know that you could go to the app store and just get it and if you want to, okay, but it would be really nice if you could go to the website so they know you saw it here.
(01:10:28):
Zoc doc.com/mac break, Z O C D c.com/mac Break find and book a top-rated doctor today. You really do want this on your phone, although you can do it also on the website. I've done the website search many times, well, not many times. How often do I need a doctor? A few times zocdoc.com/mac break. When you need a doc, you want to find 'em fast. zocdoc.com/mac break. We thank 'em so much for their support. If Mac Break weekly, always get excited when I see Sebastian Dewitt weighing in, by the way, they've really been good at immediate support for the iPhone 15 promax with Hali. As I mentioned, the action buttons work with it. He does a really good, this is more, not as much a review, I would say as a helpful tool for iPhone photographers on what the different lenses do and how you should be thinking about composition and stuff. It's really a primer in photography almost.
Andy Ihnatko (01:11:37):
It's an experiential review. It's not about, Hey, look, the sensors are the same, but the lenses have new coatings. Hey, I noticed that there is an X micron shift in whatever. It's more like you have someone who not only is a developer of what is the de facto official professional photography app for the iPhone, the most popular pocket camera in the entire world, but also an avid photographer themselves
Leo Laporte (01:12:01):
And a very good photographer. By the way, I love his shot. Exactly,
Andy Ihnatko (01:12:04):
And this is why this annual piece is so valuable. Not again, it's not, Hey, I took some test shots here during a half hour of the sidewalk just outside my office. No, this is someone who has experience who's going to carry this around and treat it like a real camera and it really does show in the work,
Leo Laporte (01:12:22):
It's helpful too because he understands how the iPhone gets the shots that it gets, and so he's giving you information that Apple does not give you about what's going on when it's doing a night shot or when you're going into macro mode and so forth. Night mode for instance, combines pixels for higher light sensitivity, but you only get 12 megapixels no matter what format you're capturing it in. This is useful because now you know what you're going to get. He talks about raw file sizes. I've been wondering, well, should I use the compressed high efficiency formats or should I use the native raw format? What should I do? He also talks about the five x telephoto photo and says, you really have to think about what you're looking at to use it, and I think that's true of any, if you're going to shoot exclusively telephoto, that's true because you're very much narrowing the field of view.
Andy Ihnatko (01:13:19):
Yeah, it is not just about being at the sidelines at a kid's soccer game and being able to take closer photos of your kid, although that's very, very good. That's
Leo Laporte (01:13:27):
Part of it.
Andy Ihnatko (01:13:29):
It's also about just take, Hey, here's a nice, I'm taking a walk. Here's a very nice little landscaping thing and ooh, I like the bushes that are kind of in front of the lake and with the house in the distance, it's the thought of, oh, if I were to take 10 steps back and shoot this with a telephoto, suddenly the foreground in the background and the flake will all look like they're part of the same thing. That's the sort of thought that these sort of telephoto lenses open up for you in mobile photography
Leo Laporte (01:14:00):
Likes, and I had never really thought about that. He prefers shooting with the ultra wide, which I probably never would've thought of to be honest.
Andy Ihnatko (01:14:08):
He made the good point that you almost don't have to aim anymore, which is a really good point because the new AI generative tools in Photoshop, not withstanding, if it's not in the frame, who cares If the thing that needed to be part of the picture got cut off, then you lose, you may as well. So in so many situations, you may as well shoot ultra wide if you're at a party or if things are happening kind of fast and you're not really sure that you're going to be able to react and move the camera and recompose very quickly, and the fact that Apple has made the super wide that much better makes it even more imperative to have this idea in your head that there's, I know that this is the artist's interest outside the theater. I know that I'm going to maybe have 30 seconds to get a picture of someone, someone coming out of the venue after the play. I'm going to go ultra wide because that way I know that if the actor hugs somebody or says something or gives someone a high five, is I going to get the whole high five and not just some arms that got cut off from the bottom.
(01:15:15):
He also says the telephoto lens is really sharp, lots of detail best yet, which I guess we'd expect you on your review, Jason showed that if you go beyond the optical zoom though, you can really get some weird smearing
Jason Snell (01:15:30):
Kind of stuff. Yeah, don't do it. Don't do it. I'm not trying to create a gate here. Basically what I'm saying is even if a five x, it'll let you go to 20 x, but don't do it. And if you do do it, don't zoom in because it's doing some things to try and smooth everything out and faces get real weird If you zoom in on 'em, you're like, Ooh, what is wrong with that person? And the answer is, it's a 20 x digital Zoom is what's wrong with that person? Don't do it. So it's just I think that getting the extra makes you more excited about, I could go even further and don't actually, Apple's processing is so good that if you go to seven or 10 x on the five X and the Promax, it still looks pretty good, like shockingly good, but if you push it, it will all start to break down and that's just the nature of it. There is no more information for them to use there. They're just guessing.
Alex Lindsay (01:16:19):
Yeah, I shot my kids on a stage at high school, they're playing in their bands and I shot at about 10 x from a pretty far distance and it was not as good as if I had been closer up, but it wasn't bad and I was kind of amazed that I was holding up a phone at 10 x with them that close. Imagine being not in the front row, like 10, 15 rows back and then shooting someone on the back of the stage and getting pretty much a head to head to toe shot and the stabilization is kind of amazing.
Andy Ihnatko (01:16:52):
You just see this little, well, that's another thing. He says you'd normally with a five x,
Leo Laporte (01:16:56):
It'd be very hard
Andy Ihnatko (01:16:56):
To handhold, especially at night, and he says he does a great job, although he does caution that. That's another difference between if you're using telephoto, if you're not in really good lighting, you may want to just back off. You'll get less lens blur. It's one of the hardest things for me to learn because all of us since this conversation, we've been using digital cameras since almost the very beginning, and so one of the hardest things for me to unlearn was it's okay to use digital Zoom because the computational photography
(01:17:29):
Modes and iPhones and other super highend flagship cameras, it's going to be better than simply shooting with the normal lens and then blowing it up in Photoshop or blowing it up in whatever the image editor is because boy, you can practically go two x without really, it costing you a whole lot given that you're already shooting with a phone camera anyway. But yeah, IO is the other thing to learn, but yeah, that's the sort of thing where don't be afraid to test out the digital Zoom, although it's an app like Hali is really nice to be able to say that, Hey, I don't want you to ever use Digital Zoom. I'm a conis. Just lock me into whatever the natural focal lengths are.
Leo Laporte (01:18:14):
Oh, I have been accepted. The state of California has allowed me to join them in the state and I have for you a driver's license in the
Andy Ihnatko (01:18:22):
Phone now. No,
Leo Laporte (01:18:24):
I have never used this. I like to share my, we talked about it before, but because I have a new phone, I had to move it over, which was, and it didn't move over. You had to just do the process again. John Richard Ello, is that how you say his name? Maybe you knew him as the c e O of Unity. Not so fast
Andy Ihnatko (01:18:44):
Bucko.
Leo Laporte (01:18:47):
This has ended up being just a calamity for Unity. You may remember they suggested that they would change their pricing and retroactively start charging developers for every install of games or apps using Unity. The developer community basically said, okay, well that's it. We're never using Unity again. Unity backs down. I knew they would had to and now the Aftershocks Richard Chio is out.
Alex Lindsay (01:19:15):
It's complicated. I mean the hard part is for a lot of these companies, they did a lot of stuff to make sure they compete with each other, whether it's Unreal, epic did its own thing and Unity did those, and a lot of these have been kind of this free, but then eventually you're going to have to pay and Unity took a lot of ground because of the model that it had, but even now, unreal is Epic is trying to figure out how to restructure because so many people are using their software for free because if you're doing production tools in Epic, you actually don't need,
Leo Laporte (01:19:46):
But it doesn't hurt them if you're using it for free, it doesn't cost them more money. They just want,
Alex Lindsay (01:19:52):
They're not generating their
Leo Laporte (01:19:52):
Money revenue, they're making more, but
Alex Lindsay (01:19:55):
It costs them money in the sense that they have overhead and they're not able to cover it because there's not enough revenue coming in there is
Leo Laporte (01:20:01):
Burn me. The way to phrase it is not that more people are using it for free, but that fewer people are using it paid would be or just
Alex Lindsay (01:20:08):
Not enough. They've grown to a certain point they were growing at a certain, if the growth doesn't make, this is the problem that Epic is having as well. They had to lay off a big chunk. I mean I think it's 900 people or something like that in the not to distant pass because they're not making as much money with Fortnite. They probably wouldn't have that problem if they hadn't sued Apple, so they didn't get any return out of that. All they got is the problem for Epic now is they're not being shown on every keynote at Apple, which they were. Almost every keynote was showing Epic in some way, shape, or form until they sued Apple. And so suddenly they're now finding out they don't, they're not making as much money as they were before, and so I think that they're having to rethink their model. I think Unity, again, I think that the growth isn't, at some point, the growth doesn't make up for the fact that you're not charging enough for your product. And now it's hard as any first grader will tell you, you can't change the rules in the middle, and so that's the real challenge they have. It's not that what they're asking for is necessarily outrageous. It's just changing the rules in the middle of the game, and that's always going to be hard.
Andy Ihnatko (01:21:23):
I think they also prove to themselves that they rely on their developers a lot more than the developers rely on them in terms of if they were to do anything that was sufficiently frisky as to cause an open revolt, they would have to shut that down really quickly.
Alex Lindsay (01:21:37):
It's not as fluid as I think the developers made it sound. I mean, it's not as easy just to move. I mean a lot of developers said, we're just going to go somewhere else,
Leo Laporte (01:21:44):
But in the past,
Alex Lindsay (01:21:46):
Well, someone's tried that in the past. It's kind like, yeah,
Leo Laporte (01:21:50):
A lot of people, a lot of work opened up GitHub pages with their own engine, but that takes years Can't
Alex Lindsay (01:21:57):
Apple, apple is partnering with Unity. Apple is the largest company in the world and they're partnering with Unity instead of building their own solution
Leo Laporte (01:22:07):
That we just think about
Alex Lindsay (01:22:08):
How complicated it must be if Apple is doing this instead of building it themselves.
Leo Laporte (01:22:13):
I want Unity to succeed. I certainly don't want them to go bankrupt or anything like that. In fact, many of the games I love dearly like Heim are written in Unity, but I also don't want Heim, which is a 20 person team to go belly up because they can't afford to pay licenses for all these people who installed their game over the last three years
Alex Lindsay (01:22:33):
Because the problem really is that those games didn't build into their business model that they'd be paying Unity. So it's not just that Unity is just suddenly doing something that might be reasonable, might not be what we can make that, but the problem is is that all their business models, how they charge people and how much they charge and everything else, so everybody has to change the rules or they'll go under. So Val High might have to say, well, we can survive, but we're now going to have to all charge you this much a month.
Leo Laporte (01:22:56):
Yeah. What they did is they put it out in beta for $20 at the beginning of the pandemic, and they haven't charged me a penny since. Obviously I'm not paying my fair share for Unity. It's a good deal. Epic had to fire a bunch of people and it's funny because Epic made so much money on Fortnite. Tim Sweeney, their C e o made 7 billion the year Fortnite was released, but they're now in Tough Straits and have fired I think 16%. Well,
Alex Lindsay (01:23:23):
Again, I
Leo Laporte (01:23:23):
Think part of Is that because of Unreal Engine?
Alex Lindsay (01:23:27):
Well, it's definitely part of it. I mean, again, epic was getting this pump from Apple. Every keynote, they had an Apple platform to go to, and I think part of the other issue is that when 87% of kids under 18 are using iPhones and you're not there, things start to tighten up a little bit on your revenue. So I think that that's the real, I understand why Epic shook Apple to Cord because they want to build a platform and sell products. They want to sell into the metaverse, so to speak. They want to be able to make that and taking 30% out for every sale is not going to make that viable. So they have a vision for their marketplace, which is that's really where they want to go. So I get what they're doing, it's just that they had to do something but biting the hand that was feeding them a lot might've not have been the best outcome there.
Leo Laporte (01:24:22):
Yeah, epic Cat got 830 jobs,
Andy Ihnatko (01:24:27):
But don't you think that's a sign of really good corporate leadership where there are certain, we'll not mention the name of the beast lest he appear, but there are CEOs who say, no, no, no, this isn't an argument. This isn't a discussion. This is a decision we've made and people have to to live with it and rather than turn this into an unnecessary showdown, they saw exactly how unpalatable this move was going to be and they backed down from it and actually actually losing the CEO E o, it's probably
Leo Laporte (01:24:52):
One of the most, it seems to be
Andy Ihnatko (01:24:53):
In the forms that I've been, I've been looking at one of the more popular decisions that the company has made in a little bit.
Alex Lindsay (01:24:59):
Yeah, it is definitely, I think it is a very Japanese approach to it.
Leo Laporte (01:25:08):
We took the
Andy Ihnatko (01:25:08):
Wrong path.
Alex Lindsay (01:25:09):
Somebody's going to
Andy Ihnatko (01:25:11):
You. The train that you're conducting was 45 minutes, 43 seconds late. I think you know what to do.
Leo Laporte (01:25:19):
So Richard Telo, who was actually a bit of a lightning rod at Unity, retired effective, immediately scuttled away. They're replacing him with somebody else who, unlike Richie Telo has no experience in the gaming industry. Jim Whitehurst, you may know that name, former c e o of Red Hat. He then, of course with the acquisition of Red Hat by I B M became president of I B M. He retired or left I B M in 2021, so he's going take over Unity, no gaming experience. He'd worked at Delta Interim, right?
Alex Lindsay (01:25:58):
He's just there to is
Leo Laporte (01:25:58):
Interim. Yeah.
Alex Lindsay (01:25:59):
Yeah. I think he's just the interim c e o that's there to keep the, I think that they felt that immediate action was required, but they don't have the right replacement yet. It feels like you have to bring someone in from the outside. It doesn't sound like he might be the final pick, but it is something to kind move the conversation quickly and try to quell the angry villagers.
Leo Laporte (01:26:28):
Yeah. Well, villagers were real angry. They were going to have a town hall to talk about the changes and then they got a bomb threat and they think the bomb threat came from within the company that somebody else
Andy Ihnatko (01:26:39):
At Unity had
Leo Laporte (01:26:40):
Phoned it in. So that's not good.
Andy Ihnatko (01:26:43):
HR is going to have its hands full after that one.
Leo Laporte (01:26:46):
Oh boy. Oh boy. Tim Cook
Andy Ihnatko (01:26:48):
Morning slip on the desk for sure.
Leo Laporte (01:26:50):
Cashed in some stock. 41 million worth of stock. Guess Tim's going to buy himself a boat. I dunno.
Alex Lindsay (01:27:02):
Yeah, I think that it's interesting when people sell off. I mean, that's a very tiny number for Tim Cook. I, I don't think it's that big of a number for him, but I think that other CEOs have a regular schedule and I think that that really makes a lot of sense is to not to create a lot of people talking about it. I think that, for instance, I think Mark Benioff gets a certain amount every week. He sells out a certain amount of stock every week and it never changes and it's just constantly pulling that out and I think that that makes a lot more sense than doing it in spurts. I don't
Leo Laporte (01:27:31):
Know if I'm the S E c, I'm going to say, Hey, you cashed in 750,000,002 years ago. What'd you do with that? Did you just spend it all? What'd you do with that? I don't know what Tim's doing. This is second largest sale since that 2021 share of 750 million shares. He sold 241,000 shares yesterday day and held back 270,000 shares for tax purposes. So it gives you some idea of how much money goes into the, goes to the tax man and all of this, $41.4 million after taxes, and so he had 750 million. He ran right through that. This is only going to get you a few months, Tim. I dunno.
Alex Lindsay (01:28:17):
You just got to stay out of Vegas. That's all I'm
Leo Laporte (01:28:19):
Saying. Stay out of Vegas. Tim. Tim Cook is worth, according to Forbes, which according to Donald Trump, because Forbes took him off the list, is now a Chinese propaganda outlet. Tim Cook is worth 1.9 billion. So I guess this 41 millions pocket change, chump change,
Andy Ihnatko (01:28:42):
But you know what? That's not, own your own space if company money, and that's got to really common. No, you
Leo Laporte (01:28:48):
Couldn't buy Twitter with that. Right.
Alex Lindsay (01:28:52):
He's not an owner. He is only an employee.
Leo Laporte (01:28:54):
Right, exactly.
Alex Lindsay (01:28:55):
Yeah.
Andy Ihnatko (01:28:56):
I hear from certain sources that he needs the health. Apple has really great health coverage.
Leo Laporte (01:29:01):
Excellent.
Andy Ihnatko (01:29:02):
He's not going to retire again. I mean the dental alone, it's like
Leo Laporte (01:29:07):
I saw really interesting. You
Andy Ihnatko (01:29:08):
Want decorative grill
Leo Laporte (01:29:09):
Comped 30
Andy Ihnatko (01:29:10):
Copay
Leo Laporte (01:29:11):
A really interesting article. Some guy, some reporter, I can't remember what outlet it was, had you have the health savings account, and he got to the end of the year and he couldn't spend it. So he thought, well, I'm going to just try this executive health rundown that all the CEOs get Tim Cook included, where they go to the Mayo Clinic or somewhere similar and get the full rundown. Something US poor get. They're so important to the company. I mean, Tim Cook I would say is very worth a lot of money, but it wasn't hugely expensive. It was like $5,000 to do an M R I. He said it was amazing that they were so nice and it was like a hotel and it was really comfy. They get a very different experience of healthcare when they're CEOs and they're that valuable. Yeah, I told Lisa I wanted to send her to the Mayo Clinic, so we'll see. We can't live without her. We're out of luck. What is this? Fake it till you fake it. One of you has put this one in.
Jason Snell (01:30:19):
I put that in there. It's just a good piece by Nick here on Pixel Envy, his blog, he's a writer in Canada and he's responding to a lot of the criticism of Google's announcement of their AI photo feature.
Leo Laporte (01:30:34):
Oh, a lot of people are saying, yeah, is it still photography?
Jason Snell (01:30:37):
What is a photo? And I think that from an Apple perspective, since that's what this podcast is, what there is is a spectrum between, I think Apple is really dedicated as we've been talking about with Sebastian's story, the art of photography and photos, trying to reflect reality and having a certain philosophy of what photography is. I think Google is on the other end of the spectrum where Google is sort of look computational photography. It's not really photography anymore. We can process it. We can do things with it. We're going to give that power to the user. And I think we can have debates philosophically about that. But what Nick here's point is, and I thought it was really great to make it, is hey, everybody who's suddenly worried and clutching pearls about how now we can't believe what we see in photos.
Leo Laporte (01:31:21):
His
Jason Snell (01:31:21):
Point, and it's absolutely the perfect point to make at this juncture in history, which is you've never been able to believe what you see in a photo from the very first photo taken. Because a photo is all about where is the camera, what's outside the frame, what happened before and after that moment. None of that is disclosed. There's no context to begin with. And of course, manipulation of photography began, believe it or not, before Adobe or before Photoshop, before the Knoll Brothers designed Photoshop, people were still manipulating photos in dark rooms. They're also shooting lots of pictures and choosing the one that does the thing that they want. And Nick goes through it. He's such a good writer and it's a really fun blog post. But I think that what I took away from it is the overarching point, which is like, let's not get ahead of ourselves here. Yes, Google is doing some things that seem a little extreme and from my taste maybe are like, maybe you're making it too easy. But the fact is photography always has always been not something you should really trust unless you start to ask all those other questions about what happened outside of that one tiny moment in time in that tiny angle where that photo was taken.
Leo Laporte (01:32:29):
Absolutely. I could promise you that it did not look like this in Yosemite Valley when that thunderstorm hit without a little extra help from Ansel Adams dodging and burning. I'm just saying.
Andy Ihnatko (01:32:40):
Yeah. As a kid who was really into photography, reading Ansel Adams Dark Room book absolutely made me feel great and got me energized because I thought, wow, I can't take pictures as good as that. Oh my God, there's so beautiful. But then seeing, here's exactly how much work I had to put in to take the glass plate of this image and turn it into the print that you all know and love. I mean, this is an opportunity to teach people about media literacy, the basic media literacy that they should have already had, because there are books published in the
Leo Laporte (01:33:12):
1890s
Andy Ihnatko (01:33:14):
On here is how to remove wrinkles from faces. Here's how to make Waistlines look tremor. I can't think of what it was, but there's a famous controversy that went on for decades that only got solved kind of recently about a famous war photo, I think war, A war zone in Belgium where a famous picture of this back country road stripped of all vegetation with just cannonballs, like riddling the car paths. And the question, actually, there are two versions of this plate, one in which the cannonballs are in the road, one in which they are not. And just examining the Zapruder film people were examining saying, okay, did the photographer put the cannonballs in the road or did he take them off the road for composition? And was only recently that they figured out that no, he definitely put them in there for his zone. I think that this is all the features that Google introduced last week.
(01:34:12):
They are really great, really strong and really empowering because they give ordinary people who are just futsing around with a built-in photo app with five or 10 seconds or 15 seconds of effort and no skill or training. The ability to do things that would normally cost you a year or two ago, a Photoshop subscription and at least a year or two of experience. I'm sure that I'm not the only one in this conversation who's the unofficial p shopper of the family or the friend group. The number of times where I find out that my sister is in Disneyland because I got this beautiful picture of my nieces in the middle of a sidewalk, but there are some people in the background, she would like to not be in the background and ask me, could you get rid of, I want to print this out and have this on the sofa. I really don't want this person who's got mustard and gravy all over his T-shirt to be the dominant thing. And there you go. You've remove it. It takes you an hour or two and it looks nice. Now it's something where they can just circle it and say, get rid of this. Fill it in with more background and boom, it's done. That's empowering. That's exactly what technology ideally is meant to do. Give power to people who do not have power and sort of make it not so consolidated in the hands of just a few.
Alex Lindsay (01:35:30):
Well, and I think that it's also just so important for people not to believe what they see. Exactly.
Leo Laporte (01:35:34):
Someone who's this famous photos from 1855 during the Crimean
Andy Ihnatko (01:35:38):
Thank You War,
Leo Laporte (01:35:40):
And Errol Morris, the great documentarian actually tracked it down and there's a good podcast about it. And from radio, he
Andy Ihnatko (01:35:51):
Actually traveled to actually traveled to the site to get pictures of it, to figure out, okay, well there are shadows that are moving, so maybe I can figure out by the movement of the sun. And after working on this for years and years and years, it was a friend who just glanced at this who said, oh, well, don't you notice that gravity tends to make things roll down rather than up. So if the same rock is lower in this picture than in the first one, that means that whoever was walking around, they're kicked over a rock. And he said, oh, that is conclusive. Thank you very much.
Alex Lindsay (01:36:25):
Well, and also even, I mean, there's been discussions about Matthew Brady in the Civil War posing things and not having it not,
Leo Laporte (01:36:35):
I think part of the reason this is an issue now is though it's so easy and anybody can do it
Alex Lindsay (01:36:39):
Well,
Andy Ihnatko (01:36:40):
That's so important.
Alex Lindsay (01:36:41):
It's so important that everybody can do it because then they understand that they
Andy Ihnatko (01:36:45):
Shouldn't
Alex Lindsay (01:36:45):
Be looking. It's too
Leo Laporte (01:36:46):
Easy things and thinking
Alex Lindsay (01:36:47):
That that's proof of something that we don't know what happened until we see it from a couple of different angles that we get it, we see multiple reports on it, but saying that this photo or this audio sample, we've been doing a little bit of work with rebuilding. There's a glitch in a record or there's something else. Can we rebuild that little section with ai? And it works so well that it's frightening that we forget that it's there. And so I think that it's really, really powerful and I think people do need to know that it's easy. It, we've been doing it for a long time, not just photo manipulation, but you have a protest. I mean, I've worked on shows where we had, we expected 300 people and 50 people showed up, and what that means, put the camera on a riser. We're going to put the camera on a riser and we're going to point down and we're going to make sure that you don't see the empty room that we thought we were going to fill. That is not, I'm not manipulating the photo, but I am manipulating the situation. And those are things that are super common
Andy Ihnatko (01:37:53):
That happen
Alex Lindsay (01:37:54):
All the time. And so it's really important for people to understand that they should look at everything through this filter of, I need more information to understand what happened.
Andy Ihnatko (01:38:08):
The only area in which it kind of worries me, and I'm not just talking about these phone features, but broadly, is when you're talking about photographs that are being entered into evidence and the potential for a defense lawyer to basically introduce an element of doubt. There's so many cases that hinge upon, Hey, we've got security footage, and here's where you see that the defendant was clearly approaching the composing the car with a gun in their hand and doesn't look super, super clear. But yeah, it looks like they got a gun in their hand. But what if the photo has been taken in such a way that you can't get back whatever the original unai processed version of that image is, and you can say, yeah, it looks like a gun, but maybe the AI tried to figure out, I need to clarify what this person is holding.
(01:38:57):
It's in the shape of a gun, so I'm going to not put a specific gun in their hand, but I'm going to sharpen it with the idea that it should be looking like this. There was, remember there was a court case was a couple of years ago where really, really reaching sort of attempt to discredit a photo where someone had, I think the prosecutor had their iPad plugged into the overhead, the digital projector in the room, and just basically pinched and zoomed, just basically zoom out to give you, it says, focus on what it was. And so I think the defense had to say, oh, well, we don't know. As we all know, the iPad, the Apple is actually adding more detail to there, so we don't know what those pixels actually are. And you have to step in and say, no, here's how it does not add pixels. It simply makes these pixels s kind of bigger. That's why. Well,
Alex Lindsay (01:39:47):
I think that most defendants deserve to call in into question every piece of evidence, and you have to see it, you have to triangulate it
Andy Ihnatko (01:39:54):
A lot should a chain of evidence for,
Leo Laporte (01:39:56):
But as Nick here points out in this great pixel MCV post, Samsung has a feature that gives you perfect moon photos and they are adding pixels. They are,
Andy Ihnatko (01:40:08):
They're adding pixels.
Alex Lindsay (01:40:10):
And I think that that'll keep on happening. And I think that the issue is that photos, again, have never been, even eyewitnesses do not have a clear, oftentimes adrenaline and a lot of other things change what they actually think happened. And so that's why it's so important that we have a lot of different corroborating evidence that ties into those things. And so that photo by itself shouldn't be the only thing that we look at it, and it shouldn't even have a heavier weight than all the other things because when a defendant is charged with something and the prosecution is coming down on them, it's generally not a fair fight. So for 99% of the defendants out there, the prosecution has the home field advantage because they've got a lot more money. So we have to understand that it is important that we call into question probably more important that we call into question all that evidence than to assume that it's correct.
Andy Ihnatko (01:41:03):
Absolutely. There's also the CS I effect where you have people on the jury box
Alex Lindsay (01:41:07):
Who
Andy Ihnatko (01:41:07):
Have watched a lot of csi, a lot of procedural like crime shows. So if a prosecutor says, oh, well, we basically told our computer to zoom in and enhance, we using technology that wouldn't have been available 20 years ago, and that's how we see this clear picture of this, and people in jury say, oh yes, zoom in and enhance this. Exactly. Wow. That's how 100 technology solve the case for us. It's like, no. Basically the AI that has a bias for certain types of faces has an expectation of what it thinks a human face should look like. So if it enhanced it, it made it look like not necessarily what was there, but what the AI thinks. What should be a Caucasian male face should be in that scene. So yeah, again, it's all about media literacy.
Leo Laporte (01:41:51):
I re-watched Minority Report over the weekend. That's another example of technology run amuck. Yeah, I don't think there's an obvious answer really to this question. I think we'd all agree that Samsung's beautiful moonshots are not fair
Andy Ihnatko (01:42:12):
Game. That
Alex Lindsay (01:42:12):
Feels like it jumps
Andy Ihnatko (01:42:13):
Over. It just feels like
Alex Lindsay (01:42:14):
It's very unreal. It's
Leo Laporte (01:42:16):
Not if you delete the fact that they
Alex Lindsay (01:42:17):
Didn't talk about it. I think
Leo Laporte (01:42:19):
The thing that, and that's actually a quote from Nick's article that I think is probably worth repeating. Dr. Bob Carey, president of the US-based National Press Photographers Association said, if an image has been altered using technology, the photo consumer needs to know label it.
Andy Ihnatko (01:42:38):
Yeah. That's also why I think that it's the replacing the moon is a really great feature for the built-in photo editing app for it. Part of the list of things to say, Hey, I noticed that it looks like there's a moon in there. I'm sorry, but this isn't 2053. Our camera sensors cannot have the dark landscape underneath and also balance out the moon would you like me to create a moon for it? Because again, it's always the same moon. There's a little bit of a wobble from whatever time of the year is, but it's always the same side of the moon. That's something that can easily be done and it will make it look a lot better than simply having a white.in there. But that's the difference between, this is something that you were offered a choice and you made a deliberate selection as opposed to, I took a picture, I sent the picture directly from the camera app to whatever, and this is the reality that I saw. You need to maintain that sort of portfolio of trust and there's no need not to do that.
Leo Laporte (01:43:38):
Yeah. So I'm not sure what the answer is. You could put it in the exif information as Nick points out, but then the exif can be modified.
Alex Lindsay (01:43:47):
Media literacy is part of the answer is having these conversations
Jason Snell (01:43:50):
And having Nick's blog post and generally all of us recognizing the fact that it's never been true. It's just easier now to make it even less of a reflection of reality and being aware of that and not saying, oh, I can't believe this. I mean, media literacy is the answer to a lot of problems that we have in society where you've got to look at something and say, eh, I don't know if this is real or not. It's like a big step, but it helps if you do that. And it's like, I'm not against photo editing. There's a poster on the wall in my house, framed a picture of my kids at Trafalgar Square on one of the lions. And when I got home, the fact was I had a shot where my daughter looked great and a shot where my son looked great and they weren't the same shot, and I ended up in Photoshop putting them together and using part of a third shot in order to cover something else that had changed between the two shots.
(01:44:49):
And I don't think anybody can tell, and it's on my wall, and I know I'm also sort of depicting, and that's the thing about the face replacement that Google is doing. It's depicting a moment in time. It really is because every pose that's being made when you're taking a picture that is already artificial posing, and it's sort of like the whole purpose of it is to get a nice picture. I'm okay with making that easier. In fact, at some point what it's going to do is it's going to do a capture of every frame possible during that moment and then just kind of go through and assemble it for you. But right now you have to do it like this.
Alex Lindsay (01:45:26):
I mean, what I do is I sit there and I go, okay, everybody smile and I take a hundred exactly, and I just take this timeframe and then I just go back and find all the ones that are there.
Andy Ihnatko (01:45:36):
And
Alex Lindsay (01:45:36):
This is just doing that
Andy Ihnatko (01:45:38):
A lot faster. That is the sort of thing that will sell a phone because everybody has, just like we're talking before about being able to use Bluetooth to locate your wife in a football stadium, that is a very real practical thing that makes you happy that you bought this phone. The number of times you take pictures of four people in a group, your kids and one of them can't their got finger out of their nose in one frame. The ability to simply say, okay, we'll just replace that. Don't contact your cousin who knows about Photoshop. Do it that way. The ability to, this is, I want to be delicate about this, but there's times when with your family, there is someone who's not a member of the family. They're maybe a friend of one of your nephews or something, or someone that they just met and they've been hanging out with. It's the only beautiful group photo you've ever had of all your nieces together. And plus this one person that nobody even remembers who they were. The ability to simply, let's lose this kid and shove this other kid to, it looks like just these four people in the space. That's another one of those things where people like what used to be a real project for even someone who knows Photoshop is now, oh, it'll suggest, oh, we're outlining these specific separate people in this picture. What do you want to do with any one of them?
Alex Lindsay (01:47:01):
We no longer have to fold the photo in the wedding album.
Andy Ihnatko (01:47:06):
Oh God, I've been asked to take pictures casually of weddings like twice for friends where only they almost have to sign a document saying that I promised them not even one photo from this, but I will. And so even as a non-pro, I thought, okay, I think I'm going to pick a place where I'm going to get all the formal portraits taken. I'm going to put it on a tripod and I'm going to take one picture of just the background with nobody there so that if someone needs to go, I have a clean background for them. And that's the sort of power that is going to be available to everybody just on their phone. I mean, we're really at a cliff here where it's not just photography, but everything is going to be suddenly untrustworthy. What is the answer to this? Just don't trust anything.
Alex Lindsay (01:47:59):
Just know that it's not, I mean, we should
Andy Ihnatko (01:48:01):
Trust
Alex Lindsay (01:48:01):
A lot less than we've been trusting. And I think it is. It's not that you don't trust anything, but you need to see a couple different, you should not trust anything on its face. I think that that is, and that should have happened a long time ago, maybe hundreds of years ago,
Andy Ihnatko (01:48:19):
But it, it's worse and worse. And now with AI generating text, it's not just photographs.
Alex Lindsay (01:48:24):
I wouldn't say worse and worse, I would say more and more obvious.
Andy Ihnatko (01:48:27):
Oh, that's interesting. It's always happened. But in the background, without
Alex Lindsay (01:48:32):
Our awareness, when we absolutely believed everything we saw, because there were three networks and they all told us this is, and this is what we believed in some, you could argue that that was worse if it wasn't totally accurate. There's a lot of things that get, whether it's being manipulated by the people that are handing the press, that it's not that the press is trying to lie, it's just that it's trying to publish information with incomplete data all the time. The press is always in a situation where it's being given data and it has to do the best it can, but at the same time, there's been a lot of things that we thought were so that just weren't, and we go back, it's not a conspiracy theory. There's a lot of things that we just go, oh, well, yeah, absolutely. That was actually not exactly what happened, or a lot of things are withheld so you don't have enough context to understand what that actually meant. So those are things that have been around since we started publishing anything and so of how it's being spoken of and even just the lens that is listened through. So
(01:49:38):
That has manipulated a lot more people at one time than what we're doing now. So I think that what it does do is it's definitely building up micro distrust that is, I think, very healthy. And again, I think that people, when I see stuff, and I've worked on a lot of cases where from the surface I went, oh, that person's guilty. And then as you start to dig into it, you're like, I don't
Leo Laporte (01:50:01):
Know. I don't know. That's true.
Alex Lindsay (01:50:03):
And so the thing is that, so when you see all the data as someone who's worked on some pretty high profile cases or my father has, you see all the data and you're like, oh, I don't think that this actually happened. And everyone is sure that it went the other direction. So the thing is, but
Leo Laporte (01:50:17):
We live in a land in time of hot takes where everybody has an instantaneous ill-informed opinion and you're flooded with them and thank you to social media for weaponizing that. And so now we're surrounded by garbage,
Alex Lindsay (01:50:34):
But the next generation is not going to believe anything,
Leo Laporte (01:50:37):
But they're not. That's problematic as well, right? Well, they'll say, you
Alex Lindsay (01:50:40):
Have to prove it to me and you have to show it to me from a bunch of different angles. And I mean where you find,
Leo Laporte (01:50:45):
Okay, so I'll give you an example because this is a big problem right now on X, formerly known as Twitter. They're trying to get their trust and safety people to eliminate disinformation about the tragedy happening in Israel right now. But Elon Musk is still posting QAN on crap, and it's just a flood of disinformation. There's really no way, Alex to go and find out what's true. It's not like you can go over there. I mean you could, but I wouldn't recommend it.
Alex Lindsay (01:51:18):
Yeah, I mean, you have to look at a lot of different sources. So usually if you're looking at, you're not going to find truth on Twitter or X or whatever.
Leo Laporte (01:51:26):
Yeah, clearly that's out, right?
Alex Lindsay (01:51:29):
But what M S N B C and N P R and C N N and Fox News, so
Leo Laporte (01:51:35):
You have some trusted sources.
Alex Lindsay (01:51:37):
No, no. I'm not even saying any one of them are trusted. It's kind of like a blockchain. It's when you look at all the different sources that don't agree on a day-to-day basis about almost anything, whatever they all say is probably more reliable, whatever all of them say that are, if M S N B C and Fox say the same thing like this happened, and if you include Al Jazeera and N P R and you start having four or five different sources, and then you look at that and they're all saying the same thing, what they agree on is probably pretty valid. What they all disagree on is their opinion. It's their take on this, but they're, all of those folks are saying, what we know happened is some people came out of Gaza and did something and Israel is doing something back. And the facts of those things, almost all the news organizations, regardless of whether they agree on that, what that means and why it happened, and all those other things are all things that are more depending on what lens they look through and looking at it through that. Because I try to listen to as many different sources, definitely ones that there are ones that I go and there's other ones that I'm just grading my teeth listening to, but I feel like it's important to constantly be listening to both sides of every issue. I also don't agree with any one of them all the time, but I think that it's important that you are constantly looking at these from different angles, and I think that that's, I think most people in the United States are not doing that.
Leo Laporte (01:53:17):
I think the real risk in this is cognitive bias and that you're going to end up favoring the thing that agrees with what you think, because what it sounds like you're doing is taking weighted opinions and then amalgamating 'em and somehow, somehow all magical answers out of it what they all agree on, you're going to end up, I think the real problem with this is you're going to end up with confirmation bias. You're going to just say, well, yeah,
Alex Lindsay (01:53:44):
But you always would.
Leo Laporte (01:53:46):
Yeah, I mean, we always have. I guess it's just there was some hope
Alex Lindsay (01:53:50):
You ask 10 people in the United States about whether we should have left Vietnam and what that meant.
Leo Laporte (01:53:55):
No, that's right.
Alex Lindsay (01:53:56):
And whether we could have won, and that's an old, there's a lot of different opinions about that and about all of these things.
Leo Laporte (01:54:07):
One of the advantages, one of the reasons a traditional Soviet propaganda ploy to flood the zone is one of the consequences of this is people give up and they just dial out as opposed to trying to figure it out. And that's good for the people who would like to pull the wool over your eyes because the more people who aren't paying attention, the better it is,
Alex Lindsay (01:54:32):
Or you show you a bunch of stuff, and there's usually a lot of stuff, especially in a military action, there's just a lot of stuff that they're not talking about.
Leo Laporte (01:54:39):
There's the fog of war too, of course.
Alex Lindsay (01:54:41):
Yeah, exactly.
Leo Laporte (01:54:42):
Anyway, our hearts go out to everybody in the area suffering from this, and there are a lot of tech companies, by the way, Israeli tech companies. There was an article that a significant percentage, these companies of their employees are going to war and so expect some disruptions. We have an advertiser who's Israeli who said, we're going to have to stop advertising for a little bit. And I said, yeah, I think you will. I think you should.
Alex Lindsay (01:55:09):
Yeah, I mean, our mutual friend, Brent BA was in Tel Aviv when it hit.
Leo Laporte (01:55:12):
Oh, no kidding. Oh, I didn't know that. Oh, is he okay?
Alex Lindsay (01:55:16):
He's okay. But he sent me a cell phone thing. He went out to, oh, I hear some banging. He went out and the bangs got pretty close, so he ran back inside, but was he found his way out. It was a little bit of tricky to find a little flight to get out of the country and then
Leo Laporte (01:55:34):
Bigger
Alex Lindsay (01:55:34):
Flights to get home, but it's a pretty intense time right there.
Leo Laporte (01:55:38):
Yeah. Our hearts go out to all those suffering. It's a very, very terrible thing. Yeah. I think we, oh, one more story. I wanted to talk about Dan Morin's story. If you have a problem with iCloud, wait 12 hours essentially. Could you summarize this, Jason Snell?
Jason Snell (01:56:05):
Yeah. Well, so Dan, basically, this is a great story of what it means. His point is about Apple being a little bit too much of a black box, and I think that's a pretty strong point here is he relies on it for email and other stuff, and it just stopped working. And that's frustrating, right? You rely on it, it's your workday. And it started right at his workday beginning. He couldn't get access to his email. iCloud wasn't syncing. He goes through Apple support and there's a moment in his story that's just amazing where the person he's talking to on the phone at Apple Support gives a little laugh and says, oh, I see what's going on here. Let me put you on hold. And then comes back and says, okay, I can't tell you why, but this'll be solved in 12 hours from when it went down. It'll be back up in 12
Leo Laporte (01:56:59):
Hours.
Jason Snell (01:57:00):
Exactly. Afterwards,
Leo Laporte (01:57:00):
12 hours.
Jason Snell (01:57:01):
And sure enough, 12 hours later, right as Dan has done for the day, everything comes back up. And the question is, why one, is there something weird going on there? Is there a court order? Are they going through the server? Did the server catch on fire? Why is it 12 hours exactly from when it went down? Is it scheduled maintenance? Is it again, something legal? And running services and stuff is hard and there's downtime, and even if you're down only 0.1% of the time, that's many, many hours a year that you're down. And that's just how it is. If you're down 1%, you're down 36 hours a year, so three days you're down three days, right? Yeah. Lemme do that math. Little numbers that are actually just brutal if you're running a service. So I get it, but Apple adds the extra thing of they just don't want to ever communicate with you anything.
(01:57:57):
When I have other things going on with other services I pay for in the cloud, I get communicated with, OD will say, we have to reboot your server, or we're going to move your server to new hardware. It'll be down for two hours, probably ish at 2:00 AM on this day in three weeks. And I know that mysterious things happen all of a sudden. But again, you could have a thing that says, oh, current status of your server in particular on iCloud, it's broken or it's down, or we had to take it offline. It will estimated return. Is this, even the cable company does that, but Apple just doesn't have it in him. And it's a problem when you're doing services because this is a case where Dan relies on it to do his job and it's just not there. And I mean, it's easy for people out there who are watching this to be like, well, that's your lesson.
(01:58:43):
Don't use iCloud. It's like, yes, but iCloud is a product that is offered by a very large company and integrates it with all their systems in a way to make you want to use it. And we can all blame the victim here, but how about this, which is why doesn't Apple communicate stuff like this to its customers? It's a case where they've taken their secrecy about product releases and also I think their pride in creating things that aren't too complicated, it just works and all of that, and then allowing that to sort of be a little rug that they can sweep all the other dirty stuff under when they shouldn't, they should. Disclosure should be the order of the day for stuff like this. The fact that that customer service person laughs and goes, oh, I see what's going on here but will not disclose. It can say is just, it's bananas.
Leo Laporte (01:59:29):
There are a number of theories, 12 hour maintenance windows, so forth, but I like the theory that it's a national security letter and that the law enforcement has said, you must freeze the server until we do our forensic examination and you can't
Jason Snell (01:59:43):
Tell anybody, and it's not X number of thousand users on it.
Leo Laporte (01:59:47):
And by the way, as often as the case with an N S L, you can't tell anybody so what's going on? Because they don't want the perpetrator to know that this is going on, so it may not be Apple's fault. Who knows? We don't know. I agree with you. Disclosure is everything when it comes to the cloud as is making sure you have a local copy and you can do as much of your work as possible without access to the cloud. Our power went out for three hours. Access to the internet is also very important.
Andy Ihnatko (02:00:16):
You
Leo Laporte (02:00:16):
Can't guarantee that pg and e, our local power company is going to tell you when it's coming back accurately, and it's a lot harder to get anything done without the internet. I can tell you right now, yeah,
Andy Ihnatko (02:00:29):
I've had one of those really, really big, big, big shoebox size battery banks kind of on my wishlist for a while now because the number of times, where did we have to lose power? Like 20 minutes before I have to do a show, all I need is to be able to run a small setup for 90 minutes and then I'll have six days to solve this problem, but right now I need a box full of electricity that won't run out for 90 minutes. We
Leo Laporte (02:01:01):
Were actually fortunate, so last week the power went out in the studio and we do not, there's no way we can have a big enough battery to stay on the air, so everything's shut down. Amp Pruitt was the last man out and he did a little video of himself
Andy Ihnatko (02:01:12):
Tiptoeing
Leo Laporte (02:01:13):
Out in the pitch black, but then a couple of days later, we didn't have an outage here. We had an outage at our house a couple of miles away, but we have Tesla power walls, and so there was a blip, and then we continued on and survived three or four hours and the internet survived because I guess it didn't go down, and so it was a business as usual. We can continue to watch Band of Brothers, which we are. I might add rewatching because get Ready Apple TV in January is going to give you the third entry into the Band of Brothers Saga
Andy Ihnatko (02:01:47):
Also. Did you hear that? I don't think I put it in the dock. So the director's cut of Napoleon
Leo Laporte (02:01:57):
Is going
Andy Ihnatko (02:01:57):
Directly to Apple tv, and so the director was saying about how this is the perfect situation where it is usually sweating bullets for him. Again, as a director of Alien, as the director of all these really great epic movies, to have to cut down of director's cut to make sure that it'll actually fit into a release slot that yes, it's going to be released direct to theaters exclusively, but shortly after that you will get the, it currently stands at four hours and 20 minutes, I think.
Leo Laporte (02:02:25):
Really Scott's
Andy Ihnatko (02:02:25):
Version of,
Leo Laporte (02:02:26):
I want to
Andy Ihnatko (02:02:27):
See that.
Leo Laporte (02:02:27):
Yeah. That's not out yet, is it? It's,
Andy Ihnatko (02:02:30):
No, no, I don't think it's released until November. I think
Leo Laporte (02:02:33):
November.
Andy Ihnatko (02:02:34):
But yeah, this is the reason why
Leo Laporte (02:02:36):
This is what Apple should do. This is brilliant.
Andy Ihnatko (02:02:39):
It's not only prestige, but it's epic prestige. This is classic like 1960s, 1970s, crazy directors wanting to make a movie as big as they can possibly make it on a subject that cannot possibly be contained by anything more than 20 hours worth of footage. So
Leo Laporte (02:02:56):
The theatrical version is two hours and 38 minutes fine release that, get as much movie tickets and sell some popcorn and then all that, but for the real buffs, put the four plus hour cut on the streaming. We can always pause it and go to the bathroom and things like that. I think that's fantastic. Apple hasn't said, but presumably they'll do both the theatrical cut and the director's cut. In fact, I'd love to see when you buy stuff on iTunes now, they often have D V D extras, including commentaries. I'm really glad those are surviving. I think that's fantastic. I don't buy anything if I don't. Yeah, I look for the
Alex Lindsay (02:03:33):
Reason I buy it and I can find it on a free service. The reason I own hundreds of movies on iTunes or whatever they call movie TV is because I can go through all those extras,
Andy Ihnatko (02:03:46):
Which
Leo Laporte (02:03:47):
Apple's budget for first run Flix according to nine to five Mac is 1 billion a year, which isn't going to go that far. The New Exorcist sequel costs 400 million, so you'll get two exorcist sequels and maybe low budget
Andy Ihnatko (02:04:07):
Thrown
Leo Laporte (02:04:07):
In.
Alex Lindsay (02:04:09):
I think Apple is starting to prove, I think that quantity over quality, quality
Leo Laporte (02:04:14):
Over quantity, quality over quantity, and
Alex Lindsay (02:04:17):
With the changes in a lot of the contracts and everything else, the rumor is that a lot of the services are going to take more of Apple's route, which is really spending a lot more money on a lot less content because it's just of the way that everything's structured. So I think that you'll probably see a lot more of that from all the services.
Leo Laporte (02:04:36):
That's good way to solve the conundrum for streaming services, which is how do we keep people paying for subscriptions and
Alex Lindsay (02:04:44):
If you
Leo Laporte (02:04:44):
Offer some of real value, they're going to pay for it
Alex Lindsay (02:04:47):
And you spread it out. I mean, that's what Disney does pretty well, which is that we're just going to keep on rolling things out to you at a certain rate, and I think that there, and then you'll see probably more windowing, which Max is doing more of where they're just taking stuff out of rotation as well because they're going to have to manage it a lot tighter now than they had before. Yeah,
Andy Ihnatko (02:05:07):
There also seems to be the swing away to, you know what, let's not just dump all the episodes up once and have people binge it. Let's give people a reason to come back and open up that app at least once a week. And it's good for episodic storytelling. It's also probably good for the bottom line and
Alex Lindsay (02:05:25):
I can't watch it anymore. I can't really can't watch weekly. My daughter's watching Gilmore Girls and we were talking about the fact that she's just plotting through it one after another and I was like, yeah, they used to do this once a week. She's like once a week. She watches one a day and she's like once a week.
Andy Ihnatko (02:05:46):
They keep track of what's going on once a
Leo Laporte (02:05:48):
Week.
Andy Ihnatko (02:05:48):
I agree. I'm with her. My memory
Leo Laporte (02:05:50):
Only extends about seven hours. I need to
Andy Ihnatko (02:05:53):
Watch it. I need to at least. There's some air between the episodes. I was watching this week's Bob's Burgers yesterday, and my
Leo Laporte (02:06:04):
God,
Andy Ihnatko (02:06:05):
They're in season 14 and they just made one of the best episodes of television I've seen in a long time. They're taking chances. They're doing things that are extremely hard. It hits hard emotionally, even though it's a comedy, they find, you know what? We have an idea for a story that requires a major pivot in how we tell stories and how we direct this show.
Leo Laporte (02:06:25):
Do I have to watch all 13 years of Bob's burgers to understand the importance and value of this episode?
Andy Ihnatko (02:06:31):
No. No, not at all. As a matter of fact, it might even help because the main cast, like the Belcher family who run this burger restaurant that's struggling, but basically surviving in the seaside tourist town, they decided to we're going to take a minor character and make them the star of the show and tell a really interesting, and again, I was like,
Leo Laporte (02:06:55):
I'm fine. No, no, I'm just need to shared the air filter. It's like episode three of Last of Us, which really didn't fit in with the rest of the thing, but it is obviously the director of the writers had some great thing they wanted to express and we put it there.
Andy Ihnatko (02:07:12):
But what I'm getting at is that last week was another really nice, well-earned challenging episode, but more along the lines of a typical funny episode with lots of funny bits in it. If you had with an week's worth of air between last night's episode and last week's last night's episode, this week's episode hit so much harder and it was so much more of a beautiful experience, whereas I were just watching all of them in one afternoon with no time to process and ruminate. It would've seemed like a piece of disposable conveyor belt
Leo Laporte (02:07:44):
Package
Andy Ihnatko (02:07:45):
Twinkies. Obviously
Leo Laporte (02:07:45):
I'm a binger. I am. If I can binge. Sometimes I'll even put off a series until it's fully dropped to watch it all. But then I feel like I ate a dozen Krispy Kreme donuts at one sitting and I kind of regret it. So maybe it's not the best. When Lisa and I look up and we say, we've been watching this show for five hours, that's when we know maybe it wasn't the best final story before we take our break and get your picks. We now know what was wrong in France. You remember that the French authorities said, you cannot sell the Aon 12. It will kill our people.
Andy Ihnatko (02:08:23):
It's a radioactive nightmare,
Leo Laporte (02:08:25):
Terrible thing. Apple said, well, okay, we're going to fix it. We're going to fix this SHI and z French said, you better or you cannot sell it. So Apple has now an iOS 17.1, which will be the fix. Put this summary out. iOS 17 one includes an update for iPhone 12 for users in France to accommodate this specific test protocol that requires reduced power when off body on a static surface. So it was a very particular situation. iPhone 12 will no longer increase the allowed power when the off body stay is detected, such as when it's sitting on a table as such a cover areas where cellular signal is low
Andy Ihnatko (02:09:09):
Ain't going to work as well,
Leo Laporte (02:09:11):
But you probably won't notice it. So I guess they're turning up the antenna if it's not in your pocket, if it's off because it's presumably to protect you, and the French said, well, we can see it. It's still Regi into my GRA
Andy Ihnatko (02:09:28):
Basically is that they had a test system for the safety of the phone without taking into consideration that the iPhone can detect when it can detect when it's not actually close enough to somebody's body to do any damage where they can just say, let's go YOLO with a radio signal. However, it's on a test stand that's designed to measure how much radiation is coming off of it. So whereas it started off with a, oh my god, this is pumping out there, there are people who are basically, their left ear is green and Hulk ish because of all of radiation coming off of the iPhone 12. No, because of here is a test protocol that Apple was not sufficiently hip to be able to make sure that they can pass this protocol. I
Leo Laporte (02:10:08):
Love that name. So they took the let's go YOLO feature out of the iPhone 12, but presumably that's in all subsequent iPhones. So 17 one will I assume fix this and no more. Let's go yolo. Thank you for that. I'm
Andy Ihnatko (02:10:21):
I's surprised it took them by surprise because if there's anything that an iPhone has to test, they have to pass in any regionality. They know what it is and they want to make sure that they pass it. It's amazing. I also realized that the iPhone 12 has been out for quite a while now, and the French regulators were just now getting around to saying that, oh, there's a health hazard we think defined by this phone. If this were like an Alley Express phone that actually was causing health issues, I would want them to catch that in less than few than two years. That's
Leo Laporte (02:10:54):
Not bad, that's not a bad thing, but maybe a little sooner. Next time, French guys, they were busy eating some brie, drinking some wine, enjoying their life besides it was August.
Andy Ihnatko (02:11:05):
Love your pastry,
Leo Laporte (02:11:06):
Love the pastry guys.
Andy Ihnatko (02:11:09):
No nights
Leo Laporte (02:11:10):
Little break and then your picks of the week as we continue with Mac Break Weekly, our show today brought to you by ZipRecruiter. Hey, you know what? Tip of the hat? A raise the roof. A shout out to all those people who in HR who have to hire employees, whether it's somebody like Lisa in a small business going to job fairs, HR directors, vetting hundreds of applications. That is a tough job and it's a very important job because every business rises or falls based on its people. So what if I were to tell you there's something that can make you heroes of the hiring revolution, your whole hiring process faster and easier? Well, there it is. It's ZipRecruiter and right now you can try ZipRecruiter free at ziprecruiter.com/mac break. You will love ZipRecruiter. It's what we use when we need to hire for a number of reasons.
(02:12:07):
Of course, once you post your job on ZipRecruiter, it goes out to over a hundred job sites, so you're casting the widest possible net. ZipRecruiter is a lifesaver though because all of those applications don't go into your email box. They don't go into your phone voicemail. They go into the ZipRecruiter interface where you could do some really useful things. They reformat all the resumes so it's easy to scan them. You can actually write screening questions, true, false, multiple choice, even essay questions to help you eliminate people who just don't have the qualifications you need. And then there's this ZipRecruiter's powerful technology. They have a million plus resumes, current resumes on file scans through those resumes and looks for people whose skills and experience match your opening. They don't then tell those people, they tell you, they say, Hey, we've got 20 people here who seem to fit your job listing.
(02:13:03):
What do you think? You get to look at 'em and say, well, that guy, oh yeah, she's great. Okay, how about these three? We're going to invite them to apply. I'll tell you what happens when you invite somebody to apply. You jump right to the top of the list. I mean, let's face it, we are competing for the best employees. It's a tough situation out there for employers. Wouldn't you like those top employees to come back and say, yeah, I want this job. They asked me, they invited me. They'll apply sooner. They'll stick through the whole process and much more likely to be the employee that you hire. ZipRecruiter has help make hiring faster and easier for businesses of all sizes. It's all we use. We love it. We will find a good candidate usually within just a couple of hours, which is important when you're down a person, 3.8 million businesses have come to ZipRecruiter for their hiring needs.
(02:13:52):
You should too. So to you hiring heroes, I say let ZipRecruiter make your job easier. Four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter, get a quality candidate within the first day. See for yourself. Go to our special address, ziprecruiter.com/mac break and make sure you use that so we get credit and try it for free. ziprecruiter.com/m A C B R E A K. ZipRecruiter the smartest way to hire. We thank 'em so much for doing such a good job for us. They'll do a good job for you too. Try it free ziprecruiter.com/mac break. Jason Snell,
Jason Snell (02:14:33):
Leo Laport,
Leo Laporte (02:14:34):
Pick of the week. Hello. Hello sir.
Jason Snell (02:14:36):
Pick of the week.
Leo Laporte (02:14:36):
Hello, sir.
Jason Snell (02:14:37):
Hello, sir. Pacoima. Hello, you're on, sir.
Leo Laporte (02:14:40):
Hello,
Jason Snell (02:14:40):
Pacoima. Do you know the count or
Leo Laporte (02:14:43):
The amount lemme
Jason Snell (02:14:44):
Grow for We're ca coming in clear live Grove bartender five is out and bartender me.
Leo Laporte (02:14:51):
Oh, I use this for
Jason Snell (02:14:52):
Me, an
Leo Laporte (02:14:52):
Essential
Jason Snell (02:14:52):
Mac utility, new version number five $16 cheap if you're already using it, $8 upgrade fee cheap. I am a little bit of a minimalist. It turns out I don't like a lot of clutter, unnecessary clutter on my Mac, including in my menu bar.
Leo Laporte (02:15:05):
And if you're a person with a notch, this is a must because stuff hides behind the notch. It's
Jason Snell (02:15:13):
Exactly. So what this does is it lets you organize the items in your menu bar up in the upper right hand corner, all those little icons, and it does things like hide them until you move your mouse into the menu bar. You can do groups in this version. In version five, there's actually a scripting interface, so you can actually have it run a test and say, if this is true, show this item. Otherwise keep it hidden. So it's like a lot of really advanced features. You can change the look of the menu bar too to make it look really weird and creepy and I don't like it, but little lozenges or little floating bars and stuff instead of the traditional Mac menu bar. But I have 5, 6, 7 items that are just hidden. Dropbox. For example, if I want to use, I don't need to see the Dropbox icon all the time in my menu bar.
(02:16:02):
If I want to look at the Dropbox menu, I will move my mouse up and it reveals all of the hidden icons and then I can click on the Dropbox menu. Same for a whole bunch of other menu bar items that are just, I don't need to see them unless I choose to go up there and see them. I don't need to have them hovering in my peripheral vision all this time. So it's a really simple utility that does all of that. A bunch of tweaky settings if you care. It's such a good well-built utility, continuing to be updated, continue to be supported, new features added all the time. It's so good. It's a must have for me. Every time I sit down in a Mac and I see like 15 icons, splayed all the way out into the notch. No, no, no, no, no.
Andy Ihnatko (02:16:43):
Bartender,
Jason Snell (02:16:44):
Bartender, five.
Leo Laporte (02:16:45):
Hate having stuff. Mac
Andy Ihnatko (02:16:46):
Bartender.com,
Jason Snell (02:16:48):
Mac bartender.com
Leo Laporte (02:16:49):
Recommended highly
Jason Snell (02:16:51):
So good.
Leo Laporte (02:16:52):
Yes, and coming soon, menu bar widgets, which will be very interesting to see how those
Jason Snell (02:16:59):
Work. Like I said, there's a lot going on in that developer's brain about what to do up on the menu bar. I love it.
Leo Laporte (02:17:06):
Yeah, I can't wait to see what that's all about, Andy, and not go pick of the week.
Andy Ihnatko (02:17:10):
A really exciting one. This week after four years, we have a new version of the Raspberry Pie single board computer. I have released hardware or first one's off the line. It starts pre-orders at the end of this month and oh my God, it is a huge, huge upgrade over the previous one, over the Raspberry PI four where the four was a hell of a lot of fun because it could do pretty much anything you wanted it to do. If you want to slap it inside a case, plug in a screen keyboard, whatever, and use it as like a simple Linux box, it'll work just fine as well as, Hey, I want to run it as a media server. Hey, I want to run it as an ad block or a might network. I want to run it as the core of a robot run AI vision models on it, whatever you want to do with it.
(02:17:57):
This is such a boost in performance that whereas before, I would use it as a desktop sort of in a pinch or just to show that I can do it now. It is a legit desktop. It's fast enough and has enough IO on it that I've had it plugged into one of the H D M I ports on my desk next to the My Mac Mini. And it was running fast enough and solid enough that it did that thing where I forgot that I was testing something and I just got into an afternoon of work with it because before you would see sort of a lag, particularly if you're doing video, there's limits to what it could do now. It really is so fast that it can handle pretty much anything. They also super upgraded the io now it has a P C I express.
(02:18:41):
So if you want to use, instead of an SD card, you want to use like an M two SS s d. It doesn't have an M two slot on it, but now you put a hat on it with the IO pins, and now basically it has P C I E, so it can run like a regular M two Ss s d, like a two terabyte S S D at the speed that you would expect a desktop to go at. Not super, super, super duper fast, but again, the idea of I want to run this as a media server or I want to basically put together a $100 desktop box that I can keep in the living room with one of my old screens and old keyboards. It's also super, super cool because you remember a couple weeks ago I talked about this really cool app for my iPad called Orion by Lux, the same people who do again, that camera app that we've been talking about today. Yes,
Leo Laporte (02:19:34):
You haylight. I dunno why
Andy Ihnatko (02:19:35):
It's not in my mind, but yeah, where with this free app, you can plug in a $15 H D M I adapter, H D M I to U S B, excuse me, to SB three,
Leo Laporte (02:19:46):
Sorry,
Andy Ihnatko (02:19:47):
50 H D M I adapter to your iPad and turn had too
Leo Laporte (02:19:50):
Many crispy creams and that's what's going on.
Andy Ihnatko (02:19:53):
Well, the problem is that I've switched to clear alcohol instead of ING the,
(02:19:59):
I'm kind of off my game, but the idea is that they don't have, I don't have a case for it yet because it's a different design. They have to put a different case in it, but I can easily, it runs off of a standard power connector, so I can basically put this little deck of cards thing in my bag along with an HT M I dongle, and if I run into a situation where one of those many situations as an iPad user where, oh, if I had a real PC with a real file system and a real operating system, I could solve this problem in 20 seconds, but I don't, so I'm in hell with this little board in my bag. Hey, I can now use, I can just simply plug into my iPad as simply an hdm I monitor and with my keyboard, my mouse, now I have a real desktop pc, even though I didn't really intend to do so.
(02:20:49):
It's the top of the line one, if you want a cheap raspberry pie, you could still get the previous models for the usual cheap rates of anywhere from 10 bucks to 30 or 40. This is now the top of the line, one with four gigs of operational ram. It's 60 bucks with eight gigs, it is 80 bucks. That's still not a lot of money for a machine you can have a lot of fun with. I mean, just to close out, I mean, yes, I do have some vintage max. Yes, I do enjoy them, but the reason why I just can't get any interest in actually getting my Mac classic up and running is because by the time I recap the board, by the time I fix any damage done to the board with battery leakage, by the time I get the monitor screen going, by the time I make sure I have the proper mouse and keyboard, it's like, but I can just run emulation on this and it will be just, it'll run all the same software in color.
(02:21:44):
This will support two four K monitors simultaneously. That's how powerful it is. So I'm like, why wouldn't I just tear out all the guts of this Mac Classic, like a Halloween pumpkin mounted in a brand new HD display and just have this empty shell of empty air that just has this little board and that little screen in it. It's like that would be a much more, if all I want to do is run apps and run a West nine or whatever, it's a much, much better situation. But that's what I'm getting at. It's a fun board to have around just to say whatever I want to do with a single board computer, I can explore and have fun with it. Again, that's why I'm just not terribly interested in vintage computing because every itch that I might have had that would be scratched by having an Apple two E set up.
(02:22:30):
Oh wow. I can write and assemble. Wow, I have complete control over everything. This is complete control over everything, and it's completely modern set up too. So it starts shipping at the end of the month. I don't think they started taking orders yet, but go to raspberry pi.org to read more about it and find places where you can buy it. They might sell out really, really quickly. They've been really constrained on merchandise for the past couple of years, since the covid limitations. So this might be your first opportunity to easily place an order for a raspberry pie and actually get it in three or four days.
Leo Laporte (02:23:01):
Very nice. Very excited about
Andy Ihnatko (02:23:03):
This
Leo Laporte (02:23:04):
Alex Lindsay
Andy Ihnatko (02:23:06):
Pick
Leo Laporte (02:23:06):
Of the week.
Alex Lindsay (02:23:07):
So as you know, I cook a lot of things and my whole family now has kind of gotten into cooking most of the meals that we have, and most of them are pretty much from scratch, and so we're constantly keeping track of recipes and I was complaining about, and a friend of mine was like, you got to check out Paprika three. Paprika three Paprika is an app that runs on your, I'm using it on my iPhone, I guess I haven't used it on any else.
Leo Laporte (02:23:30):
I use it everywhere. I love paprika. Yeah,
Alex Lindsay (02:23:33):
So
Andy Ihnatko (02:23:34):
Here's the killer.
Leo Laporte (02:23:35):
I'm not talking the spl, I'm talking the app.
Andy Ihnatko (02:23:39):
Paprika pretty good,
Alex Lindsay (02:23:40):
But the crazy thing here is when you go into browser and you have almost every website that you would go to, Epicurious and b, BBC Food and Bon Appetit and everything else, and then you go into, I'm going to go to Epicurious and I'm going to find something on let's say pancakes, and I'm going to go to that, and so I find the pancakes that I want, we'll just say the lazy days pancakes. And the crazy thing is then you just say, I'd like to download that. And what it does is it pulls all the information that you wanted out of it so it separates
Andy Ihnatko (02:24:22):
The ingredient. Lately
Leo Laporte (02:24:23):
This has been a terrible
Andy Ihnatko (02:24:24):
Thing, but recipe sites have page
Leo Laporte (02:24:27):
After page of prose
Andy Ihnatko (02:24:29):
And then at the bottom
Leo Laporte (02:24:30):
Of it, the recipe, and you've got to go all
Andy Ihnatko (02:24:32):
The,
Alex Lindsay (02:24:33):
And they have all these, and the reason they put all that prose in is because they want all those ads. They have all these ads and it just becomes get the business model, but it's really painful to use when you're actually trying to make something. So what it does, it extracts all
Leo Laporte (02:24:43):
That. Then here's the recipe at the
Andy Ihnatko (02:24:44):
Bottom.
Leo Laporte (02:24:45):
So yeah, this is so cool. Go ahead, describe it. I'm on an epicurious Italian rainbow cookies. So
Alex Lindsay (02:24:53):
Then you just go download at the bottom, press the
Leo Laporte (02:24:55):
Download button,
Alex Lindsay (02:24:56):
And it just pulls it in
Andy Ihnatko (02:24:58):
And
Leo Laporte (02:24:58):
It's got a recipe. Oh, wait a minute. Didn't work on this one.
Alex Lindsay (02:25:01):
It didn't because I
Leo Laporte (02:25:02):
Think there was no recipe in it. Thank you.
Alex Lindsay (02:25:06):
How you get that?
Leo Laporte (02:25:08):
Holy cow.
Alex Lindsay (02:25:09):
But it extracts it, and the big thing is that you can save it and then once now you have this little list, but you can categorize it. These are my dinners. These are the ones that I like. These are the, I don't know, the ones that you make with, here's a good one. Those types of things.
Leo Laporte (02:25:25):
That's what we want to make. Yum. Thank you
Andy Ihnatko (02:25:27):
Very
Leo Laporte (02:25:27):
Much. Thank you very much.
Alex Lindsay (02:25:30):
I have this
Andy Ihnatko (02:25:31):
Ice step that's a different lock. That's good though. I liked it. I got it.
Leo Laporte (02:25:35):
And so look, it puts in the recipe, but puts a convert it once you
Alex Lindsay (02:25:41):
Save it.
Leo Laporte (02:25:41):
Yeah.
Alex Lindsay (02:25:42):
Where's the save? Lemme
Leo Laporte (02:25:43):
Save it. Yeah,
Alex Lindsay (02:25:44):
And then go open it
Leo Laporte (02:25:45):
Up. Now go to my recipe. So that was in a browser, and I'll do the most recent recipes so that we can Yeah, well, I do it with anything. Let's do it with this. All right.
Alex Lindsay (02:25:55):
But then you have that scale and convert. So you go in there and you go, oh, right at the very top, right at the very top of the ingredients, right under ingredients, but above the words. You'll see it, it's blue. Hit that
Leo Laporte (02:26:07):
Scale and convert right there. And I can say,
Alex Lindsay (02:26:09):
Now I can say this is a scale of one, but I have a lot more people coming, so I can make it two. I can change it to metric. I can do all, I tend to cook in metrics, so because I use scales for everything. So let's
Leo Laporte (02:26:22):
Make chicken soup for a hundred. Okay, yeah, so many.
Alex Lindsay (02:26:29):
And then make it metric, and then you'll be like
Andy Ihnatko (02:26:31):
80
Alex Lindsay (02:26:32):
Liters of chicken. I need
Leo Laporte (02:26:34):
A hundred hold chickens. There you go. Exactly. The 200 celery stocks, celery stock.
Alex Lindsay (02:26:42):
But the thing is, is that you can categorize it. There's so much here.
Leo Laporte (02:26:47):
Oh, I love
Alex Lindsay (02:26:48):
This, and it is, and it
Leo Laporte (02:26:50):
Syncs, which is really important to me. From your iPhone to your Mac, to your Windows PC to your Android device. So your recipes are everywhere,
Alex Lindsay (02:27:00):
And you can find them really quickly. You can add notes to them. It's easy to change. You're not trying to figure out where was that on or where was that somewhere else. You now have it. It's in there and it's kind of every time I open it, I find some new little thing that you're like, oh,
Andy Ihnatko (02:27:16):
This
Leo Laporte (02:27:16):
Works really
Andy Ihnatko (02:27:17):
Well.
Leo Laporte (02:27:17):
Grocery lists, meal planning.
Andy Ihnatko (02:27:21):
Does it work with the share sheets? I use recipe keeper and it's nice. I'll be on Reddit or someplace. I'll come across a recipe and I just simply just simply share it to the app and suddenly it is inside my recipe book. I use the built-in browser.
Alex Lindsay (02:27:38):
I have to admit, I don't know. I think I would cut and paste it in there. I have to admit that I just open it now. I
Leo Laporte (02:27:44):
Open it in the browser. Yeah, the
Alex Lindsay (02:27:45):
Browser inside the app. I haven't tried to use it somewhere. I don't know if it has an external input version of it. And then it also has, for instance, the other thing is you can say, I want to put this in my grocery list. And so you can take all the different meals that you're going to make. So you could decide, here are all, this is what I'm kind of working towards. I haven't figured this out all yet, but you basically say, these are all the things I'm going to eat next week and these are the things that I need. And you can even add everything you have in your pantry. I'm not going to go that far, but you could. And then you say, these are all the things I'm going to eat. Put these all into my, I can go through each one and say, I don't have this. I need this or whatever, but I'm thinking about it per recipe. It will then build a shopping list that has all of those things and it groups them based. The biggest thing a problem I have is I do 'em as I think of 'em. I don't categorize 'em as
Andy Ihnatko (02:28:35):
The vegetables
Alex Lindsay (02:28:36):
Or the spices, but it does. So now I go and I can go on Sunday morning and which is the best time to get bread at Whole Foods in case you're wondering. And so you can go to Sunday morning to Whole Foods and I can go and I can just go through all of it and go to each section and get everything that I need for next week's cooking. I didn't forget anything unless, but it's all categorized and just I feel like, again, as I have to admit that the inflation has really, the place I notice it the most is when I go to restaurants.
Leo Laporte (02:29:10):
Oh, it's so expensive to eat out now.
Alex Lindsay (02:29:13):
It's outrageous. So I have to admit between that and the fact that I really have been trying to eat much more healthy, we've just gotten to this thing where almost everything we have comes from the farmer's market. Now. We bring it back and we have a C s A with, and so we bring stuff back and we go, now we have to figure out what to do this with eggplant and
Andy Ihnatko (02:29:32):
Which
Alex Lindsay (02:29:33):
We went through a lot of last night, which is good. Anyway, but the point is the hardest part was trying to tag all of these websites and all these locations, and this allows you to just bring it all the things you have normal regularly or even things you want to experiment with. It's all
Andy Ihnatko (02:29:52):
Just gets pulled into one place.
Leo Laporte (02:29:53):
To answer your question, Andy, on iOS anyway, it is not in the share sheets, unfortunately, so you have to copy. I know that's a nice feature.
Andy Ihnatko (02:30:01):
I'm sure they can add that really easily. That's such a game changer. It doesn't
Alex Lindsay (02:30:04):
Seem like you can save it. You can share with other people either. I haven't figured that out either. Where
Andy Ihnatko (02:30:09):
You
Leo Laporte (02:30:09):
Can, oh, you can, but you have to share it in a format. And there's a couple of, there's the mastership format, you can't share it to other people. I do that all the time. So you know what, everybody, all three of you now have had your favorite recipe app, so I'm going to get 'em all in here. So you say paprika. I'm with you on that, Alex. That's the one I use. Andy, you said, what do you use?
Andy Ihnatko (02:30:29):
Recipe keeper.
Leo Laporte (02:30:30):
Recipe Keeper. It sounds
Andy Ihnatko (02:30:31):
Like a fraudulent app, but is actually
Leo Laporte (02:30:33):
A big, I think that's been around for a long time. I used to use a master chef, and that actually was so successful that it made a standard for recipe formats.
Andy Ihnatko (02:30:46):
Recipe. It's copyright tutor span limited
Leo Laporte (02:30:50):
T span limited recipe keeper online.com. And I know Jason Snell, you have one that you've recommended. What's your
Andy Ihnatko (02:30:57):
Mela?
Leo Laporte (02:30:58):
Mela, the one that is eggplant, M E
Andy Ihnatko (02:31:00):
L A
Leo Laporte (02:31:00):
In Spanish or
Alex Lindsay (02:31:01):
Something. Zi from Italy.
Leo Laporte (02:31:03):
Yeah. So there's, you know what? Obviously all three of you're cooks. Mela is at Mela recipes. I think you probably should try all three of these and pick the one you like.
Andy Ihnatko (02:31:17):
I just realized I was on a super rutt for weekend weekday cooking. I kick out the jam for the weekend, but on the weekday it's like, okay, let's put a pork cup in the So and heat up some rice or whatever. But yeah, whatever app you use, it really is kind of a game changer because the times when I'm shopping and I suddenly remember, oh, that's right, I saw that really cool recipe for, they called it apple cider donut bread. What do I need to get for that? And because it's right there on your phone already as opposed to a bookmark somewhere in your browser, you tend to actually leap on that. And when you go to the next level and you start doing things like, yes, definitely I want to slot this in for Tuesday night. I'm going to slot this in for Thursday night, and Alex says, it will just simply tell you here's what you need to buy and why you need to buy it. It's just amazing.
Leo Laporte (02:32:06):
It's funny, we're all cooks. We, I guess that's a good thing. You should be a cook. We all eat food. Yeah, everybody eats
Andy Ihnatko (02:32:12):
Commonality in most
Leo Laporte (02:32:12):
Mammal, so it's
Alex Lindsay (02:32:14):
One of the things I'm really working on with my kids is making sure they know how to cook. I didn't really cook much until I was probably 30. I knew how to cook ramen. The
Leo Laporte (02:32:22):
Kids need to cook, as you say,
Alex Lindsay (02:32:24):
It's such a basic skill. I think that in all of our No Child Left Behind in all the things that we did with our school, we took out all the Home ec and all the things that, and the shop class and all the things that actually made life livable art, music so that we could learn things that we'll forget.
Leo Laporte (02:32:42):
So anyway,
Alex Lindsay (02:32:45):
I just think that it's such a core skill that I wish I had gotten into much earlier.
Leo Laporte (02:32:50):
I agree. And
Alex Lindsay (02:32:50):
If you're listening to this, there's nothing better than learning how to cook and just being able to be self-sufficient with basic stuff, not feeling like you have to buy. I think
Leo Laporte (02:33:00):
Cooking attracts nerds because it's like chemistry, it's like coding. It's kind of, I
Alex Lindsay (02:33:07):
Think that Elton Brown is what got me into it.
Leo Laporte (02:33:10):
Oh yeah. He's fantastic.
Alex Lindsay (02:33:11):
Just watching out in Brown nerd. It's just nerdy nerd. And he was a nerd that went to learn cooking so that he could make a nerdy show about
Leo Laporte (02:33:22):
TV show. Yeah,
Alex Lindsay (02:33:22):
TV show about it. So that's the perfect solution. And yeah, if you don't watch Alton Brown, then you should, if you're listening to the show, you should watch out. You should go back and look at Good Eats. Check it out.
Leo Laporte (02:33:35):
Well, by the way, I just installed Melon. I noticed it somehow automatically imported all of my paprika recipes, so a little victory for MEA there. It's not cross-platform, but boy, that's good. Nice job. How did it know? How do it find 'em all? That's
Andy Ihnatko (02:33:53):
Impressive.
Alex Lindsay (02:33:54):
I imagine that saving paprika, saving them in a folder in your iCloud or on your phone.
Leo Laporte (02:33:58):
Yeah, it must be the paprika folder way to look. And this is the problem in general is if you pick a, that's why I was so mad that Master Chef disappeared because I had so many recipes in there. And so
Andy Ihnatko (02:34:10):
That's
Leo Laporte (02:34:10):
A nice,
Andy Ihnatko (02:34:12):
It's weird with what gets you into it. The show on the Food Network Chopped actually got me kind of perked me up because just watching how people cook in a non fussy presentational way, just like, oh, that's why when I make green beans, there's always way too much dressing or way too little it. They actually get a little metal bowl and they actually toss it in the bowl before they take it out of the bowl and put it on the, oh, it sounds stupid, but it's like, I only know what I've saw. I've seen my mother and my grandmother do, which means that if they did it wrong, if they did it brilliantly, that's how I'm doing it for life. If they did it wrong, I'm going to be keeping it wrong until the rest of my life. So yeah, all kids should learn how to cook. Well,
Leo Laporte (02:35:00):
We all agree on one thing anyway,
Andy Ihnatko (02:35:02):
So
Leo Laporte (02:35:02):
Thank you very much. All three of you for a
Andy Ihnatko (02:35:05):
Wonderful show. Jason Snell
Leo Laporte (02:35:06):
Is@sixcolors.com. We've referred to it quite a few times on this show, so I think you probably should go visit. And of course, all of his podcasts are at
Andy Ihnatko (02:35:16):
Six
Leo Laporte (02:35:17):
Colors.com/jason. Is there one in particular you think people should be checking
Andy Ihnatko (02:35:22):
Out?
Jason Snell (02:35:23):
Oh, I don't know. Robot or Not is a podcast that I do. It's ridiculous. I
Leo Laporte (02:35:28):
Love that idea. Me
Jason Snell (02:35:29):
And John Syracuse and we just debate what things are, or really, John sort of tells you what the right answer is, and you can pick that as you may. But we did the first a hundred episodes just about if something was a robot or not. And then we've since spread out to broader philosophy things, the most recent episodes about nachos, where John being from Long Island and living in Massachusetts. There was a question about what nachos are and I was like, wait a second, John, I got this one. It's a
Leo Laporte (02:35:55):
Lifelong time. I don't know what they do in Southeast for nachos, but I don't think it's the same in Cal as in California.
Jason Snell (02:36:00):
I don't know. It turns out though, that in England chips and cheese means something entirely different. So
Leo Laporte (02:36:05):
Oh,
Jason Snell (02:36:07):
It's like french fries with cheese on it.
Leo Laporte (02:36:08):
Oh, I thought it was dirty. I thought
Andy Ihnatko (02:36:10):
It was a urban dictionary entry. Oh, you
Jason Snell (02:36:13):
Wanted know chips
Andy Ihnatko (02:36:14):
And cheese? Hey,
Jason Snell (02:36:15):
It's just french fries with cheese on them. Why would you do that? Well,
Andy Ihnatko (02:36:18):
I found out when I went to Wisconsin that cheese curds
Leo Laporte (02:36:20):
Are just cheese.
Andy Ihnatko (02:36:22):
So
Leo Laporte (02:36:23):
I opener for me, Andy and aco, when are you going to be on G B H next?
Andy Ihnatko (02:36:30):
I'll be at the Boston Public Library next Friday at 1230. So you can come on, Ben, come on in, go to the cafe, pick up, buy yourself a coffee or beverage or a sandwich and watch what's going to be really cool to our show of me being maybe 20 to 30 minutes of it or go to WGBH news.org to stream it live or later or go to the WGBH News channel on YouTube to actually watch the video later.
Leo Laporte (02:36:52):
Thank you so much. Great to have you Alex Lindsay. Office Hours is the place to go to find out what's going on in the world of production and graphics and cooking and a lot of other things. What's up on
Andy Ihnatko (02:37:06):
Office Hours this week?
Leo Laporte (02:37:07):
Well, we're
Jason Snell (02:37:08):
Trying a little
Leo Laporte (02:37:08):
One-two
Jason Snell (02:37:09):
Punch
Leo Laporte (02:37:09):
Here with interviews and so we're going to see how this goes. So
Jason Snell (02:37:11):
Michael Krasney
Leo Laporte (02:37:12):
Had Ian Mcca, who's an old
Jason Snell (02:37:14):
Friend of
Alex Lindsay (02:37:14):
Mine from Lucasfilm, one of the character designers for Star Wars on last Friday, just released today. So we just dropped it on Grey Matter Show, and then we're having Ian on Office hours on Monday. Oh, nice. So you get to listen to the interview and then go and then ask questions yourself. So we're kind of doing this, but it's, people kept on texting me like, this is an incredible interview with Ian. And so Ian Mcca is not just a great artist, but just the way he approaches life is pretty interesting. He'll say things to the side that you're just kind of mind blowing.
Leo Laporte (02:37:50):
Wait a minute, you interviewed Geraldo? Geraldo
Alex Lindsay (02:37:54):
Rivera. Yeah, that must've been
Leo Laporte (02:37:56):
Interesting. Here's the funny thing.
Alex Lindsay (02:37:57):
I know you say it's interesting. It is the most multidimensional version of Geraldo that I've ever seen it. The best interview of Geraldo that has ever
Leo Laporte (02:38:07):
Krasney would be able to bring out the best. I
Alex Lindsay (02:38:09):
Think
Leo Laporte (02:38:10):
He
Alex Lindsay (02:38:10):
Brought out an entirely, a much more nuanced version of Geraldo
Leo Laporte (02:38:14):
Rivera. Was he friends with Geraldo? Is that
Alex Lindsay (02:38:17):
No, I don't know. Michael's Rolodex is very deep and Michael knows Geraldo Rivera's neighbor.
Leo Laporte (02:38:27):
Oh, well, almost as good.
Alex Lindsay (02:38:29):
And it was somehow they got back and forth. They, Ronald Rivera is my neighbor,
Leo Laporte (02:38:34):
Michelle.
Alex Lindsay (02:38:36):
This is
Leo Laporte (02:38:36):
Incredible. This list. James Fallows incredible. I Justine Robert Lustig. Holy cow. I mean, just an amazing list of people.
Alex Lindsay (02:38:47):
Yeah, it's a pretty amazing, again, it's just incredible. And once what happens now is that you have all these, anyway, so we're going to
Leo Laporte (02:38:57):
Grey Matter show and of course if you want to check out Office Hours and Ian's interview on Monday, office hours.global, it's a Zoom call. You can join or watch on YouTube after the fact. Thank you, Alex. Lindsay, I did not mention the entire show that Alexy has a day job and you can get him to help you set up your next event@ohnineoh.media. He works there. Does
Alex Lindsay (02:39:24):
I mostly work on really complex live events. Most
Leo Laporte (02:39:26):
Of the time Complex live events are him oh nine oh media. Thank you everybody for joining us. We do Mac Break Weekly every Tuesday, 11:00 AM Pacific, 2:00 PM Eastern Time, 1800 UT C. Still going to be at 1800 for the next couple of weeks, but we will be moving to daylight or rather standard time in a little bit right after, I think it's the first Sunday after Halloween, so that the candy makers can get all of the candy in your children. That's possible. And then we will fall back. Anyway, it doesn't matter right now it's 1800 utc. You can watch the, or listen to the live stream at Live TWIT tv or you can also get versions of the show. You can go to the website for ITW tv slash mb. You can also watch the YouTube channel that's got Mac Break Weekly. It's dedicated. And of course the best way to do this would be subscribe in the podcast, do the audio or video versions in your favorite podcast player, and that way you'll have it automatically whenever it's available.
(02:40:33):
Should mention that members of Club Twit get ad free versions of this show and all of our shows plus special programming we don't put out anywhere, including that interview with John Scalzi, aunt Pruitt did earlier last week. All you got to do is go to twit tv slash club Twit Fork over seven bucks a month, and all this could be yours plus. And there's no price on this. The wonderful, warm, happy feeling you'd have in your heart knowing you're keeping twit running, and that is very important to me too. So thank you in advance. Twit tv slash club twit that does it for this week's Mac Break Weekly. It is my sad duty to tell you at this point you must go back to work because break time is over. 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 GIZ Fizz and more. Go to twit tv slash club twit and thanks for your support.
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