MacBreak Weekly 896 Transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.

Leo Laporte (00:00:00):
It's time for Macbreak Weekly. The show we talk about the latest from Apple. Jason Snell is here. Andy Anaco is here. Alex Lindsey is here. We are going to have to talk a little bit about the craziness. Over the weekend at Openai Apple's classical music app is now available on the iPad. Why Nothing shut down its Imessage app and Apple bringing Rcs green bubbles to the Iphone. All that more. Coming up next on Macbreak weekly podcasts you love from people you trust. This is twit.

(00:00:39):
This is macbreak weekly episode 896. Recorded Tuesday, November 21st, 2023. Waffles at Jj's. macbreak Weekly is brought to you by zocdoc. The free app where you can find in 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 slash macbreak and download the zocdoc app for free and buy discourse. The online home for your community discourse makes it easy to have meaningful conversations and collaborate anytime anywhere. Visit discourse.org slash twit to get one month free and all self-serve plans. It's time for Macbreak Weekly the show. We cover the latest news from Apple and joining us now the man, the myth, the multicolored legend. Jason Snell six colors.com. Hello Jason.

Jason Snell (00:01:43):
Hello Leo. It's great to be here. I just want to say over my left shoulder is my replica of the Stanford Acts, which the University of California continues to possess. Damn

Leo Laporte (00:01:52):
Them. I was going to ask you how it's the big game, right? The

Jason Snell (00:01:59):
Big game. Yes,

Leo Laporte (00:01:59):
The big game went.

Jason Snell (00:02:00):
Nothing like having your college football team beat its rival. Love it. Brighton High all week again. It's great. It's all it takes. It's like there's nothing like it.

Leo Laporte (00:02:12):
Okay, got the Axe. Own the Axe.

Jason Snell (00:02:15):
We love the

Leo Laporte (00:02:16):
Got the Axe. It's nice to possess that. Do not use it in case of fire, I'm thinking. But there's

Jason Snell (00:02:24):
A whole, it's that early 20th century stuff where there's nonsense of like there was something and then some students stole it and then somebody stole it back and then there was a threat and then somebody brought a live bear to a football game and then there was bad. And finally they're like, okay, why don't we just agree that whoever wins the game can take the Axe, we'll put it on a plaque and let's stop with the nonsense. And then they more or less have stopped, not entirely, but mostly have stopped with the nonsense. But boy, there were shenanigans happening in colleges in the early 20th century. They didn't know what they were doing.

Leo Laporte (00:02:52):
Those days were fun. My friends also with us from Wgbh in Boston, Mr. Andy Anakko. Hello Andrew.

Andy Ihnatko (00:03:02):
Listen, Jason, women lying in ponds distributing forestry equipment is no basis for a system

Leo Laporte (00:03:08):
Of education if

Andy Ihnatko (00:03:10):
There's ever to be any progress.

Leo Laporte (00:03:14):
I love it. And from Officehours.global and Twitter this week. Thank you for filling in. Mr. Alex Lindsay next week. Good to be here. Are you going to be on Twitter next week? No, this week you were on. I was on last week. Yeah, this was last Sunday, day before yesterday. It's very confusing for me. I've been in Vegas. You know the time it has no meaning. You're still getting your hearing back, especially in a race is at midnight. Yeah, it was pretty amazing. Do you want to see some video? Video of the Yeah, it's not the kind of thing. You really have some appreciation for the F one people, the broadcast team. And in fact sometime I'd love to see if you could get us in there. That is a hard thing to do to catch cars going 215 miles an hour by you.

Alex Lindsay (00:04:07):
It's one of the most amazing videos setups out there. They've got feeds coming in from the cars, they, they've got cars obviously in certain

Leo Laporte (00:04:14):
Locations, 124 cameras or something because of the cars.

Andy Ihnatko (00:04:17):
I'm just amazed they managed all those radio channels, not just the video. It's all the telemetry that has to come from each individual car for a million different sensors. And if any one of them fails that's like, Hey, that was $18 million that clutch cost us because we couldn't get that data. Okay,

Leo Laporte (00:04:34):
It's

Andy Ihnatko (00:04:34):
Fun to be on Ferrari teams

Leo Laporte (00:04:37):
$15 million car and when the drainpipe came up in the practice and destroyed sciences car, it cost a million dollars to fix it and he got a penalty.

Andy Ihnatko (00:04:58):
Some punk kid steals your catalytic converter overnight. Don't even ask about it that you don't want to know. Am I the only one that this occurred to that this sounds like the basic premise of Oceans 14, like a big heist movie where there's an F one high-speed race in the middle of Las Vegas. They'll be shutting down and the owner of this new casino built this really ridiculous illuminated ball. That's a big video screen. That was wild

Leo Laporte (00:05:23):
Too. Yeah, they told the ball

Andy Ihnatko (00:05:26):
Is figuring out how this is

Leo Laporte (00:05:27):
During the race. You're not allowed to display red or yellow because they don't want it to be confused with red flags or yellow flags. Oh god. But they

Andy Ihnatko (00:05:36):
Were allowed

Leo Laporte (00:05:37):
To display checkered flags. So that,

Andy Ihnatko (00:05:41):
Is there also the Acme law that says that you cannot display opening to a tunnel or something in the side effect? Oh

Leo Laporte (00:05:48):
Yeah, that would be because seen,

Andy Ihnatko (00:05:49):
I've seen how close that is to the regular road. That would be, I cannot imagine there being huge pileups just like, wow, what the hell is going on there?

Leo Laporte (00:05:55):
We're talking folks about the Formula one race, which is a very expensive high-end auto racing league that happened in Las Vegas over the weekend and on the streets on the strip and shut down Las Vegas. And I have to tell you, the cabbies were very unhappy. It was just a mess. I'll show you the problem with going to an F-One race. And I kind of knew this is the cars are going very fast. We had seats on the strip, by the way, the strip looks horrible. Look at these fences and everything. They had to hide people's sight line. They had to really block off stuff. Let me show you what it looks like when you're on the strip. Lemme see if, is my audio going? You need to hear the audio. Let's see.

(00:06:52):
I'm sorry. This is all you see. Yeah, but isn't it like when you use that app and you figure out when the iss is going overhead and you're like, that was one second. I cannot believe any physical object can go that fast. It is. The first time i went by, I was like, I mean your heart is in your mouth. The TV fools you because you're following it from a distance and it doesn't look like they're going that fast. They're going really fast, so fast, so fast, fast. And the cars are really, you're not hearing what it sounds like. The cars are really loud. My watch kept going off. That's loud. I was wearing actually Airpods Pro Noise reduction is great because it cuts the low end, which is really where most of the noise is. So you just hear this whine go by, but those are really loud.

(00:07:53):
You feel it in your chest and you think who drive a rocket down? Let's make a strip. What insanity. Anyway, it was a lot of fun. We had a great time. But don't go to an F-one race expected to see or race. You're basically seeing what you just saw. There you go right there. Alright, so I'm back. I did miss Did anything happen while I was gone? Was there any tech news? No flow. Yeah, pretty quiet. I was briefly CEO of Openai. You went about a dozen Other was you told me I was in line. I was like, I had my phone on Do Not disturb. I was having dinner when I woke up. When I woke it up, I thought, oh, from six 10 till six, I was disappointed because I could have gotten some stuff done there for everybody, but oh well, it was a large deluxe pizza from next door and I was looking forward to it for a few weeks.

(00:08:49):
I'm sorry everybody. So the Openai drama, which was kind of unexpected, shall we say real here's Sam Altman, the founder and CEO on stage two weeks ago on developer days, announcing Price Cuts and amazing stuff. And I've been playing with it and it's like, wow. And then apparently it was as far as we could tell a palace coup from within the chief scientist, Ilya Sutskever, who was one of the founding fathers of ai, along with Jeff Hinton pointed out, I guess to the board, the problem with open AI is it had a very bizarre organization. It was originally intended to be a, it is a nonprofit 5 0 1 c three nonprofit. And the intent was to when Elon Musk founded it with Sam Altman and a few others. And so Skipper was we don't want big tech, Google, apple, Amazon, Microsoft to own AI because it's too dangerous for a company to own it.

(00:09:53):
It's too powerful. So we're going to start a nonprofit and we're going to do the research in the nonprofit with the best people we can get and we will keep it from the big tech companies. A few years later, they started a move in a weird direction. They actually create a for-profit arm for good reason. It's very, very expensive. It turns out to create ai, especially the training of the models. Elon at that point said, this is not what Y signed up for. I wanted this to be open. And in fact, when they released chat, GPT, Three-Point-five, it wasn't open. They had hidden how the model was generated. And so the board, which was there from the beginning to preserve nonprofit status apparently acted under the instruction of Ilya Suits giver, who was also on the board to oust Sam Altman and the chair of the board too. Greg Brockman because they felt like they were, I think because they felt like they were moving too far in the for-profit Arena and they weren't revealing that to the board. And the board was there for one thing to at least those three, four members were there to preserve this integrity, this open nonprofit integrity. So even though what they did was apparently from a business point of view, suicide, I think they felt like they had to do it.

Jason Snell (00:11:18):
They're a nonprofit. I mean I've been on a nonprofit board, they're a nonprofit board. I mean, I don't know, I would be really interested Leo, especially you, but everybody's thought about, was it naive or cynical to set up this thing as a nonprofit? But it feels like Silicon Valley's full of a lot of people who talk big and I think that they wanted to talk big about being humanitarians by creating open ai. But the fact is vcs are going to vc, founders are going to founder and you end up not that kind of foundering like founding founders are going to found I'll just going to found, founder's going to found. So you end up with Sam Altman who doesn't have actual skin in the game. It's a weird setup here.

Leo Laporte (00:11:57):
None of them do. Not even the board has

Jason Snell (00:11:59):
Shares.

(00:12:00):
So he productizes because that's how he thinks and they build a product and Microsoft based, this is a strategy on it and I get all of that, but it strikes me as being that it was sort of like maybe naive, maybe cynical, but the nonprofit board is acting like a nonprofit board. It's not their job to maximize value or productize something to make a profit. It's totally not why they're there. And that's why it feels like this whole thing was almost doomed from inception if it was ever going to chance upon a profitable product, which it did

Alex Lindsay (00:12:36):
Well, and the problem was is that you can't do what they're doing without billions of dollars, not millions, but billions of dollars. And it's very hard to raise billions of dollars as a nonprofit. And so I think that they got to a point where this isn't sustainable unless we can't do the next thing without having some arm that's generating revenue and pushing it back in. I think that what they needed to do was build probably a firewall between that nonprofit and the for-profit where the nonprofit could have influence, have a seat or two on the profit board but couldn't fire the CEO. That was the missing piece of this firewall because putting the kind of people that they had into the nonprofit board that made sense, having nonprofit people coming out of research facilities, being on a board for a commercial entity is throwing snowflakes into a sauna. Let me

Leo Laporte (00:13:25):
Show you,

Alex Lindsay (00:13:26):
This is from the founding. This is not where they belong.

Leo Laporte (00:13:28):
This is the founding documents, this is the structure of the company. And you immediately see that this is problematic. I think the board members did what they were duty bound to do and they knew it was a suicide mission. They were duty bound to Do I

Alex Lindsay (00:13:45):
Think that they panic?

Leo Laporte (00:13:47):
No, I don't think so. I think that they thought about this long and hard and I don't think that this was a panic move. I mean it was a dumb time to do it. They did it before the markets closed. They killed billions of dollars in value in Microsoft stock. But I think that just as you said, that wasn't their job. Their job was to think as a nonprofit,

Jason Snell (00:14:06):
When you're a nonprofit board, you are a trustee of the public.

Leo Laporte (00:14:10):
Exactly.

Jason Snell (00:14:11):
And in this case, I mean if you read their document, kind of all of humanity, your job is not to have open ai, be a successful productizing company and make Microsoft stock go up and make a lot of money. That's literally not what your job is. Your job is to follow the charter and think about the public, which is who you report to, who you represent. And people, I've seen a lot of hot takes from people who understand how corporations work and don't understand how nonprofits work, but their actions are completely understandable. And then people are like, ah, but they're committing suicide. And they're like, but they don't care their

Leo Laporte (00:14:48):
Job.

Jason Snell (00:14:50):
And a lot of the counter arguments are essentially like, but should they not be tempted by the poison fruits of profit? And the answer is, well technically no, they shouldn't be.

Alex Lindsay (00:15:00):
I think the only counter argument to that is should they have some seat at the table when we talk about ai? Because they've just given it up. They're not going to, the thing is is that now it's off to the races because they're either going to step down and allow something else to happen or all of open Ai is going to go to Microsoft and do whatever they're going to do there. The thing is that I think that the suddenness of it though is it didn't seem like there was any discussion.

Leo Laporte (00:15:27):
We don't know what conversations they had with Sam. Sam was going out and raising money. He has this world coin thing that he's doing that's designed to somehow combine cryptocurrency, a giant orb that scans your irises with basic universal basic income. I mean there's this big effective altruism piece of it. And then Sam was also doing this capitalism thing, going to Saudi money, sovereign funds and Softbank, he wanted to do a phone with Johnny. I funded by Softbank. I mean, so honestly I think the board's going, Sam, Sam, Sam and finally said, Sam, you got to go because this is not what we're supposed to be doing. Now I'm sure they knew, although an interesting thing happened because the guy who led this was one of the board members and the chief scientist of Open Ai, Elias Sutskever, which I've mentioned before, Sutskever backed down. He apologized. He basically tweeted, I'm sorry, we screwed up Sam, come back. Which is very a surprise. The other thing, and this is getting very science fiction and we got to talk about Max, I

Alex Lindsay (00:16:41):
Can't not talk about it. This is like the

Leo Laporte (00:16:44):
Water cooler talk after a bravo of your housewives thing. You can't not talk about it before you start work. The chaos was amazing. Go ahead. I think there is this little thread in here and I don't know how much credence to give it, but what is important to understand about Elias Sutskever is he's a believer in Agi. He is, along with Jeff Hinton and others, one of the people who really thinks we are imminently going to see the development of an artificial intelligence that is equivalent or better than human. And they understand and I think it's the case that it would change everything, every industry, every business, every job, all everything's thrown up in the air. And Sutskever was according to reports from Bloomberg and the information becoming a cheerleader for Agi, which he was really driving them in that direction. And I think there's also this thought that maybe they had hit it, it happened or was about to happen and Sam was hiding it from them. Now I think this is science fiction. I'm not convinced that this will ever happen and I don't think Sam knew it and was happening and it was hiding it, but it's an interesting idea. Well,

Alex Lindsay (00:18:03):
And one of the comments that came up that people are tying to this theory or some theory, it was that Sam said in the conference last week that he said, you only get to see something really happen in this field. We've only seen it four times and one of them was a couple of weeks ago, and a lot of people think that Ilya came back and said, see, see, he's not telling you what that is. That was a big moment and he didn't bring it up and tell you what it was. And so the fact that he brought it up in that conference and just kind of threw it out there kind of casually might've panicked them, but again, I don't think anybody had anybody on that board had a concept of what was going to happen next when they pulled that pin. I think that they thought that it would be like a little hiccup and then they just keep moving forward and they will have exerted their control and they didn't realize that they just opened up this massive box of energy and we'll

Leo Laporte (00:18:54):
Never know. Lot of, we'll never know, won't know. They may have known and said, we still have to do it. Had I been on that board in that role, I might've done that. Remember, not all of us are capitalists. By the way. David Sachs and Jason Calacanis take on this was you can't trust a nonprofit. You can always trust a capitalistic enterprise. You know what their motivation is to make money. That's what Adam too. There's truth in

Jason Snell (00:19:18):
That, right? You trust them. There's

Leo Laporte (00:19:20):
And trust to

Jason Snell (00:19:21):
Be predictable and do exactly what

Leo Laporte (00:19:23):
Their motivation is. They're

Jason Snell (00:19:24):
Going to do. And some people, some members are saying this in the discord, and I think it's true. I think the fatal flaw here is that the structure was so broken and that what you really want as a nonprofit is to, if you're have you do stumble into something and you need to either make a for-profit entity or you need to partner with somebody, you need to structure it in such a way that it benefits your mission but is held at arm's length. And it seems like here again, maybe this was structured this way, it strikes me as being maybe not quite so much that, but even then you can't have an incidence where you look at the for-profit entity and say, this is too much. But maybe the problem is that they made this decision. Now it looks like basically the whole thing, if Sam Altman goes and all of his people go, there's nothing left. Ideally should be able to hold them at arm's length and say, look, they're going to do their capitalism thing and we're going to get money that we're going to put toward altruistic goals. And that's how we're structured and that's not how

Leo Laporte (00:20:25):
Openai is structured. Let read from Charlie Wartzel and Karen House really I think incisive piece in the Atlantic about all this because I think they actually got down to the nub of it. In 2019, OpenAI launched a subsidiary with a capped profit model that could raise money. They had to, it was expensive, a track top talent. They had to and inevitably build commercial products. But the nonprofit board maintained total control. This corporate minutiae is central to the story of Openai's meteoric rise and Altman's Shocking fall. It was the culmination of a power struggle between the company's two ideological extremes. One group born from Silicon Valley techno-optimism, Sam Altman energized by rapid commercialization.

(00:21:13):
The other Ilya suskever steeped in fears that AI represents an existential risk to humanity and must be controlled with extreme caution. For two years, the S managed to coexist with some bumps along the way. The tenuous equilibrium broke one year ago, according to current and former employees with the release of Chatgpt and Suskever was going around getting the team to chant, feel the Agi, feel the agi they were really going for. And who knows, maybe they achieved, I don't know, artificial general intelligence. We haven't seen any of that. I mean, chatgpt is the same dope it ever was, but anticipating the arrival of this all-powerful technology, suskever began to behave like a spiritual leader. Three employees who worked with him told us his constant enthusiastic refrain was feel the agi a reference to the idea the company was on the cusp of its ultimate goal.

(00:22:16):
One year ago at their holiday party, suskever led employees in a chant feel the agi, the phrase itself was popular enough that Openai employees created a special feel. The agi reaction emoji in Slack, I think you're right. I think there was a corporate structure that was just not a house of cards. There was too much tension and was not going to hold, and then it just collapsed. And when it collapsed, well of course what happened? All of the value flowed under the door and over to Microsoft. Now we don't know what the final result is. Microsoft, Satya Nadella was on a very interesting media campaign yesterday talking to Cnbc and Bloomberg and Kara Swisher trying to, I don't know what he was trying to do, trying to show, first of all, trying to get the stock back, which it did by the way. It came back because he said, well, we love Sam. We're going to work with him no matter what. In fact, we would like to hire him and his entire team of the 770 employees, 750 sign a letter saying, yeah, if Sam's not back, we're gone. And Microsoft said, well, good, we'll hire you all. That's not going to work out by the way, because those people are there. Let's not forget this. The scientists, many of the scientists are there because they believe in this altruistic or perhaps science fiction vision of an agi, and they want to create, they're not interested in creating better excel spreadsheets with ai, and that's what they'll end up doing at Microsoft. I think it was Ben Thompson who pointed that out.

Andy Ihnatko (00:23:57):
But you can go the other way too. I thought there was a really good, I think you'd have to call it an opinion piece in the York Times this morning. I have it in front of me. It's called the Long shadow of Steve Jobs looms over the turmoil at Ai, basically making the case that the influence of Steve Jobs on Silicon Valley culture is the idea that I am ACEO, I'm a visionary. I'm Tony Stark. I'm here to push things into the future. I'm here to have those big ideas and create those moonshots. When a, you don't have the chops, you don't understand exactly what Steve Jobs was 100% about that. There was that part of his personality, but there was also that part of his personality that said, okay, we are slashing everything but these four product lines because that's what we have to do right now. And it's, again, it's more of an opinion piece than reportage, but it really does make the case that boards are getting very tired of people who make a lot of these grandstanding pronunciations without keeping at least one foot on the floor.

Alex Lindsay (00:24:56):
And again, I guess I would say there's a lot of ways to pull that back other than firing the person. That's kind of the central piece of the thing. And it will say, this is one of the things that a lot of ceos have started to take on, which I think Sam Altman did really well, is by being a public figure, by doing lots of all hands, by doing those things and building a connection that your employees are looking up to. Some ceos aren't like that. They're more mechanical. And that creates a separation between the CEO EO and the employees. And what you can see here is there wasn't a ton of separation between the CEO EO and the employee. And that's how as a, because one of the ceo's primary jobs is to get people going to be the cheerleader and sometimes the bully to move things forward as opposed to just being ACEO, just managing the process.

(00:25:42):
It's more of a leader than a management position. And I think he proved that he did that fairly effectively. I do think that, again, I think that's a board that wasn't equipped to do that. They don't come from the experience that it would be required to do this in a more nuanced way. And so I think that that was the challenge and really, I guess I do agree that it could be well within the realm of the duties of a non-profit to stop something, but I think that they also had to think about the fact that stopping it could destroy it. It means they have no impact. Open Ai is on the verge of being a footnote, and I think Ilya also realized that he may be a footnote. I think the reason he's

Leo Laporte (00:26:27):
An academic, he may not have managed this very well, right?

Alex Lindsay (00:26:30):
No, no, he's academic, probably not. Academics are not known for eq a lot of times, and so the very high Iq sometimes has an inverse relationship to the Eq because you have a hard time understanding why all these people think the way they do. And so I think that the problem he has, I think he realized as this started to unwrap that he may end up as a side note of just someone working somewhere else. And I would say that it never being part of whatever happens next, and I will say that I have a lot of complaints about Microsoft, but I will say that when they tell you you're going to have a research area, they have huge swath. This is the kind of a thing that kind of amazes me about Microsoft. They can hire a lot of people and then just let them think and play. And Microsoft tries to figure out what to productize, but sometimes it never turns into a product and that team just keeps going. The Photosynth team was an incredible team 20 years ago or whatever that was building this stuff out, and I was like, when are you going to turn this into a product? And they were like, never. They

Andy Ihnatko (00:27:29):
Were flat-out,

Alex Lindsay (00:27:30):
We're not interested in,

Leo Laporte (00:27:31):
But I got to tell you, the people who joined open ai, these researchers were not interested in creating a big tech win or doing research for a big tech company. I really think that was part of the problem was that Microsoft's getting more and more involved in this. I don't think that the best people are going to end up at Microsoft maybe, but I think that that's part of the problem is the reason people were at Open Ai was because listen to the mission as submitted to the federal government in their 5 0 1 C three application, the company exists to advance open Ai's mission of ensuring that safe, artificial general intelligence is developed and benefits all of humanity. The company's duty to this mission and the principles advanced in the open AI charter take precedence over any obligation to generate a profit. The company may never make a profit and the company is under no obligation to do so. The company's free to reinvest all or any of the company's cash in a research and development and are related expenses without any obligation to members. There's a reason that language is there because that's what these scientists who are joint remember this. It takes some real skill to develop these ai's, and it's the same thing that happened at Google with a revolt against doing work for the government. I think they're very, these people are going to be very nervous and very hard to maintain, and I think that's why they created that strange,

Andy Ihnatko (00:29:05):
Can I also say that this also underscores the importance of labor and the importance of organized labor, whether it's organized under a union or just simply organized by unity of spirit. Google had to shut down immensely lucrative military contracts because their labor said, we're not doing this. We don't want anything to do with this. Open Ai has, I'm sure that everybody or everybody involved in that original decision thought, you know what? It's going to be turbulent, but you know what? We're the board. We're the people who run this company, not anybody else. We will weather the storm. And when everybody says, guess what, we're all leaving. Are you going to go to Craigslist to hire more AI researchers? I don't think so. And these are the ways that people influence change. So it's not like I'm raising the right banner of revolution here, but it's a reminder that the only thing that oftentimes keeps this kind of unshut capitalism in place is when labor who is often the first part of the balance sheet to get into the neck once they're trying to eke out profits are the ones who say, your company doesn't work unless we do the work for you, so you're going to have to keep us happy some way.

Alex Lindsay (00:30:13):
Well, but I think that the challenge now is that what was a nonprofit that was supposed to have some checks and balances is going to be gone, and there's not going to be another nonprofit that does this. This is over because the problem is, is that no one is going to touch a nonprofit with some kind of weird business model. Again, not with real money. And so the thing is, is that they've kind as someone who likes to, I'm a big fan of nonprofits and love the idea of nonprofits doing business underneath where the money goes into something that is a greater good rather than investors' pockets. I love that model. It's going to be very hard to do that model in the future and find investors. And so anybody who thought that they were going to get to work on this in a non-profitable way is probably, there won't be enough of them to reach critical mass because the problem is that the AI is so expensive to execute. It is so expensive. They're talking about they're losing money on every subscriber of Chatgpt, and so it's an incredibly expensive thing to do, and so if you don't have revenue coming in, it's just not sustainable.

Leo Laporte (00:31:17):
That's the trick. That's the difficult thing, right? You've got these kind of conflicting needs. One is you've got to raise a lot of money, but two is you've got to keep these scientists happy about the work that they're doing, and there is absolutely a cultish belief that we are creating a next generation intelligence,

Alex Lindsay (00:31:36):
Which I don't believe,

Leo Laporte (00:31:37):
I don't know if I believe that either.

Jason Snell (00:31:39):
I don't think there's any basis in reality. I think there's vein in Silicon Valley of people who have read

Leo Laporte (00:31:45):
Too much

Jason Snell (00:31:46):
The Torment Nexus thing, right? They've read way too much and they don't understand it, and they think it makes them be a big thinker, and I think that it's, yeah, I think it's very woo-woo and much more like believing in crystals than it is actually what's going to happen. I've felt that

Leo Laporte (00:32:01):
Strongly for a while, but then after all this happened, I'm starting to think maybe they're right.

Alex Lindsay (00:32:07):
I think people who think that it's possible are more worried about it. The people who don't think it's possible are less worried about absolutely. Let's figure out how to use this new tool. I think they're

Leo Laporte (00:32:16):
Happy to make pivot tables in Excel, but the people who are doing the most interesting work are the people who want to create Colossus or the Forbidden project

Andy Ihnatko (00:32:26):
Or

(00:32:30):
Hal, 9,000 this bomb. It'll destroy all life on earth. And the general says, how much would you be happy with? I would be happier with zero chance that detonating this bomb will destroy all life on this earth. And so when you're talking about the worst science fiction scenario possible, okay, yes, that is, without being a joke about that, yeah, the worst situation possible is often an extinction level event. You can't run your day based on that. But however, if there are simple safeguards early on that we can place in just as there were safeguards that were put onto genetic modification and genetic research back in the seventies when that became Goddess Revolutionary moment, there was an agreement that no, we are not going to try to make sure that, Hey, you want your kid to have blue eyes. We'll make sure that we adjust the genetics inside the egg and the sperm to make sure that they're basically discussions saying that if you do this, you are scum. If you don't want to be scum and be considered to be scum and unhireable, untenurable get involved in this kind of research.

Jason Snell (00:33:40):
I guess I'm a little fatalistic about it too. The idea is that if everybody's like, okay guys, we're not going to do it. Somebody's going to do it, right? The hard part is the genie is genies leave bottles, right? That's what happens. The bottle is open, the genie is going to leave the bottle. We want it to be guided, but it's going to happen. We just need to figure out the right way to deal with it. It's the

Leo Laporte (00:33:59):
Moral of Oppenheimer. He believed that he had to, they realized that it's possible that atomic energy could be released e equals mc squared to this massive multiplier and then said, well, if the Germans get it, we're toast. Oppenheimer's Jewish was so we've got to do this to counter the germans, but he regretted it because you do let the genie out of the bottle. It's true, and it's gone, and I think he regretted it in the end.

Jason Snell (00:34:33):
I mean he did. And yet that's the great contrast. Oppenheimer is my favorite movie of year. One of the great contrasts there, the challenge, the complexity of it is they did absolutely need to because what if the Nazis get first and then later was what if the Soviets have it, which they did obviously because it was going to come out of the bottle and the thought was, well, we are creating a horrible thing, but it's inevitable that somebody will, and I'd rather it be us. And it is. I mean, he's haunted with those noises. Then it's deployed against civilians in Japan and it's terrible. But there is this thought process which is, well, it's going to happen, and if it's going to happen, it should let it be us.

Leo Laporte (00:35:17):
Well, and it was Edward Teller, by the way, who said, oh, yeah, well, it could in fact set the atmosphere on fire and destroy the earth, but that's a small chance. It was then Edward Teller who Oppenheimer tried to convince, we got an A-bomb. Let's not make a hydrogen bomb. It would be too destructive. And Teller said, oh, no, no, no, we got to do that. And I think that's really when Oppenheimer realized crap. I mean, he realized at the minute he saw it go off at Trinity, but I think he realized you can't control. And that is an important lesson for today, is that once you invent it, it's done and you can't control how it'll be used. And if you invent an Agi, there will be people who will use it in a bad way, right?

Andy Ihnatko (00:36:05):
Yes,

Jason Snell (00:36:06):
A hundred percent. Think of every security flaw in every computer system in the world, and the idea that you have intelligent agents who are entirely devoted to seeking out those security flaws. You can very rapidly get to a point where every vulnerable system, which is technically every system can be broken by that. That would be real bad. That would be real bad, but it's going to happen unless we pardon our defenses. You got to be just kind of accept it and say, how do we deal with the inevitable here? Yeah,

Andy Ihnatko (00:36:39):
Even simpler than that, the easiest way to raise funding for any pie in the Sky project is to come up with a business case that says that this will allow a big corporation to fire a lot of people. This is why self-driving cars got so much investment because, hey, you mean that we can actually fire all of the truckers? We can fire everybody who operates all of these fleet vehicles, all of them replaced by robots. Awesome. And 10 years later, we still don't have anything that really works the way the halfway that actually should. But ai, I'm not so much afraid of these world ending events so much as the idea of organizations that already have an immense amount of power, who are the only organizations that can even come up with the energy resources, let alone the technological resources to build a powerful ai are the ones that are going to say, Hey, let's come up with a list of every employee category we have. I bet we can get rid of 40% of them with ai, and that is the sort of catastrophic without, in any country that does not have an absolutely defense department scale, secure safety, net social safety net for people, that is a catastrophic bomb on society. I think.

Leo Laporte (00:37:54):
Well, we'll find out, won't we? Good news. Maybe I won't, but you guys will. Good news is,

Andy Ihnatko (00:38:02):
That's okay. I'm a creator. My job is safe and secure. I'll never replace me. No,

Leo Laporte (00:38:06):
Never. Oh God, I just can't wait until, and I think it's just a few years off. I can sit back and let the AI do the show. Speaking of which, we need to take a break and actually talk about Apple. But yeah, we had to talk about this. It's a fascinating story. There will be an increasing more detailed conversation next on Twig tomorrow, on this week in Google, which by the way, we need to rename because it is not about Google anymore. Google is just a small fraction. If anybody can come up with a good name for this week in Google, it's not this week in ai. Maybe this week in … is tui-i-e-a.

Andy Ihnatko (00:38:50):
I am. I'm so glad we decided to name our podcast material because okay,

Leo Laporte (00:38:55):
It

Andy Ihnatko (00:38:56):
Smart Google, which means it's be about every good and bad thing that Google or any Google-related thing ever does.

Leo Laporte (00:39:03):
Good heavens. Alright, let's take a little break. Apple will be on the menu soon, any day now. But first a word from our sponsor, Wix Web Agencies. Ooh, you're going to like this one. Let me tell you about Wix Studio, the platform that gives agencies total creative freedom to deliver complex client sites while still smashing deadlines. How? Well, first, let's talk about the advanced design capabilities. With Wix Studio, you can build unique layouts with a revolutionary grid experience and watch as elements scale proportionally by default. No code animation adds sparks of delight while custom css gives total design control, but it doesn't stop there. You can bring ambitious client projects to life in any industry with a fully integrated suite of business solutions from e-com to events bookings and more, and extend the capabilities even further with hundreds of apis and integrations. That's real power. You know what else? The workflows just makes sense. There's the built-in AI tools, the centralized workspace, the on-canvas collaboration, the reuse of assets across sites, the seamless client handover. That's not all. Find out more at wix.com slash studio with, thank you so much for supporting Mac Break Weekly.

(00:40:26):
Yeah, I'm on vacation. I'm in Las Vegas, supposedly watching a race, and I'm watching the news develop and it's like basically, unfortunately, Lisa had to sit there where I did an entire this week in tech in front of her. Oh, yes. It's like, let me explain what's going on.

Andy Ihnatko (00:40:45):
I did a talk with a Washington Apple Power user group early Saturday morning, or at least early for me. And so I was asked a question about the was going on in Openai. I gave them an answer based on what I knew as of 10 p.m on Friday, thinking that how much could this possibly have changed God? And then when I finally the end of the call and made myself lunch, look at the news, say, wow,

Leo Laporte (00:41:10):
Okay,

Andy Ihnatko (00:41:12):
Can we start the meeting again? So I sound less completely out of touch.

Leo Laporte (00:41:15):
One thing happened is I'm getting on the plane Friday, apple updated Apple Music, classical for the iPad. It made me so happy. I'm sure the same for you, Andy. It is now using that space instead of being an iPhone app on the iPad, does it mean, I mean, they catalyst to move it over to the Mac or have you tried it? Has anybody tried? I wonder because

Andy Ihnatko (00:41:42):
I haven't. No,

Leo Laporte (00:41:43):
It seems like that would be the next thing easily, right?

Andy Ihnatko (00:41:46):
Actually, as we're looking that up, I'm disappointed because the android app for Apple Classical does not support chromecast, so I can't listen to it. I can't listen to this music quite, quite seamlessly. And a higher definition too, like Chromecast speakers, and it's doubly galling because the main Apple Music app, which does support Chromecast, does that really annoying thing that a lot of apps do where you say, Hey, why aren't you using the Apple Classical music app? We're going to recommend you use the Apple Music classical app because it's great and you want to say, I would be using it if it didn't. Absolutely, totally not work for this thing I want to do with it. The New York Times Web experience does the exact same thing where every time I read something on the New York Times on my phone, it says, Hey, open this in the New York Times app. It's a better experience, and I wish there were a button to say instead of maybe not now, I could say, I've tried the app. It's terrible. If I wanted to use it, I would be using it. Stop bothering me every time I open the app, so please upgrade Apple Classical music on the android app so that I can actually use my chromecast. Otherwise, it's a wonderful app.

Jason Snell (00:42:49):
I hope it doesn't appear that Apple has opted it in for Mac users on Apple silicon to just run the iPad app. I hope that means that they're going to do a proper catalyst version specifically for the Mac, because that would be even better. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (00:43:02):
Thanks for trying anyway. Appreciate it. It's not there, Andy, you will be happy though. I think to hear that Apple is bringing Rcs messaging to the IPHONE next year, the green bubble. I don't know what color the bubble is. Did we do it still? We do it.

Andy Ihnatko (00:43:18):
We talked about it last week. Mission accomplished. Did we do it? Yeah. I really have no idea what, it's not as though they didn't have lots and lots of different opportunities over the past year to at least say we're looking into rcs. We think it's an interesting way to improve the iPhone, the messaging experience for Iphone users, and therefore of course we're going to be interested in it. The fact that they were like, we talked about so much last week and previously that they were like, no, your grandmother's on wellfisher. Buy an IPHONE instead. What do you think we are? But yeah, it's weird.

Leo Laporte (00:43:55):
Would you explain before we go too much down this road, what rcs is and why this is significant?

Andy Ihnatko (00:44:04):
RCS is really different from Imessage. It's not as good as Imessage at a lot of things, particularly. IT stands for Rich

Leo Laporte (00:44:11):
Communications

Andy Ihnatko (00:44:12):
Communications System.

Leo Laporte (00:44:13):
So basically just a little history, there was sms, which was a weird technology of messaging that wasn't based on data. It was actually going over the voice channels. That's why it was so limited

Andy Ihnatko (00:44:25):
Created during the George Bush senior administration, by the

Leo Laporte (00:44:27):
Way. That's exactly, and the fatal error that the phone companies in the United States did is they charged a lot for Sms capability. They did the same thing in Europe. They charged even more. And so as a result, data-based messaging platforms like Whatsapp emerged and became dominant. Meanwhile, apple did their own version messages, which did both because it was on a phone, did both sms and a database messaging system, preferring the database messaging system, but falling back to the sms, that was the green bubble, right, was okay, used sms to call you on your Android phone, Andy, because you don't support our fine protocol. So you got a green bubble, and that was your life and your lot in life, and sorry, and there were some missing features. Chiefly you couldn't create a group with both blue and green bubbles.

Andy Ihnatko (00:45:20):
Yeah, basically the bottom line is that Rcs messaging is something that the industry coalition that created the previous messaging standards and all the carriers in Europe and elsewhere, and Google got together and said, let's fix this. Let's start making a much better messaging platform because they were also seeing that third party messaging platforms were much a much better experience. The difference being that RC Rcs was still a carrier-based standard. So yes, you do have to have your messaging app support rcs, but this is not something where it goes through the Rcs corporations or Google Corporation servers or Whatsapp servers or Facebook servers or Apple servers to process everything. It can go through any service that supports rcs that's created by the carriers. Now, the thing that has caused a lot of people to misidentify this as, oh, the reason why Google wants this is because it's google's new private proprietary messaging service.

(00:46:18):
No, it isn't. They were very, very big in getting this going because they had to be on board to develop this because they basically make the messaging app for every phone. That is not an iphone. The twist that Bears mentioning however, is that although every individual carrier across the planet can create their own rcs messaging system, because again, it's a carrier-based service, it's more likely that they're going to basically put that contract in google's hands because Google bought a company that does rcs services, so it's most likely going to be trafficked by Google to begin with. However, I don't think that really counts as much as rcs. I thought that

Leo Laporte (00:46:56):
The carriers were going to do the rcs.

Andy Ihnatko (00:46:59):
They can. They absolutely can. They're free to do so. But in

Leo Laporte (00:47:27):
Most cases, in phones will use Google's Rcs server, not the carrier's rcs server.

Andy Ihnatko (00:47:32):
It's still rcs. It's still plain rcs. However, Google owns the company that handles a lot of this traffic. Again, all I have to do is write a check. So even

Leo Laporte (00:47:40):
If at&t is doing it, it's going through a Google server

Andy Ihnatko (00:47:44):
Or I don't know specifically about at&t, so as long as it's rcs, it'll be inter-compatible. That is the big of all the positives and minuses, and there's been a lot of discussions about difference between something like Whatsapp and iMessage, which is true end-to-end encryption, Bulletproof real stuff, real stuff. This is weaker encryption. There are people in the middle, for instance, but it's still better encryption. Also also

Leo Laporte (00:48:10):
Feature-wise, more like Whatsapp or Apple

Andy Ihnatko (00:48:14):
Messages. Let's go through the list you get. Your photos will not be downgraded when you send it to somebody who's using android. Now that, excuse me. Next year when rcs is supported in the iPhone, you can send videos, you can send files, you can do voice chats through the messaging app that will, and all the media traffic, all the messaging traffic can go through Wi-Fi instead of the phone network, if that's better for you. Things like groups of groups, 100 read receipts, the ability to see when people are typing. A lot of the basic stuff that people expect when they see these basic services. And then the big selling point I think about all of this is that all you need to know is the phone number of the person you want to send this message to, that it's always part of the discussion that, oh, well, gee, WhatsApp is, no one uses carrier messaging anyway, so it's irrelevant.

(00:49:04):
Yeah, but how do a person who walks out of a store with a phone, do they know what WhatsApp is? Do they know where to find it? Do they know how to install it? Do they know how to use it? Do they have everybody in their contact database who uses WhatsApp? Do they know how to inform them that, Hey, you need to download WhatsApp. Whereas though, again, in many ways, particularly security-wise, RCS is not as good as Imessage. The selling point is that all I need to know is I just need to know Alex's phone number. If after a long love affair over basic Sms or Rcs messaging, we want to upgrade our relationship to Imessage or WhatsApp, we can do that. But I know that can send Alex a text message and through one of these services, particularly Rcs, they will definitely get it.

(00:49:51):
And when I take a full 12 megapixel photo that I'm very, very happy with, he will get it in the full 12 megapixels. So this is why I've always said that. I don't know why Apple is adamant about doing absolutely nothing because Sms is almost literally nothing. There is no security. It's easy to snoop for. All of pictures are going to be immensely downgraded. The green bubble effect of social stigma among social groups where, oh, there's a green bubble inside the chat. That's a real thing. A, because kids are mean and horrible, but also because it degrades an all Imessage chat group, suddenly has to dumb down to the standards of sms MS, which costs everybody a lot of big stuff. Apples already. Apple hasn't said very much. I don't think there's even an official announcement so much as they've confirmed to nine to five Mac and other outlets what they're doing. But, and by the

Leo Laporte (00:50:44):
Way said it will be green bubbles.

Andy Ihnatko (00:50:46):
It will be green bubbles. I think that's okay. I would've, because I think it's important to say, Hey, by the way, you are using a less secure transport I think from

Leo Laporte (00:50:55):
IMessage's platform. But

Andy Ihnatko (00:50:57):
So there, they've already said that, hey, we're going to be working with the gsm, our committee, to do things like increase the security level that's possible through rcs, which is again, something I think they could and should have been doing all along. So I'm very glad. I don't know why they decided maybe they just looked at every piece of legislation that's coming through the eu, the problems of trying to deal with the Digital Markets Act and said that it is now more difficult to be petulant than it is to simply comply. And I am actually optimistic that they're not going be a very whiny sort of compliance, the bare minimum they can possibly do to basically say that Imessage is interoperable. I think that at this point, all the people inside of Apple who have been fighting to adopt Rcs are going to get their way and say, we're not going to do it in a halfway way. We are going to do this the best way it can possibly be implemented, including making rcs better for everybody.

Jason Snell (00:51:51):
Their statement that they're going to work with the Gsma, I thought was the point where they're showing we're not going to drag our feet. We're going to do this and we're we're going to work with them on it. Although it is funny, after Google has put so much effort into all of this, it did have a feeling like there's some meme out there that covers this. I'm sure, is it the boyfriend meme? I'm not sure. But it's the idea of like, Hey, Apple's coming over here. They're coming over here. We did it. Everybody. We did. Oh, they're talking to the gsma, and then there's a Google statement that's sort like, yay, they're here near me.

Andy Ihnatko (00:52:21):
We're looking forward to working closely with them.

Jason Snell (00:52:23):
And Apple is not even looking at Google. They're just looking at the Gsma that

Leo Laporte (00:52:27):
Google was hoping that they would use the Google Jive servers and not do an open,

Jason Snell (00:52:34):
I think Google was using this as branding for Google and android and trying to shame apple's. Not it's though. And now Apple is not even talking about Google. Google, they're just talking about adopting a standards. That's a very cold move. That is a very apple move. But I think in the end, yeah, they're not going to drag their feet. This isn't going to be kind of like a halfway move. I think that they're going to really legitimately supported, and I think that they probably do have the attitude, if we're going to do this, we should probably work with the standards body to make the security better. Not really thrilled with the security level on it, but I think that they're going to, it

Leo Laporte (00:53:07):
Beats Sms

Jason Snell (00:53:08):
Security. This is so bad and old, and that was my point last week was just so it's an improvement. This is not replacing Imessage, but I do think it's because of the Eu. I think in the end that's why they're doing it, is they want to be able to say, look, iMessage is for our users. Everybody else gets, and they're looking like not that this Rcs thing. That's okay. Instead of it being a thing from the Bush administration.

Leo Laporte (00:53:32):
So to be clear, as long as you're messaging somebody with an iPhone, you're going to continue to use iMessages and Imessage protocol and have all the

Andy Ihnatko (00:53:39):
Absolute

Jason Snell (00:53:40):
And messages.

Andy Ihnatko (00:53:41):
You won't notice anything instead of

Leo Laporte (00:53:42):
Falling back to Sms. When you talk to Andy on his android device, it will now fall back to Rcs. Still be a green bubble, but it'll be somewhat more secure, somewhat more richer rich. Now, by the way, I want to point out with

Jason Snell (00:53:55):
Read receipts and locations and all sorts of stuff that you can't get with Sms,

Leo Laporte (00:54:01):
Pathetic really and data,

Jason Snell (00:54:02):
And it'll fall back to Sms if it absolutely has to. But there's

Alex Lindsay (00:54:05):
Always that when they say later next year, it's before December thirty-first. So we that track. And I think that obviously we're probably going to see more features in Imessage that would not be compatible with Rcs. You know, you'll get all the things that Rcs has, but I would be surprised if Apple doesn't add a bunch of little chachkis that the kids like, because as we've talked about before, the kids are really important. And I'm not clear that I think that the trajectory it, it'll be really interesting to see how the director goes in many parts in Europe and many other places where someone was talking to someone or someone was tweeting me or ex-Post or whatever they call it now from Australia, and they said almost everybody's on Android in Australia for kids that are in school. So it really depends on the part of the world. But in the US where there is some revenue, we're seeing, we've talked about it before, the stat of eighty-seven percent, and I know that with my kids, they just look at the blue bubble. I don't think they even know what the feature set is. That means that's the difference between blue and green. They just look at the color and the color is a bunch of decisions that they've made about what that color means. And I might take a little longer to get out of.

Leo Laporte (00:55:17):
We should point out that the Iphone is about fifty-fifty in the us. It's just among young people that it's eighty-seven

Alex Lindsay (00:55:21):
Percent, but that's obviously what everyone's concerned about. You're absolutely right. It's just that when eighty-seven percent of everyone under 18 is using a one thing, the chances of them getting off that platform becomes less and less as they get older. So Jason

Leo Laporte (00:55:35):
Thought

Andy Ihnatko (00:55:38):
I was hoping that Apple would, like I said, I think it's a good idea to keep it as a green bubble again to communicate that Imessage is a much more secure, stronger security than our rcs. We just want to let you know that you're not using Imessage on this transport. I think it's important. I wish that there were a parental control setting, however, that basically if the parent has set up, oh by the way, this Iphone is someone belongs to someone who's between 12 and 18 can have a setting that says, oh, by the way, all iMessage bubbles are going to be orange so that they can basically say, I don't want my kids to know that they're talking to somebody who uses an android. I don't want them to either bully people or to be bullied. I don't think that as long as the parents have access to knowing the nature of the communications, I think there's no problem in getting the kids to say, you know what? We're not going to let you, it's orange. Congratulations. It's your friend Josh. You don't need to care what kind of phone they have. A lot of it's class shaming. Oh look, the poor person who can't afford a phone, this is a Pixel six pro with a terabyte of storage, it costs more than your phone, idiot.

Jason Snell (00:56:42):
Yeah, I think that that's a really cool idea of just saying parental advice to say, I don't want my kids differentiating between platforms and being bullies or being, I think that's cool. I think that's a cool idea and to Alex's point, I was just going to add on, of course, apple is going to keep adding things to Imessage because Apple given a choice, is going to build things itself that it thinks are going to be cool and new and the last thing they're going to do is wait around and propose them to a standards body and tap their feet and wait for a year and then have it be kind of, that's just not how Apple

Andy Ihnatko (00:57:15):
Works. Like lightning all over again. Yeah,

Jason Snell (00:57:17):
If they have something cool that they think they want to do, they'll just do it and then maybe eventually the standard will catch up with them. I think that's just

Alex Lindsay (00:57:24):
Their attitude. I don't don't even care if the standard happens or not. They'll just be like, this is what you get when you have Imessage. I mean obviously we talked about this earlier, the difference between a non-profit or for-profit, they have a vested interest in making their product cooler than the cross-platform version of it, and they're going to keep on doing that and I think if anything, they'll accelerate that effort as opposed to decelerating it and you'll see more features and mostly ones that we probably don't need as an adult, at least all the gestures. Mine doesn't do that because don't, I'm not, but that's making everybody crazy. I don't know. Everybody I know is just like, how do I turn? We get this question all the time, how do I turn these things off because it's all the fireworks and the balloons and everything else that has not been, at least

Leo Laporte (00:58:05):
We have a whole hands on Macintosh and a whole ios today about how to turn that off.

Alex Lindsay (00:58:11):
That's that's a synonymous feature.

Leo Laporte (00:58:12):
So lemme you guys move very quickly and assume a lot of knowledge on behalf of our audience, but just for those who are not up to date on this, you kind of mentioned the Digital Markets Act, Jason Snell Apple is one of the gatekeeper services, although there's an argument that messages is not dominant enough to be a gatekeeper service in the media. Exactly. But Microsoft, apple Alphabet, Google, Amazon Meta, all of these are gatekeeper services, which means they are required to be interoperable. It has to be easier for people to move between competing services requiring them to interoperate their messaging app with rivals. Now, Apple's challenged this by the way, but I think they also see the writing on the wall and Apple's never been known for interoperability in its messaging, so this is basically Apple saying, okay, we will support it. We have to, but this is a good way for them to do it. I think

Jason Snell (00:59:09):
They're going to say, you shouldn't consider messages. I messaged this because it's not popular enough and besides which, it doesn't matter because we are now properly supporting the robustly interoperable system.

Leo Laporte (00:59:20):
They're fighting at every

Jason Snell (00:59:21):
Front for everyone and I think it's a fair argument to say, look, what we do to build features for our customers is our business, but look, we are going to now demonstrate that we're not going to create such a fall-off Cliff that it's just a miserable experience for everybody who is not our customer or us talk to someone who's not our customer. I

Leo Laporte (00:59:40):
Think, honestly, I don't know why, the only reason Apple fought this for so long is because as we know from emails revealed in the Epic trial, apple was worried that kids would start using that Parents would give their kids Android phones and so the iMessage was,

Jason Snell (00:59:56):
They'll hear about it on the street if,

Andy Ihnatko (00:59:58):
Yeah, exactly.

Leo Laporte (00:59:59):
Imessage was a wall, a moat against competition.

Andy Ihnatko (01:00:01):
If you're going to use an android, we at least want you to use an android at home where you'll be safe

Jason Snell (01:00:06):
And it still will be to a certain extent. It's the default and the default messaging app and you have to go get another messaging app and in the US that has definitely played out that people want to use the default, but I think it will not solve that. I don't think it will, but I think it will ease the pain of everybody else where you're like the one person in your family who has an ANDROID phone and everybody is mad at you or wants you to switch or leaves you out of the group chat because they have to. That pain will be lessened and I think that's a good, is

Leo Laporte (01:00:34):
This a victory for regulation? We have type C now on the iPhone, we're going to have rcs on Apple messages. Both things Apple probably didn't want to do. Is this a victory for the Eu's regulations?

Andy Ihnatko (01:00:47):
Absolutely. I think this is why I like it when big tech companies, not just Apple, but everybody gets sued. This is why I like it when there's a threat of really big, painful legislation because

Leo Laporte (01:00:57):
Established that you're a communist, Andy, I just want to make sure that everybody understands that right

Jason Snell (01:01:05):
Party

Andy Ihnatko (01:01:09):
Law. You are

Leo Laporte (01:01:11):
Very appropriately to the left of Alex Lindsay who's on the right, so we've got a good little Jason Allen.

Andy Ihnatko (01:01:19):
All I was going to say though is that this is why I like it because maybe they have a case, maybe they don't have a case, but it forces a company like Apple to say, we are going to have to now make a case and a court of law where if we don't make a non-emotional non week, you can't make us do anything. We don't want to case they're going to again feel some pain. You think about all the really great, very positive, excuse me, many of the really great really positive changes that Apple's made to the app store to adopting Usb C earlier than it might or more than it would ever have done, so adopting Rcs. It wasn't because they finally decided, oh, well gosh, the time is right and we didn't have the resources but this blah blah, blah. It's because they felt pressure from the outside and said that, okay, we now can't fight this anymore. We're going to go ahead and do this, or we feel as though this will head off a much bigger pain in the future. This is why, again, I don't think that regulation is always the answer to a problem, but I do think that the considered application of regulation, class action suits all this sort of stuff usually creates more good, good than harm. In cases like these,

Leo Laporte (01:02:21):
The tendency for companies is initially to do things for users. This is Cory Doctorow's famous in Shitification doctrine to initially do things for users, but ultimately they start making decisions that maybe aren't the best for users but are the best for profits and I think you could make the argument that they held off on Rcs or some sort of compatibility with Android for so long because they were trying to preserve profits, not because users demanded it. Of course. Now there is a question, is somebody in the chat room, James is saying Rcs is a pos. Is rcs a bad protocol? I mean, is there a reasons not to want to have Rcs

Andy Ihnatko (01:03:02):
CS? It's operating on I think actually more than hundreds of millions. I think it's actually exceeded a billion. Again, it's not something that Google just came up and proposed with composed three months ago and they're trying to get at it because it'll increase their ad share. This has been around now, I think it was first proposed in 20 10, 20 13. Its current form. The form that Apple is going to be supporting I think was finalized in 2016, maybe 2018. It's been around for a while. It is now being supported by every phone that runs Android that can run anything close to a modern version of Android because what part of google's work in this coalition of rcs was we will basically put it into every stock Android messaging app that ships with every version of Android out there, Google

Leo Laporte (01:03:48):
Added on top of it, encryption by the way, and then yes, that wasn't part of the spec

Andy Ihnatko (01:03:55):
And then they're free to do that. Again, the messaging app, this thing can be enhanced. I did see over the weekend a lot of people, including some people that I really respect, basically saying, oh no, it's not secure at all. This is a fallacy, this is a lie. Say, okay, it's again, not as secure as WhatsApp, not as secure as Imessage. It's still subject to whereas an IMESSAGE to Imessage secure app, nobody can get access to that. If a government gets a subpoena, they can't get access to that message without unlocking either one of those two phones. With Rcs, there is the presence of entities in the middle that could be persuaded with the right legal documents to turn up message traffic. It also is just not as strong a standard in terms of security fundamentally. However, there's a difference between Sms, which is not secure at all and Rcs CS, which has a lot of very good security features, but with some gaps in it that Imessage doesn't fall into as a trap.

(01:04:53):
So yeah, it's not a piece of crap. Anybody who's saying that, I will engage with you. I'll have a discussion with you. I will try not to make it really obvious that the purpose of my end of the discussion is to try to figure out why you believe something that I personally having talked to security people and people in the phone community don't agree with. Is it something that I don't know about? Because if you can convince me, I will learn something I did not know before and I'm always very, very, I always value that kind of stuff very much according.

Jason Snell (01:05:23):
I can't bring it to you, but it's tribalism is the reason tribalism because we have an Apple versus Google thing and that sound you're going to hear over the next month or two or maybe even the next year is going to be all of the swords about Rcs placed down because Apple has decided not to fight that battle anymore and we'll all just move on with our people who have decided, wait, RCS is the devil. What Apple's going to adopt it and they have to get their story straight and they have to get their thoughts in order and then they'll move on

Andy Ihnatko (01:05:55):
Something else to fight. Apple is choosing to adopt this standard that I think is absolutely terrible and decreases the security and destabilizes the entire platform as I've been saying on three different social media networks for the past five years. Crap. So

Leo Laporte (01:06:08):
According to a Forrest, interactive, eighty-eight operators in the world are launching Rcs in fifty-nine countries. It may not be called Rcs in your neck of the woods in many services call it join Joyn, some call it Sms+,, some call it advanced messaging. It is ip based, the Google edition, it means it is encrypted not, I think that's where people aren't not happy with it end-to-end means that even the server can't read it. That is not the case.

Alex Lindsay (01:06:39):
I mean one thing that'll be interesting to see is if Apple distinguishes Rcs from Sms because there's still a lot of places where Sms will be there. It may just go, you're not in messages, so I'm just going to give you a green bubble and then you just won't know and that will

Leo Laporte (01:06:50):
Yeah, that's unfortunate. Actually I think I have no idea whether they'll do it or not. I think it would be better to know if you're on it would be percent the worst sms, but they may not. Again, this may be Apple going well, we don't want to be too kind.

Andy Ihnatko (01:07:04):
Not only that, but Apple is a very specific case. Again, on my Android phone, if it's Rcs and not sms, there's a little subscript that says Rcs so that underneath each bubble that's good. I

Leo Laporte (01:07:16):
Think that would be valuable

Andy Ihnatko (01:07:17):
And that would be valuable. But Apple, I think again, without them being jerks about it might just mock that up and say, but that looks so ugly. That's so much

Leo Laporte (01:07:26):
Clearer. We don't want to do purple

Andy Ihnatko (01:07:27):
Bubbles. What if we just let people long press on the bubble to get more information about it such as here's the time it was posted, here's when it was read, and by the way, here was the carrier that was, you

Leo Laporte (01:07:37):
Can already do that, right? We didn't get the time. So it's nice to be able to get more. By the way, it is unclear what carriers are going to do, whether they're going to use Google's Jive server. It looks like At&t. I'm looking at the At&t Rcs fact. If you downloaded messages by Google from Google Play Store in your previous smartphone, you may need to first deregister from Google Rcs to accelerate set up with At&t Rcs on your new smartphone. I don't know if that means that they're using their own Rcs server, but it kind of implies that. So ultimately the carriers really did not want to do Rcs. They dragged their feet. That's why Google bought Jive and made the server available on

Andy Ihnatko (01:08:22):
Google. Google had to get involved to make it worth their while because like you said early on, messaging was actually a profitable add-on service. Yeah, that's

Leo Laporte (01:08:30):
The problem, right?

Andy Ihnatko (01:08:31):
Until all these other apps, until all these other apps made that totally irrelevant. So that made them more malleable and also when Google said, we will instantly put this on every single default messaging app on every Android phone and also through the kindness of our heart and our checkbook, buy a company that will handle all this stuff for you. We will buy Jive. We will run Jive as a division of Google so that if you want to do this, the fact that it makes us profits and gives us opportunities, no, no, no, could be that was nothing farther from our thoughts. We just wanted to promote Rcs as a better standard and

Leo Laporte (01:09:06):
Remember Google had this get the message ad campaign in which they compared the iphone to a pager and they complained that the messages would be blurry and you'd have to see green text on a bright white background and Apple should,

Alex Lindsay (01:09:27):
It really is in the United States, this is an existential threat for Google. This is why they're putting so much energy on it right now is because 87% of, I mean that is the future of everyone using their phones. While it may be a small percentage now eighty-seven percent of kids using the same thing, not that many are going to peel away and I think that they have to look at that as getting this to work is a huge victory for Google.

Leo Laporte (01:09:53):
So you think Google got what it was? I

Andy Ihnatko (01:09:55):
Wouldn't call it existential threat.

Alex Lindsay (01:09:56):
Eighty-seven percent of kids making a decision about what they're going to use and then where at school? Eighty-seven percent

Andy Ihnatko (01:10:04):
What part of

Alex Lindsay (01:10:04):
The world on the United States?

Andy Ihnatko (01:10:07):
Only

Leo Laporte (01:10:07):
The biggest market, only the U.s actually not the biggest market. I'm sure China is a bigger market, bigger, I'm sure India will be a bigger market. China,

Alex Lindsay (01:10:15):
Those are much more complex markets though this one is the highest most profitable.

Andy Ihnatko (01:10:18):
That's why I would agree with it being an important matter for Google to make sure that Androids are more palatable amongst young people than they are in a lot of their major markets. I just don't see it as an existential threat. That's all we partially agree.

Leo Laporte (01:10:38):
So Google by the way, says Rcs is now fully end-to-end encrypted. So that was as of August of this year. So maybe they fixed that part as well. That means the server cannot rcs fully encrypted like signal like app. I don't know if Apple's messages is fully end-to-end encrypted actually,

Alex Lindsay (01:10:57):
Yeah, it is.

Andy Ihnatko (01:10:59):
I would need to learn more before I would agree that Rcs is as secure as Imessage, iMessage and Signal are like the gold standard

Leo Laporte (01:11:08):
Signal's a gold standard.

Andy Ihnatko (01:11:09):
I'm sorry, signal is a gold standard. iMessage would be a bit under that, but now we're talking about are you worried that a nation state is going to want to get access to your text messages? In my case, I'm thinking usually no, but it's a big deal. There are differences and they should be acknowledged. Anybody who's saying that Rcs is absolutely the equal of Ims is absolutely wrong, but the people who are saying that Rcs is so bad that that's the reason why Apple wasn't doing it also equally wrong.

Leo Laporte (01:11:40):
So I think it's fair to say this is a victory for Apple users, not Apple, sorry, there is a distinction between Apple and we who use Apple products, but this is a victory for us, right? This,

Andy Ihnatko (01:11:54):
There's

Leo Laporte (01:11:54):
No negative to this.

Andy Ihnatko (01:11:57):
Absolutely no negative, no one will notice any difference except for, and I think this is what is, I can't wait to see the next big keynote about how if they mentioned this as a new feature in whatever the next prognosis is, they said, but still there was a way to improve that our iPhone users take the best pictures of any smartphone platform on the planet and now we're happy to say we've improved Imessages to make sure that all of your friends get to see how great your Iphone images are. You're welcome.

Leo Laporte (01:12:31):
Let's take a break. More to come with Andy Iannacco, Jason Snell, Alex Lindsay. Macbreak weekly is on the air by the way, I should mention financially struggling, I'll be frank. Advertising has dwindled and unfortunately even though we have ads on most of the shows, they are paying less for those ads. Next year is going to be a little grim as well. And as a result, we are starting to cut back some of the features that have cost us money including live streaming, but people really hollered when we said, oh, you have to go into Discord, you have to be a member of Club Twit and watch the live stream there. Partly because Discord's live stream isn't very high quality. There's problems with it, they're working on it and I'm sure it'll get better. So we've decided because people do seem to really want to be able to watch us produce the shows most, I'd say 90% of our audience downloads the shows and watches it at their leisure, but I hear from people who leave the stream on all the time and so forth.

(01:13:34):
So what we're going to try anyway, we'll see how this works, is once the shows begin, we will stream them live on YouTube. So if you go to YouTube.com slash twit and subscribe, you'll get a notification when the live stream begins for each show. There will no longer be reruns that costs us money to do and we're going to kind of keep the pre and post show conversations isolated for the club just so we have some more value to incite you to join the club because honestly, the revenue from the club is rapidly overtaking the revenue from advertising and more and more going to be important to paying the rent, keeping the lights on and keeping the staff employed. So if you like watching live, that's great, we appreciate it. YouTube has the live feed during production but only during production YouTube.com slash twitch and if you're not a member of Club to it and or say you want to watch everything all the time, you can do that by joining Club to it for seven bucks a month.

(01:14:33):
It's very affordable. I paid that much for a latte at Starbucks at the airport and I got less value than I got from Club to It. Club Trick gives you all of our shows ad-free additional shows like Hands on Macintosh with Micah that we don't put out in public. It also gives you access to our fabulous discord and the twit plus feed, which has lots of extra stuff, the stuff that people enjoy before and after shows and special events and so forth. So if you're not a member of Club Twit and I know you're not because you're hearing this, you wouldn't be hearing it. If you remember then if you would do me a favor, do us all a favor, go to twit tv slash club twit and sign up seven bucks a month, $84 a year. There are family plans and there are corporate plans available and it really makes a difference to our bottom line increasingly, and I thank you from the bottom of my heart for your support. Our show today brought to you by we do have a fine sponsor, Zoc Doc. It's funny because if you're searching for the perfect pair of disco pants let's say can go and shop around, you can get reviews and you can do so much research. You could spend a day finding the perfect disco pants and you'd be there and you'd be happy and it's going to be delivered tomorrow, right? Weirdly, we've set it up so that you can do that for disco pants. You can't do that for a physician.

(01:16:03):
How come you can get disco pants in just two days? But if you want to see a good doctor, it can take you forever, like months to get an appointment and even then, how do you know if they're good? Well, there is a way now thanks to Zoc Docs, Zoc Doc, it is a free way to find and book great doctors read amazing reviews from actual patients or negative I guess. But if you want to find the right doc, look for those reviews and many of them are available for appointments within 24 hours. Zoc Doc, it's a free app where you could find amazing doctors and book appointments with them online. We're talking about booking appointments with thousands of top rated patient reviewed doctors and specialists. You can filter, especially for the ones who take your insurance for instance or are near you, you can treat almost any condition you're searching for.

(01:16:54):
Dentists, chiropractic od all the kind of doctor, all with verified reviews from actual patients. They're very careful to make sure no bots, no fake reviews, so you really get a sense it's not just is this a good doctor or a bad doctor? The reviews will tell you what style of a physician. Some people want a doctor that will give them every possible fact and option and all the information. I like that. Some people say, no, please just cut to the chase. Tell me what I should do doc. And you may want that better, but the review will tell you, and here's the great thing. The average wait time to see a doctor booked on Zocdoc is between just twenty-four and forty-eight hours. You might get the doctor faster than you get the disco pants. You can even score many of them same-Day appointments once you find the doc.

(01:17:42):
That's why doctors love this by the way. It's a great way for them to get new patients and to fill empty slots in their booking. Once you find the doc you want, you can book 'em immediately. Just a few app taps. No more waiting awkwardly on hold with a receptionist. You see I have this rash all up and down. Go to zocdoc.com slash macbreak, download the zocdoc app for free, then find and book a top-rated doctor today, Z-O-C-D-O-C dot com slash I've used it, it really works. zocdoc.com/ I've used it many times for family members and it really is a great way to find a doc. Alright, back to Macbreak Weekly. I'm just looking in the discord. Somebody has shared a picture of their Christmas in 1981 back when Sms was the only way you could communicate. There he is with his Atari communicator. Nice. That's great educator. I mean that's great. I remember that. Thank you Dan for sharing that. That's fantastic. Okay, we did our Cs. Do you want to see? I don't want to see. I watched, I regret I Apple's new holiday film. Yay. Did you like it?

Andy Ihnatko (01:19:03):
I didn't think it was the strongest thing they've ever

Leo Laporte (01:19:05):
Done far from it,

Andy Ihnatko (01:19:07):
But I thought it was nice when you get George Harrison master tapes as your soundtrack, you're already on the right foot and halfway through I was like, oh man, are they really doing a story about this woman who is petty and awful and when working out negative feelings in the most labor intensive way possible through stop motion felt animation and thought the twist was nice. I just thought that No, it was nice. It is Christmas video. It's nice. I also liked the fact that

Leo Laporte (01:19:40):
The

Andy Ihnatko (01:19:41):
Apple ad content was maybe all of six seconds at the very beginning of it. It wasn't like, hey, well, and here's a time where I used my new Vision Pro headset to records videos that my elderly aunt who's in hospice care could then relive. Like, okay, thank you very much. Well think it was nice. The big Apple ad is the behind the scenes. Now they're behind scenes.

Leo Laporte (01:20:04):
Yeah, they're two videos this time more important.

Alex Lindsay (01:20:07):
And the behind-the-scenes was very effective for the keynote as well. They put out a, we actually broke the whole thing down to learn from it, but I already have clients who are asking me if we wanted to shoot some footage for your show and we wanted to use a phone, an IPHONE 15 and they're very specific. 15, what is the formats that we need to deliver this in because there's so many on the phone. And so I say I remember responding to someone saying, well, we'd like to get four K if you can 60, that means you're going to use an external drive. If you don't have that do 30 then give us Apple Pro, res hq. And the fact that I'm lining that out for them on a phone is crazy, but I thought it wouldn't be that effective, but we're already getting in productions that I'm working on, can we deliver in this format? So it definitely has made an impact on folks.

Leo Laporte (01:20:58):
Apple made a point of saying it's shot even in the ad, although I haven't seen it on tv, I'm sure it'll be a lot shorter on tv. It was two and a half minutes on YouTube, but they made a point saying it was shot on an iphone 15 and edited on a mac book. The Stop-motion animator, they hired to do it actually apparently already was editing on a mac book using the same software, so it was just changing the camera for an Iphone 15 and she was happy with that. I'm only

Jason Snell (01:21:27):
Shooting too, right? Like connect by Usb and have an app and you're controlling the capture on the cameras have been doing this for a very long time, but the iPhone, you can do that connection and so a lot of professional photographers do this. They're looking at a good monitor and they're getting it exactly right with animation. You're probably even maybe onion skinning to the previous frame to make sure the movement is exactly right and that's a real Iphone 15 feature because of Usb

Leo Laporte (01:21:57):
C. Yeah, maybe I got started. I felt like it was trying to be up, but it wasn't good. I like to stop motion. That was cool. Maybe I got sour by the fact that it begins with what looks like a salvation army red bucket and I'm no longer, suddenly I've been ripped my head. I've been woke about Salvation army and I thought, well, I don't know if you want to really promote that apple given all your Lgbtq employees, I Think.

Andy Ihnatko (01:22:27):
I've figured out in the past five minutes what kind of bothered me about it that for those who haven't seen, it's basically making, she has a part-time with a co-worker. Her boss is a jerk, her boss is a jerk and she works out her feelings about it by making Stop-motion felt animation in which a doll that is definitely her boss Suffers day to day and relentlessly and. Then there's a turn in the middle where he gives her the same gift that he's giving everybody, but it's like a pair of hand knitted mittens or whatever. What is the humanity of this person overlooking then sees this person, sees that he's eating alone dinner in a restaurant and then she basically turns around and okay, and that's nice and that's the sweet Christmas turn. It takes two and a half minutes, minutes to get there. I got to point out out of a four minute, but what got to me is that she should have realized before she should have recognized the humanity of this person before having pity for him in any way, shape or form.

(01:23:29):
And that's the thing that kind of let me down a little bit. I also didn't like that she, I just thought it was an opportunity she tore apart the hand stocking that he gave her to make a dog for her stop motion, which by the way, he will never see. I mean the whole thing true. Hopefully you never see it was very poorly scripted. This was not a good idea. And I think Apple, it was cute, which has done some real tearjerkers in the past. I've found myself actually physically weeping on some of 'em. Not on this one. This one I was weeping in pain. I still remember the one where like, oh, typical generation Z. He's with a family Christmas thing and he's the only one who's on his phone all the time, not paying attention to anybody. That one I liked. That was fun.

(01:24:13):
Oh, we assumed that he was just being sullen. What he was doing was he was shooting videos of everybody to make This's Christmas gift this gorgeous video produced on his iphone that everybody loved like, oh, I'm a jerk. I judge when I should not have judged. I'm cleaner and better for this. Having this emotional experience, it's Apple's fault for making this be a thing every year that they have the holiday video on top yourself. You have to give, once you make one blockbuster, everyone's saying, why wasn't the next one a blockbuster two? Hey normal. We can't show you anything at all from it because they will immediately take us down. We've discovered so worth watching them. You just can go out and watch Fuzzy feelings. There's also a fuzzy feelings behind the scene. Can I have one more? Can I make one more nasty? This isn't technically the holiday season yet, so I can still be scroogey.

(01:25:03):
You notice that they wanted as many people as possible to have access to this and to enjoy this and watch this. So they put it on YouTube. Okay. They didn't make it exclusively on Apple TV plus, did they? But if you want to see a Charlie Brown thanksgiving that's different or Charlie Brown Christmas, you have to sign up for Apple tv. That's really Scroogey. First off, they're giving, they're not even giving Pbs what they used to do, which is like we will give one over the air airing at one night so that people can still see it over the air for free. I

Jason Snell (01:25:34):
Just want to be crystal clear. If you want to see Charlie Brown Thanksgiving, think again. You don't, it's really bad. The Christmas one is the one you want. Wait a minute, the Halloween one is the one. It's the

Andy Ihnatko (01:25:47):
Great Pumpkin's. Great. The

Jason Snell (01:25:49):
Thanksgiving one is, so my kids used to demand it all the time. It is so bad. Don't do it otherwise. Listen to Andy. Just don't. Not that one. Not that one. And I feel like it

Andy Ihnatko (01:26:00):
Was Curb

Jason Snell (01:26:00):
Your enthusiasm for kids and

Alex Lindsay (01:26:02):
I found that to all be traumatizing. I don't care what Apple does with this peanuts.

Andy Ihnatko (01:26:07):
Did you identify with Charlie Brown? Is that why Alex?

Alex Lindsay (01:26:10):
I don't know what I identified with. It might've been. It was the whole football thing made me upset.

Andy Ihnatko (01:26:15):
Again,

Alex Lindsay (01:26:17):
It's upsetting.

Andy Ihnatko (01:26:20):
I was

Alex Lindsay (01:26:20):
Keep doing that

Andy Ihnatko (01:26:23):
Because this is something I was actually thinking of this morning because there's also an announcement like last week, the week before that there's going to be a new Peanuts. Apple is producing a Peanuts feature film in which the gang goes to New York City. And I was thinking, I think that Apple is being a really good steward of the characters visually, they're on point, the stories they're telling are on point. The slight disappointment is that they tend to be very much not just oriented towards kids, but the way that adults, modern adults want to create children's entertainment. And one of the things that was so valuable to me as a kid reading the Peanuts Strip and watching the Specials was that it wasn't as a kid, there were moments where I was just thinking that I am alone.

(01:27:09):
Everything just is absolutely terrible and I don't think that there's any joy to be found anywhere. And this wasn't a Treakley story. Treakley Strips are saying that, oh, but don't worry that bully who was a jerk to you at school, you know what? Did you know that he fell in the mud and everyone laughed at him. It's like the idea that the Peanuts Strip was saying Charlie Brown lost the baseball game and it was his fault and they did a week's worth of strips or he's just in a darkened room because he just wants to be there with his sadness. And it wasn't celebrating sadness, it was just simply acknowledging that sadness is something that you carry as humanity. If you are grateful for your humanity, you have to be aware and in some way grateful for all of it. And actually, again, even as a ten-year-old or eleven-year-old child who had to figure out how to get on that bus to junior high on days where I absolutely did not want to do it, it gave me strength and power saying there is suffering in life is just simply something that happens. You're right. It's terrible. I'm not going to tell you that's going to get better today. All I'm saying is that it's better if you get on the bus today than if you just simply stay home. So just responding to having the football pulled out from under you a, it's a funny gag. A, it's totally loosey. It's also totally Charlie Brown saying, you know what?

(01:28:25):
She wouldn't do it 13 times in a row. And how good will it feel to finally kick that football? Pretty identifiable, isn't it?

Alex Lindsay (01:28:32):
If someone did that to me, I think the problem was I always have problems with any content. When someone does something completely so out of quiet character that I can't be with it anymore. I guess someone did that to me, I'd just be dead to me. I'll never talk about Loosey. It would just be like, I'd just be like, I don't need to have you around anymore. Jason,

Andy Ihnatko (01:28:49):
I have a new idea. Loosey Van Pelt, I rebuke thee as I would rebuke Satan himself.

Alex Lindsay (01:28:55):
I just stopped paying attention. You just don't exist anymore, Jason. You don't about it. I just wouldn't have you around.

Leo Laporte (01:29:00):
I know you don't need another podcast idea, but somebody's going to do a ranking of the 45 Charlie Brown specials.

Jason Snell (01:29:07):
You're

Leo Laporte (01:29:07):
Right. Volunteer from Best to Worst. I'm just thinking, but

Jason Snell (01:29:10):
I don't want to be the one. We did do an incomparable podcast where they watched every Muppet movie. Oh God. So this could be like that. You just got to find people who want to watch all the peanut movies, all the peanuts.

Leo Laporte (01:29:20):
I didn't realize there's 45. We must have a meeting, Jason, there's two and Apple owns them all. There's an Arp. There's an Arbor Day one. There's so many.

Jason Snell (01:29:29):
Just don't watch the Thanksgiving one is real bad.

Leo Laporte (01:29:32):
Well, we know at least the worst one is the Thanksgiving one, right? Can probably agree that great Pumpkin's the best

Jason Snell (01:29:38):
Flash beagle though. There's Flash Beagle. That's not good. That's the Flashdance theme. Charlie Brown special. Not kidding, not kidding.

Leo Laporte (01:29:47):
And they're as immortalized in a Peanut's watch face. There is a Flash Beagle sequence. What a they shifts off with, by the way, speaking of insecure messaging, you may remember we mentioned that the Nothing Phone was going to have interoperability with Apple's Imessages not so fast. In fact, it's so insecure. They were using, as you had pointed out, so Insecure not only did nothing remove it from their phone, but Sunbird basically stopped, went out of business or least got pulled from the app store. Yeah. Yeah. So that didn't work out. But

Jason Snell (01:30:29):
Sad Trompa, good

Leo Laporte (01:30:30):
News. Funny thing is the security issues were discovered by an app, which I was actually thinking of making my pick of the week Text.com because it was bought by Automatic and it does kind of the same thing. And it was, they know a little bit about interoperability messages and keeping 'em secure. They designed Text.com to be fully secure end to end. So they knew a little bit about that and they did some research and they said, this is so insecure, this is so bad. And they were promoting it as just as secure as Imessage explicitly. This was one of the biggest clutches

Alex Lindsay (01:31:11):
Of everything from any altitude you could tell that this was a bad idea was like, what are you doing? What are you talking about? Why would you do this? I didn't even know why they even, yeah, I was just confused. I was like, okay.

Leo Laporte (01:31:25):
A little bit of a crazy people. Yeah, a little bit of a dark spot on the escutcheon of Nothing.com. Lisa said. She said, there's a phone company called Nothing. I said, yeah, it's not a great name. And they think they're clever and they think they're clever. Android is a fake open platform. Epics at it. Again, Tim Sweeney on the stand testifying in the doj's antitrust action against Google and remember that Epic didn't like Apple much either and took them to court lost basically. Although there's still a little bit to be determined in the Supreme Court, Sweeney testified that Google tried to cut a deal with Epic with Fortnight that he rejected and went on to strike Secret Accords with mobile device makers to maintain Google Play as a dominant app. He said in 2018 he believed Android wasn't closed to developers, but subsequently realized it was a fake open platform that was just as close as the app store. And Apple, he's not looking for monetary damages, he just says, we want the jury to find that Google has violated the law so the court can make Google stop enforcing these policies. Although Google's lawyer did score some points and cross-examination getting Sweeney to admit that in fact Epics paying a 30% cut to Sony's, PlayStation a Microsoft's Xbox and to Nintendo's switch. So that's

Alex Lindsay (01:33:06):
Arguably that's where the 30% came from when everyone else, where did the 30% came come from, both Apple and Google and everyone else looked at the consoles and they were like, well, they're charging 30%, we'll charge 30%. That's where, so they have been all paying that. And the problem is, is that what Epic wants to do is something they can't do without Google and Apple making this much wider, which is that they want to create a marketplace where they sell things and they don't want to give them 15% or 30% of that income. And so they're just desperate to get that because their entire future is all based on this idea or Tim's entire future is based on that idea. And so he really has this possibility that he wants to step into and he can't step into it because of that. And that's the challenge that he has.

(01:33:51):
He's trying to break this wall down and the reality is he may actually destroy his own company by doing it in this process because he's not making any friends with the companies that are the gatekeepers in this case. And there's a lot of soft power that can be like Apple used to bring Epic onto the stage every single, and they gave that up and that is the millions, the tens of millions of dollars that brought them in soft. The aura that comes with, Hey, we're working with them, I think was, it's an expensive problem in addition to not being on the Apple platform. And so I think that it's a really, and Google, of course, they're just fighting with everyone trying to create a world that they think should exist but probably won't.

Andy Ihnatko (01:34:41):
But that gets back to the point I was making earlier about the reason why all these platforms have decided that, you know what, maybe if you're not actually making a lot of money on the Play store or on the App Store, we won't actually make you pay any money whatsoever. Maybe that would be a good thing to do. And also all the stuff that we're talking about, about the reasons why we know that Apple had been explicitly talking about how no, we don't want Imessage to make things easier to talk to Android users because we think that that will help sell more Android phones. We want to help sell more Iphones. But I feel guilty about how happy this stuff makes me because yeah, I agree with you. I don't think that Epic is making arguments. I think they're making very emotional, oddly enough, they're making a business forward argument that is propelled by emotion as opposed to here is all the legal stuff that we have behind us, more than simply we're paying money.

(01:35:38):
We don't want to pay. We shouldn't have to pay it. So this is why they already lost it. Once they lost in 2021, they immediately filed the lawsuit, same lawsuit against Google, and they're using the exact same playbook. Only other interesting thing about the second redux about it is that Google is trying to make the same argument that Apple was using that both companies are going to be making in the future, which is to say we are not a monopoly of anything. Because if you don't want to operate in the Android app store, hey, we've got competition in the form of the Iphone app store and vice versa. However,

Alex Lindsay (01:36:16):
Arguably Google's argument is better because they do have side that. So the thing is is that if you lost against Apple, you're not going to win against Google.

Andy Ihnatko (01:36:25):
It's like figure out,

Alex Lindsay (01:36:29):
Let's pick a cliff. It was a steep hill that we didn't get up. Let's pick a straight up cliff to figure this out.

Andy Ihnatko (01:36:34):
We spent so much time and effort putting together these slide decks for the last court case. It seems a shame only to use them once because we're really proud of them. But it is interesting because in the other bit of court news, this is relevant to Apple, so they're winding up. The Doj's antitrust case against Google search is winding up. However, there is one of the pieces of evidence that was put into evidence into testimony on Monday. A reporter from the Verge was quickly scribbling down like a transcript. That was, I think, I don't know for sure. It wasn't something that was entered into evidence that you can now download as a pdf. I got the impression because he said that he was typing as fast as he could. It was something that was simply projected up that was Apple produced transcript of, or excuse me, a summation of here's how our two hour meeting in 2018, I think it was between Sundar Pichai and Tim Cook went, and it is full of, it is like a Hallmark Christmas movie in terms of all the dialogue saying that, oh yeah, you know what? We've had our fights and our disagreements, but I'd like to think we've put that past us and we can have a great future together. I want us to think we're both one same company with the same goals. Like, oh, that would make me happy too. Sundar

(01:37:50):
Saying that now that that testimony is out there, that might make it harder for either of these companies to say that No, no, no, we are bitter rivals. Grr. We are fighting against Apple all the time. And of course that's true. And this is just the notes from one meeting in which they were trying to be very productive on a bunch of things that were just baggage that those damaging a mutual relationship. But nonetheless, that's certainly going to come up sometime in the future. You got to think. Yeah,

Alex Lindsay (01:38:14):
I mean what's interesting is that it's much more likely that Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai would make that deal compared to the original founders of those companies, which probably don't, don't see as much Eye, didn't see as much. Steve Jobs

Andy Ihnatko (01:38:28):
Hated it.

Alex Lindsay (01:38:31):
I angry,

Andy Ihnatko (01:38:32):
I can't come up with a quote, but if I had prepared for it, there were quotes where we were like, I want Android dead, I want his family dead. I want his office burned to the ground. Just like the Untouchables or something.

Alex Lindsay (01:38:45):
Oh yeah. And Steve was known for some of those things. I mean the one that I had heard was when Avid released that press release about their dropping the Mac platform. I guess someone that I talked to that reportedly was in the meeting said if Steve Jobs head had spun around and fired come out of his eyes, he wouldn't have been surprised at that point. He was like, and there was a whole lot of pounding. It came up because we were having lunch and they were giving everyone at Ilm new Macs with Final Cut and said, and all the only question is what does Avid have that we don't? And I was like, why are you guys doing this right now? And then he told me the story of Avid and everything was fine and everyone's getting along and then Avid said one thing and then it was like, let's pound those guys into the ground. And so I'm not surprised that that

Andy Ihnatko (01:39:34):
Happened. It's good when you see this evidence of adults running the company basically space is saying that, yeah, you know what? It would've been great if we felt as though we did that. This stuff doesn't happen, but we don't have a time machine and we need to move forward. There's lots of opportunities that we work together. We are not going to simply let that we're upset that you took two milks in the lunch line and there was no milk left for me, that this is the reason why I'm going to screw my own company and not work with you at all. And

Alex Lindsay (01:39:58):
What you see is common diplomacy. This is just adulting just like, Hey, we don't weren't here when that happened or we don't care when that happened. It wasn't close to us. Let's just sort this out. And so I think that using that to say that they're not competitors would be hard. But because it sounded like a conversation between two adults about let's not keep fighting

Andy Ihnatko (01:40:19):
Tim's overall message. I'm quoting, I'm quoting what the Sean Hollister wrote down Tim's overall message to Google was, I imagine us as being able to be deep, deep partners deeply connected where our services end and yours begin and sees no natural impediment to us doing more together. We know that there's a past but that doesn't feel encumbered by it and we want to figure out how we work more deeply together and share information together. I couldn't help remember because one of my favorite movies is the Bandwagon with Fred Astaire and Sid Sharice where that they don't fall in love In the second act like in most mgm musicals, it is like there are two professional dancers who've been hired on the same show that's really, really troubled. And so the entire movie, yes is going to be that inevitably there's going to end with a relationship between the two.

(01:41:01):
But it's mostly about, I'm a tap dancer, you're a ballad dancer, I'm like a movie star. You in the classics are dance styles even compatible. You're taller than me. And at the end where everything has gone through the show has gone through hell. They've finally gone through their first broadway opening night and it's a super, super huge smash and there's a surprise celebration party for Fred Astaire's character who became the producer of the show. And Sid Shreese is speaking for the entire cast and crew who are all gathered on the stage with catered lunches and things like saying, oh, we might've had our difficulties and maybe we didn't know if we'd ever make it through, but we are in this for a long, long time and there are no longer any impediments keeping us in the way. Like, oh, you are in love. You're telling him that you're in love in front of these 60 people and that I couldn't help but think about this language that was written down by Sean Hall.

Leo Laporte (01:41:51):
I'm stunned that you were able to connect that to the bandwagon, but well done, Andy. Well done. It's a great movie. To

Alex Lindsay (01:41:58):
Be clear, epic Epic is visionary. What they've done and what they're creating is amazing. It's just that they're trying to force and the place, the only way they can force it is through the courts. They're trying to force open something that they think is intrinsic to their future. I will say in fairness, the future is the difference between where they are right now and where they are if they were able to get this to work is tens possibly hundreds of billions of dollars between the two. Because what they're looking at is the metaverse and people buying and selling goods. What they want to do is they want to sell not just swords, but your virtual house and your virtual car and your virtual whatever else you buy for your virtual world. And that's what they're trying to get to and have you buy all those things and they don't want to pay Apple or Google 30% of every sale. It's just not efficient.

Jason Snell (01:42:49):
Andy, how about this one? I'm just ACEO standing in front of another CEO asking him to share revenue.

Andy Ihnatko (01:42:58):
That's

Jason Snell (01:42:58):
Awesome. This is another classic movie line I thought of. That's all.

Leo Laporte (01:43:01):
What movie that from

Jason Snell (01:43:03):
Notting Hill would

Andy Ihnatko (01:43:04):
Hill, would you imagine Tim Cook or Sundar Pichai standing in the driveway holding the home box over his head in the trench coat? I'm trying to figure out which

Jason Snell (01:43:13):
Money Rains down. It's money raining down as he stands out there.

Leo Laporte (01:43:17):
I think Hug Granted, make an excellent CEOI was today I learned that Dua Lipa has had a podcast for the last three years. I don't know where she finds the time, but she does. And not only that, but she gets some pretty good guests like, well, I don't know Tim Cook this week. Andy, you have listened to Dua Lipa's interview with Tim Cook and you said it's pretty good.

Andy Ihnatko (01:43:43):
It really is because we're all used to hearing, oh wow. Tune in next week or the next week's video. I have an exclusive interview with Tim Cook. I have an exclusive interview with Sundar Pichai or Sadia, and it turns out to be okay, this was transactional. They decided that, Hey, YouTuber, this is your reward for giving us so much good pr. We're going to give you access. And there's three PR people who are saying, if you screw up in any way, shape, or form, if you do not let our CEO promote what he wants to promote, you are going to burn, burn, burn, burn, burn. And I'm standing here with a gas can. It was actually a very open interview of forty-five minutes. It was more personal in nature. Rarely did Tim get into

Leo Laporte (01:44:25):
Any sort. Of... said, Cook's a Dua Lipa fan. Maybe he likes your music and said, Hey, you know what I'd like to do? I'd like to do that Dua Lipa podcast. Could I do that for off-key music? It's a pretty good crossover. Exactly.

Andy Ihnatko (01:44:36):
But yeah. But they got into your childhood of not just trivia, but what things were kind of influencing you about being a teen, being a kid and cognizant and aware when Mlk was killed, when Rfk was killed. Growing up gay in an Alabama town, the glass ceiling that still exists. She did a lot of really good research. This is one of the best interviews I've seen of ACEO ever. She was asking somebody did a lot of good research and of course we all know that even if it's the head of the nightly news, that person is operating off of three months of research being provided to them. But the thing is, oftentimes it is just, I'm just so excited. First of all, where do you get your shirts? Because I always like your shirts. You get your shirts someplace. And the fact that he was, and again, he's been CEO for a very long time, so he knows to keep his guard up. He knows how far he can go in talking about his personal stuff and where things are just private and he doesn't need to talk about stuff, so I don't have to

Leo Laporte (01:45:41):
Listen to this. Could you summarize the highlights? Anything? Did we learn anything important? I don't really care how he grew up, but did we learn anything important?

Andy Ihnatko (01:45:50):
Important? Yes. There is a plan of succession. They have number of people that are ready to take the CEO role. He has not prepared to leave at any immediate future. However, he knows that he could be hit by a bus. So yes, there was a line of succession in place. Well,

Leo Laporte (01:46:05):
He's in his sixties, right? I mean he's actually almost retirement age. He's 60.

Andy Ihnatko (01:46:09):
Yeah, he's about 60 I think Born in 1960, I think. So 63. So that was one thing. He also had some, he was asked directly about kids over using phones and he talked about how much the metrics that the Iphone is collecting to present saying, here's how much time you spent online. Here are the apps you use, how are the notifications? He talked about his own experience and I thought it was interesting that the solution to, we want kids and adults to not to be spending so much time on their devices. What's the solution to essentially block them for doing them? No, the solution was we are going to give them all the metrics they know basically to a, have that moment of shock and then the tools to know how to make this stuff work. There are a lot of little details like this talking about, again, working with Steve.

(01:47:03):
The idea of a phrase that I think that other people might've come across before, but it was new to me, the philosophy of one plus one equals three in their corporate mentality, which is that two people with an opinion together is not just two. You actually get more value than just the sum total of these two people. I thought that was a very concise way of putting it, but no, he wasn't giving ship dates on Vision Pro or anything like that, but it was a very nice conversation about the background stuff that goes on behind Apple, and it was very much worthwhile.

Leo Laporte (01:47:36):
Did he mention who his planned successor is?

Andy Ihnatko (01:47:40):
He was asked specifically, but he said no. There's a group of people that are, I don't think this was a quote, but he basically said there are some specific people that would probably be called on to fulfill my role. But again, I have no plan to leave. So there's no need. There's been no need to get someone ready by an exit date. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:47:59):
No. It's the hit by a bus scenario. And every good CEO has that somewhere in the door of his desk.

Andy Ihnatko (01:48:08):
Are you interested in learning that? He played trombone as a kid and he wanted to be a jazz musician, but then he realized that he has as much as even a good trombone player would struggle in their career, that he's not a good trombone player, so maybe he should parallel into his other interest of engineering.

Leo Laporte (01:48:23):
I actually knew that, and I'm trying to remember where I read a biography of Tim Cook's Younger days. There was a book or maybe it was an article. Anyway, I did know that actually. Not that it in any way informs anything having to do with Apple, but

Andy Ihnatko (01:48:44):
One last thing, I'm just going off the top of my head. I just listened to it this morning. Yeah, you have

Leo Laporte (01:48:48):
Transcript for us. Thank you.

Andy Ihnatko (01:48:49):
As usual, I had my Android phone, my Android recording that does really good transcripts, so I still like audio Hijack's new transcript feature. It's not ready yet, but I'm working with it and it's good. But yeah, I thought that he's famous for being an operations person. The reason why he came that Steve Jobs brought him aboard Apple was because he was the king of ops at Compaq. That actually went back to the very, very beginning that when he embraced engineering as his career, he was most fascinated by robotics and manufacturing and other technology that went into and engineering that went into the manufacturing process, which I think is a really interesting line of continuity because this is not just somebody who got an mba, then got an advanced degree and then worked his way up Vp positions at lots of different companies that he was essentially been working towards this role at Apple since he was 18 years old, which I think is kind of foundational on how he works.

Leo Laporte (01:49:44):
It's interesting. It does look like a really good interview. I guess I'll have to listen to it. Dua Lipa's podcast is called What at Your Service? Dua? I can't remember what's the name of it. Anyway, you could probably search for Dua Lipa and find it. I think I put a link in there, but Oh, you did? I'm just right now I'm just having trouble mousing for some reason. Here it is, interview with Dua Lipa. Oh, you can even watch it. It's called at your service. You can even watch it. So there's video as well from bbc. Sounds alright. Let's take a break and your picks of the week will wrap up this thrilling gripping edition of AI Meets Mac. But first a word from Discourse, the online home for your community. It is the online home. I'm happy. I'm very proud to say has been for some years for the Twitch community at Twit.community.

(01:50:48):
Discourse is the best. They don't use the word forum and I guess it really has gone so far beyond a forum, but I think of it as forum software and I've used so many different programs and this is easily the best for over a decade. Discourse has made it their mission to make the internet a better place for online communities. It's open source, trusted now by more than 20,000 online communities. Some of the largest companies in the world use it for customer service. We use it to have a great conversation and I'm loving it by harnessing the power of discussion. Real-time chat and ai. That's why it's so much more than a forum these days. discourse makes it easy to have meaningful conversations and collaborate with your community anytime and anywhere. We realized that YouTube comments weren't the best way for us to find out what our audience thinks, and I didn't really want to use YouTube comments, so John O'bacon said, you should try Discourse.

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You have access to all the conversation history. There's no advertising and they will never sell any data to advertisers. So really, it's private, it's secure, and they do the hard work discourse gives you everything you need in one place. Make discourse the online home for your community. We've been using it for years and Love it. You will too. And by the way, I moderate the whole thing along with Paul Holder, our kind of volunteer moderator. And it's easy. They make it very easy to moderate. Visit discourse.org/twit to get one month free in all self-serve plans discourse.org/twit. I'm a big, big fan, very happy discourse customer and have been, I saw John O'bacon at the race. I was a little jealous. I don't know if his wife is a Vc or they know a vc. Anyway, they were going down to the Mclaren Paddock to hang out with Mclaren said, well, enjoy the race. You'll see a little bit more of it than I will. Let's get our picks of the week in Jason Snow. What do you got for us?

Jason Snell (01:53:45):
I'm going to suggest an app called Timeree, which is an Ios client for the Toggle Time-tracking service. I got a backstory here. I have a lot. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:53:55):
You better explain yourself what

Jason Snell (01:53:56):
Into time tracking and things like that. And I've never, here's the thing. So a decade ago when I left my job, one of the things that made me unhappy with my job is that at the end of the day I realized that I only realized this sort of too late. The way I kept score was in a very narrow area of like, did I write an article? Did I do something in traditional editorial? And at that point, my job was not that anymore. And so I would come home exhausted having fought all sorts of battles as a senior level manager in a media company and feel like I didn't accomplish anything even though I was absolutely doing what I was paid to do. And ironically, the times I felt like I had accomplished something, I was doing what they didn't pay me to do because that was really writing articles about Max was not what I was being paid to do at that point.

(01:54:45):
They really gave me a realization that I have some very specific ways at the end of a day or a week that I keep score and I say, did I do my job? Did I work? Did I do? Was I doing anything? And my self-Worth as a professional really fed into that. So I realized that I still do this in the sense that my wife comes home from work and I sort of tell her what I did in a given day. And there are days where I can say, I did a podcast. I posted this article where it's very clear, and then there are other times where the work that I absolutely was doing that absolutely is important, fell through the cracks, slipped through my fingers, and as a result I had this question of did I really do anything today or was this a waste?

(01:55:24):
And I realized that might be why I want to try to do some time tracking, not to bill anybody or anything like that, but really so that at the end of the day or the week, I could say, look, posting those podcasts and doing those edits that took two or three hours out of my day, I might've let that evaporate along as being like, that's not even a thing worth tracking. But that was real appreciable work that needed to get done and that I did it. And so at the recommendation of a few friends, I decided to try toggle, which is free. So timery is free within that purchase. Toggle is a web-based service that you can, it also can use for free. So it's fairly low cost to do it. Timery, the reason I wanted to mention it's been out for a long time, iOS and Macos versions is they have a bunch of widgets, interactive widgets that support the latest Os versions and they're really good.

(01:56:18):
And in fact, that's when it really has clicked for me is I don't really want an interface. I don't want to fiddle with stuff. I don't want to look at charts and graphs. I really wanted to keep it simple. And you can pull one of these widgets out on your Mac desktop or on your iPhone, and you tap to start a timer and then you tap when you're done with your work and it all gets logged and you can look at it later. And the widget experience is so good and such a great example of interactive widgets that are now available to us with the latest versions of Ios and Macos. And they did a really good job with those. So using that as I'm, I've got my Mac Break weekly timer going right now. And that way at the end of the day I'll be like, wow, what did I do today? And I'll be like, well, three hours on Mac Break weekly. That's a thing you did today and I'll be able to keep score a little bit and feel better about my life and my choices and what I'm getting done. This a

Leo Laporte (01:57:11):
Product, I'm so afraid that if I use this, it would just be waffles at jj's. Waffles at Jj's, more waffles at Jj's went down to Jj's and

Jason Snell (01:57:20):
Not some waffles. Maybe it's not for you, but I've already heard from some people who heard me talking about this and they're like, actually, that is a problem for me. It's really almost like an internalizing are you and part of it, it

Leo Laporte (01:57:33):
Makes you feel better that you actually did do something. And I think parents

Jason Snell (01:57:36):
Are like, you got to work as an adult and are you holding up your end of society? And I have internalized some of that. And so I want to know is this, did I just, I work at home by myself, so it's like did I just lounge around all day and do nothing? I want to feel like I'm actually doing something worthwhile and the tracking is trying to help me understand that

Leo Laporte (01:57:57):
I'll take a chance and try this. Maybe I'm doing more than I think

Jason Snell (01:58:04):
You might be right. The insight I had a decade ago was there are things that you do or that I do that I don't keep score of, and that when I started hating my job, it was because I let all that stuff that was real work that I was being paid for and that had a positive impact on my work and my coworkers and everything else. And yet I discounted it as being worthless. And it was important to have that moment of realization. First off that if that's your job, maybe you shouldn't do that job anymore. But second that you can't let that stuff run through your fingers because then you're going to look at the end of the day and say, did I just sit around watching star trek all day? No. Well then what did I do? Oh, I'm a failure, right? And it's very easy to get to that point, so I'm trying to not do that.

Leo Laporte (01:58:52):
But what if you did in fact, sit around?

Jason Snell (01:58:57):
Don't track that. Don't track it, track that. Don't track that. Put that in a secret thing of special business that's in the special business timer. Don't

Leo Laporte (01:59:04):
Worry about it. Good idea.

Jason Snell (01:59:06):
Forget about it. Do you

Andy Ihnatko (01:59:07):
Like this? Are you tracking which star Trek series? It is. That is a very important data point about whether you're wasting your time or not.

Jason Snell (01:59:13):
Glad you asked. If you want to get really specific, you can have tags on specific projects, so you could say Star Trek is the project, but this is the deep Space nine tag that I was in today, so you can really narrow down if you want to go that far. I'm really looking at high level though personally, I just want to know. Yes, you did spend, oh, I did spend two hours editing and posting podcasts. That's an important part of my job. I should probably give myself credit for that too. I

Leo Laporte (01:59:42):
Think this is interesting because usually you think of time tracking as lawyers doing it to build the right people, and I think it's an interesting notion that maybe it's worth tracking whatever you do just to see what you do. It's kind of Apple screen time for life.

Jason Snell (02:00:00):
And the second level of it is if you find out that, oh, I spend 10 hours a week on a thing that makes me most of my living and 15 hours in a wake on a thing that pays me almost nothing. That allows you to have that second level, which is my priorities are out of whack. And that could be useful too.

Leo Laporte (02:00:23):
Yeah, I know actually almost all the free time I have is spent scanning for stories for our shows, but it'd be kind of good to know how much of that I do every day. It's probably upwards of eight hours a day doing that. Thank you. Jason. Still Timeree, you start with Toggle to Gg L.

Jason Snell (02:00:44):
Yeah, it's a web service, but timeree is the really good iOS app and also a pretty good, it's on a great Mac app. It's okay, but the widgets are super and there's a menu bar thing too, but the widgets are the thing. Yeah, you could

Leo Laporte (02:00:57):
Do, it's really command one waffles with Jj's command two down to I Hop for a quick stack,

Jason Snell (02:01:04):
Right? Command three, looking at links. Looking at links.

Leo Laporte (02:01:08):
Yeah. Yeah, that's kind of like it. Mr. Anacco, what is your pick of the week?

Andy Ihnatko (02:01:15):
My pick is my favorite comic book reader app for the iPad. It's called Panels and a comic book, digital comic book reader. You can't have just a generic reader app, even if the file format, if you're downloading comics that are not in a drm format like from Amazon and Comixology, you're downloading Pdfs or Cbr Cb Cb files. It's a really specific way of reading comics and navigation has to be free form sometimes. You really want to get a good look on the art, so being able to zoom in very closely without the interface taking over and thinking that you want to click from panel to panel. Not only that, but organizing a collection so that yes, you have Fantastic four, but there have been a gazillion different Fantastic four series, which you want it all in one box, but then you want folders for each subdivision of it. Or maybe you just want to arbitrarily organize this as Here are my favorite story runs no matter when they were published. It's a very bespoke, very specific sort of thing, and I think that Panels does this better than any other app I've tried. Well, and now

Leo Laporte (02:02:23):
That Comixology is going away, you probably want to replace it.

Andy Ihnatko (02:02:28):
That's why it's been on my mind. I mean, again, unfortunately, Amazon and Comixology, they only sell Drm version of these comics, and as we all know, there's no place on the internet where you can download illegally pirated comic books an hour after they've been posted in Cbr, CBZ or Pdf format. If such a thing were to exist, panels would be an awesome app for doing that. Okay, I'll

Leo Laporte (02:02:54):
Top. You know what, Andy, I know you support the comic book writers and the artists very much, and so this is not, your goal is not to get around that.

Andy Ihnatko (02:03:05):
I'll just say that quickly that there are two sides to this coin that there are a lot of the comics that I back on kickstarter are delivered as pdfs and open formats. That's very important. A lot of Golden Age comics are actually legitimately in the public domain and you can download 'em that way. Thirdly, there are a lot, of course, the majority of comics, they are like little independent comics from the eighties and nineties. One of my favorite comics Action Girl by Sarah Dyer, who's artist and also editor in chief, an amazingly cool series, and it was like 12 issues in the eighties and nineties. Of course, it's not collected anywhere. I think it's actually a cultural benefit that people have scanned these in and uploaded them someplace where people can download them and read them on an app like this. The other side of that is that you can't be johnny, no want to pay.

(02:03:51):
I'm upset that the comics of the comixology app, which is not a perfect comic book reader app, but at least it was a specific comic book reader app for the iPad. They've announced that on December one, it will not just be no longer be the standard. It will cease to work that you have to use the kindle app, which is again a jack of all trades reader app for reading comics. I hope that this means that they have basically taken comixology app and turned it into a feature of the kindle app if it really is the entire structure and readings reading style of the kindle app. That's just absolutely horrible. And my position is that I've been using Comixology since the very beginning, since Jason and I were on a panel before the iPad was formally released of all the different companies that said that they wanted to bring digital comics to the iPad, and there was competition before Comixology ran the table and then Amazon bought Comixology.

(02:04:45):
So in that time, I have bought thousands of comics that are drm'd through comixology, thousands of dollars, maybe even more than $10,000. I believe that if I have paid for a comic, there is nothing ethically wrong to me. That's fair. Deciding to finding a place where someone has posted it illegally and then simply downloading my own drm copy of it so that I can read it in an app that I think is much, much better than the kindle app. I mean, maybe it'll be a fine app, I don't know. But I always felt that, again, if you have already paid for this, you're not just johnny, no want to pay. It's that their drm is preventing you from doing something you should be ethically and legally entitled to do with this thing. I don't have an ethical problem with downloading illegally, but no matter how you come to use an app like panels, it's really great. Last comment. It makes it so easy to move comic files onto the iPad no matter whatever, what mechanism you caught into or is appropriate. It's not limited to just the Files app. It can connect directly to your, I'm sorry, no dropbox and Google Drive

Leo Laporte (02:05:48):
Drop Dropbox. Onedrive, yeah. Yeah, that's

Andy Ihnatko (02:05:50):
Cool. But you can also connect directly and just simply Usb sync and simply dock the iPad and just simply drag comic book files onto the thing. You can turn on a web server inside the app and simply mount it as a file. Excuse me. Open up the web page on any desktop Mac and then copy things over to it. No matter what fails, you will find a way to successfully copy things onto it. Again, it's a very, very rich, sophisticated experience. Not expensive either. Buck forty-nine a month, 12 bucks a year, and if you want the previous version and just own it outright is 20 bucks. They're giving you lots of options here.

Leo Laporte (02:06:23):
Panels in the app store, panels Comic Reader from Product Studio spelled with AK, Alex Lindsay pick of the week.

Alex Lindsay (02:06:34):
I decided to start asking my kids and talking to them about things and getting them things to test that I may not think, I may not use as much, but things that they're interested in this. This is a combination of my daughter and I. She does a lot of things with journals and stuff like that, and she really wanted something to print, but it needed to be small. And I really thought of this. I started doing some research and I found this one that was kind of like a polaroid, and so this is a Fujifilm Instax Mini link. Smartphone Printer. So this is a little printer that your phone can connect to over Bluetooth and it will print little versions of Polaroids.

Leo Laporte (02:07:13):
Aww, how little? Really?

Alex Lindsay (02:07:17):
They're about half the size of a polaroid, half the width of a polaroid,

Leo Laporte (02:07:21):
And the quality's good. It's

Alex Lindsay (02:07:24):
Surprisingly good. I thought it was going to come out dot matrix when I saw this little printer. I thought it just looks like a photograph. It looks like a polaroid photograph on a half width Polaroid film, but I really didn't. I thought it was going to be something kind of cute, artsy and just print some again dot matrix level quality. I was kind of surprised when I asked her to bring some up. She's like, no, you can't show those on the show. So anyway, so

Leo Laporte (02:07:50):
Just of

Alex Lindsay (02:07:51):
Her friends and stuff like that, she's like, no. But anyway, she really likes it and she's using 'em for some of her stuff along her,

Leo Laporte (02:08:04):
I saw a whole bunch of Instax cameras at the race. All the young people, they weren't taking pictures with their smartphones. They were taking pictures with these little

Alex Lindsay (02:08:14):
Instax cameras. This one's kind of a bridge between it, so she can take

Leo Laporte (02:08:18):
Smartphone pictures and print

Alex Lindsay (02:08:19):
Pictures with a smartphone and then she can print them out on and have the physical version of them. It's relatively easy and fun. And so it's not super expensive. About 130 bucks or 120.

Leo Laporte (02:08:31):
How much is per print?

Alex Lindsay (02:08:33):
I don't know. That's

Leo Laporte (02:08:35):
Where

Alex Lindsay (02:08:35):
Get It comes with 40 sheets of it and I don't know exactly.

Leo Laporte (02:08:40):
120 sheets are 79 9 9 on the

Alex Lindsay (02:08:43):
Amazon. In my head it was probably like a polaroid. It's like a dollar a sheet. It's less than a

Leo Laporte (02:08:47):
Yeah,

Alex Lindsay (02:08:48):
Yeah. Mean polaroids are not

Leo Laporte (02:08:49):
75 cents each. Inexpensive. Yeah.

Alex Lindsay (02:08:52):
So it's not something you start printing everything on, but I think that for the kind of thing that she's using it for, it was pretty useful. But I gave it to her. I let her test it for a month and tell her, come back and tell her I bought it and told her come back. I came back in a month and said, okay, are you using it? Is it worth it? And she thought it was great.

Leo Laporte (02:09:13):
Along these lines, I wanted a way to print out standard size photos from my phone, and I didn't want to buy a whole photo printer. I got a Canon selfie last week. Was it a hundred bucks? A little less expensive and it does pretty decent full-size shots. I was just wanted pictures. So it's interesting. There is a kind of, and I understand why the Youngs want pictures. I want a picture I can hold.

Andy Ihnatko (02:09:41):
They're fun and tactile. You also get really cheap thermal printers that, of course, they're thermal printers. They're black and white and they're thermal. They're not great. But the idea that you spit out an actual paper image that you hand to somebody that is really, really social and expensive, either

Leo Laporte (02:09:55):
These are 30 cents a print. So I think a little less expensive too. I think it's reasonable.

Alex Lindsay (02:10:02):
These are, she brought a couple of'em in. This is the size. Oh,

Leo Laporte (02:10:05):
They're cute. They're

Alex Lindsay (02:10:06):
So cute.

Leo Laporte (02:10:11):
That's a feature, by the way, for some people. She wants 'em small.

Alex Lindsay (02:10:16):
You put 'em in a journal if you're doing something and they really feel like kind of half-sized polaroid and a little bit nine x 16. So if you're shooting vertical, you have kind of more vertical orientation as opposed to Yeah, that's, and anyway,

Jason Snell (02:10:34):
It was a good experiment. Nice.

Leo Laporte (02:10:36):
It's good. Fujifilm in Stacks. In Stacks is a standard though. So other companies offer in Stacks paper and in Stacks, cameras and so forth. $126 on Amazon. It comes in pink looking for Christmas gifts for the pink. Did you get her the pink one?

Jason Snell (02:10:54):
No, I got her the black one. Oh

Leo Laporte (02:10:56):
Yeah. I think she wanted the black. I always think white, but

Jason Snell (02:11:00):
Person color, pro color Pro

Leo Laporte (02:11:02):
The pro in Stacks. Jason smells the pro at Six Colors.com. He does so many shows. If you want to see them all, you can go to six Dollars.com slash Jason and soon to come. The Charlie Brown ranked specials.

Jason Snell (02:11:20):
No, what is that even going to be called? No, I don't even know. I'm going to come up with a clever title for one.

Andy Ihnatko (02:11:24):
Oh,

Jason Snell (02:11:26):
It could be. It's hard to Hard bad Seo there though.

Andy Ihnatko (02:11:30):
Yeah, we'll workshop it. We'll do this plus the Colombo, the Colombo podcast

Jason Snell (02:11:34):
With the football this time. Something like that. Next time Football,

Andy Ihnatko (02:11:39):
Charlie, Charlie Brown, lust for Glory.

Leo Laporte (02:11:41):
He does have a Magnum podcast, a Dr. I Do podcast.

Jason Snell (02:11:46):
Yeah, doctor's coming back this weekend

Leo Laporte (02:11:47):
As a vending machine episode by episode review of For All Man, for All Mankind. That's back.

Jason Snell (02:11:52):
That's active right now too. Yeah. You

Leo Laporte (02:11:54):
Watch a lot right now watching tv. I hope you're logging it all in your toggle.

Jason Snell (02:11:59):
I am going to have to, and then I'm going to say, oh no, that took way too much time. And why am I doing this to myself?

Leo Laporte (02:12:04):
But there's also six colors, which is absolutely the place to go to get great Apple News the minute it happens. Thank you, Mr. Snell.

Jason Snell (02:12:14):
Thank you, Leo.

Leo Laporte (02:12:15):
I appreciate it. You're filling in for me next week?

Jason Snell (02:12:18):
Yes, I will be in the chair, probably that chair next week. Are

Leo Laporte (02:12:22):
You going to come up? Oh good. Yeah,

Jason Snell (02:12:24):
I'll come up. Alright.

Leo Laporte (02:12:25):
I'm going to give you a dispensation to sit in the Dr. Evil chair. We won't make you sit on some nondescript chair.

Jason Snell (02:12:32):
You don't

Andy Ihnatko (02:12:34):
Leo. Just make sure you give him the de-arming code just in case you forget before you leave.

Leo Laporte (02:12:38):
There is, don't forget the ejector seat button is, there's

Andy Ihnatko (02:12:42):
A lot of load on that spring,

Leo Laporte (02:12:43):
The cushion right there.

Jason Snell (02:12:46):
I have come into the studio and sat in that chair and everybody looks around and I'm like, oh, is this sitting in Captain Kirk's chair? Should I not have done that? And they're like, it's an unwritten, it's fine.

Leo Laporte (02:12:55):
It's an unwritten rule. We kind of expect people to understand and have some humanity, but okay, for you, you

Jason Snell (02:13:03):
Get the thank

Leo Laporte (02:13:03):
You. No, I don't care. I think for a while there was this notion that only Leo should sit in a weird chair, but I don't know if that was good or bad. Andy and I, you will be here next week as well and on Wgbh when?

Andy Ihnatko (02:13:18):
Not until December, but first week in December. And I think, I don't know whether I'm going to be the library or not, but you could just go to Wgbhnews.org to listen to it live or later.

Leo Laporte (02:13:27):
Lovely, lovely. Thank you. Andrew Officehours.global is where you'll find Alex Lindsay pretty much every hour of the day. He's not going to log that, but the mornings are special.

Alex Lindsay (02:13:40):
Just the morning. It's just really, I'm just there. Seven to nine. Yeah. So we are doing q&a this week, so it's actually a great day to ask a great week to ask questions. So we're not trying to have any specific shows. We're just

Leo Laporte (02:13:51):
Questions about what

Alex Lindsay (02:13:52):
Though, anything people ask around media production. So people ask all kinds of this camera, this mic, my computer, anything that's related to, and it stretches into just general tech, but for the most part it's all media related cameras and lights and here. And so yeah,

Leo Laporte (02:14:09):
For years on the radio show, if people would call and ask about those kinds of things, I said, officehours.global, just go there, get in the Zoom and ask your question because the experts

Alex Lindsay (02:14:19):
Are there and a bunch of folks that normally can't make it onto the show are there. So it's a really good, really week to ask questions. Good.

Leo Laporte (02:14:27):
Thanksgiving week, what are you doing for Thanksgiving? Anything?

Alex Lindsay (02:14:34):
I'm doing office hours. Of course you're in the morning and we don't miss a day cooking. And

Leo Laporte (02:14:39):
How are you cooking your Turkey? My,

Alex Lindsay (02:14:42):
I'm not cooking any turkeys. Nice. My mother-in-Law, my wife's parents come up and my mother-in-Law is from Louisiana. So there is Malaya and Greens and the Turkey will be cooked amazingly. And the food is, I stop eating. This is my last I, I'm fasting from this day on to kind of just prepare the space that I have for that process so that yeah, that's,

Leo Laporte (02:15:10):
But you'll be watching the Macy's Day Parade in office hours in

Alex Lindsay (02:15:14):
The morning? No, no, not really. Macy's Day, parade

Leo Laporte (02:15:17):
Office. And of course, don't forget Grey Matter, the podcast you do with Michael Krasny, you produce for Michael Krasny. Great guests on that show, greymatter.show Humanizing Healthcare this week. But there's always something fascinating going

Alex Lindsay (02:15:34):
On. Abraham Verghese was an amazing interview and we had Reb Anderson on from Green Gulch, one of the He's c Anderson. Amazing. Just an amazing hour. And that's coming up. Jason Snell. Jason Snell is coming on. Oh, nice.

Jason Snell (02:15:53):
How'd you get him?

Leo Laporte (02:15:55):
I know. We've been trying for years. I think

Alex Lindsay (02:15:57):
We've done enough. I think we've done enough podcasts. I think you might think that we're okay to be honest.

Andy Ihnatko (02:16:01):
What podcast is he going to be recording while he's recording that

Leo Laporte (02:16:04):
Podcast?

Jason Snell (02:16:06):
Yeah. Can Timeree do two timers simultaneously? You can really save a

Leo Laporte (02:16:12):
Lot of time that way. There you go. Just think of that Andy. Are you going to do the traditional sous vide burrito for Thanksgiving this year or

Andy Ihnatko (02:16:20):
I'm actually going in a different direction. It's going to be a pork tenderloin, homemade mac and cheese arousal sprouts with bacon and homemade ciabatta. And I have not decided on the pies yet. I might actually farm it out because there are at least two things I've never cooked for Thanksgiving before, including this is why I think that Threads is winning for social media as replacement for X. Because this morning I asked, does anybody have a good macaroni and cheese recipe that doesn't include either a blender or start three days before? And I had eight really great ones within 45 minutes. So I'm looking forward to, if you're not looking forward to cooking thanksgiving, you should not be cooking thanksgiving or you're planning the wrong menu. So I'm looking forward how many people

Leo Laporte (02:17:03):
Are you expecting?

Andy Ihnatko (02:17:06):
Sounds like a big one. Oh no. Small table. And that's the reason why I can go total alternative because it's like when you have one guest and you're very simpatico with them, it can be something as simple as, I find that up to four people. You can have a conversation about a, are we okay with no Turkey? Yes. Okay, great. If you could have the ultimate anything, what would it be? So as it happens, I'm cooking for myself, I'm having thanksgiving remotely with lots of other people. This is just going to be a meal for me. And sometimes, sometimes that's nice too because again, I don't have to convince somebody that pork tenderloin and baked macaroni sprouts is the ideal. It's not toast, chili popcorn and pretzel sticks, but it's out there. That's a pretty easy one to compare. That sounds like a pretty good meal.

Leo Laporte (02:17:53):
Sounds damn fine. Are you kidding? I want to come over Mr. Jason Snell Thanksgiving plans

Jason Snell (02:18:01):
Going to visit my brother-in-Law and all my wife's family in Denver where I will be cooking a sweet potato pie. So

Leo Laporte (02:18:08):
There, and you might get some snow in Denver this year,

Jason Snell (02:18:10):
Might. Maybe it's going to be cold. That's what I hear. Yeah. I got Bay Area clothing, so I'm completely unprepared.

Andy Ihnatko (02:18:17):
Perfect.

Leo Laporte (02:18:18):
You'll really enjoy the nip in the air. Well, we wish all of our fine friends a wonderful holiday. For those of you who celebrate. I know many of our audience members have already had their thanksgiving in Canada. Others are saying, what is this thanksgiving of which you speak, but you know what? This would be a great week for you to enjoy family and friends and a fine meal. Regardless. We thank you for joining us. We do Mac Break Weekly, Tuesdays 11, a.m Pacific, two P.m Eastern, 1900 Utc. We turn on the live stream right at the beginning of the show. So if you go to YouTube.com slash twit, you can watch that as we do the show. Honestly, the best thing to do if you want to watch the show is subscribe to the podcast and your favorite podcast player. We like Free from Automatic.

(02:19:05):
We like Matt and his company. And if you subscribe, you'll get it automatically as soon as it's available every Tuesday afternoon. You can also download it from the web page, TWiT.tv slash mbw, and we do put all the shows, the video from all the shows on a YouTube channel dedicated to Mac Break Weekly. So there are lots of ways to watch. Of course, club Trip members can also watch us do it live in the Clubtwit Discord, thank you all for being here. It is now my sad duty to tell you, you got to get back to work because break time is over. Bye-Bye. Listeners of this program, get an ad-free version if they're members of clubtwit. $7 a month gives you ad-free versions of all of our shows. Plus membership in the Clubtwit Discord. A great clubhouse for Twit listeners. And finally, the Twit plus feed with shows like Stacey's Book Club, the Untitled Lennox Show and more. Go to TWiT.tv slash and thanks for your support.

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