MacBreak Weekly 898 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.

0:00:00 - Leo Laporte
It's time for MacBreak Weekly. Hello everybody, I'm back and happy holidays from our MacBreak Weekly team. Jason Snell and Ian not go. Alex Lindsay, it's a light news day, but we will talk about the Apple card. Is it going to chase Netflix plans for spending 17 billion dollars Next year and the end of the line for filmic pro? It's all coming up next on MacBreak Weekly Podcasts you love from people you trust this is.

This is MacBreak Weekly episode 898, recorded Tuesday, december 5th 2023. Dedicated Vulcan salute apparatus. This episode of MacBreak weekly is brought to you by FastMail. Reclaim your privacy, boost productivity and make email yours with FastMail. Try it free now for 30 days at fastmail.com/twit. And by ZipRecruiter. Good news if you're hiring, you've got help ZipRecruiter. ZipRecruiter works for you to find great candidates fast. It's smart technology, identifies qualified candidates for you and you can invite your top choices to apply. Try it free, ziprecruiter.com/macbreak.. And by ZocDoc, the free app where you could find and book appointments online with thousands of top-rated patient reviewed physicians and Specialists filters specifically for ones who take your insurance, are located near you and treat almost any condition. Go to zocdoc.com/macbreak and download the ZocDoc app for free.

Well, happy holidays. It's time for MacBreak Weekly, the show. We cover everything Apple, and Today we have decorated the set. Thank you, burke, who were Burke's helpers and who are the elves, sebastian and Debbie, who are actually our party maesters here at the twit brick house. Well, this is the east side studio. I have been, you'll forgive me.

0:02:12 - Jason Snell
The cottage. Where the hell am I?

0:02:15 - Leo Laporte
I have been on a digital detox for the last week and I'm still a little spacey. But you know what's funny? Everybody said, oh you're, oh Leo, you're never gonna, this is, you're gonna go, you're gonna bail on a day. And actually the hard thing was getting my phone back at the end of it and having to sit down at a computer I had no. It was like, ah, what a relief there's Jason's now. Thank you for filling in for me, jason from the incomparable and six colors calm.

0:02:46 - Jason Snell
We reach. Let me just gonna be a little spoky little.

0:02:51 - Leo Laporte
Press.

0:02:51 - Jason Snell
You could do it with both hands infinite diversity, and infant combinations will just be a little philosophical today. Leo, that's fine. Yeah, it's deep man.

0:02:58 - Leo Laporte
No one's deeper than mr Spock. I could do this hand, but this hands it's a little bit of.

0:03:02 - Jason Snell
You see, my pinkies got a mind of its own thing to look for in Star Trek is if somebody gives the Vulcan salute. But what they do is they start off camera and then it comes up like this is they totally can't do it. It's taped together or something right, and that's like that first time, the lady, the lady to Pow, who does that at the first start our episode with Vulcans. It is totally she can't do it and they like holding her hand below and she's like.

0:03:29 - Leo Laporte
I'll show you the the trick we use here at the twit. Wherever the hell we are, it's all about gaffers tape.

0:03:36 - Jason Snell
So you just.

0:03:39 - Leo Laporte
Gaffers on the back of the hand hold that pinky in place because he just wants to run. And now it's easy. That's it. Hello, jason. Thank you for filling in for me. I appreciate it. Andy Ihnatko, co-brother in arms, brother inside, burns.

0:03:57 - Andy Ihnatko
Hello, yes, I think I think by like the first season of the next generation, or was it the second feature film. They Basically, when a cast someone, they would say, okay, now you have me give the Vulcan salute, do you think you'll be needing the apparatus? And then you know what? Yeah, and so this, look, this, this armature that they can basically clamp onto this, so long as you don't see it from this angle. You don't know that their hand is in the apparatus.

0:04:22 - Leo Laporte
They have a dedicated Vulcan salute apparatus.

0:04:26 - Andy Ihnatko
Just guess and the pride of some of the cast that you know what he is. It was great working with them. It was a treasure. I hope to work him again, but they're kind of an apparatus kind of. So you have to do with your left hand right?

0:04:39 - Leo Laporte
I mean I could do it fine with my right hand, is it? The right with the right work, it's all good.

0:04:45 - Jason Snell
Okay.

0:04:45 - Leo Laporte
Vulcans don't care Gibson, oh, he says it was left. They're not about rules and no, they're not.

0:04:50 - Jason Snell
They're not about balls.

0:04:51 - Leo Laporte
No, thank you, andy. We do have a show title immediately upon Upon start dedicated Vulcan salute apparatus.

0:05:01 - Jason Snell
This this is what it was like all last week. Leo, you didn't miss the thing, love it.

0:05:07 - Leo Laporte
And Mr Alex Lindsay, the Lord of the dance, look at that perfect.

0:05:14 - Alex Lindsay
Perfect Vulcan. It's hard to be doing too many times. Yeah well, you got a bill. What happens is it goes, it goes. I go for a long time without doing it because I don't see a lot of Vulcans on my daily, my, my daily drive, and and so when you, when you have to do it again, you're like can I still do it, can I still do it?

0:05:31 - Andy Ihnatko
Does the daughter Nimoy appreciate exactly how much he screwed things up for everybody? Because the entire character is based on. What do you look like? What is your voice like? What are your mannerisms? What, what, what Jewish, but what historical Jewish like sigil do you do you remember? Like oh my god, now we're gonna have to like. Everybody has to have the Nimoy skill set, with no room for error first seen in the episode.

0:05:55 - Leo Laporte
I remember this dimly and so thank you for confirming it. First seen in the episode. A mock time.

0:06:01 - Jason Snell
I'm up.

0:06:01 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, uh, yeah the idea came woman.

The idea came, says Nimoy, who had seen the gesture during a blessing in an Orthodox Jewish shul. The idea came when I saw the way Joe Joe Pevney, the episode's director, was staging the scene. He had me approach teapow and I felt a greeting gesture was called for. So I suggested the blessing to Joe, who accepted it immediately. So, yeah, I wonder Nimoy ever regretted that, or maybe he thought you know what I'm giving a, a holy blessing to people. Hmm, and you're right, he's doing it with his right hand. So I feel okay now he's actually I mean, he knew immediately.

0:06:42 - Jason Snell
It was hard, because then they said to see Lila Lopsky, who played tepaw, okay, you do this too, and she's like I can't, I just like Out of a.

0:06:51 - Andy Ihnatko
Obses. Can we, can we, can we give blessings to like one of the greatest, like near final lines in star trek history, like live long and prosper spock. I have murdered my captain. Clearly, I, I, oh wow great.

0:07:11 - Jason Snell
The star trek podcast. Right, leo, that's what we're doing now.

0:07:14 - Leo Laporte
Wow, I feel like I've been oh, christmas. Star trek podcast christmas star trek podcast and a little wars, star wars and we're gonna run a little portal just for fun.

0:07:25 - Alex Lindsay
This is the new star trek christmas special.

0:07:28 - Leo Laporte
Is there a new star? I hope not. No, I'll get my record.

0:07:32 - Andy Ihnatko
I'll get my old record player from the old rome Will you set as the vr projector? You know apple tv should.

0:07:36 - Leo Laporte
We can talk about apple vr. Apple tv should have, should read, should do a new star trek. Get together with who owns it out paramount. I can't remember paramount.

0:07:45 - Jason Snell
That's one of our stories, leo, one of our.

0:07:47 - Leo Laporte
well, let's tell the story because, god knows, we need a story. This is a slow new week.

0:07:52 - Jason Snell
Are considering bundling their streaming services together, uh, as an offer at least, which is paramount, famously not for sale, but totally for sale, looking for suitors and, uh, at least this report to the wall street journal that they're also Kind of talking about. Could we do a thing where, like you, you as an apple tv subscriber, you get a deal on paramount plus and if you're a paramount plus subscriber, you get a deal on apple tv plus? That apparently they're talking?

0:08:16 - Leo Laporte
It's not really about a merger, it's just about, like, trying to find a maybe another way to bundle them together, uh, as a way to get both of them in more homes and it's really just excuse for the wall street journal to have a picture of john ham uh, conuddling with jennifer aniston From the morning show, which has nothing to do with paramount plus, uh, but um, thank you, wall street journal, for that. So I mean, uh, google, already with google tv you can subscribe to hbo youtube tv, I should say well, you can, you can do all those things.

0:08:48 - Alex Lindsay
I think that, right, I do think that, uh, lots of people are and I think apple included has have thought about the idea that, right, you really what Consumers want?

They say they don't want cable, right, but the kind of one you know, like now that they've seen it, a lot of us who worked in cable, when everyone said we want to break apart this so that you don't have to subscribe, make one subscription and get forced To have all these, these channels, and we were like, do you like really want to not have that, because you'd be surprised at how much you're going to pay if you have to pay, buy and buy them a la carte.

And and so now everyone's, like you know, a lot of people like me are like I'm starting to turn ones off, I, you know the ones that came in late, like paramount, I haven't turned on, you know, like I, just, you know it's not like it. And so now everyone's, and, and I think that when apple and amazon and google are all in in a position of going, hey, you could just subscribe to apple tv, like, like with apple news, you could just subscribe to apple tv and get all these things. Now, this isn't that yet, but it's starting to go towards that, as these companies have a harder and harder time Generating profits. You know, like you know that I think that's gonna be the challenge.

0:09:52 - Andy Ihnatko
I mean part. Part of the problem is that the one of the reasons why cable tv was so annoying was that, okay, what channels do I actually want? Oh, this, this, and I sometimes watch that like, hey, congratulations, here are 18 channels, directed, directed. Just a competitive axe throwing like, yeah, how much would it be without those 18 channels? Same amount of money, like oh, and plus 43 Central american finance channels like again, not in my interest. I'm like no, no, no, it's all, it's all the same package, congratulations.

And we had just added another hundred new channels that you don't know it's not interested in, and so that's. That's why, like, the streaming was so great to begin with, because it's like, oh, 10 bucks a month, it will give you 80 of what you want. And I actually just did an audit, like A few weeks ago, of the sort of like survivor sort of thing, like the rose ceremony, whatever, where it's like, okay, I'm subscribed to eight different streaming services, which ones are going to get these two roses? And it's like I can't, there's so many that would not make the cut because I just Don't enjoy them enough, and I kind of held onto them when there was six dollars, seven dollars a month, but now that, oh my god, why am I paying 16 dollars a month for something that only allows me to watch bob's burgers without having to skip over the commercials on my dvr, you know?

0:11:03 - Jason Snell
just to be clear survivor does not have any roses in it. I just want to be clear about that. I'm trying to see we know that.

0:11:10 - Andy Ihnatko
We know that I'm trying to be inclusive, so that Fans of the bachelor will understand the reference. Fans of the bachelor.

0:11:18 - Alex Lindsay
Both shows that they've been entered into the zeitgeist. How do we not have a show that mixes survivor? With the bachelor at the bachelor, like together that would be. I don't even know how you do that, but it seems like that's you.

0:11:29 - Jason Snell
The bachelor is sort of survivor with dating.

0:11:32 - Andy Ihnatko
Whichever of you ladies can stand the most on a on a telephone pole in the middle of a frigid ocean gets to enjoy one date with me. I will line up, line up, line up.

0:11:42 - Jason Snell
It was like this last week survivors.

0:11:46 - Alex Lindsay
But the um, you know that's the hard part is, is that part of what made these channels work? I worked, I used to work, at prime sports network and prime sports network got 50 cents a sub, you know. So that was the, and so you know it was part of a larger, you know, group of things. But it doesn't, that math doesn't work. You can't run prime sports network when people are picking and choosing. It only works when everyone pays a little bit of money, and so that was the. By the way, all of the local sports networks are dying.

0:12:11 - Leo Laporte
Yes, probably for that reason. Yes, piena was more like 16 bucks a subscriber, at least less.

0:12:16 - Alex Lindsay
Oh no, yeah, it was h. I know back back in the day when I was doing it, it was like eight bucks for HBO and HBO was the big game in town, like right that time you choose HBO, espn.

0:12:25 - Jason Snell
Every literally every subscriber paid for ESPN and prime right. I think tech TV actually paid.

0:12:33 - Leo Laporte
The cable guys is like please Take us this.

0:12:38 - Jason Snell
This rumor about about apple tv Plus and paramount is interesting because paramount's base rate is six dollars for the base rate with ads right, so it's not that expensive. And it makes me wonder. There there is a higher tier with showtime content and a higher tier where you don't see the ads, but the base rate to get you in the door is six dollars Because they're going to make the money on the ads. And it makes me wonder what the terms of a deal with apple would be. Would there be little or no like? Could apple just roll the ad tier of paramount plus Into every apple tv sub, because paramount is going to be foregoing, you know, five or six dollars a month from that sub, but they could upsell and they've got Presumably more eyeballs looking at those ads, which is how they're making money on that channel.

I don't know, but like the economics. And then what's the reverse of that? How do you get paramount plus to say, you know, for Six dollars extra or some some sort of add-on, to bring in the apple tv plus content? It's that's what would have to be, though, because, as you said, you can already like add channels in apple tv or in amazon prime or in google tv to get these streaming services. So the idea here is is there a savings if you bundle them together that induces people to subscribe to both?

0:13:51 - Leo Laporte
Part of the savings is we all have subscription fatigue and it would be nice to have fewer little paper cuts on our bill every month. You know, the interesting stat in the journal article and this comes from antenna, because nobody tells these numbers is that both apple tv and paramount plus had churn a customer defection rate of seven percent in october. The industry average is five point seven, so they're both losing customers at a faster rate than the industry, which surprises me. But then I think about it and I think you know I subscribe to paramount plus for Yosemite. That's done. Apple tv hasn't had. You know, a kid, you know Slow horses is coming back. That'll be worth watching. Yeah, yeah, really. What else happened while I was going? Yeah, it's, it's, it's great For all mankind is on.

0:14:43 - Jason Snell
It's great there's, there's a bunch of stuff there, but you're right, I mean with the writer strike and the actor strike and all of that, things on a lot of services.

Maybe not netflix, because another item that we might, yeah, Well, let's talk about netflix about how they've got content, but a lot of these services are a little bit thin on the ground and raising prices and it's it's a moment that I I do wonder. I want to throw out this wacky idea, though, because the the journal reports just about apple and paramount, but I do start to wonder. Wouldn't it be very much like apple to take this thing we're talking about, about how people maybe actually do want to bundle?

I wonder if apple might try to build a little mini bundle of its own where it puts you save some money and you pick up three or four different streaming services for one price Through apple, not the. You know paying.

0:15:30 - Alex Lindsay
But like to save apple news does that right now, like that's what apple is doing with magazines and everything else at the moment. Is there bundling content that you have?

0:15:39 - Leo Laporte
I mean, I think that that is the model and let's face it, you could do that because those, all those magazines are dying. The newspapers that do well did not want to be part of apple news. It's. It's that it was the. It was the herd, the members of the herd, who are falling behind.

0:15:55 - Alex Lindsay
But I think apple and apple and I don't know how it's working for everybody, I know, for me as a user Between you know, apple news kind of just became what I check for news. I don't, you know, like the folks that aren't in apple news kind of Stopped existing for me because there's enough news to keep me in up to speed. You know, I and I do check a couple of things. I check tech meme and I check, you know, cnn, out of habit. But but, but outside of that I, you know, I everything else kind of fell away and I think that's apples Angle. My biggest complaint with apple news is that when I mute something I never want to see it again and they keep on showing it to me anyway. It's like they keep on filling up the space with I'm like I Muted it. Why are we still here?

0:16:35 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, you know, like you know, like you should see my facebook feed. I mean every time I you know, I mean it's filled with weirdly Purvy.

0:16:44 - Alex Lindsay
I understand, I understand it with facebook and I understand.

0:16:46 - Leo Laporte
I say no, no no, and they come back again and again and again.

0:16:50 - Alex Lindsay
It's such an apple non-apply thing to do is to is to keep showing me things. As a user, I said you know that there's a contract issue there that they promised people Uh, x amount of exposure. So you know there, anytime someone does something weird, you know they show. Anytime a Consumer company does something weird, you know they chose money over people.

0:17:10 - Andy Ihnatko
And you talk about like a very apple-y thing to do, when it's like, oh wow, here's a, here's an article that I kind of want to like follow up on or use someplace else, like I'll do, oh great, and here's a share. Just copy the link like oh, the link takes me back into apple news, not directly to the article itself.

0:17:25 - Alex Lindsay
I'm not going to get to somebody.

0:17:25 - Andy Ihnatko
You can't do it, so you have the power to be your best. Thank you, so I cut it very consumer friendly.

0:17:30 - Alex Lindsay
So I cut and paste the title, I put it into the, into the, into the uh, into my web page and then I cut and paste that back. I'm like, isn't that frustrating? That's right it is, it is. That is a super unapply thing. That's why I don't use it at all because I only read news so I can bookmark it.

0:17:44 - Andy Ihnatko
Lockin is not part of apple's brand. Alex, I'm surprised at you, yeah.

0:17:49 - Leo Laporte
Speaking of what is before we get to this. Well, okay, let's do the netflix story. And then I want to know what your expert prognosis is for all of this, because we're headed down. Clearly things aren't working right. Netflix, ted sarendos uh, this co-CEO, speaking at the ubs global media and communications conference in new york yesterday, said, oh, we're doing great. Not that kovat was good for anybody, but it did give us muscle for delivering content in an uncertain time. And uh, the whitest strike yeah, we didn't really have much interruption in our delivery to customers. Bridgerton, cober, chi, emily and paris all in production. There's gonna be a the sex knighters first rebel moon film, yep uh, first and and and there's no reason why it would it.

0:18:40 - Alex Lindsay
the question is, what will it disrupt in the spring? Because it takes a while? Yeah, yeah, it takes a while because you're in post for six months. You know, for a lot of these shows three to six months.

0:18:48 - Leo Laporte
So these are all shot and produced and they were in post during the writer strike, yeah well they.

0:18:53 - Jason Snell
They have so much that they buy that they can spread it out better than anybody else.

0:18:57 - Leo Laporte
Well, that's the main reason I bookmarked this because get ready for this.

0:19:00 - Jason Snell
How much international where the strike didn't happen?

0:19:03 - Leo Laporte
Don't do that to jason, that's just rude. I don't mind if he talks a way me, he froze up, there he goes I don't know something bad happened, they put it nothing happened nothing.

0:19:13 - Jason Snell
Everything is great everything happened last week.

0:19:18 - Alex Lindsay
I mean, this is what happened right before the shelter in place. Oh wait, we're gonna have to talk about that, so the um netflix spent, uh, or we'll spend in 2024.

0:19:29 - Leo Laporte
Now, what was apple's budget? I remember it was like six billion. They were all excited. We're just about six billion dollars a year on production 17 billion dollars Next year, billion less than they and it's a billion less.

0:19:41 - Alex Lindsay
They saved a billion.

They saved a billion dollars this year because of the strike. That was the whole. That was the whole. Problem is that they, you know they have less production to do and so they, they say, actually save money which will go to next, you know they'll spend whatever they're gonna spend next year.

You know it's a very different approach. I mean, apple's taking me, we're gonna do a lot less content but spend a lot of money on each piece of content. Um, netflix, you know, kind of has the shotgun approach of we're just gonna build a lot of content and they're trying to serve a lot of different markets in a different way, and I think that that's gonna. It'll be interesting to see. I think that, yeah, I think that the netflix will. There, there are some changes In the way that they're probably gonna mix up the content. They'll probably be less narrative content going into the into the future because of the strikes. Um, save some money, you know like. You know like, and so they're, you know they're and that's you know. So that's what. That's what's probably happening across the board, and a lot of people spending more, less money on narrative but doing more money per unit, you know.

0:20:35 - Leo Laporte
So the data has become a tent pole and the other stuff fills in the spaces two areas of focus again reading from variety for netflix In terms of new original products, are feature animation and local language unscripted programming. Unscripted is the keyword Yep cheap. Uh, although I'm very happy to say that adam sandler's leo was the biggest animated film to debut on netflix today. Is that about me? What's that about? Is that about me? Am I in?

0:21:02 - Alex Lindsay
it. That's the problem, isn't it? That's the problem with, with for the streamers, we don't know what it is.

0:21:07 - Leo Laporte
I sat in sandler.

0:21:08 - Jason Snell
He does about a movie a month Um it's netflix and some of these other actually apple that play internationally have the advantage that they are getting content from places when there weren't writer strikes right and there weren't actor strikes, because it's different unions, and so they they can patch that in and make and and that helps them even more Keep that stream kind of flowing and that makes it it's easier for netflix to do that than apple, because netflix is Overall.

0:21:33 - Alex Lindsay
Average quality is much lower. They just do a lot more of it. But there's a lot of these, I mean there's always something to watch. The narratives that they do. You're like, do people actually watch this? Like, like is this actually and I'm not talking, I mean just talking about Like schlocky acting with schlocky writing, with schlocky production values, like, and you're just kind of like I don't know why, I think they're just some of this stuff, like the gray man, is high value, high production value and still crap.

0:21:55 - Jason Snell
I am, so I do a podcast about this, uh on relay called downstream and and julie alexander's my co-host and she, she is she knows all about this and she knows so much and she talked about netflix.

Said said you almost want to think about netflix like it's a cable subscription that netflix contains we. We can't, you can't treat it as a A single entity, even though it is that. Think of it as a cable bundle that you're buying into, and part of that is they have international content. They also have high value content. They have low value content. It's what zaslab is trying to do with max, which is say, well, if we put the, the cheaper discovery stuff in and the expensive hbo thing Stuff, we get a, we get a spread of content, and netflix does that too.

Netflix has the stuff that they really spend on and they got the stuff that is mid-budget and nice, and then they've got a bunch of stuff that's cheap and they Allows them to have all that volume. Because the truth is, you don't always want to watch prestige, prestige tv. Sometimes you want to watch reality. You want to watch great british bakeoff. Sometimes you want to watch some High value korean import. Sometimes you want to watch a reality show from us where people are buying houses or apartments or Antiques or whatever, and like it's a mixture like you would have found on cable back in the day and that is sort of one of the games netflix is playing, because it can't all be high budget stuff.

0:23:15 - Alex Lindsay
Well, and I think that I agree with you. All the examples that you have are a diverse selection that everyone wants. What I'm talking about is Another american narrative about something when they hit. You have other things that were released in the same space and I'm just kind of like I don't understand why anyone's buying this. You know, like it's not like it, you know. But I totally get, I totally agree with you. I think you'll see more of the american, the next, the british bakeoffs and more of the you know Chef's table and more like those. Things are all Great things to fill in because, from a contractual perspective, they're a lot less expensive in the long term, because we have to think about. But now, with the new contract, you're talking about the long. The cost of the long tail, you know, is a huge deal.

0:23:59 - Jason Snell
That's what I was going to say is one of the reasons you do more of that stuff is algorithmically. You've got stuff that people are watching and you might not be able to buy more of that or produce more of that in time, but if you buy, if you do something like it, the netflix algorithm is just going to shunt people over to it and, like the long tail, extends to things that are kind of like it when you're on netflix and it's Real powerful.

0:24:19 - Alex Lindsay
I think that the, the, the netflix is going to be far more interested in having the long tail be and and to have a lot of volume there that people are watching, because there's I think that there's a thing in the contract that says, if it's more than there's like a, there's a change in the way it's managed if it goes over 20 of the total number of subscribers.

And in that Model, I could see netflix taking things off at 18 percent, like you know, like you know, just just you know, and I think that you're going to see a lot more windowing in Netflix than you saw before, which is that they're going to take stuff narrative stuff out of the system because they're not going to want to keep paying for it, and so there's going to be you know it's going to be a different. You know the model, the business model. I mean the, the, the strikes were a huge success for the actors and the writers, and but we are going to see some nominal changes in how you know how a lot of the content gets created, because it just has to be managed inside the construct.

0:25:10 - Leo Laporte
I have been informed that Leo is a wacky coming of age musical comedy as a lizard named Leo about the last year of elementary school, as seen through the eyes of a class pet. Thank you, 34.6 million views in the first six days. That Adam Sandler deal is really paying off.

0:25:33 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, again, that's, that's, that's, he's exactly the what, what makes Netflix work for itself? Because it's, they know they're like. They're like Amazon delivering, you know delivering food processors or whatever. They know exactly the demographics of everybody who's watching. They know when they started, they know if they bailed after a certain episode. They know if they paused and rewatch certain parts of it. They know that, for whatever reason Adam I'm more of a fan of Adam Savage they know that Adam Sandler is exactly who, like Netflix, wants.

They, they will get as much money as he wants, for any project he wants, because he always delivers.

0:26:14 - Leo Laporte
The only thing that's tested is your patience, right.

0:26:17 - Andy Ihnatko
Um, it's, it's, he's, well, he's, he's interesting because all I go, all I need to know is give me one frame and if he's wearing his street clothes and he and he's in some sort of a luxury like vacation place, I know it's probably going to stink. However, if he's, if he's not, if, if part of his deal was look, if you're willing to pay for like a three week vacation, the Cayman Islands, and I don't have to ever change out of whatever. I woke up and you got.

0:26:40 - Leo Laporte
I always feel like that's how they get those produce.

0:26:43 - Andy Ihnatko
But when he acts, he acts, he's good.

0:26:44 - Leo Laporte
They say Jennifer Aniston, how would you like to go to the Seychelles Islands for three weeks? All expensive? Yeah, no punch drug love is brilliant. I mean there's some brilliant Adam Sandler movies, what's?

0:26:54 - Jason Snell
the punch drug.

0:26:56 - Andy Ihnatko
I was going to say that one is great.

0:26:58 - Leo Laporte
I'd cut the water boy. I'd cut you the water boy. You're baiting me.

0:27:03 - Jason Snell
I just stolen it. Popper man oh, that's on the movie. What is it?

0:27:08 - Andy Ihnatko
What is that line that Khan says?

0:27:10 - Jason Snell
that, he, he, he asks me, and I shall have me, I shall have you, okay, okay yeah.

0:27:15 - Leo Laporte
Okay, top five. I don't know if you're going to be able to do five Adam Sandler movies on cut gems, brilliant Punch drug love brilliant. What's the one with love, rain or me? Is that we're? That was quite good. What's the name of that one? Any others? That's three, I can't. I can't, remember.

0:27:34 - Andy Ihnatko
I can't remember the name of the movie, but it was the one where he was. He played basically himself, but if he, if he had a terminal illness cause that's it.

0:27:41 - Leo Laporte
That's love, rain or me. Yeah, that's the one I was thinking of as well. He's dying or no? This is the one where his family died and he's, and he sits there playing video games all day, not happy, Gilmore not cut dates. Sorry, I cut gems. It's really good. I think everybody should just watch uncut gems. We'll leave it at that?

0:28:00 - Jason Snell
Clearly the answer is happy. Gilmore, the water boy, um doos, bigelow male gigolo, mr Deeds and the hot chick those are. Rob Schneider is mostly the lead in some role with those, but he's Adam Sandler is also you know, if you didn't, if you weren't satisfied with Adam Sandler, you gotta get paid.

0:28:19 - Andy Ihnatko
With my last breath, I speeded the uh yeah, this is how our friendship ends. Jason, this is what this is like. You know what, if I can, if it'd be worth ending our friendship over Adam Sandler, that's. That's unfortunate, jason.

0:28:39 - Leo Laporte
he does a lot, I'm just looking at all these movies.

0:28:41 - Andy Ihnatko
I haven't heard about gift box of cheeses that you were going to get for Christmas this year. I think I'll just give it to the UPS guy now.

0:28:46 - Jason Snell
That's more about cheese than Adam Sandler. Yeah, zing Boom.

0:28:50 - Leo Laporte
You're coming back, Good Lord. Look at all the movies he's made. This is ridiculous. Lots of movies. You know some. Uh, yeah, Wow, Okay, but I mean honestly it was called Rain or Me, that was the name of it.

0:29:03 - Jason Snell
Okay, the wedding singer Billy Madison Sure.

0:29:06 - Andy Ihnatko
I mean his movies averaged to a perfect C, because they're either amazing A level movies or they're like that's right, jack and Jill Look really.

0:29:15 - Jason Snell
Here's some I'm done Trolly Andy. What I'll say is Adam Sandler is a very talented man who also was a very candy businessman and he knows what movies pay, and he and Netflix have had a very lucrative partnership because the kind of movies he wants to make hit it for Netflix exactly the way Netflix wants them to for what they cost, and so he does that. But because he is very talented, certain directors will look at him and say I would like you in my really good movie and Adam Sandler is like great.

0:29:41 - Leo Laporte
That's what happens. I can do good movies too, yeah.

0:29:43 - Jason Snell
But meanwhile he's cash in the checks and I don't blame him because it's a tough world.

0:29:46 - Leo Laporte
Don't go to a movie where he's playing Shekhi Moskowitz, a drug dealer, shifty or dink the clown. Stay out of those. The name, the characters he's played. Steve Poly, chronopolis Okay, it sounds like you really know the entire air for there. Jason Snow.

0:30:07 - Jason Snell
Now I just have his IMDb page. I will point out that when you search for Adam Sandler on IMDb, it does not come back. With one of those nice movies that you mentioned, it comes back with actor comma the water boy.

0:30:18 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, the top movies. Look at the top movies the wedding singer and big daddy yeah.

0:30:26 - Jason Snell
Big daddy, where he does a Louisiana accent, all right.

0:30:30 - Leo Laporte
I don't know how we got into the Adam Sandler stories, but let's um. You guys didn't tell me the big story of the week. Grand Theft Auto six trailer came out yesterday.

0:30:46 - Andy Ihnatko
Uh, is it coming to iPhone though? Yeah, that's, but also I love these trailers because it's like oh wow, it looks great coming out in 2035. Yeah, exactly Assuming that it doesn't get delayed like what engine?

0:30:58 - Leo Laporte
do you know, alex, what engine they use? Is it unreal, cause it really looks. It looks amazing, very realistic.

0:31:04 - Alex Lindsay
It's either their own or unreal, and I'm not sure I don't know the answer.

0:31:08 - Leo Laporte
I mean um? Anyway, I can't show you the trailer cause it's full of things I can't show you.

0:31:14 - Andy Ihnatko
That's words, ungodly words, yes, but it's, it's pretty we're. We're only the fifth day of Lent, everybody, a holy, holy period.

0:31:24 - Alex Lindsay
That's right, and it's. It's their own proprietary one, it's called rock, it's called rage, which is rock star advanced game engine, and for a long time it was kind of the laughing stock.

0:31:32 - Leo Laporte
right, there was a whole series of tick tocks of people doing the walk, the hooker walk, in the rock star games, but they've clearly improved it quite a bit.

0:31:41 - Andy Ihnatko
It's it feels like unreal Almost the reality is not only that, but the, the, the ability of them to like, commit to a storyline which is just seems like this, seems like a trailer for a movie that I would want to watch. Yeah.

0:31:52 - Leo Laporte
It looks like a trailer for a movie. Yeah, uh, all right, let's see here, let's take a break and, uh, we'll find something else to talk about yeah, we've done enough damage to this. It could be the WhatsApp update for iOS. That could be it, I don't know.

0:32:10 - Jason Snell
Oh, let's talk about banking.

0:32:12 - Andy Ihnatko
We've got, we've got, we've got exactly exciting news about a credit card partnership that might be faltering. Well the weather outside is frightful, I know. I know, I know, I know Our partnerships are problematic. I should. We hate to do this to you. You're going to have to listen to a dad before we talk about the finance story. Oh, you've been waiting, it'll be worth it. Oh, my God, you have. Hey look, hey, look, look what I brought.

0:32:34 - Jason Snell
I brought the tea, it's called the teas, leo, we're teasing the next Right now. We're helping you out, thank you. No, no, no, no, no.

0:33:07 - Alex Lindsay
If you want a preview of how you get. Last week went, you see verse. It's nothing like on Rye. I'm telling you Jason Snell, andy and Aco.

0:33:17 - Leo Laporte
Alex Lindsay. We will have more MacBreak Weekly in a moment. Maybe, Well, we won't have anything to talk about, but we will have more Mac Jason.

0:33:27 - Andy Ihnatko
We were lucky that Leo came back at all. Okay, don't, don't rub it it.

0:33:31 - Jason Snell
It wants to go back now. Oh, I do, oh I oh, we're redamping his A-lon.

0:33:36 - Leo Laporte
It was the house that we dampen his A-lon the hardest thing in the world to leave. Let me tell you and it's getting worse by the minute. Our show today brought to you by FastMail. Oh, I do love FastMail. Make email work for you. With FastMail, you can use FastMail with your existing. It's a, it's a mail server. Now I gotta tell you, if you're using one of the freebies and I notice everybody uses Gmail or outlookcom or the old hotmail or or Yahoo I guess we're cheap, right, why not? It's free. But I gotta tell you you're paying for free email. You're paying for it in your privacy and maybe, even more important to you, you're paying for in support. If, if you're running your business, let's say on Gmail and, and they decide, for whatever reason, we don't have an account anymore, you're there's no, there's no door you can knock on, there's no phone number to call. That's it. No support at all because it's free. Okay, FastMail is not free, but as little as $3 a month and there is somebody to call. There is great support and you're the customer, not the product, and I think that's really important.

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There's a really good search, which is nice because I keep all my email. I never throw anything out, and FastMail lets me search through it very quickly. It's become a database of all the important details in my life. I'll just try it 30 days free Right now if you go to fastmail.com/twit. I've been recommending FastMail for at least 10 years and I'm thrilled to have them as an advertiser. Reclaim your privacy, boost productivity with FastMail. Try it now for 30 days. fastmail.com/twit. F-A-S-T. Fast mail M-A-I-L.com/T-W-I-T. We thank them so much for their support of MacBreak Weekly. Make email yours. I didn't ask the question. I don't want to go back to the streaming thing, but I was curious. I know, jason, this is like a big thing for you because you have a podcast on it, but all of you how this is going to shake out? Are we re-aggregating all the content we disaggregated? You know we split it all up, we got a la carte and now it's getting back together again. Is that the future? What does it look like?

0:38:36 - Andy Ihnatko
I mean, especially when you factor in that Spotify had a huge, huge round of layoffs last week and they are by far.

0:38:43 - Leo Laporte
What is it? 17%, 1500 people.

0:38:45 - Andy Ihnatko
Wow, and they are like the giant of music streaming and if they're not making money, I mean, obviously they wasted a lot of money on stupid money for stupid things that probably didn't affect their business as much as they were going to, but I think that we're seeing huge regents.

Like podcasts. Well, I'm just saying that maybe Joe Rogan would have taken less than 200 million. I mean, I know it took a lot to tease him away from a stand-up career, but I'm saying that that was not one of those things that paid off. So I just think that we're seeing a huge readjustment in like now that everybody's Disney is not doing well with this, Netflix is not doing well with this Everybody's sort of desperate to find better solutions, and even just hiking the price is not going to be enough of it. So we're going to see major re-thinks, major reorganizations and a good chance that whatever it is that has made streaming worthwhile for you might be changing in the next two or three years.

0:39:43 - Jason Snell
Yeah, when this all started and people were cutting the cord, I kept saying to people don't worry, they're going to get their money right.

0:39:48 - Speaker 2
Oh yeah, they're going to get their money from you oh yeah.

0:39:50 - Jason Snell
You're going to save money, they're going to get their money, and so what's happening now is the ratcheting up of all of those services and you have to choose. And the next step is the great rebundling, which is well, wait a second, can I save some money? And the answer is yes. We're going to put these all together in a bundle and then you're going to buy that and you might be able to opt out for some things and go all a cart. But if the you will reach that point I mean like when I I have the Apple One premium bundle and it was the same price or less than I was paying for the individual services. And that's the trick with some of the bundle.

Logic is, in the end, you pay for stuff you don't want because it's still the best deal that's out there and you get, like you get Apple news with it and you're like, all right, whatever, but you get the stuff that you want to. And that's going to happen with all of these services. There's going to be consolidation. Some of these companies are going to get bought by the other companies and they're going to get merged together. That is inevitably going to happen. But in the end, yeah, I think that you're going to end up, if you choose to go all a cart, you're going to have to be really, really tough in terms of saying I'm just going to do these handful of services and otherwise we're going to be driven back into bundles, because the bundle will get you the best deal, because everything's a little discounted inside the bundle.

0:41:01 - Leo Laporte
Essentially, YouTube TV is cable. It's just over the top and it's the best version.

0:41:07 - Jason Snell
Sure. But it's my cable and it's better I like it.

0:41:10 - Leo Laporte
I'm January one. We're turning off Comcast. We have to keep the internet and, as you point out, jason, they've raised the price to the point where they're still getting their money from me, but at least that's right. But YouTube TV is much better. Even just watching football now I get lots of glitches on Comcast, but the data on YouTube TV is great. I can fast forward. I can do all the things I want to do.

0:41:33 - Alex Lindsay
It's the future of the idea. Youtube TV has changed the way I watch football because I, yes, it's one thing to have TiVo, but the thing for me for whatever reason. Now I get on, I start about 20 minutes late and I'm just jumping 15 seconds really, really fast, constantly through slow plays, through the commercials.

0:41:52 - Leo Laporte
And then I jump and I go to something else. For a while I figured out how long each break is and I will use seriously. I'll say skip ahead two minutes, skip ahead three minutes. This one's at 2.45. And I know, and it gets right back to the play. It's amazing. Yeah, it's lovely, it's lovely.

0:42:05 - Alex Lindsay
It's really lovely and I think that YouTube is the one to be having fun.

0:42:08 - Leo Laporte
Please don't do that to us ladies and gentlemen, our ads are variable length. You may miss some very important content.

0:42:14 - Alex Lindsay
Well, the thing is is that the I think YouTube and TikTok and some of the other ones are the sleeping here where we're talking about all the streaming, but the size of the streaming table keeps on getting smaller. Because when I look at what my kids watch, it's a huge amount of YouTube and not like YouTube TV, just YouTube. And when I look at what I watch of time, probably 70 to 80% of my watching habits are on YouTube, like watching things that I'm interested in and saving things. I have this thing I save things all the time because I'll look at something. I know that the rest of the time it's so easy and you have unlimited storage, just save it and then I open it up, and then I open it.

Well, I mean, I'm talking just there's YouTube TV and then there's just YouTube, and I'll have hours and hours of YouTube stuff saved up and if I just feel like sitting on an afternoon I'll watch two hours of stuff I had saved, and just in 15 minute or 10 minute or eight minute increments and it is. Anyway, I guess that's the other one I think people aren't paying as much attention to is the fact that this YouTube, yeah, this rolling experience of all the next generation not watching any of this, yeah, you know, like that's the and I think that that. So there's this. There's kind of like everyone's trying to get to the top of a room that's filling with water and some of them are getting close to drowning and some of them will pull them up for a deal.

0:43:37 - Leo Laporte
I prefer to think of it as a garbage compactor, but okay, you get the idea Exactly.

0:43:42 - Alex Lindsay
So I think that's what's happening to podcasting.

0:43:44 - Leo Laporte
By the way, one of the reasons podcasting is dying Spotify, etc. Frankly, twitter is because under 30, they watch YouTube and all the advertisers have gone to YouTube. I just talked to Henry, my son, who is getting a vast sum from Cheetos for a one hour stream and it's like I mean, at least it's in the family right but that's where that money's going.

0:44:13 - Andy Ihnatko
Right, right, yeah, I think that it's easy to forget how valuable it is just simple consumer habits are. And once you get, once people lose a certain habit, you realize this industry will realize that, wow, broadcast television was never essential whatsoever. And then, wow, this form of communicating was never essential whatsoever. Because as soon as when Letterman went off the air, it broke me of the habit of watching television after a certain hour of the night, even though I like the new host, I like the new show, it's great. But it just broke me of the habit of, hey, it's 11.30. It's time for me to watch Stephen Colbert. It's like no now. It's like, hey, look, a clip from Stephen Colbert has shown up on YouTube, I'll watch it there. And I think that that's something that's almost impossible to get over. Once you lose the habit, you can't get them back again.

0:45:11 - Leo Laporte
Little did the VCR makers know that when they taught us time shifting, it was the end of the line for life.

0:45:18 - Alex Lindsay
Well, and I think that part of the challenge for all media in general is that there's so much of the old catalog that's available to us. So the other issue you get into is that most of the series that I watch and my family watch Person of Interest, and then we watch Alias, and then we watch Heroes, and then we watch or that's what I just listed off was like a year and a half of our regular watching. That's all you needed, you know, and you simply Everyone sat down and watched the next episode, which was, by the way, way more fun when you watch it every day than when you watch it once a week. And so the thing is is that we're all watching this older content and not necessarily watching a lot of the new. They're getting really picky about the new content and not sure if you want to commit to a series that you don't know is going to get to the end. You know, like there's Like I would normally go back and want to watch Game of Thrones, but the last two seasons were so bad I don't want to see it again. Like I'm not willing to commit time. Same thing with Lost. I was like my kids wanted to watch Lost and I was like well, you don't know how it ends Like, you know like, you don't know like, this is all you know like it's like. And so the you know the.

I think that the challenge you know I was talking to someone about copyright because you know there's some people that have argued that copyright should go back to I think I don't remember what the math was, but it's like 1967 or something like that and I was talking to someone in the industry about that and they said, yeah, if you did that, it would just destroy the industry, because if you made all of those songs available before 1967 into the Into the, into the, you know Open domain, open domain, everyone would be watching it, using those, so much that would For remixes and everything else that there'd be nothing new. You know like. You know like they're really like they were. Just, you know, because you know you gotta they're kind of you gotta keep a clamp on some of that, you know, to keep people moving forward for the new stuff. What about?

0:47:00 - Leo Laporte
David Shub, who says in our chat room and I think this is interesting and it's actually my greatest fear he says yeah, basically all the streaming is going to have ads unless you're willing to pay four times more. Yeah, our bill is going to go up a lot.

0:47:12 - Jason Snell
I mean, maybe not four times, but it's going to go up a lot. It's going to go up a lot, and they've done the math. They realized. The moment that they realized that they make more revenue per user on the ad streams than the premium ad free streams is the moment the jig is up for people who don't like to watch ads, because that means they're just they're going to jack up the rate because they have no reason to make less money on people giving them more money. So the good news is, if there is good news is that some people don't really care and would rather save the money and see the ads. And for everybody else you know network TV you didn't get the option of not seeing the ads unless you eventually bought a Tivo or something Right. But like you will still be able to do that, and I'm glad because I would be miserable if I had to sit through ads ever again. I'm ruined that way because I bought a Tivo in 2001. It's going to cost you, though.

0:47:58 - Leo Laporte
Jason.

0:47:58 - Andy Ihnatko
It's the end, but yeah, it's going to cost me, and there may be things that I brought.

0:48:02 - Leo Laporte
That's, by the way, what's happening to podcasts too. I mean, one of the reasons we have a club with ad free content and we do the ad free content is because we would far rather charge you seven bucks a month. Excuse me, then you know grind to get sponsorships, and that's that's the future for podcasting, probably.

0:48:25 - Andy Ihnatko
I'm just waiting, I'm just kind of studying myself for when I mean, already, these are. These ads are unskippable. I mean, I have, I have. Paramount Plus is the only streaming service in which I go cheap for the for the ad free part of it, because I there's enough content to there I really, really like. But I don't want to spend $15 a month for it and of course you can't skip past the ads. But what I will do is I will thumb the mute button on.

0:48:47 - Leo Laporte
Google TV. I close my eyes.

0:48:50 - Andy Ihnatko
Hate to be petulant about it, but I just find it kind of annoying, Like, okay, I can put my attention elsewhere, but I'm waiting. Waiting for the time when, like these, streamers basically make deals with with Google and Apple saying how much would it cost for our app to be able to disable the mute button selectively and that's when.

0:49:08 - Alex Lindsay
Well, I, I, and all I'll say is that not that I would ever do this, Cause, of course, that I would never, never any active activity like this. But if you had some of them with a lot of ads and you had something that would, that would be an HGCP mirror. You know, like, do a HGCP handshake but then pass on that video. You could record it to H264. And then you can just fast forward through anything you want, like, and what you do is you just let it run the whole season in the record while you're away for the day, and then you come back and it's all. It's all. And the only thing I'll say is that there's always a way around it. Like you know, like you know and, and, and there's and, and what they're going to drive toward. Now they get, they get the, the, the impacts.

But I think that also, as someone who I could never go back to ads, like Jason, I could never, ever, ever, watch that. Now I changed my, my credit card and it I had to change my credit card number and I lost it for like a day on YouTube and I felt violated. I was like so help me, if they're putting ads on my paid version. I'm going to kill somebody. You know like, like, you know, like. You know like, like, like, like. If they my paid version because it doesn't give me a warning. It just stopped, started putting ads in it and I thought that if my premier version was such a normal guy he was a

0:50:17 - Andy Ihnatko
little quiet guy.

0:50:17 - Alex Lindsay
But yeah but they added ads to his premier membership. I was like I'm paying not to have this and the and anyway. So I, you know, I figured it out and fixed it. But but the thing is is now I'm making decisions, like I'm like, do I really need? How often do I watch Max? How often do I watch Disney? How often do I watch Netflix? Like, I don't know if I need any of those, because most of what I watch is on Apple TV and and and Prime and YouTube, you know, and there's there's enough on Netflix that it might make the make the cut, but I'm not sure if the other ones are going to like because, and so what's happening is is that you're, by doing the ad thing, by not having ads for so long, you've conditioned a bunch of us to like ads are not okay anymore. You know, like we're not, we don't have a we don't have a a pattern anymore.

So then what we'll do is we'll keep paying for what we want, but we're going to just start killing, you know killing the subscriptions, which at some point creates kind of a bit of a downward spiral.

0:51:13 - Leo Laporte
So as a retiree on a fixed income, I don't want to watch ads and I certainly am not going to record the stuff. Then I almost thought you were going to say, edit out the ads.

0:51:25 - Alex Lindsay
No, no, no, no, no, no. Nothing. That would take a lot of work. Oh no, no. Although, although I'm sure you can do an AI thing that would, that would just go through it and take all the ads.

0:51:34 - Jason Snell
Yes, what you do is use, use channels, which is an app that will record from either your TV anywhere stream which, if you've got like Fubo or something like that there there are streams that go with it for those channels or you're over the air antenna. I have that. I use that for some stuff and it has. It has channel, it has AI based commercial sense in it and it auto-skips the commercial six colors.

0:51:58 - Leo Laporte
The channels app, Apple TV app is excellent.

0:52:01 - Jason Snell
It's buttery smooth says six colors.

0:52:04 - Leo Laporte
It is real good it's real good, so I buy this. I can run on my Apple TV.

0:52:10 - Jason Snell
Well, you run the server on. You have to run the server on a device you have to run a server. Can I run a server on what is your?

0:52:15 - Andy Ihnatko
server.

0:52:16 - Leo Laporte
Can it run on an iPad or does it have to be a Mac? It has to be a Mac.

0:52:20 - Jason Snell
No, it's got to be, it's got to be a computer to run the server. And then if you've got, if you can get over the air, you can attach an antenna and a little box that goes into it. And, like I said, some of your cable or over the top TV channels are also available via stream and you can record those. So like I record Jeopardy on on on that via stream and then I watch it and I never even have to pick up the remote because it auto-skips the I do.

0:52:45 - Leo Laporte
I do know, in fact, that the first break on Jeopardy is three minutes and 45 seconds. The second break is two minutes, and then there is a two and a half minute break in the third break, and I know exactly how long to skip. Amazing Nice. So this reminds me a little bit of Silicon dusts HD. Home run Nice to have that.

0:53:04 - Jason Snell
It works with that. In fact, if you plug an HD home run or anything like that into the server where channels is, it'll also record over the air, and then you've got a DVR on your Apple TV or other boxes or iPad or iPhone or Mac or what really wherever. It's good stuff.

0:53:20 - Andy Ihnatko
These, these, these also work with a unlocked cable channel. So the, so the base of your local, your local stations will come through the clear qualm and I think they HD home, the Silicon, the HD home run series. They have one that can actually use a cable card as well, so it can also technically record like discovery and stuff like that. I've never, I've never been excited to like pay for discovery or those other channels anyway. But yeah, it's, it becomes a whole different thing.

0:53:45 - Leo Laporte
That's a part of Mac Sandy and you get more for your money.

0:53:51 - Jason Snell
I said actually it's so weird to see Daniel Thrones next to Dr Pimple Popper.

0:53:56 - Leo Laporte
I got to tell you that there's some, there's a disjoint, there's somewhere.

0:54:04 - Andy Ihnatko
Can that? Can also that be like really super disheartening to say that. Well, you know what. We took one of the most beloved and rich with lore book series ever and we saw the potential in this and, if anything, we decided to make this as the even better as a video. We spent millions of dollars we get the actors are passionate about it, the cinematographers are passionate about it and we're getting our butt kicked by somebody with a consumer video camera watching pimples being exploded.

0:54:31 - Alex Lindsay
But I will say I will say that the one, the one, the one thing here is like when you have paid service, like the reason I'm getting rid of Macs is because they started taking away their old shows, right Shows that were.

0:54:42 - Leo Laporte
HBO shows. There's an economic reason for them doing that, though right, there's a tax reason. I get it.

0:54:47 - Alex Lindsay
But I was like I'm not like like, if you're going to take away the things that that are part, it's one thing. For when Netflix gets rid of something, I'm like okay, well, the contract ended. When HBO gets rid of HBO content, I was like, okay, this isn't worth having anymore. Like I don't know why it was. I was just like mad and that's why I'm getting rid of it. Now, that's why I got rid of it. I actually got rid of it.

0:55:08 - Andy Ihnatko
And the worst part is that when they they're, they're content that they produce for their own streaming service and they and they pulled it off their own channel. They're not making it available to other streaming services and also they never made it available for sale through iTunes, through the Google Play Store or through disc. It's like this is when you feel like you know what. I actually feel morally emboldened to seek out people who have basically put this up on pirate sites and grabbing it, because if you're not willing to take my money for this in any form, in any situation, what is the reason? What, what, what?

You're suddenly I feel as though it honors the creators slightly to say that if I can't possibly give them any money for this, at least I can keep this alive and this, this is why I have a Plex server. This is why I buy stuff on DVD and blu-ray instead of, like, renting it or buying it digitally, so that I know that it will never go away for my server. If I ever, if I ever want to see this movie, all I have to do is to go to this. But as long as I keep this thing backed up, I will always have it, and that's important.

0:56:11 - Leo Laporte
You've been very patient, boys and girls. It's time for the banking segment. Hooray Woo, Money, money, money. So Goldman Sachs tired, probably a year ago, of being the Apple Card They've lost. They said a billion dollars on it. They don't make money on it and the rumors were swirling that they were going to try to sell it to American Express, which is challenging because it's a MasterCard. So Mark Bloomberg says Apple's ideal credit card partner to replace Goldman Sachs is Chase, because it's already a MasterCard. He says Apple and Goldman are on the verges splitting up Now. He says it's the ideal partner. But does he know that they're close to a deal or is this just his genius plan for them?

0:57:03 - Andy Ihnatko
He's only saying. He's saying that it's, it's ideal because they already have a relationship. They always have. They already have a relationship and like the retail type of consumer card.

The deal with Goldman Sachs is the Wall Street Journal broke the story a few days ago that Goldman Sachs has made no secret of the fact that, hey, apple, we would really like to be done with this. And so Apple, according to an inside source, has basically made them an offer letter saying here is a plan that would have you out by 12 to 14 months from now, but that would leave them now. How do you now serve the Apple card? And one of the one of the things that Wall Street Journal was talking about not Mark Gurman was that they could basically have a taken over by this company that basically runs all these store credit cards, which is not what Goldman Sachs was about. The Goldman Sachs play was about we want to and we don't have. We don't have a play in consumer credit space. We would like to enter that market and we think that Apple will do for us what they did for AT&T all those years ago with the iPhone, and of course, it didn't work out that way.

The big stumbling block I mean, chase is a good idea. I don't think it's a bad fit, speaking as a non-business reporter. But the thing is, the stumbling block has always been Apple wants it the way that they want it, and one of the biggest problems with the Goldman Sachs deal is that every single nitpicky, designy, customary sort of thing that they wanted to do that's sound like great as a blue sky sort of thing on the whiteboard, made it a terrible, terrible business to try to run, most famously the Apple's insistent that no, no, no. This thing about you don't know what day of the month your bill is due. That's, that's anti-consumer. That makes things more difficult. Congratulations, your bill will come on the exact same day.

Everybody, every and Goldman Sachs and every other credit company, is saying, yeah, we tried that, it was a disaster. That means that on the first of every month, all of our customer service people are absolutely overwhelmed because everybody is calling on the same day. But little things like that that were torpedoing the steel and not helping it, seeking to profit or not helping Goldman Sachs. Have the courage to say you know what, we're going to stick with this because we think this is a good idea. So it's not, it's it's. They might have Chase, but Chase might say, no, we don't, we don't want to, we don't want to be next up, next up to be shot as.

0:59:14 - Leo Laporte
Mark points out in the article, Chase had already turned them down. They went to chase, America Express and Citigroup before they went to Goldman. What puzzles me and again, like you, Andy, I'm not a business reporter is, I mean, Apple savings has $10 billion in savings, including a couple of thousand of mine.

0:59:34 - Jason Snell
So here's the difference of money maker Between a few. Yeah, here's the difference between a few years ago and now is that now there's a track record and so anybody chase anyone else going into this is going to be able to see that, and Apple may be able to package together all of this stuff and say now you can see what we're doing here, and that's a different kind of thing than the theoretical that they were negotiating.

0:59:52 - Leo Laporte
It's the same thing with the iPhone, right? Only they couldn't get anybody but singular to take the iPhone. Now, everybody wants it At first. Now everybody wants it so.

0:59:59 - Jason Snell
I think this. So this is where Mark German, good reporter, writes this piece. Chase's name is in the headline right, and yet nowhere in it does he say anything other than hey, you know what would be? I got an idea, chase. So I mean, maybe literally Bloomberg, a market moving pride, takes pride in moving markets company that reports on this stuff. Maybe he's just, you know, spitball in here and through Chase's name out. I find that hard to believe.

This feels to me like either somebody at Apple is like Mark push push push them to get their attention, or somebody that Chase is like Mark mentioned Chase. We need Apple to think about us again because we might. Something is I mean, or he's heard something that he can't attribute because it's not sourced.

1:00:47 - Leo Laporte
This is not, I've been told.

1:00:49 - Jason Snell
Because there's no source, but I have a hard time believing his idle speculation. He could be here in the headline of a story on Bloomberg, right, Because that's pretty. Then you're really trying to make something happen that way.

1:01:03 - Alex Lindsay
So I don't know, I think it could be. He just thinks it's a good idea, like Chase is the next one and it's it's a pretty like. He just may be filming lines Like there, you know, for that, for that week, I mean, it's the, the. I don't think it's necessarily a large league. I think Apple's choice is Chase. It's narrowing, isn't it? Yeah, you know, like, and and I think that you know there, I think that the the hard part for them, I think, is that they got rushed.

You know the, the. What they had right now was allowing, giving them five years to figure this out, because I do think that I still think that there's some version of this that they stopped using the banking. There's no way they'll ever get to where they want to go using existing banking infrastructure. It's just that they needed it as a, as a bridge of five years to figure it out. You know, five or 10 years to get to where they want to go.

And now I think that the, the complaints about the partnership, forced Apple to do something, because it's bad branding for them to have someone complaining about the oh, this is a, this is a horrible deal, and blah, blah, blah. I think they're like, okay, if you don't want us, we'll leave. You know like we'll, you know we're, you know like that's fine, but I, they obviously took some time. This isn't the first time people are complained. They obviously took a little bit of time to, you know. Think about like, obviously, obviously Apple has a plan. They didn't say Apple's not the type of company that says we're going to leave in a year, a year, two year and a half, without knowing how they're going to get from A to B. So, and they're not going to let close it up. So I'm sure that they're already in talks with somebody to do it for themselves.

1:02:27 - Andy Ihnatko
That is a point. I think the I think Goldman Sachs's deal with Apple was for like 20 years and they kind of recently renewed it. I could have the numbers wrong, but it's not as though they're wrong.

1:02:35 - Alex Lindsay
I think they were on a five year clip. That they just that they. That is a couple of years left I was.

1:02:40 - Andy Ihnatko
I was reading up like I could be wrong, but I think that there was something a few months ago where they're trying to sort of indicate that, hey, I know that we're having problems, but hey, don't think that your, your Apple credit card is going away anytime soon and it was somewhat long, long to that, but they were they. When you get quotes from inside Goldman Sachs of the severity you were getting, this is not a disgruntled soon to be, soon to be former employee. This was messaging from, I think, inside the company where they wanted to make sure it was known that we are not happy with this deal. We are not making any money. Excuse me, not only we're not making money, but we don't see a path to profitability.

1:03:14 - Alex Lindsay
We are bleeding money from this and also, it's not like the Goldman Sachs was really the the prestige consumer really. I mean, you were asking them to do something. They already weren't very. They already didn't know really how to do, as well as other consumer credit card companies. So they're not. They're not the top of the line. Apple didn't get the top of the line. Apple got who was willing to say yes, which is what Apple needed. So they got that and they've now proven that there's a bunch of people that want to do this and there's a bunch of money floating around. They're they're Apple's deal. The Apple's leverage is much better now than it was before, you know, and so I think that I think that it's well, I mean, but I think that other bankers I'm sorry, I should, I should be quiet, I'm sorry.

When, a when, when, someone, when, when a minor league player is complaining about not being able to hit the pitches, there's major league players. They're going to look at it and go. I'm a good one. You know like so okay, you know cause Goldman Sachs was a minor league, minor league player and consumer credit, you know. And so the thing is, is that they're?

1:04:09 - Leo Laporte
you know, they're they weren't even a player. This is their first, so I'm just saying they're not.

1:04:14 - Alex Lindsay
So they don't know how they don't. So you're. So Apple now having a? You know, sure that they're complaining about all these things, but there's other credit card companies that are far more resourced and better at what they do than Goldman Sachs. They're going to look at this and figure out if they can fit into that box, because it's money, there's money there, and so they're you know they're. They may not, they may say no, we're not going to do that. But the fact that Goldman Sachs couldn't figure out that box doesn't mean that nobody can figure out that box.

1:04:39 - Andy Ihnatko
I agree with that, and but one of the things I think is a really critical factor here is that Goldman Sachs agreed to this deal because, again, just like AT&T formerly singular in 2005, 2006, they were eager to they. They did not. They were not a major player. They figured that this is their ticket to enter into, to basically become competitive again in mobile, where they dropped the ball earlier. Goldman Sachs saw this as an opportunity to get into consumer credit, which they think other companies have proven is a very, very valuable market to get into, and so they were willing to agree to a whole bunch of stuff that they were not the first people that talked to Apple about this. They were the ones that were able to agree to the stuff that Apple was doing because, again, they knew that they were launching a brand new business. They were willing to deal with a very, very long runway to profitability if this would get them into this business.

Now it's, I think that you flip this on the other end of it where, if they are going to talk to another player, like an existing player, like Chase, chase is going to say, okay, now this, it's like you're buying a company, say, okay, you have your son and daughter each taking $20 a year as executive salary. That's not happening. We're not going to do this deal unless we get rid of that. They have I think I think of that company will have the ability to say we are not going to agree to this, we are not going to agree to that. That is a poison pill. We are not going to deal with that.

We are going to retain the ability to change this. We are not necessarily going to take subprime. It could be in this big. You're not going to let we're not going to let you put us into the subprime lending business like you did with Goldman Sachs. And I think that Apple might have to not necessarily go hat in hand, but at least be able to. They must. They might be forced to negotiate on something of a more even level where they're saying you can ask for this, we can try it, we can make that sort of a goal. But our first job, if we're going to take you on as a partner, apple, is that we're going to have to make this into a non blood letting loss proposition. And we don't see that happening if we accept A, b, c and D that you seem to be insisting on.

1:06:45 - Leo Laporte
It's really an interesting story because it's absolutely a success from Apple's point of view. Apple pay the savings account. Everything's working great from Apple's point of view, so they just have to find a partner or, by the way, at German points out, it could be partners. They could sell off the savings, for instance, to a number of banks. There's lots of ways to slice this, but it's bizarre that it's so successful and yet a big money loser for Goldman.

1:07:15 - Andy Ihnatko
It's just again. You take the profit. You take the part of the business that profits you as a company, which is, hey that this allows. This helps us to sell a lot more computers at huge markup, and people exactly People buy now as opposed to deferring it to later, and meanwhile, the people who are shoveling coal in the engine room shovel faster and use smaller shovels, and that's. I think that's really the perspective. But and also not that I'm truly negative about this realize that Apple consumers are incredibly valued, so that if you have, say, here's a card in which everybody is part of this subset of the consumer marketplace that has a lot of money, a lot of education, they are the people who say no, no, no, I don't want the Ode to Wellett, I want the Ode to Cologne. No, no, no. As a fact, give me the perfume, give me the expensive top shelf stuff, and that is valuable too. But I don't think that this is where Apple can simply name their name, their terms, and people are lining up to jump in it, that's all.

1:08:08 - Alex Lindsay
Again, I just think it depends on the structure of the individual organization. You look at, a good example within the world that I live in is black magic. Black magic buys companies that basically have a bad business model but good technology, and you know so. They bought Taranex. Taranex is incredible technology that was losing money hand over fist and then they restructured it. They make more. I bet you they make more a week from the Taranex technology than Taranex made a year. You know like they. You know the profit by selling, by selling the Taranexes at one, 20th what they used to cost. You know so. The thing is that they lowered the price painfully low and they are still making more money on it than than Taranex ever made because they, they had a. They had a much more efficient structure than what Taranex had to do it.

So Goldman Sachs did not have a very I just don't, I don't. I don't buy that nobody can do it. I just buy that Goldman Sachs doesn't know how to do it. You know like, and this is the first time they had done it. So so I think that I think it'll be interesting to see whether the an apple, of course, is big enough. You look at like a capital one. Capital one is something Apple could buy in cash if it wanted to. You know, like or invest in them or whatever you know, there's a lot of different ways of structuring this in a way that that works for for Apple. So I think that, obviously, I do think that they wouldn't have announced the timeline unless they already had a solution, so I think we'll just see it roll out whatever that looks like.

1:09:29 - Leo Laporte
Well, thank you for that insightful business discussion. Thanks, we know that's why people tune in Mac Break Weekly for the latest business news.

1:09:38 - Andy Ihnatko
How did they work? And, if I may simply wrap up, my advice is to buy low and then sell high.

1:09:44 - Jason Snell
Ah, plastics, plastics. You didn't hear it from me.

1:09:48 - Andy Ihnatko
Alex you got anything.

1:09:49 - Leo Laporte
We got plastics buy low, sell high.

1:09:52 - Alex Lindsay
Volume, volume.

1:09:52 - Leo Laporte
Make it up and volume.

1:09:53 - Jason Snell
Make it up and volume Make it up.

1:09:54 - Alex Lindsay
and volume yeah, you've got a quarter. I'm sorry, are you sure?

1:09:59 - Leo Laporte
They're brought to you by Zip. More of this wonderful, wonderful repartee still to come, brought to you by Zip. Recruiter. It's a wonderful life, it is A Christmas story. Yep, sure, your eye out, elf. Give me a line from Elf. I don't know, oh my.

1:10:21 - Jason Snell
God, it's Santa.

1:10:24 - Leo Laporte
I know Santa Christmas, christmas vacation Got a line from that Plug in the lights, chevy. These are holiday classics and to make them right it took a team of talented people Not just the people on the screen, the actors, but editors, props people, the sound screw. Hey, alex knows this very well. It's about the team. Same thing for a twit. And when it comes to building a team, whether it's for the entertainment industry or any industry, you need to hire the right people. Best way to do that with ZipRecruiter, and right now you can try it free. Free at ziprecruiter.com/macbreak. We love ZipRecruiter. It's how we hire.

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1:12:54 - Jason Snell
The yellow ones don't stop. They don't stop. That movie's got lots of great lines in it, but that is the one that makes us laugh out loud every time. It's his New York City tip. The yellow ones don't stop.

1:13:08 - Leo Laporte
It's true. It's funny because it's true, yeah.

1:13:12 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, I even started liking that movie more when I read a recent-ish interview with Bob Newhart. He's telling his side I got this script and I immediately told my wife this is going to be the next holiday classic. If I do not get this job, I'm going to be really disappointed because this is one of those movies that will just go forever and I'm perfect for it.

1:13:33 - Alex Lindsay
And it was funny. I was like can you imagine it? He was so perfect. Yes, oh God.

1:13:37 - Leo Laporte
Because he's tall, he's got a flanky lean streak of bacon, which makes it funny.

1:13:44 - Andy Ihnatko
But also he's like the sort of like the fact that like that guy, like as a tiny little elf, and he just he can just deadpan, act as though that is completely normal and completely okay. There's nothing odd about this. He's so. He's because he's innocent.

1:13:59 - Leo Laporte
He has that innocence which really works very well in that show. I think if you could make a holiday movie or a holiday song. It's like an annuity right. If it's a success, people are going to unlike any other guy watching.

1:14:13 - Jason Snell
There's not a lot about a boy, I think, is that his dad wrote a Christmas number one in the UK and said he has money forever Right.

1:14:21 - Leo Laporte
That's awesome, the barking dogs. That's why you wonder why?

1:14:25 - Alex Lindsay
why did these bands do all these Christmas albums? Holy smokes. It pays it for. Most of the Christmas tunes pay more than just about anything else you can do as ongoing for a long term.

1:14:38 - Leo Laporte
Virgil's given us a quote from diehard Come out to the coast, we'll get together. Have a few laughs, you laughs.

1:14:44 - Jason Snell
Ho, ho, ho. Now I have a machine gun Yippee-ki-yay.

1:14:48 - Leo Laporte
You know who, mr Santa? Mr Santa, we have a. We did this last year, kind of it wasn't a Christmas party, we had a Christmas get together at a local place called Brewsters. If you're in Brewsters, jason, it's outdoors, but for Christmas they decorate it to the hilt and they have holiday drinks, including one that comes in a Santa mug which I bought, called Yippee-ki-yay mofo and it's it's a stereo. They're all Santa named drinks it was. It was a lot of fun. You know what? If you come up again, jason, I'll I'll take you to Brewsters. Oh, here's an annoying story. So this company Bending Spoons which is what an Irish company that's been no, italy, that's where they're Italian. Yeah, terrible name Buying up stuff. They bought up. They bought Filmic Pro and then in November last month, laid off all 22 members of the Filmic team, including the founder.

1:15:51 - Alex Lindsay
Well, I think the founder yeah, I think the founder might have left earlier, but but the no, he says a film X, founder, and CEO Neil Barham's LinkedIn shows he concluded his time at the company.

1:16:02 - Leo Laporte
That's a knife use Nice use of euphemism.

1:16:04 - Alex Lindsay
Well, he did that in November, in November yeah.

1:16:07 - Leo Laporte
Well, in November this was in November last month All of the layoffs yes, what it says, this is from well this is this is a pedipixel article and Filmic responded to it. On the fourth thing, this is from Bending Spoons. I can confirm that a layoff performed in November. So all 22 members depart, so I think it probably roughly the same time.

1:16:33 - Alex Lindsay
There was a bunch of things that happened. I mean, it's a really interesting case study in that Filmic basically got to the point where they were the standard for shooting film. You know they were the standard for you recommended it was a shooting.

Yeah, there's a pic and we've talked about it. We've had them on office hours. We, you know, like they, you know, by bending spoons, yeah, when they bought no, I don't have any insight information, I just know we just. But we, you know, we're big fans of what they know, what they're working on. So Bending Spoons bought them. Of course, they added a subscription, which made a lot of people really upset, right, so a lot of people got upset about the fact that they're they now have to pay a subscription to something they were used to just paying for and that was bending spoons model. And they moved to that and just, you had a lot of people that either dropped their subscription or they, you know, or they, you know, kept going but were kind of begrudgingly moving forward.

I have a feeling that, especially after the behind the scenes came out from you know, some of the stuff that was there with the black magic camera, but once the black magic camera came out, it's about four times as capable as filmic pro, for you know nothing, it's free and I have a feeling that they saw a huge drop. I don't think that they just decided they were going to do this a month, six months ago or a year ago, I think that they saw the black magic camera. They saw that there was no way that they were going to ever be able to invest what they need to invest to compete with that camera. And I think that they, you know, just are trying to stem the bleeding, you know, because it's going to be, you know, because they. Their subscription model doesn't make sense when a company is giving it.

If black magic was charging the same amount as they are, oh, maybe you can keep it going, but if they're charging nothing for something and giving people, I mean it's, I use it every day now and it is a very superior product to what filmic had. Well, there you go. I don't think there's any. There's any button in filmic that I feel like I'm missing in the black magic camera, and then there's 10 other buttons that I want, and so I think that that's the situation that they got into.

Is that there's? You know? And I don't, I mean I couldn't believe that what black magic came out, came out of nowhere to have that many features. They've obviously been working on that for a year, you know, and so it's, it's a, it's interesting, so I put them in a, put them in a vice that I don't think they could figure out a way out of, and I think that they they're probably going to use some of the technology for some of their other apps. But I think that the I think it was specifically the 15, combined with the black magic camera, that just annihilated that that company pretty quickly along with subscription service the change of the business model.

They changed the business model. People aren't happy about it. People don't feel connected to the company anymore. They're just mad. You end up in a situation where you're now like, if you can survive two or three years of that, you might be able to get to a point where it settles back down again. They just didn't have enough time and people were still feisty about the. They made it subscription immediately.

1:19:21 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, and everyone was up to about it September last year. Where do I?

1:19:24 - Alex Lindsay
go and everyone would say, like we've got questions in office hours, where do we go now that we don't want to use filmic pro? And I'm like nowhere. Like like I was still subscribing because I was like there's nowhere to go.

1:19:32 - Leo Laporte
Well, it wasn't that much, it was 40 bucks a year.

1:19:34 - Alex Lindsay
We're not talking hundreds of dollars. Yeah, but I was. But everyone was paying like 15 bucks before once, you know, 15 or 20 bucks once, and so the thing is is that, but there was nowhere to go. They had the best app out there for for what they did, and then the problem was something else came out better that was free. You know and and and and. You know you don't want to 22 people is hard to beat that price, magic yeah.

Well, it's also. It's not just the price, it was good, it's the price. It's that it's better than your app. It's free and it's released by a company that has you know, you do not want like a iPhone company making you know this. This app does not want to go head to head with black magic. You know, like, like, it's just not like, that's not going to.

1:20:15 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, so. So in your opinion, the black magic app is everything Phil Mcpro was, and more, oh way, more, yeah, so bye-bye, see you at Bending.

1:20:25 - Alex Lindsay
Springs. Yeah, I mean, it's a good job. Yeah, so it's a great app.

1:20:28 - Leo Laporte
Now what about Kino? Yesterday the folks who do hey Lied announced their video app Kino. Now it's not out yet, right, did they show?

1:20:39 - Jason Snell
much of it. Right, they didn't. They just said that they're building it and they're actually there. So they're like we're just having a baby in the new year. So he's like we got to do this now because in, you know, march or whatever.

We're having a baby and I have, I'm going to be gone, so we were going to try to ship it, because they usually what he says in the video is they usually just announce it, like Apple does, and say, oh, here it is. And like we're not going to do that this time, we're going to sort of show it as we go and we're going to figure it out.

But like everybody really likes their still app because it is bringing a lot of great still photography stuff to an iPhone camera, and I would imagine that this will be something it'll be interesting to see where it fits in, given what Alex just said about the black magic app. But they do a really good job of UI design and they seem to know what their customers want, and so I'm interested to see what Kino will end up being. I wonder if it'll be more like not for video pros, but maybe for photographers their core audience, who wants to shoot some video to. I don't know. I don't know if Alex has some thoughts about are they? Are they wise to even go down this path, given what black magic is giving away?

1:21:44 - Alex Lindsay
If they build something that is, there's always room for something that is imaginative, that serves a certain portion of the market very effectively. Like, for instance, I even think that the Apple app has gotten too complicated. Like there's too many little buttons on the Apple app. I need something that I can just open. I use it, but when I open it up and want to shoot something, I want actually less buttons than that. And then what Apple gives me to do that, and so I think that there's an opportunity there to do something that's very specialized that they might be able to do well. Like nobody can go after the I want to shoot films on my phone market, like that market is. I mean Apple was using the black magic.

1:22:19 - Andy Ihnatko
Right.

1:22:21 - Alex Lindsay
So at some point you're like well there. So the I don't think that I mean if, if the there'd be a market there in the I want to shoot films. If black magic was charging a subscription which Grant hates or a, or if if they were charging 20 bucks to buy it. There's a market at $10, you know to do it at $0. There just isn't a market here anymore to do anything, you know.

And the problem is, if you do anything that's remotely better than what black magic does, they've got hundreds of engineers. They'll just point at you, you know, and just and just do and just add those things, those things to their, you know, if they think it's valid. So if you're doing something very creative, if if and, by the way, I love their still app like I've used it since it came out, recommended it on the show, I think so. So I think that the the Halide still app is still very valid and I think it could do really well. I, when I saw this, there were two things. One is I couldn't understand why that video was so underexposed.

1:23:17 - Leo Laporte
So I was like doing a video app, doing a video app. It's kind of dark.

1:23:21 - Alex Lindsay
It's a great video but it's like it was. I was a little like they must have made some decision about that, but it was really dark so anyway. So I was kind of like I don't understand, that's moody dude.

That's what we call moody. I was in the business, so that was my number one thing. And number two was that that I, if they're doing something really creative that solves a simple thing elegantly, I think they're still a market for them. I think if they are trying to do filmmaking on a phone, they're probably not going down the wrong path.

1:23:50 - Leo Laporte
Is it so? Yeah, I guess there's room for an app that's dead easy, dead simple. Well, or? Or or? Does Apple's app not dead easy and dead simple?

1:23:59 - Alex Lindsay
I find it too fiddly Like I can get myself into a place where it's taking video in a format that I don't want it to take Launch the app, press the red button and go.

1:24:09 - Leo Laporte
So yeah, I mean, that's what they're going to do.

1:24:12 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, and I've gotten better at it with the Apple app, but I have found myself capturing stuff in weird states because it had so many little options in it. Like I get, there's something that I do where I get into it and it like doesn't give me all the options later and anyway. So I and that's when I started thinking this is there's too many, too many buttons now in the, in the, in the phone app, and but. But I think that yeah, so I think Halide has a until we see what it does like a really really dedicated, amazing HDR app that's really simple but has scopes and all kinds of other things. That would be something that, if it was specialized, could be better than the Blackmagic app. But it really depends on what you're doing.

1:24:55 - Leo Laporte
All right, Did they did? He didn't say when, but it's before the baby Like so the baby comes yeah. Oh, dude, you have no idea how I do delegation, delegation.

1:25:10 - Alex Lindsay
That's all I have to say. It's important.

1:25:12 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, if you want to watch the movie shot with Kino Kinocom. Yeah, I mean, I think they get a lot of leeway because Halide is so great and they're so smart. I mean I read their article every year when the new iPhone comes out about the camera and they know more than anybody. They're really great, so I give them credit.

1:25:31 - Andy Ihnatko
Now maybe they could explain the wedding dress picture with gold, blue with gold until the day I die Leo.

1:25:41 - Leo Laporte
So comedian Tessa coats posted this on Instagram and she's standing in one of those you know double mirrors so she could see the sides in the front and the back, but in each of the different parts she's got her hands in a different place. There's three different poses in one picture. She swears this is not edited. This is what happened. Did the computational photography take over? What's going on in this picture? Well, according to nine to five Mac and iPhone do, farouk from iPhone do, an excellent YouTube channel, says nine to five Mac. We now know she had the pet. She took a panorama by accident.

1:26:30 - Jason Snell
Yeah, or the person taking a picture of her right.

1:26:32 - Leo Laporte
Oh yeah, she's not a panorama.

1:26:34 - Jason Snell
Yeah, yeah, the panorama, because somebody was pointing out that, although this is a really great idea to educate people about computational photography, the fact is that the iPhone takes multiple frames, but it does it in a fraction of a second.

1:26:46 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, you couldn't move your arms fast enough yeah.

1:26:49 - Jason Snell
And people are like well, but it isn't a panorama, but Apple actually depicts. Apple call something a panorama not based on where it was shot, but based on the aspect ratio of the final photo, and so if you do a very small panorama, it won't be marked as a panorama, right? And this is a case here where Apple is probably doing the dividing line based on, since it's a person moving, they're not going to, they're going to want to keep the whole person unedited, so and do the dividing line in between the people, and so they've auto-stitched together this panorama of a person who's been moving, and so she's in three different poses, and it is the most reasonable explanation for why you've got this effect.

1:27:26 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah. Also, when people were started looking at the, this debate really started raging. They started looking at, like, the XF information on the. On the image they saw okay, that is the size of a photo that would be, that would be generated by panorama mode and other stuff. That face, and also, unless we are willing to say that, oh well, this comedian decided that the best way to get likes was to laboriously Photoshop a wedding video in some fraudulent idea to prey upon people's fears of computational photography. Maybe that wasn't the reason to begin with, although I will.

1:27:58 - Alex Lindsay
I will say that that would be about I don't know if it'd be laborious.

1:28:02 - Jason Snell
I think that would take me about 10 minutes.

1:28:05 - Andy Ihnatko
For the, I mean for the goal, for the goal that you, that you would assume that well, why would they want to do that? Oh right, maybe become a viral sensation, yeah, but I thought. But I think that's very, really important because, as computation, as people are starting to learn that computational photography is a thing, that it's not a lens shutter opens, it, exposes a frame of light onto a frame of film, and or it exposes a light onto a, onto a sensor, and that's the picture you get. People are learning that. No, there's a computer that basically decides to, turns a pile of numbers into a picture. It can cause people to think that, oh well, geez, why there is a?

There's a potential for fraud here because the, it's not the person who's trying to Photoshop this photo and make you think that this is wrong, it's actually the, the, the algorithm itself. And we just saw it was last year of the year before some some defense attorney tried to try to sort of subvert a photo that was entered into evidence on a project on a projector in the court, in front of the jury, by saying oh well, look when look the, the, the, the. The prosecutor cleverly used the, use the, the stretch the photo, like using the pinch and the stretch gestures to make it look bigger, but we all know that that adds details that were never there before, and there had this big argument about no, no, that's totally not how that works on the iPad. It just simply magnifies what's there. It doesn't add more pixels.

And if we have the situation where people can start and say, well, the thing is the, the have a picture of this person with a weapon in their hand. I think that maybe the yes, I know it looks like a gun, but I think that the computer algorithm saw something blurry, that it turned into a gun that wasn't actually there. It was actually a submarine sandwich wrapped in foil Like no, that's not what this camera does. It doesn't. It doesn't create a gun where there was not one before. But we're going to start to see that as a lot of these AI features become not part of the editing suite but actually part of the actual built in camera software.

1:30:02 - Leo Laporte
Hmm, submarine sandwich. We got a break for lunch, did you? You said last week, jason, you went through the app store awards, or did you?

1:30:15 - Jason Snell
Yeah, I don't think we. I think we maybe not the winners, but we, because that was, because they tease the finalists, I think the next. Yeah, the winners came out the next day, the next day, yeah.

1:30:23 - Leo Laporte
So we'll quickly run through these. I mean there's a lot, but the app of the year all trails, which is interesting, I've been using that. It's a great way to find hiking trails. Yeah, really like it, it's a subscription?

1:30:34 - Andy Ihnatko
You have. No, you have no idea that there are these like nature reserves and like public trails you think, just think that oh well, there's a dirt road that I passed by on my way to Walgreens. Like no, actually, if you were to go 50 yards in there, you would actually find yourself in a really great trail system that the town set up in 2003 and very few people know about.

1:30:51 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's yeah, nice job. All trails. It's kind of a it's. It's not what you would think of as the app of the year, but you know, good, good going Finalists were Duolingo and Flighty, which of course I anybody who travels knows about. Flighty, I pay for that. It's awesome, so good. Yeah, in fact it was a pick on iOS today, I think last week or the week before. I'd never heard of this, but then I don't wear makeup. Pret on makeup is the iPad app of the year.

Davinci Resolve was a runner up, as was something called concepts, the Mac app of the year. I think you know there were a lot of great apps, but Photomater, which was new to the Mac this year from the Pixelmater team was is a really great app. I use that a lot. I don't know linearity, curve, graphic design or portal the runners up, but there it's got to be hard for Apple because you know, I mean everybody kind of knows the big apps, so to find something new and different is neat. Smart Jim was the Apple watch app of the year. Jim and home workouts and that's an individual developer, matteo Zabras, that's cool. Planny and Tide guide, where the runners up Apple TV app of the year, mubi stream great cinema. I don't know, jason. Do you know Mubi?

1:32:15 - Jason Snell
That's one of those. It's a streamer app.

1:32:17 - Leo Laporte
Okay, good, it did beat out the very popular bug snacks and fit on workouts and fitness plans. Game of the year Han Kai star rail I don't you know, when I see anime in the icon I'm really pretty much go, move on, I don't stop. But fine, that's me. After place, vampire survivors the finalist. Ipad game of the year lost in play. Mac game of the year lies of P. This is actually a triple A title. I have not played on the on the Mac, I've played it on the Xbox, but I'm glad to hear it's on the Mac and I'm also glad to hear that return to Monkey Island is still in there, one of the finalists. So. And then they had a bunch for cultural impact, which I think is great, helping us care for ourselves and loved ones. I'll let you look at those. Arcade game of the year Hello Kitty Island adventure, thank you very much. And Apple's trend of the year generative AI. Oh, you think Apple really trend of the year? Huh, okay, okay, thank you, apple for the app store awards.

I don't know, how they decide those at all.

1:33:37 - Andy Ihnatko
Exactly. It's like they used to be. It seemed very, very clear that they were. They wanted to promote certain aspects of what's what's possible on the iPhone. Hey look, they just created this new rendering engine. Or hey look, there's a new feature of the iPad. Here is we're going to pick as app of the year someone that's, something that points out how good our hardware is or how good our operating system is. I don't think that that's quite true today, because it doesn't seem quite so so obvious. But I would love to see the problem with the last week. We talked about the like book of the year, like recording artists of the year. Hey, wow, taylor Swift. Hey, I'm shocked.

1:34:12 - Speaker 2
Someone give her a shock. Someone give her a shock in the arm.

1:34:14 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, it's like I don't know how they pick these winners, but it's good to give them a chance to. People are going to find out what the top five selling apps in any category are. Anyway, isn't it great to find something that could actually use the boost that that is as worthy as pretty much anything else. That's that's making a half a million dollars a year for its developers and I think that should.

1:34:35 - Leo Laporte
I would love it if that were kind of the priority of these winners and once again, I'm sorry to say Apple did not pick MacBreak Weekly as the podcast of the year. They've got this unknown. Julia, Julia Louis Dreyfus in her podcast wiser than me from Lemonada media.

So congratulations. I'm sure she'll have a wonderful future ahead of her. Why is it that mean Julia Louis Dreyfus, the podcast of the year, and you know she she's. She brings in unknowns like Jane Fonda as her guests, so it's great. She's really sharing the sharing the limelight. You know that was a season one, episode one. Was Jane Fonda? Nice way to come out of the box, right? You know? Yeah, apple announced it will be the first and largest customer of the new Amcor manufacturing and packaging facility in Peoria, arizona, arizona.

1:35:34 - Jason Snell
Yeah, peoria spring training site actually. Oh, is it really Right, isn't that? Somebody plays in Peoria? It's far, it's way out there. Yeah, padres, maybe I don't know, it's way out there. Yeah, this is interesting because this is remember that there was that story that he is TSMC was going to make chips for Apple, not the cutting edge, but chips for Apple and their new plant. That because of the chips.

1:35:53 - Leo Laporte
So called legacy.

1:35:54 - Jason Snell
Yeah, exactly, it's a legacy node but still making chips in the U? S where, where it's a challenge, they, they, you know to make chips cutting edge or even close to that in the in the U S. Okay, they're going to make them there. And then there were stories about how well, they're going to make them there but then they're going to ship them back to Taiwan to be packaged, and this story suggests that perhaps that won't have to happen because this is an Arizona based company that does chip packaging.

So it sounds like to the TSMC fab right next to the Phoenix area, so they can actually do both here in the U S. And again, is it sort of performative and sort of political? Yeah, that's true, but they're also trying to create the beginnings of a chip infrastructure in the U S so that they can grow that over time. And I you know there's a lot, there's a lot of complexity of politics involved here. But this is an interesting extension to that story where they may be able to get a whole package out which, even if it's got little bits of it that are not made in the U S, they are going to be able to say you know, it was, the package was in the U S, and then they'll ship the little, you know the actual package, to China, presumably for assembly. But it's like it's another step along the way, yeah.

1:37:05 - Leo Laporte
Apple has committed $430 billion over five years, investing in the U S economy, and they're on pace. This, this, helps them do it. Amcor is going to put in $2 billion and it will employ more than 2000 people. I think it's more than performative. I think that sounds like the real deal.

1:37:23 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, it helps. It helps also politically. It helps a lot of people here, not just Apple basically to be able to come. They can't just simply come up with a press release about, oh well, the app store pays over a trillion dollars a year into the economy. That's nice, but it's nice to when you're trying to defend yourself as no, we're. Yes, we are a $2 trillion company, bordering on a $3 trillion company at times. No, but we are. We are giving a lot more than we're taking. Hey look, we just created 2000 jobs. It didn't exist anymore. Hey look, we just put $2 billion into this region. That didn't exist before.

It's also really helpful because this is one of the one of the most important policy platforms that the Biden's administration has is less reliant technology investment, less reliance on China manufacturing and, as a matter of fact, just a week or two before, they announced, in addition to like the 30 or 40 billion dollars, that they're creating an initiatives for manufacturing, manufacturing general and technology, like $3 billion specifically for packaging. So Apple is also. I'm not sure I'm sure they're not doing this to help out Biden, but this also will give them a certain amount of political capital. That, hey look, we're.

It's one thing for the White House to propose something. It's one thing for them to create funding for something. But now, but in the next, in the coming run up to the next election, they can point to. And because we passed these, these, because we helped out major industry, look at all the jobs that have been created here. Hey, look at all the jobs that we're keeping, that we're basically not just keeping in America but we're actually taking away from China. Give us another four years and we'll do even better.

1:38:53 - Jason Snell
Yeah, and for Apple feeling the pressure from all fronts to be able to say, just as they did you know when, when Donald Trump went to the Backpro assembly factory right, this is part of Apple's like we know, we build a lot of things in China, but, look, we're going to demonstrate some amount and that's why they do their press release about how many app developers there are in the US economy and all those things. So this is part of, like I said, a political game kind of all the way around. But there is a tangible thing here, which is they're going to make some chips and package them in the US. That's going to happen.

1:39:22 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, but as. But. As Leo said, like the, the, the, I honestly think that this is, this is. I don't think Tim Cook has had a lot of lows as CEO. One of them, though, was definitely being part of that dog and pony show with Trump at that plant, basically just being this monkey at his side.

That's how he I thought that's how he came across also for a thing that, okay, technically we have a plant here. Technically we're doing some work here. We don't really have to do it here. It's not really a long-term investment, but, yes, we can say that by Webster's dictionary, we are assembling things. We are assembling max here in the United States of America, if you order the right bill to order thing, it might very well come out of. It might have some, some tobacco juice at the bottom of the box, whereas this announcement is no, even even this is a long-term investment.

As with anything, it could work out. It could not work out, but for Apple to pull the plug on this would be tantamount to us pointing this later on saying, no, that was an abject lie. So I don't think that that's what's going on here. I think that this is hey, we have an opportunity here thanks to some of these incentives that we're getting from the Biden administration. We're going to take advantage of it. We think that this is a good idea and we don't think it'll. We don't think it'll hurt us in the long run, so we're in.

1:40:35 - Leo Laporte
Big get for Katie Tarasoff of CNBC, first journalist to be invited into Apple's super secret Silicon lab. She also interviewed on CNBC Johnny Sarooji, among others, I think John Ternis as well. I didn't see it. Have you seen it Anybody? You want to comment on it?

1:40:57 - Andy Ihnatko
I did see it, it was most and I did read like CNBC had a very long write up about it. It's largely a puff piece and nothing that we don't know already. Like hey, apple's made this big turn into Apple's, into their own CPUs. Hey, look, they're being the first to create a three nanometer process and a mass market device. And hey, look, they're trying to control the whole widget from start to finish. There was some interesting it's it's.

I thought it was interesting, as always, like why, if Apple has never given access to this before, why are they choosing to give access to it right now? And that could be part of it could be part of this recent announcement about investment in, in, in packaging and chip fab here in the United States. This is the. This is not a person that Apple has put in front of a reporter before. Cnbc doesn't. Really. I can't remember the last time they got this kind of access before and I can't remember any time where anybody got to look and at least at least a walk through through this facility before.

And of course, we know that there was like either they built like a sound state on a sound stage, a replica of the chips of the chip development lab, or they actually said okay for the next 10 days. Here are the things that we are not going to be keeping in an open view. Even the coffee mug with it has a congratulations on meeting this deadline on the on the modem chip sort of thing. But nonetheless it is interesting that even if it is propaganda, it's interesting. Did they? Why did they choose this propaganda and why did they choose to release it in this form? And right now he was asked the one question that he seemed to be like kind of like upset, not upset about, but like hey, I understand that you're also also working on modem chips. You don't have to rely on Qualcomm with Apple Silicon. And he sort of tersely said after like he doesn't, we don't talk about an announcement I like to.

1:42:40 - Alex Lindsay
this is you know this is an area that we're very interested in and we will consider to prove oh God, oh God, oh God.

1:42:47 - Leo Laporte
She had no idea what a can of worms she was opening with that question. I don't think it's an accident that it was a financial news network. I mean that sounds like Apple puffing up their stock a little bit, frankly. You know that's simple enough. You know they didn't give us access, that we couldn't help their stock price. Yeah, beeper is out officially. You even get oh, you even get a blue bubble. This is an app actually, I think.

1:43:15 - Andy Ihnatko
I Beeper Mini specifically, yeah.

1:43:16 - Jason Snell
Beeper Mini yeah, Brand new.

1:43:18 - Andy Ihnatko
What is?

1:43:19 - Jason Snell
Beeper.

1:43:19 - Leo Laporte
Mini.

1:43:20 - Jason Snell
They pre-brief the Verge and Quinn Nelson at Stasi Labs YouTube channel about this and they're so really good video and a really good story about it. This is this is based on an open source project that they bought that they're keeping open source.

1:43:36 - Andy Ihnatko
It's a 16 year old kids open source project. This is not just another. Hey look, someone thinks that they figured out how to let androids send messages through iMessage.

1:43:45 - Jason Snell
By setting up a Mac virtual machine and a data center that anybody can read on. Are they still doing that? No, no, no. This is not that. This is not that.

1:43:52 - Andy Ihnatko
This 16 year old says that, according to the copy, reverse engineered iMessage. They recreated all the code with a jailbroken. Again, according to interviews, they give into the Verge and one other person, like they reverse engineered the entire thing. There is no middle man, there is no middle server, there's no translation. Your Android phone is simply exchanging, sending and receiving iMessages using the iMessage protocol, including end to end encryption, including group chat features, including a high definition everything. You even get a blue bubble, your, your friends. This is the, not just in the Verge, but I also from another couple of people I know that got early access to it, like. Their first reaction from friends is why is your? Did you switch to an iPhone? Why are you? Why are you now a blue bubble? Or has someone? Is this now not you anymore? So it will remain to be seen. A? If it's, it's I'm sorry. It's a $2 service, a $2 monthly service, and they're thinking about adding extra services.

1:44:49 - Leo Laporte
I'm just going to say this at the separate app Do not buy a one year subscription Because it's a monthly subscription. The question is like.

1:44:58 - Andy Ihnatko
is Apple going to quash this like a bug? Secondly, is this why Apple, of course, had to know that this was in the works? Maybe this is why they finally caved on RCS, Cause they said we can make this irrelevant if we simply give add those features to the basic iMessage app.

1:45:14 - Leo Laporte
This must be a shock for Apple and I have a feeling there will be an update pretty damn quick.

1:45:19 - Jason Snell
Okay so so, and I highly recommend Quinn Nelson's video. It's really good. He goes into a lot of technical detail. According to Beeper and according to Quinn's video, here's the thing they are using Apple's device registration system to register an Apple ID as part of the system and get back credentials, which are then generate a certificate. This is the same system that every other device uses. So their feeling is and we'll see if there's some hitch here but their feeling is that Apple actually can't shut this off because they would have to completely rearchitect how devices authenticate with Apple IDs. So they feel like they actually have. They're using Apple system. Also, you might say well, if Apple has technical limitations here, what about legal ramifications? There's a carve out for exactly this, for reverse engineering, a system like this without using their code. It's actually legal under the DMCA Is it?

1:46:19 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, because there was engineering.

1:46:21 - Jason Snell
There is a specific call out for reverse engineering, closed systems like this, legal in the DMCA. So Beeper says, and you know Beeper says that it's going to be hard, not never say never, and we don't know. Like we can't see their code, we can only see the Python code. That's open source. But it seems like this is going to be harder for Apple to address, unless Apple has a new authentication system waiting in the wings that they're ready to just slide on in, or that it might take time, or there's something that they haven't accounted for and will allow them to disrupt this. But not everybody else See that's. The trick here is if, if Apple's recourse is to break a certain thing or change a certain thing, the danger is they're going to break their own legitimate customers products and they can't do that, so we'll see.

I would also probably not invest a long term amount of money in the Beeper mini app, but it is clever how they did it and the fact that it's even proof of concept is open source shows that they're not trying to like hide a bug in Apple system here. They're literally just logging into Apple system and then using iMessage.

1:47:30 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I'm very interested. I will install on my pixel as soon as I get home and just to make it clear to people.

1:47:39 - Andy Ihnatko
You don't need an Apple ID. You run, you install the app. It will go into your messages with your message. Find anything that's, that's that's basically being sent by iMessage. Bring that into this separate app that it had, that that it is.

1:47:52 - Leo Laporte
And suddenly all the all of these those incoming iMessages go directly to get the two factor pop up on your Apple device saying hey, somebody's trying to log in, yet are the six digits? It looks exactly like you're logging in from another iPhone. Yeah.

1:48:07 - Andy Ihnatko
This looks. I mean, it looks like everything you would want for this feature to happen and, as Jason says, it might be so difficult for Apple to shut this out that they they're probably having discussions right now about how, if, if this, if this really is a surprise to them is like how much is this going to hurt us really? That there is this extra service that most that is not built in as a default on any of these and these other platforms operating systems, of course, if they were to cut a deal with Samsung. So, by the way, b for many is now is now we're using that, we're integrating that technology into the messaging app. Like then that could be like.

1:48:43 - Leo Laporte
I'll tell you what. The exact calculus at least the house of exact calculus at this point from Apple is a. Can we do it technically? And, and you might be right, they can't, but I wouldn't be surprised if there's ways to do it technically, be what's the political cost of doing this? Because that really is monopolistic behavior. As soon as you do it, good point Right.

1:49:02 - Jason Snell
And that that's part of the card game that the beeper is playing here is do you want to be seen as trying, via legal recourse, by technical recourse, to crush somebody who's just trying to bring I message and serve another platform? Let's add to it. I think there's a psychology at Apple that comes from Steve Jobs, which is they hate watching other people make money on their stuff. So the fact that beeper is charging for this, I think that will infuriate them. Oh, I guarantee you what's the recourse.

1:49:27 - Leo Laporte
There's. There's people running around the campus going crazy and there's engineers who have been tasked to figure out how to stop this. But the third thing is how many people are using this? I don't know if there's a way for them to know that they may not be able to tell, but how many, how much? What is the cost to us of this happening? And, given the political cost of fighting it, if the if not that many people use it, I don't think they're going to say, well, we're just going to it's de minimis, we're going to let it go.

1:49:55 - Andy Ihnatko
I think there's a. There's a possibility. You take the risk of having a strizand effect where, if this is the app that has to market on their own, it has to reach iPhone people on their own. That's one thing, but if Apple makes all of these steps to make this a hated, hated party, now wow, do you mean that there's a way that I can actually do? I'm you know, I was going to switch to the iPhone for exactly this reason, but I did not. Thank you, Apple. Yeah, I did not know that.

1:50:19 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I, that's somebody saying in the Discord. Just look at the Play Store downloads. They can get at least a thumbnail of. You know if, if you see a million people downloading Beeper Mini, Apple's going to be much more interested in taking action than if you see 10,000 people downloading it. So that's the, I think.

1:50:36 - Alex Lindsay
I give it three months on the inside, six months on the outside. By the time they get to WBC it's gone.

1:50:41 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I fully believe Apple can technically do it, and then they will. I do think there's a big concern, given the regulatory climate, that there's a cost to doing it. So really it's going to come down to? Does the cost of doing it outweigh the loss, the opportunity cost, of all these people using it?

1:51:00 - Andy Ihnatko
If a million, people using it, you're right. Alex they'll shut it down. I think. I think you're right, I think that I think that's going to be part of their calculus too, because that would be a wonderful defense to have in their tool belt when they cut. You know, you know people, people do have it. Our users do have an option if they want. If Android users want to participate in iMessage, there's a third party solution that works very well and we allow it.

We tried really hard to crush it, but we decided not to spend a trillion dollars to buy out the company.

1:51:26 - Alex Lindsay
Their argument's going to be that the blue bubble tells you that you're at a certain level of security. That's exactly right.

1:51:31 - Leo Laporte
With another iMessage it breaks their security.

1:51:33 - Alex Lindsay
It breaks the security and they're going to secure it.

1:51:38 - Jason Snell
That would be a lie, but they might say that.

1:51:41 - Alex Lindsay
Well, allowing it to have a third party have access to their message system, but it doesn't, jason. You don't know how secure that. You don't know how secure that Android is, though.

1:51:48 - Leo Laporte
According to the company they are using.

1:51:50 - Jason Snell
Well, that's that's I mean. Yeah, sure, I guess, but how secure is a Mac that's using iMessage either?

1:51:55 - Leo Laporte
Well, apple thinks it's very secure and they think the Android is terrible. Like I said, they can.

1:51:59 - Jason Snell
They can fib about it all they want. They can say oh well, the problem is that it's on Android, which is fundamentally insecure. But what they will not be able to say, at least according to what we know, is that the old argument which was oh, all of these services are fundamentally insecure because there's a middleman who is translating your information and sending it onto your phone, that's not happening here and that's why this is an interesting I don't know. Again, I would not invest in this company either, but it is putting Apple in a bit of a spot, because if Apple crushes it, it looks bad for them, but they may still need to crush it, and how they crush it is an issue, and they can't maybe legally crush it. And if they have to do I mean imagine if they realize they have to actually reprioritize some of their resources in order to get the login, credential stuff to be different, because they can't just pull the plug Like that's a huge deal inside Apple where they have to make an effort and spend a lot of money to fix this.

1:52:55 - Leo Laporte
The analog is the DVD John's cracking the encryption DCSS on. Dvds. There was no way to fix that without breaking every DVD player, so the movie industry just had to live with it, and they never were able to fix that.

1:53:12 - Andy Ihnatko
Well, they were able to make it illegal to circumvent digital copy protection during the they went to the DMCA, that's right.

Yeah, they could say so. Basically, we have that fallacy where we have the right from the Sony Betamax case to translate to basically transmogrify something we bought onto another format for our convenience or for a backup, but we have another law that says that if they product it in such a way that it would break the DMC, I'm not allowed to do that. Which is why, again, which is why we get back to, sometimes it feels like you almost have an ethical sword and shield at your back. But yeah, this is, I'm in between. I'm kind of in between.

I think that I don't know how this is going to play out. Like if they were. Let's say that I would be willing to spend $2 a month on a month-by-month basis. I would not necessarily buy the annual subscription just yet. Yes, exactly, exactly. But, man, because they're that's just it. I'm sorry I'll wrap this up, but they're being really bold. They're almost saying oh no, no, please, apple, tell us that it's insecure. We're willing to show everybody exactly that we're using the exact same security product. Oh, no, no, no. Oh really, we'd be very happy to demonstrate that we used a complete. We used complete, documented clean room technology. To actually grate this, your argument is going to come all the way down to. We don't want people to use iMessage.

1:54:25 - Alex Lindsay
I'm willing to crush anybody who tries.

1:54:26 - Andy Ihnatko
I have a feeling that Apple they feel a little bit, they feel a little bit bold.

1:54:29 - Alex Lindsay
That's what it seems like. I have a feeling that I don't know what Apple will do either. If it was me, I wouldn't even kill it, I would just make it glitchy, you know like.

1:54:38 - Jason Snell
So you know like Slightly unreliable.

1:54:40 - Alex Lindsay
All you have to do is have people not get five or six messages in a day and they'll just stop using it. Like, you don't have to kill it, you don't have to make any announcement, you just have to be like well, it's a weird app, and not have to Like the way to kill it is just a little bit of poison.

1:54:55 - Andy Ihnatko
Not all of it. Which episode are we going to be talking about? How iMessage on iPhones has become really glitchy because people are losing messages. And nobody can really explain why.

1:55:03 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it'll be nice. I should point out that the product I use and have recommended for a long time air message, which is open source and does not charge runs on your Mac at home as a server Apple's done nothing about. So you know, maybe the difference will be the two dollars a month. Maybe Apple is just going to say it's not worth it to fight this. I don't know, we'll see. Yeah, if I were a betting man I would take your money now, but let's not we're going to take what we are going to take is a break so that you can get your picks of the week prepared.

Ladies and gentlemen, you figure out which one's the lady Our show today, brought to you by ZocDoc. Oh, oh. You know that feeling. The internet is so great when you're searching for that perfect product and you can go and you can research, and you can read a thousand reviews and you can find it. And there it is. It's the perfect product. You know it's going to work, you know people love it and and and. It has five stars. It checks all your boxes and it'll rise in 48 hours. That is one of the great benefits of the internet.

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1:58:07 - Alex Lindsay
So one of the things that I have to do a lot is actually change frame rates. Sorry, I had my button on. I had a lot of times I have to change frame rates so I get stuff at 24 frames per second. I have to put it to 60 or 30 or something else. And trying to figure, trying to do that, has been a challenge. You know, looking for all the different options. You can run it through a Teranex, you can run it through a compressor, you can just put it into Resolve or Premiere or Final Cut and export it out.

There's a lot of different options and a lot of times they end up a little framy. You start to see little frames or little bits of frames still there, because you're taking, let's say, 24 to 60 frames a second, and or you want to go to slow motion and you're it basically has to draw new frames in between those. So it has 24 frames per second. It's got to add three or four more frames per second or three. Well, lots of them. Three or four per frame. You're going to add more of them there. So so anyway, so figuring that out has been a challenge and a lot of us are starting to do a lot of work and I spent a lot of last week inside of video AI by Topaz and it's not a for the kind of stuff that I do. It's not a super expensive it's 300 bucks but in production in the production world that's not a huge price.

1:59:15 - Leo Laporte
I've been using photo AI, which is really interesting. They do it for video instills.

1:59:20 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, and video AI. So what I was doing was going to court. I'm using this thing called Chronos, which is one of the AI settings they have there which is really dialed in. We talk about these LL, you know these, these systems that are dialed in to do one thing or another, and so it can de-noise, it can do, it can increase the resolution, it can make it sharper, but it can also add more frames, and so I went from 24 to 60 and I was amazed, like I've never seen a interpolation as good as what I saw here.

1:59:48 - Leo Laporte
And so I was these guys. I mean, I've used Topaz plugins for a long time.

1:59:52 - Alex Lindsay
They're good For resizing, de-noising. I've used Topaz for a decade, so it's not or maybe not a decade, but six or eight years, and so so it's a very good, you know very good set of plugins. But but this one specifically, what I wanted to do is again change that frame rate from, again from 24 to 60. And I would and usually that's a pretty big jump, and you're going to end up with some, you know, kind of jagged movement as you go through that and it and it actually worked really, really well. It takes a long time to process on my Mac studio, you know, taking an hour and a half of this is about, you know, at 4K it's like 63 hours.

2:00:30 - Leo Laporte
Wow so it's like, wow so it takes a long time to process.

2:00:34 - Alex Lindsay
I wonder if I did it with the M3 Macs, I wonder how fast it would go, that's interesting.

Yeah, yeah, no, I'm it's. It's definitely become one of those apps. Now it doesn't look like it, you know, again, it's it's doing a lot of hard work and you know you can get PCs with the graphics cards and try to, you know, make it go faster, and so it's not the again, it's not necessarily the most efficient process to that, but when it comes to adding a lot of extra frames, it has it was really successful and, and a lot of us are kind of starting to play with it a lot more. Anyway, I would, I would definitely check it out. Unfortunately, there's not a, there's not a demo version of it, so so there's not an easy way to test it, but if you're really looking for something and you need to do frame conversion and we found it to be pretty darn successful- no pass says unconditional 30 day refund guarantee, so you basically got a 30 day trial.

2:01:18 - Jason Snell
You got to put money back. You got to pay money, though.

2:01:21 - Alex Lindsay
I don't, I will say I don't agree with that. I think that they're better off. I would. I would at least have a watermarked version with a, with a trial, I think. I just put a watermark and do it, you know, then then do it. But I guess they've decided to go down that path and and I, and again they, you can get your money back from it. But anyway, I'm not going to ask them for money back Because it was a lot.

2:01:41 - Leo Laporte
So it does a lot it sharpens, it stabilizes, it changes frame rate, it smooths.

2:01:47 - Alex Lindsay
It's a nice interface too. It's not a plugin. This is a standalone app. You just open it up, throw your stuff in and hit go so.

2:01:54 - Andy Ihnatko
Alex, did you try putting a pen of Jiffy Pop on the top of your Remax studio? I'm wondering what would happen.

2:02:00 - Leo Laporte
You could fry an egg on that day. You know, I think we're to see more and more. Ai used in tools like this. I think that's very interesting.

2:02:08 - Alex Lindsay
I, you know I have to admit, ai, I use it very. I don't I don't know if I use it every single day, but it is something that especially the genitive AI stuff in Photoshop, I use all the time, like, like people give me, like I have headshots that I get for the pot you know for, for great, great matter of time showing. Sometimes people give me a square and I need a, I need a rectangle, and I just select the two sides and hit return and it's goes. I'm just going to open that up for you and and it's miraculous.

2:02:33 - Andy Ihnatko
I was posting a picture from like my towns, like the like tree lining ceremony, and Santa was there, like in the fire truck, and I'm like, okay, there is the name of my town in Blazent on the side of that truck, in the middle of, like the fire department shield, and all to do is like, select the texts and say, remove this, and suddenly it's the execs. It's not just, oh, okay, it it mastered out, like no, it created a version of that shield that did not have any text in it, and I'm like, and it was like, and it takes the fall of five seconds, so why would you not do everything that you want to do? This is it's, it's mind blowing.

2:03:05 - Leo Laporte
TopazLabscom, Andy and I go pick of the week.

2:03:10 - Andy Ihnatko
I now not everybody, not everybody has like a a panic play date handheld game. I can tell you that if one of the reasons why you did not buy one is because there was like a year, year and a half waiting list, I just checked yesterday and there's suddenly they're finally the point where if you order one today you will get one before Christmas. Oh, nice, it is. Yep, and the we've we talked about this before. All say is that for someone who does not want even a Nintendo switch style, like gaming intensity experience, someone who likes like simple little puzzle games, simple like 10 minutes, 15 minutes, 20 minutes at most, an hour of play time per game, and who does not necessarily want to spend more than like two, three, four maximum of like $10 per game, it really is pretty sweet. It's not for everybody, but it is exactly for me. So I'm glad I got it like about a year or so ago. So I'm matching it today because there is an advent calendar of games and available for for the play date. It's not sponsored by panic, it's like the I think it's itchio or some sort of consortium of independent developers. So every day there is like a new play date game that is on really nice discount and I find I've bought almost almost all of the five that have been available so far, because almost all each of them has been something that at some point like I so oh, that looks like a really cool game. And because it was like all of like $6, I'm like I will definitely check back on this because I can't simply buy every game that I that is interesting to me, but now it's like, oh, wow, I can get squished for $2 instead of six. Damn it, buy it, buy it, buy it. And it just reminds you, it reminds me of exactly why I love this little game thing Because, again, just little games that are there for you for like 15 minutes when you're, or 20 minutes or an hour when you're at the gate waiting for an airplane or you just got like you just want 10 or 15 minutes of a break from something, and these it's.

I love how like every single developer of these games is not just simply porting something that has been seen 100 times since the original Game Boy. They're like they've got a really weird idea for a game and they know that. Okay, here's a really weird little handheld game console and the people who are buying it are pretty weird to begin with. So I think we can make five bucks on this. But, yeah, if you, if you have a play date, definitely check out play dates, hyphenadventcom. If you don't have a play date. Again, the? It's not as cheap as it was when it was pre-ordering it's $199, but you do get 20 games with it and they're all really good games. So I'd say that if you were, if if I'm not, I'm not recommending it wholeheartedly Cause again, it's not for everybody, but if this interests you, if you, if you just need a nudge to like actually pull, actually go ahead on this, then I think go ahead in this. I think you'll enjoy it.

2:05:44 - Jason Snell
In the early days, when we talked about the play date a lot cause I have one too the knock on it was there weren't that many games. It's a brand new platform and it's a little tiny thing from a little tiny developer, and how many games could there really be? And that's why Panic did a season of games when you bought it, so you get those 20 games. Let me tell you they. They did a new app. They did a new app that is a store app inside there. You can still side load and do all those things, but they put a store app in and, oh my God, there are so many play date games now. So if you were, if you shied away from play date or you put it in a drawer a year ago, there are so many good, fun, different genre games now that it's totally worth reconsidering whether you might want to play Mine's still on the mine's on the shelf, cause I?

2:06:27 - Leo Laporte
I'm understandable, there was nothing there, but what's your? Favorite. What should I get, jason? What's your favorite?

2:06:35 - Jason Snell
Oh, I don't know. I mean, they're the ones that my favorite games are still in the subscriptions.

2:06:39 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, again, squish is, but generations. Generations is one of the best games ever. They actually played generations on the iPhone and I love it. Yeah, but I like I again these really interesting. So squish is a game where you're just trying to get like I can't see it. But the only, the only enduring complaint people have about it is the lack of a backlight. It's a beautiful, like high contrast display.

2:06:59 - Leo Laporte
It looks like a SoCo bottom kind of game where you're sliding yeah.

2:07:03 - Andy Ihnatko
It's like you're well, you're trying to move, like this ball into, like this like yeah, I love those kinds of games.

2:07:08 - Leo Laporte
Yeah.

2:07:09 - Andy Ihnatko
But they're blocks that behave differently depending on how you push Basically simple little puzzles that don't look like putt, not like huge rule-based puzzles. Yeah, and again, they're like it's like it's on sale today. Each, each advent calendar thing is think it's on sale for two or three days before it closes up or I don't know. If it's early, it's early. Maybe they even keep it over Playdate-adventcom. I bet Jason like we were sort of like the same worry that okay, so they decided to make a quirky with a crank. That means that there's going to be 81 versions of Solitaire and 100 different fishing games aren't there and like no, they're like two fishing games total. So don't worry about that. Yeah, I was surprised about that.

2:07:46 - Leo Laporte
Mr Jason, now pick of the week.

2:07:48 - Jason Snell
Well, we mentioned it earlier, so I'm going to cheat and pick something I picked about a year ago, which is channels, the DVR server app that lets you, if you've got a, you can attach a box with a cable card, you can attach a box that attaches to an antenna to do over the air or, yes, you can do it for streaming as well. There are various, depending on what service you've got. If you've got something like YouTube TV or Fubo, or if you've got a cable subscription, even there are some channels that you can just record on there and it will link in, it'll look at files on your server that you've got for Plex or something like that as well. You can create virtual channels, which is fun. So I've got like the Dr who Christmas special channel and it's a virtual channel.

You just tune to it and it is. It is playing through All of them One by one. I've got a mash channel that plays through all the episodes of mash. You just tune it in and see what there is and you don't worry about it. It's so thoughtfully designed. It is a little bit like Plex from an alternate universe, but it's also like Tevo, done as an app on your, on your Apple TV. The Apple TV app is excellent. The iPad app is excellent. It's just a really good app. If you're in need for this sort of thing and, like I said, this is this is how I. I record some sports this way and then it's on your hard drive, which is actually kind of nice. If it's like a thing you want to save and treasure, If you're on Jeopardy, you can record it and then save that episode of Jeopardy for all eternity if you want to.

2:09:08 - Leo Laporte
So are you on?

2:09:09 - Jason Snell
Jeopardy soon. I have not been on Jeopardy yet I hope one day to be on Jeopardy.

2:09:13 - Leo Laporte
That'd be great. Yeah, it's one of a dream of mine, but my brain is slowly going so I don't think it's going to happen, but it is a challenge.

2:09:21 - Jason Snell
I realize I'm never going to be on Survivor. So if I'm going to be on anything, maybe it'll be Jeopardy, but I gotta, I gotta get. I'm not too old for Survivor.

2:09:27 - Leo Laporte
So basically, with the skills I have left, it's going to be Wheel of Fortune or nothing.

2:09:31 - Jason Snell
All right. Well, you know, just avoid bankrupting, you'll be fine.

2:09:34 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, thank you, jason. Now sixcolorscom is the website. Check it out. He does a million podcasts. They're all listed, listed at sixcolorscom.

2:09:43 - Jason Snell
A podcast, is it?

2:09:44 - Leo Laporte
zillions now.

2:09:45 - Jason Snell
Wow, that's great, I think so I had this point. Zillions of podcasts, sixcolorscom slash Jason.

2:09:49 - Leo Laporte
Even my sleep he's podcasting all the time Snoring podcast.

2:09:55 - Jason Snell
You know it's there.

2:09:56 - Andy Ihnatko
ASMR Very, very lucrative field yeah.

2:10:00 - Leo Laporte
Nice job, well done Sixcolorscom. Thank you, jason.

2:10:04 - Jason Snell
And.

2:10:04 - Leo Laporte
I appreciate you filling in. Last week too, it's sitting in the big chair. Andy and I go GBH in Boston. When are you going to be on next?

2:10:13 - Andy Ihnatko
You missed me last time but I'm next on uh next Thursday at 1230. I think go to WGPH newsorg to stream it live or later, or to stream uh my last, uh, my last appearance last week.

2:10:25 - Leo Laporte
Very nice and Alex Lindsay office hoursglobal seven days a week for great content. What's going on this week at office.

2:10:34 - Alex Lindsay
Oh, you know, it's um. Today we actually we sat through motion Alex Golnir, who's probably one of the two or three people that I that I asked for advice on Apple motion. I came on, we, we started off. The funny thing is we're very question based, so we started off with a plan of what we were going to talk about lower thirds and everything else that we sent an answering question about motion. So, um, so, anyway, that's, and we are going to be talking about the black magic camera actually on Thursday. I'm just kind of where we, what we've learned so far, um and um, and I'm talking a little bit about the pipeline, that of how I record the Michael Krasny show, which has got a lot less infrastructure than Twitter. So it's all in my office right now and so I'm going to talk about how that works tomorrow.

2:11:11 - Leo Laporte
Only wish I only wish I'd known you before I set up a Twitter. That's all I could say.

2:11:19 - Alex Lindsay
And then we have, speaking of the gray mattershow, uh, our Jason Snell, who's going to be on this Friday. So we're really excited. How exciting.

2:11:30 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, all right. Gray mattershow. G R E Y. Very nice with Michael Krasny. Oh, I will, can't wait to hear. I would really like to know what's going on in Jason's brain. So that will be good question. That will be a treat, and Michael will get it out of him. He's done us all. Now Right, he did Andy, he did me. Has he ever interviewed you, alex?

2:11:54 - Alex Lindsay
He hasn't interviewed me yet.

2:11:55 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, maybe you should get in front of the microphone. Yeah, yeah, maybe so, alex Lindsay office hoursglobalgraymattershow Andy and not co. I'd I'd give your website, but what's the point?

2:12:09 - Andy Ihnatko
Uh, that's me. Well, now we're now we're moving into active shame. I've hurt you and I'm sorry.

2:12:15 - Leo Laporte
I I want to make amends. I'm sorry, andy, uh and, of course, jason's analysis colorscom. Thank you everybody for joining us. I especially want to thank our club twit members, who literally make this show possible. We've been looking at our prospects for next year and, uh, currently we are at a $1.1 million deficit. We would like to make that up because we want to keep the lights on and and keep the shows rolling. If you are a member, thank you. If you're not, twit.tv/clubtwit. It's seven bucks a month. Thank you very much. You get ad free versions of this show and everything else we do. You get special shows that we only put out for club members, special content. You also get access to the club twit discord, which is a wonderful community. I really love going in there. So if you're not yet a member, twit.tv/clubtwit and you know what you're thinking about a holiday gift for the geek in your life. What a great gift. A year membership would be $84 or even just a give a month twit.tv/clubtwit.

Thank you so much in advance. I really deeply appreciate the contribution. Um, we do this show, uh, we do stream it live on YouTube the minute the show starts, and we discontinue the stream when the show ends, so that you won't see the super secret hot stuff in between. No, there's, it's just me going to another room. So if you want to watch those streams live, you can do it in the discord, of course, as a club member.

But we also, and now we decided you know what, let's, let's put it up. Well, let's put it up on YouTube as well. So, youtube.com/twit, If you, if you hit the bell. Uh, I get nothing from that, but you would at least get a notification when we go live. So, uh, consider that. Uh, that's one way you can watch live. It's every Tuesday, 11 am Pacific, 2pm Eastern, uh, 1900 UTC. After the fact. Of course, you can download the show uh, god willing, with commercials, at twit.tv/mbw. Uh, you can also subscribe in your favorite podcast player. You'll get it automatically, and there is a full YouTube channel with the video. Uh, on YouTube as well. Thank you so much, everybody. I have the unpleasant, sad duty at this point to tell you you better get back to work, cause break time is over, or stick around for security now. Bye, bye.

2:14:42 - Mikah Sargent
Oh, hey, that's a really nice iPhone you have there. You totally picked the right color. Hey, since you do use an iPhone and maybe use an iPad or an Apple watch or an Apple TV, well, you should check out iOS today. It's a show that I, Mikah Sargent, and my co-host, Rosemary Orchard, host every Tuesday right here on the TWiT network. It covers all things iOS TV OS, HomePod OS, watch OS, iPad OS. It's all the OS's that Apple has on offer, and we'd love to give you tips and tricks about making the most of those devices, checking out great apps and services and answering your tech questions. I hope you check it out.