MacBreak Weekly 903 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. Jason Snell, Andy Ihnatko, Alex Lindsey, we're all here. And, of course, the big story is Apple has announced the Vision Pro ordering and availability. We will talk about it. Everybody's getting very excited. Vision Pro days just days away. It's also today the 17th anniversary of the first iPhone announcement. We'll travel down memory lane for that. And is Steve Gibson right? Is that back door in the iPhone more than just a bug? All of that and more Coming up next on MacBreak Weekly

0:00:34 - Andy Ihnatko
Podcasts you love. From people you trust. This. Is TWiT.

0:00:42 - Leo Laporte
This is MacBreak Weekly, episode 903, recorded Tuesday, january 9th 2024. I was just measuring the East Room. MacBreak Weekly is brought to you by Fastmail, a leader in email privacy for more than 20 years. Make email better. Fastmail is moving email forward with new internet standards and open source innovations that many other mail services end up using.

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Fastmail also works with password managers, like one password or a sponsored bit warden to generate unique emails for every site you visit. That's really nice. And don't forget to download the Fastmail app iOS and Android to get the most out of your email. They've got web mail too. Fastmail. It's just everything you need. The better email service. The quality really is worth paying for as little as $3 a month. Try Fastmail now free for 30 days at fastmail.com/twit. It's time for MacBreak Weekly, the show. We cover the latest news from Apple, and there is big news today. But we'll first introduce our fine panelists from OfficeHoursglobal and 090.media, mr Alex Lindsey. Hello, alex, are you celebrating the Orthodox New Year at some point, or is it Christmas?

0:03:02 - Andy Ihnatko
Christmas, the Feast of Stephen was on Saturday.

0:03:05 - Leo Laporte
Yes, yes.

0:03:08 - Andy Ihnatko
Was Good.

0:03:08 - Leo Laporte
King, wednesday's last. Orthodox. He was celebrating the Feast of Stephen.

0:03:13 - Andy Ihnatko
I don't know he was a bit of a stick in the mud. I mean, if something was a tradition, he wanted to keep the tradition, even if people were kind of sick of him. Here I'm seeing Danny Boy. I mean you know you know you're a king, you know you say it's going to go.

0:03:30 - Leo Laporte
Mr Jason Snell is also here from SixColorscom. Hello Leo, we have a date. Good to be here. We have a date.

0:03:38 - Jason Snell
We do. We do you and me next week no not you and me.

0:03:42 - Leo Laporte
That's not it. That's good, though. I appreciate your fixing the ambiguity there. Apple Vision Pro available in the US February 2nd. Pre-orders begin Friday, the 19th, which is a week from this Friday.

0:03:56 - Alex Lindsay
Talk about the. You know, let's see. Yes, everyone's excited about getting the word out of whatever their new product is, and the top of tech meme is just completely absorbed by the Vision Pro.

0:04:08 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, today's the opening day of CES, Oops oh. Apple, oh Apple.

0:04:12 - Andy Ihnatko
Well, also like today, today happens to be like the anniversary of the announcement of the iPhone January 9th so I don't know. I don't know if that clicks into it, and I think part of it is that let's see if we can make sure that anybody who's excited about a transparent TV and might be putting aside $4,000 to give to Samsung later this year will not be keeping that $4,000 set aside for a transparent TV 8 am Eastern time.

0:04:38 - Leo Laporte
a week from Friday, you can plunk down your pre-order, your $3,499. Oh, but wait, that's just the starting price.

0:04:47 - Jason Snell
You still have to buy like lenses $150 for prescription lenses, which I paid $50 for that for the Quest 2 or the Quest 3. So it's unsurprisingly more expensive than that, although there's also like a readers, like a small readers correction that I think is a hundred. Oh, that's funny. And then there's a you know it's not. I mean it comes with like a little cover and stuff, so like I think you can get out the door probably other than your vision correction with the $3,500 and be okay.

0:05:21 - Leo Laporte
It comes with the Solonit band and the Dual Loop band.

0:05:25 - Jason Snell
I was a little afraid that they were going to like make all of those things extra. Did you want tires on your car?

0:05:32 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, this is. This is the. That's the version with, like the factory stereo, no AC, no power windows. I mean, it's going to be interesting to see, given that, when the parts of the conversations we've been having for months about this was that there's probably, they're probably going to be very, very limited in how many they can actually manufacture, how many people are going to be stuck in that situation where they decided that I really just wanted the $3,500 one, but the only one I can get is the $4,199 one that has the maximum memory and has the T-shirt and has the.

0:06:02 - Jason Snell
I don't know they seem to be keeping the SKUs simple, which I think is good, because the volume is so low, right, like you kind of don't want to it's one thing if you're making millions of them to have them be in all the different shapes and flavors and colors and whatever, but for this one, you know, if there's just one model like I think, that's because they're going to be trying as hard as they can to just fulfill a very small amount of demand based on their supply For developers and adventurers. Pretty much, yeah.

0:06:30 - Leo Laporte
Exactly For your $3,499, you get the Solo Knit Band and Dual Loop Band. I don't even know what those are. What are those? A light seal and two light seals.

0:06:40 - Jason Snell
The one that goes behind the one that goes on top of your head, which was actually that's a slight difference that there was a question about whether the that was going to be bundled separately. Huh Right, whether they were going to say you actually do need a thing at the top of your head, and it sounds like that's going to be included as well as the one in the back and then the light seal goes on the front, it just goes.

0:06:57 - Alex Lindsay
it just sits over the whole thing.

0:06:59 - Jason Snell
Oh, that would really kind of the smart hats, the pictures, they have published do not have.

0:07:06 - Leo Laporte
what? Is it the Solo Loop Band or the Dual Knit Band? Which is the Well? That wouldn't really work with her fashion. Yeah, it wouldn't, would it yeah?

0:07:13 - Alex Lindsay
We have to have a version of it that doesn't do that. The fashion now evidently will be shaving the side of your head, because then you can match the proper use of the headset.

0:07:25 - Leo Laporte
A little throughway in the middle of your head so that the loop can just go over and that way you can keep your fro on either side. It's going to be called the Fade Plus or the Fade Pro. Maybe I think we would call it vision, fashion Vision fashion. Vision fashion.

So the Solo Knit Band is the one behind and the Dual Loop Band is the one above, I think. So Just to get the nomenclature, a light seal and two light seal cushions. That's an optional addition on the front of it to make it more like so you're watching a movie, so you don't see the ammio, I think it's, yeah well, it's to protect your face because it's this thing, otherwise it's going to smash into your face.

0:08:03 - Jason Snell
So they're trying hard. It's all ergonomics, is the impression I get that they're really trying to make it that right. They want you to wear this thing and not be miserable with it right, that's like a deal breaker right.

So they've got the light seal which is attached that is going to block out the light from the room around you, and then cushions to make sure that whatever force is being applied from that rear strap to your face to clamp this thing onto your face doesn't make you feel like you're in a vice. And then the top strap helps gravity, you know, acting against gravity as well?

0:08:35 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, because it's heavy. So, in fact, this is the question A lot of ergonomics here. Yeah, dee, do you need a thing? As as you, is this optional with the MediQuest that goes over your top? So what is the thing they met? Because you have to go in store to do this. What is the thing they're measuring you for? Is that the light seal? Light seal, okay.

0:08:51 - Jason Snell
Yeah, they said that there are a bunch of different. I don't know what the final number was because they haven't talked about it since June, but there are a bunch of different shapes and sizes of the light seal and that's what they would scan your face for, because there's a special app. Nobody knows their face size.

0:09:02 - Alex Lindsay
Right, that's your face size. What is it? I mean, you think you could hold up your phone and turn it and it would do the you know this is well.

0:09:10 - Jason Snell
This is at WWC in June. That's what they did with me is? They just scanned it in from an app and they told me that they were going to be able again. So it's six month old information. We'll see if they changed it, but they said that in the Apple Store app. Basically you would be able to scan your face and it would. It would give you a face seal size of some sort that they would be able to match it with you. Now whether that actually did happen, we don't know yet, but that would be right. That would be. Ideal is if they could let you use the face ID sensor essentially to get a sense of the shape of your face and choose a size for you, you also get a cover.

0:09:46 - Leo Laporte
Is that the cover for the spooky eyes, or is that? Yeah, yeah.

0:09:51 - Jason Snell
It goes on the front covers, the camera and the and that display, the spooky eye display, so that it doesn't get scratched in. You know, in transit, when you're packing in your bag to watch a movie on the plane, wow, whatever.

0:10:02 - Leo Laporte
The cloth is included. That's a. That's a nice. That could have been a good, good upsell, but no, it's a $50 value. Right there you get a battery that's an external battery, right the plugs that you put in your pocket, and has a Right.

0:10:13 - Jason Snell
So if you want more than more than one battery, you can, I think, do that. But it comes with a battery with a USB-C pass through so that if you're in a place that's got USB-C power, you can keep it plugged in and use it all the time. But if you unhook, then it's got. I think they rated it at two and a half hours, Two and a half hours With battery life.

0:10:29 - Andy Ihnatko
I've been looking at SD video two two, rather two D video playback at two and a half hours yeah.

0:10:34 - Leo Laporte
M two chick is. Didn't they say it was going to be the M one when they first announced it? Or no. They said it was M two.

0:10:40 - Jason Snell
We're in the M three area now, though, so it is one step back. It's the M two, yeah, but it also has that coat, that other processor, right, so it's got an additional piece of silicon that isn't in any other. The R one device, the R one Letters. They're going to run out of letters eventually, I don't know. They're going to have to go to like Greek letters after, after a while.

0:10:58 - Leo Laporte
Let's watch this young woman putting on her, putting on her. How do I get backwards in the Apple newsroom? Go back up.

0:11:10 - Jason Snell
That's the question.

0:11:12 - Leo Laporte
I wanted to show you the best part of this, maybe if I pop it out. Yeah, there we go, and I hope Apple will not take us down for this. So she is holding the what is that called? The solo loop, and she watched this. Oh, that's the knit, that's the knit thing. So it's just like putting on a toque. Yeah, and it's a beautiful video. She's not wearing that topstrip.

0:11:36 - Andy Ihnatko
So that's yeah, she's not. They don't. They don't want people to. Maybe they think that's kind of ugly and they don't want people to think about that.

0:11:41 - Leo Laporte
But notice there are little grommets on the sides that you would hook that into. I guess that's what those are.

0:11:46 - Jason Snell
So keep this in mind too, all of these demos. So I just said earlier that I'm using June information and I don't know if anything has changed between June and now. Right Another thing that has not changed between June and now is all the PR and media assets for this product and that I am legitimately surprised about. Now. Maybe there'll be some new stuff when they ship it, but I'm not surprised that there's no event Like I get that.

The demand, like the supply, is so limited that they want to kind of control demand and they want to be a little cheeky about it. They, I get all of that. I am a little surprised that it's the same model, it's the same videos. I mean, if it's, if there's some new photos and videos, they're obviously from the exact same session. It's all the stuff we saw in June and I don't know whether that means they didn't want to spend the money, they didn't want to bother, they didn't want to confuse. But you know, if they make an in a midstream decision to put in something like that over the headstrap, well the video doesn't show it because in June they didn't want to show it and they're using the videos from June.

0:12:47 - Alex Lindsay
I think they still don't want to show it.

0:12:48 - Jason Snell
I don't think yeah, well, that may be, but it's interesting that they didn't Right now. Like I mean, it just struck me that there are no new media assets for a product launch and it's all stuff we saw six months ago.

0:12:58 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, I think that I think that will be interesting as it comes out. I mean, I think that they want to see how. My guess is they want to see a what kind of sales? What does sales look like without having to do anything, which will probably be all of them, you know, like, you know you'll be on waiting, you know wait lists and everything else, and so I think that there's a little bit of it, because I think that the other problem you get into this is this is what happened with, like chat, gpt and Dolly.

Is you get? We got so excited about Dolly that suddenly everybody was looking for it. They wouldn't let anybody in, and so then we all shifted over to mid journey, so so building up to you know, and suddenly mid journey kind of took off because it was the thing that was available, you know, and and so I wonder whether you know, I think they, they've created enough pressure to get everybody to join, they have enough people developing software for it, they have enough people, they have enough apps going into it, that. But I think that there's probably they'll continue to ratchet this up. I think they're also pacing themselves. This is a, probably not a. You know, this is. This is a. This is a grinding kind of a marathon for them for the next three or four years, not a, not something like hey, let's see how this goes. They're not wondering whether it's going to go well, they're just going to keep doing it for the next five to 10 years. I think you're right.

0:14:06 - Andy Ihnatko
I think they again, with this limited product is going to be available. They don't have to convince people to get this. The people that are going to get this are going to are going to. They don't have enough to make to get to the people who are going to get this anyway. But that. But that's interesting, the idea that they haven't maybe they haven't introduced any new media assets.

I was looking at the official product page and one thing that stuck out to me is that that's the first time I've seen an image of obviously have put together a faked image, I'm guessing, of them you know the magic, the magic eyes feature where you're not seeing the skin tone rendered in shades of Smurf blue. As a matter of fact, if you scroll down, there's, like some of these images, where there's the Smurf blue that I remember from June, but there's at least one image in which they seem to be saying hey, look, here's somebody with a normal skin tone presented behind these. Again, the that, that, that that fake I display. I wonder if that's something that I missed the first time or whether this is something that they're now confident enough about to at least say under some circumstances, maybe you will not look like one of the Navi.

0:15:10 - Leo Laporte
I didn't really picked up on that.

0:15:13 - Alex Lindsay
I think that their goal is to have it look like you're just in a darkened, like you're looking through a sun shield. I think from a color perspective, probably where they're trying to get to is it just looks like you underneath the underneath that you know. I think that that I don't know whether that'll work or not, but I don't think it's cool. I will say in that in the document they built little 3d versions of their apps which I don't know I don't know whether they're using that for it or just for the PR. Looks so nice Like if you, there's a close up one, a little half what? Half three quarters way down which says photos. Anyway, as someone who has to build icons, I was like they really spared no expense on their multi layered icons for sure.

0:15:52 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, but I mean at the very top, like that's the image that people see, the very, very beginning when they go to Apple. Hyphen vision had hyphen pro, so I think she looks normal.

0:16:01 - Alex Lindsay
I think at this point that looks like you're looking at her right exactly goggles. I think that's. I think that's their intention.

0:16:07 - Andy Ihnatko
I think that's the intention. But again, if you scroll down, like you see, like tinges, you see blue tinged imagery If you scroll down. I remember I again I could be remembering correctly but everything I saw in the all the June, all the June presentations, it seemed as though it was a limitation of the display technology. That was that was that was outward facing, that it wasn't going to give any kind of natural color. If you scroll like maybe, oh yeah, where?

0:16:36 - Alex Lindsay
she's smiling with a red shirt and she's looking over and there's like a blue tinge and that also maybe head on versus well, yeah, and also reflections across that, that LED surface.

So, and I have a feeling that we didn't want to make it look like they're photoshopping, like it probably does reflect that way internally because of that's just where the internal components look. But if you look at it without a lot of reflection, I bet you it looks normal. And when you look at it from the side, where the little sun or light, you probably see it hitting across those LEDs.

0:17:04 - Jason Snell
I can also be. I can guarantee you whatever they did there, they're very specially rigged up for all of that, because reviewers are, or the demo people. In June we never got a chance to see it, like it was not shown anywhere. That is not a feature.

0:17:18 - Andy Ihnatko
See what the Spooky.

0:17:19 - Jason Snell
Eyes, the Spooky Eyes. Yeah, I'm sorry.

0:17:22 - Leo Laporte
I'm interested, that's because I'm totally biased against this thing. I'm going to.

0:17:27 - Alex Lindsay
I'm wondering. I'm wondering whether how they're going to capture stuff in it Like so I'm a developer, I want to capture training marketing materials Like this is what my product does Everything.

0:17:39 - Jason Snell
Airplay it to a Mac and capture it, even like using QuickTime.

0:17:42 - Alex Lindsay
Oh really.

0:17:43 - Jason Snell
Yeah, you can airplay the output to a Mac or maybe anything, but certainly that would be the way, just like capturing an Apple TV, the same idea right when you end up viewing the device in QuickTime player and recording it, and then you get a screen recording, and that means other apps that do screen recording will probably.

0:17:59 - Alex Lindsay
I said no that works Like how do you do? I guess it'll just be a really wide version of it If it's.

0:18:04 - Jason Snell
It'll be field of view. It'll be. Yeah, it'll be some kind of like decided upon what the field of view is and then within that, yeah.

0:18:13 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, and does it also seem like some of this stuff is not quite finished, because number one there's mentioned. There's mentions of a couple of features that are like beta and won't be finished. Like right in them the newsroom article also scrolling down to like the actual product page off the official Apple site, it says that this has not been certified by the FCC yet.

0:18:33 - Leo Laporte
Wow, it seems like they're shipping them and they're in the stores by now, right, apple?

0:18:38 - Andy Ihnatko
Apple Vision Pro has not been authorized as required by the rules of the Federal Communications Commission. This device is not and may not be offered for sale or lease, or sold or leased, until authorization is obtained. Well, I'm sure that's they're pretty confident.

0:18:50 - Leo Laporte
I bet they're confident, yeah, yeah.

0:18:52 - Andy Ihnatko
Wow, that would be that way. And the thing is also, I think yesterday Apple also announced that they're having their earnings call the day of February 1st, the day before release. So if it's like that's a bad time to be talking to, like analysts saying so, the FCC, you're delaying the release because the FCC will not license this. Tim, what's your color on that Right in the face.

0:19:17 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, yeah, interesting, but I think that it is going to be. You know a lot of apps. Of course. They touted a million apps that are going to be available. A lot of those are iPad apps that were poured over. You know like they're, but the you know of the folks that I've talked to, jason, I don't know if you had much of experience, but the folks that I've talked to that have seen it. I haven't seen the headset myself. Some of the stuff that you don't expect to be impressive was impressive Like. They were like yeah, there's stuff built for it, but then they're like but then there's stuff that's in there that you go, oh, that's just a really great way to display that. You know I don't know if that was the case for you where they're just just basic stuff is useful.

0:19:56 - Jason Snell
I would say I don't get the sense that the iPad apps running on it are going to be as disappointing as like opening an app on an iPad and finding out that it's an iPhone app. It's not going to be like that. They're not going to have the sense of depth, but they're still going to be in a, in a plane. So you can imagine, if you will like, taking an iPad app and putting it over there and another one and putting it over there and then putting a Vision Pro app over here, like you're going to be able to multitask with iPad apps and they're going to feel pretty good. They're just not going to be a fully immersive multiple, you know, because with a Vision Pro app you can put it, you can have different controllers in different places and obviously there's a sense of depth and it is much more well integrated.

But I think that the iPad apps are going to get them a decent amount of the way they are and, of course, getting the impression I get is getting an iPad app turned into a Vision OS app is also, while not easy, you know you're you're it's like converting something from the iPhone to iPad. You're sort of in the same same platform. So it's going to be. It's going to be okay, right, and keep in mind, just as a footnote Mac Mac stuff is all screen sharing. The Mac Mac OS apps don't run on it, but you can screen share a Mac and take it over and control it from within.

0:21:07 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, and that's actually kind of something that kind of worries or not worries me, but makes me it's it's, it's an item ticked on the list of things to keep an eye out for that. Looking at the difference between here is an iPad app that's running on Vision Pro. Here is an app that is a Vision Pro app and it looks like okay, at the, it looks like the iPad app with some extra like UI ornaments on it. It doesn't look like. It's fundamentally a spatial app. And, given that Apple another another thing that people have been digging into is like the developer guide and say no, no, no, don't call an AR app, don't call it a, it's a spatial computing app.

And I wonder if that first round of apps, or even the first year's worth of apps, is going to kind of underscore that. No, no, no, we're creating a brand new category of class of computing as opposed to. Well, no, we have virtual windows, which in itself could be interesting and could have their place, but if they're setting everybody up for thinking that, oh my God, like I do remember I think all of us remember the difference between the first time we used an iPhone and, like the user interacting with a pane of glass without any fixed buttons on it, whose user interface rearranges itself depending on what the use is. At this very very moment, and how squeezing and pinching and stretching were just so so natural, tracing your fingers were so natural. It felt like this is really what the next generation of not just mobile computing, but all computing could be like. And I'm wondering if they've they're setting everybody up for its apparel goggles that could give me some virtual screens. I have that on this $800 gadget I've had for the past year. What's up, apple?

0:22:43 - Jason Snell
Now they have a challenge to balance having software there, which means letting iPad apps run there, because you don't want it to be empty.

But at the same time you don't want it to be so good that nobody bothers to do vision OS apps right, because they ultimately do want that. And that's a challenge. I will say in my 30 minutes with it that I can still lord over people for the next few weeks. What I will say is the eye tracking is. The thing that reminded me of the of trying an iPhone for the first time was the eye tracking and the gestures where I tracking. I think it's really funny.

I think the way the human brain works is, at least for me and I think for a lot of people, where you're looking is sort of an internal thing.

It's. I know people can look at your eyes and sort of say are you, are you paying attention or whatever, but like the actual, exact object you're looking at at any given moment is a very private kind of internal thing. And the vision pro knows exactly where you're looking at any given moment and it allows a level of. It feels like telepathy almost. It feels like an outside thing knows my inside thing right, which is bizarre and it's not. It's not obviously because I have to point my eyes there and it can figure it out. And you combine that with those fairly subtle little pinch and tap gestures that it can see, even when your hands are down out of range, just sort of sitting in your lap, and you do get some of that magic interaction. Now, what it gets applied to is an open question, but there is some really interesting magical interaction there if, again, you know, if the experience merits it. And that's the big question we're all asking is what, what, what it's going to be like and what the software experiences are going to be like.

0:24:19 - Alex Lindsay
And I think when we get back to looking at the content, they have no reason to put anything more out right now, but I have a feeling that all this year they're going to keep on rolling things out that are like hey, look at this isn't the school, look at this isn't the school. And these are like. I think that one thing that hopefully Apple has learned is the lesson from iBooks, which is they could have done something pretty dramatic and instead they went to the old school you know textbook companies and asked them to do old school. They asked them to do something cool and they just did old school things, you know. And and so I think that you know, hopefully, you know, apple has learned from that and they're they're working with folks to build some great content.

I mean, I know that meta did I mean, like when I again I you know the the most interesting apps that have been on the meta quest, many of them were developed by meta or paid for by meta. Sure, so, you know, to prove the model, and so I don't think Apple will fair, will do much different than that as far as some of the content, to make sure that it's actually there, and I think that again, there's a lot. This is going to be something that you just see rolling out all year. Yeah, they're going to get a bunch of people to buy it. They've got what they need, but you're just going to. You know they want to build up to the next, you know to the build up that demand. You know. Just keep people buying as many as they're making.

0:25:28 - Jason Snell
There's a lot of the, a lot of the hype at the beginning, unlike most Apple products where the product is the hype. A lot of the hype this time out of the gate is going to be those initial reviewers where there's a report out that, like Mark German said, that reviewers are going to like get a controlled demo and then they're going to be asked to come back a week later for another follow up experience and only then will they be shipped hardware which is just wild, like fill your calendar with Apple. People will be motivated to do it, but that is, you know, actual reactions from influencers and journalists and YouTubers and all of that Like that's going to be a lot more of their marketing than it is with, like, an iPhone, where that stuff exists. So there's a huge blitz and it's almost like they're. There's that in baseball.

There's a concept of pitching backward. You know you do a, you do a slope pitch and then a fast pitch instead of a fast pitch in the slow pit. Apple's pitching backward a little bit here where they're like, you know, because they, because they don't have the supply, so they're trying some other stuff. So some, alex, some of this stuff is going to details about how Apple has built this stuff are going to roll out in personal experiences relayed from, you know, youtubers and writers. That's going to be interesting.

0:26:36 - Alex Lindsay
And with the supply. Right now, the big work they have to do is working with developers, working with content. You know, owners with developers, with game companies. It's less of a public PR blitz that's necessary on their end. It's more of a you know, how do you keep on filling that pipeline, especially when you only have 500,000 that are sold?

The good news is, anything you know, reasonably interesting for the 500,000 that's been, I don't know, probably, when the dust settles, 4500 to $5,000 with taxes and your lenses and everything else, you're going to spend somewhere between probably 40 low 4,000 to $5,000 on what you're doing there.

They're going to be pretty insensitive to going, oh, I'll spend 20 bucks on this or 50 bucks on that, you know, for quite some time, because this is their new thing and they've got the money to do that. So I think that you're going to end up with a yeah, a fair number of folks that are ready to buy things, and that's really good for a developer. I mean, when developers say, well, the market's not big enough, I'm like well, how many? I talked to a developer about that two weeks ago and they were like, well, the market isn't going to be very big. I'm like so when was the last time you sold 10,000 units of your software and I was like it's bigger than your, it's bigger than your current market, so you're still fit into that box, you know so you know again the first.

0:27:53 - Andy Ihnatko
There's going to be a race to be the first like viral, viral hit app for because if you can charge $18 for what you as a developer might think is an inconsequential app, but if it catches people's imagination and everybody who bought, everybody who buys one of these things, that's one of the three apps they always go to the store and buy because it's the one they've heard about, even if it's just like a simple thing, that that that's that will be worth the half. And after noon you spent coding the stupid, stupid idea that your kid came up with. As a matter of fact, I'm wondering if, if Apple is apportioning a certain amount of their, of their units to make sure that gets into the hands of developers, as opposed to someone who might walk into a store, walk up, because they've got the sort of money where, for three or $4,000 on a fun little toy that they might have fun with for two or three weeks but then like almost never use.

Well, they've been great investment for Apple.

0:28:47 - Alex Lindsay
They've been. They've been seeing these for a while. It's quite a thing If you've seen the stories about them. See like you have to have a room that has its own lock, that has a control and control who's going to be in it. You have to give them a list of who's now. That'll loosen up as soon as they're available, but it's still going to. Obviously, developers are a huge piece of this, because to develop interesting things is going to take a long time.

But I also think that as people see some of these things I one of you know like there's the problem you get into if you put some of these headsets on, like some of the tests that I've done is that it kind of poisons your mind.

Like once you see it you're like you don't want to go back to anything else and so, like we did this golf test I think I talked about it earlier where just see a plain, plain video and on one side had all this data that we wanted and the other side had social stuff so that you wouldn't take the headset off, the tweet and check email and stuff like that. Soon as I had that, I've only ever seen that test for a couple hours total of over, across all the testing, and I still can't watch golf on TV, like you know. Like I still like, I'm like, oh, all this debris all over top of it and blah, blah, blah, and so I think that that's going to be also a challenge as you start to see different ways of handling that data. It's going to be interesting.

0:29:55 - Andy Ihnatko
I just think that the day the biggest demo Apple is going to promote is going to be that one amazing game that they have been someone's someone who's had a team that's had a condo in Cupertino for the past eight months developing just this game To be the premiere game on Vision Pro. The thing that everybody buys, the thing that qualms people after the thinking, oh my God, I can't believe I spent $3,500 on something that I can use Microsoft Excel on for exactly two hours and 10 minutes before I can't state it anymore. The thing that, like, really will help, will get people that get that starry eyed, evangelistic glow in the back of their eyes that says, oh my God. I and I bought every single VR headset that's been around for the past 10 years and this made me forget about my mother and my father and my quest for anything.

0:30:45 - Alex Lindsay
I will say that for me in the Oculus time, that Robo Recall, and then also the little one. There's a little one where you shoot arrows at books, attacking your thing, and I can't think of where it came. I don't even know where it was. I don't know what you see, but I don't remember what. Somewhere in there in there, like demos, they have this thing where you're sitting on a thing and you're firing these little arrows as things that are for some reason, those two specifically. They were so immersive that I felt like this is the future of gaming.

And then we didn't. You know there's very few that were compelling after that. You know, just that really had stick to it. And the challenge really with games in general and where Apple has a soft point, if they can get it is, the problem with most games is they're created by gamers. You know, to break to the next level, you have to stop having gamers develop games and have people start thinking about them as a mass market. And they're big market, but it could be a lot bigger if they weren't so vertical.

0:31:41 - Andy Ihnatko
Something that's more passive entertainment, particularly in the VR space, where I don't necessarily need something that's I get. I get killed in the first 10 minutes. Just let me have an open world and there's something off on the side. There's a cat with a glowing tail that if I follow the cat, I'll have something to do Otherwise. I really just want to explore this place and feel what you were feeling when you were building these graphics.

0:32:01 - Alex Lindsay
And I think also that, like, when you think about games, especially as spectator games, which is really how you build that up? Most specter game, spectator games that we watch are pretty simple, like they're not, they're not complex. You don't. You don't. You see everything that's happening all the time, whether it's football or baseball or soccer or all these other things. These are, we see the whole field, like we get to see the whole thing, and most games don't work that way.

You know, most of the games that we watch are much more like I don't know where people are, I get lost watching it and so on and so forth, and I think that there's something else. And look at that, you got a cat and then there was a cat, Anyway. So, anyway, so it'll be, it'll be. It'll be an interesting puzzle. I do think that it will. They'll have a lot of success. I mean, already Microsoft's had a lot of success. I don't think Apple doesn't want to promote, I don't think they want people to get caught up in games, and I think they don't want to get people get caught up industrial, because VR stuff and AR stuff have been successful in industrial appliances for a very long time.

0:32:58 - Jason Snell
You know, like you know whether it's the only details in that newsroom post that I thought was like really new was that they actually did mention some game experiences and that's, you know, and that's a part of the press release where they're trying to just shovel in the names of pieces of software because they want to impress people that yeah, office is going to be on there and things like that. And they mentioned some game experiences and they they really didn't talk about games other than, like, you could play an iPad game in a window, which is not that interesting. And they did mention that. So it, I think it's one of those things where, like, despite Apple not talking about it, people are making games for it and they're like all right, I guess we'll mention it. So they did.

0:33:35 - Andy Ihnatko
But it's such a good like instinctive demo, like it's. You put an experiential sort of app. Those aren't going to come, I think, for at least I'm going to say two years before you really anything. Just like the thing with the game or an existing 3D movie that's been adapted for this kind of headset. You put it on and you get the reason why this thing exists. That doesn't really happen with Excel. That doesn't even happen with a lot of like 3D creation apps. Even if you're capturing things in the real world and putting them and modeling them and adjusting them in the virtual world, it's they really have to, especially for the first year. They have to give people the most thrilling 30 minutes of their lives the first time they put it on.

And if they fail at that, it doesn't. It doesn't mean that it doesn't mean it's a failure of all their engineering. But if you can't impress people in 30 minutes, you are never going to impress people, no matter what you do for the next year and a half.

0:34:30 - Alex Lindsay
And I'm really. I can't wait to see Flight Simulator, Microsoft Flight Simulator, like with the Logitech control, You'll be able to look down and see all that stuff, and then you'll.

0:34:42 - Andy Ihnatko
But you won't have to have all those monitors that you're trying to figure out how to put around you and everything else goes away and you throw this thing on and you're flying a plane and it'll you know I the one of the best VR experiences I've ever had was a simple, like well simple F1 racing game where just the idea of, like, I am sitting in the cockpit of this car, when I turn my head, I'm seeing what I'm turning. I have never had like my pulse rate get up to 140, 150, 160 like that in any place where I was sitting down comfortably and safe, and so there there are going to be a lot of people for them Three. $3,500 is cheap at that, and when it gets down to $2,000 for a really high quality experience like this and I'll predict it's going to go both directions.

0:35:23 - Alex Lindsay
So Apple's going to make they're going to. This is the middle of the road, like there's going to be, you know, three or four years from now. There's going to be one that's 50% more and one that's 50% less than this. This is just because there's a bunch of compromises that they've made on this, on this headset, that I think they'll want to fix, which is higher frame rate, higher resolution.

0:35:41 - Leo Laporte
When I was at the in Vegas for the F1 race, they had I think it was McLaren had a simulator that looked like a car. You were in it, you'd put on VR headsets probably the meta quests and then do a driving game. So you had pedals, you had controls, you had everything, and then you had the driving game and of course they were smart so the spectators could watch. They had a screen that was showing what you were seeing inside the headset. But and oh, one more thing the car moved, tilted and stuff. So it must have been. I wanted to do it, but I I don't know, I was too embarrassed to, but I think you had to buy something. But it seemed like that would be a pretty vivid experience and I know F1 drivers do actually use simulators to look at a track before they actually get to the track. I imagine this is the kind of.

0:36:26 - Alex Lindsay
Thing.

0:36:26 - Leo Laporte
It's a lot. It's a lot safer. Well, they still have to drive it eventually, right, you can't stay in the simulator forever, so Apple did not all Apple says in the press releases.

They gave the price for a 256 gigabyte version. They didn't mention RAM, they didn't mention other SKUs. But nine to five, mac is pointing out actually Mac rumors is pointing out that Xcode 15 too, which was also released, which has support for the Vision Pro, shows 16 gigs of RAM, which on an M2 is, you know, probably more than enough. And there's some speculation that perhaps the Vision Pro will be available in other storage sizes 256, 512 and one terabyte. So the price we're talking about 34.99 is for 256. Honestly, that's probably enough, right? Is there any evidence that they'll have other SKUs?

0:37:24 - Andy Ihnatko
Depends on how much, how much the size of the assets that these apps are going to consume, particularly for consuming entertainment titles.

0:37:29 - Jason Snell
Yeah, we don't have to be care of them.

Yeah, keep in mind, though, that most things are going to be streamed and that Apple has built a system in iOS where it can dynamically delete things and then reload them later when you want to use them again, and I think that that's so.

So, I mean, there are probably scenarios where you're on a slow connection and you're going to want to get it and keep it, and that it's going to be difficult for that, but I struggle with this, like I struggle with the Apple TV storage, where I'm not sure the device is really made to for storage to be relevant, even though it apparently is on the goal.

The goal is right that it shouldn't matter, because you're using the cloud as the backing for all this stuff and you can get it all on demand, and so you shouldn't have to worry about it. Of course, if you're on a plane, you're going to have to have downloaded stuff, and is that going to be enough? That's a good point or in a low connectivity setting. So so I mean, like I said before, I feel like they want to keep these SKUs simple, because they can only make so many of them, but at the same time you know that's. I think that's the mystery is do they? Do they go out with the low, low price of 34.99? But actually all the ones that we have in the store today are four grand.

0:38:38 - Leo Laporte
I don't know what's interesting, according to Chance Miller, in nine to five Mac, some developer kits did feature five, 12 gigabytes of storage. So and I you know, you said and I think you're right, jason Apple does not want to have too many complicated SKUs for something they're only going to do a run of 500,000, four in a in a whole year. So I would be, I honestly think, they might only have one, one storage SKU. I don't understand why they would want to do more. They also probably want to encourage developers or give developers the idea that this is the size you're developing for, right, right, I don't know, I don't know. We, we will all find out soon enough You're going to either get one from Apple or buy one or both, right, jason?

0:39:24 - Jason Snell
I mean, it's my job, so I'm going to have to.

0:39:29 - Leo Laporte
You have to spend that good colorscom add money on something useful. Uh, and and and I know that you, alex Lindsay, will, because you probably want to develop for this thing, right? Yeah.

0:39:40 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, I mean we. I think there's a lot of opportunity there, so at least two of the panel.

0:39:44 - Leo Laporte
Half the panel will have one. Andy and I will. We'll we'll sit in the back seats and just watch.

0:39:50 - Andy Ihnatko
We'll. We'll be like I'll send you pictures. I'll send you pictures. It'll be like hey, alex, punch it. It's been a while since he's, you know, expated state over my place for a couple nights and hey, why'd you bring?

0:40:01 - Leo Laporte
It will be an interesting to see how long I can hold out against the FOMO.

0:40:05 - Alex Lindsay
Um well, the problem is, if you hold on too long, you might hold out all year. I mean, I just think that I think the backlog on these are going to be pretty high. I'm more mostly worried about the fact that if I order by 530 in the morning on Friday, it's going to be like two months or three months to get them.

0:40:19 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, I mean I just I mean I'd be on the same page If it were half the price. I'd be at least a little bit tempted. But I can't spend $3,500 on, like a beta essentially at least 40% of beta product that I don't know if it's going to earn back its money for me in terms of how I could be more productive or more engaged or excited.

0:40:41 - Alex Lindsay
I have to admit, I started putting money away like. So I started like putting a little bit in this account and now I'm like I'm talking to my credit card company about okay, I'm going to make a big charge, You're not going to block it, right, Cause it's five o'clock, and you're not going to block it, Like Thursday will be like a. Hey, I just want to make sure you're clear. It could be up to $5,000. I'm going to go through tomorrow. It's really going to let it go through.

0:41:00 - Andy Ihnatko
There's been a lot of blocking. I'm sure that the algorithm at your bank has figured out that. Is it in any way related to a tech company? Yeah, exactly, it's legit.

0:41:10 - Leo Laporte
I do think, though, that there's I don't know, it's maybe just my experience has been a lot more, and Lisa's too, a lot more blocking this holiday season. I think there's been a lot of fraud. I was trying to buy a box of chocolates from my mom from season. I got rejected by four credit cards in a row. Uh, I mean, it was really hard to buy this box of chocolates. Uh, was this you? Well, you never know what you're going to get.

There's a lot of fraudulent chocolate buying going on. I don't know it was weird effect Chocolate.

0:41:38 - Jason Snell
Chocolate and.

0:41:39 - Leo Laporte
Lisa's had a. Of course, lisa uses her Amazon account to buy a gift cards. That's her favorite, one of her favorite kinds of gifts, and that obviously is a source of fraud. And Amazon has gotten worse. It's harder and harder for her to buy something on Amazon because they think she's doing something skeevy. She's not. Uh, let's take a break. And, by the way, you can hold the email saying you guys are talking so much about the Vision Pro, you ain't seen nothing yet. Yeah, this is just the beginning, right.

0:42:11 - Jason Snell
See you in a couple months, yeah.

0:42:13 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I'm going to use this tune out for the next six months, because that's a as soon as you guys get them. Well, I want to know. Let me give a pitch.

0:42:23 - Jason Snell
I want to give a pitch here. Which is the reason that you should care, even if you're not going to buy this thing is that it's a brand new Apple platform. Apple's invested a huge amount of money in it. It's put a lot of cutting edge tech in it. It's going to be interesting, even if it's all just a kind of an academic exercise of like what would Apple do if they had a product that they had to make and they were given a nearly infinite amount of money to make it and they didn't even care about what it costs? So it's going to cost a huge amount of money but it's still like first real new Apple software platforms since the Apple watch, completely new sort of interaction model than they've ever had before. Apple's got some very smart software designers and interaction user experience engineers and designers and they have, in taking my 30 minutes with it, like.

One of the things I walked away from was oh, this is a very thoughtfully considered product. It's very interesting, even if you don't want it, even if nobody wants it, even if it's going to be a flop, like if you're interested in Apple and how they work and how they build devices and how they write software and what their philosophy of computing devices is. I think you should pay attention to the Vision Pro anyway, because it is Apple doing its thing, whether you want it or not. It's a great example of what Apple does, and it's the current state of the art and the current mode of thinking that Apple has. Presumably that will extrapolate to impact other products as well 100%.

0:43:42 - Andy Ihnatko
Apple is a storyteller and every product they release is a character in the story that they're telling. I can't say that about any other company out there.

0:43:53 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, we'll be watching with great interest. Apple my guess tell me if you think I'm really off base is that Apple's probably put, over 10 years, as much as $100 billion into developing this thing. Does that seem outrageous?

0:44:08 - Jason Snell
No, it's less than 10 years, but I think it's been like six years maybe.

0:44:17 - Alex Lindsay
So they started talking about USDZ, I believe in 2016 or 2015. And that was the beginning. So that was, and they had been thinking about it before that.

0:44:30 - Jason Snell
And I suppose we're talking about ARKit and USDZ and all that. It was clear that the video was on the wall. So, yeah, it's coming up 10 years and it's certainly with how much they put into this.

0:44:39 - Leo Laporte
We know that, meta says they put in about $10 billion a year in developing their VR efforts. I'm sure at first Apple put in a mere billion, but I think as they got closer to a product it ramped up. I mean $100 billion would be the outside, but that's a big commitment. It's just so hard.

0:45:00 - Jason Snell
And I think that's one of the reasons that's my theory for why they're doing it.

World's most prominent technology company, spending a huge amount of money on a product category that nobody has been proven to actually want. But they think there might be something there and they're going to do whatever. And also, I want to say again, that price. The interesting thing about that price is that this is a fascinating product because it's not hobbled in a way. A product that is meant to sell like hotcakes would be right. You've got that weird kind of contrast where you're like, well, we have to cheap out on it if anybody's going to buy it, but by cheaping out on it it makes it less useful. Where do you draw the line, I mean, with this product? I think it's clear that Apple Truth Align at it's going to be useful and it's going to be expensive.

0:45:41 - Leo Laporte
Make it as good as we can. Right Make it as good as we can.

0:45:44 - Jason Snell
It's like a hero product.

0:45:45 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, but they could wind up like which makes it interesting.

Repeating. They could wind up repeating what happened with a Newton message pad, where they once again created a personal digital assistant. That is no. This is this idea, executed flawlessly, with everything that you could possibly want, the best way you can do it. And then, like a year later, paul came out and said what if this cost a third as much, fit in your shirt pocket? The development kit came free with the thing and no, it doesn't do handwriting recognition, but will give you a bunch of things that are an advantage that we A big advantage. I'm saying that it's going to be interesting to see if this actually promotes VR AR as a category, in addition to promoting Apple Vision Pro.

0:46:28 - Alex Lindsay
Well, if you look at the number of headsets that are coming out of CES, it absolutely has. It has turned the whole industry. Everyone sees this market that sits below $3,500. There's this huge opening of like well, that's where Apple's going to go. So now they're spending and so you have the XR and the MR and all the other things that are coming out during CES, and so you're right that there is an opportunity for that, and there's an opportunity, bluntly, for Meta to take advantage of this and have something that's $1,500 or $2,000, that it gives them room to actually go up a little bit and go into that market, because Apple's kind of set a bar where they're like well, it's half as much as Apple, and so I think that there's a bunch of things.

The good news for people like me is that there'll be a lot of production. People need to build content for it, but I think that there is a. I do think that we're going to see something that I've never seen a product release. When you go back and look at when Apple announced USDZ, they had been thinking about this headset probably for a couple of years. That's what it takes. Oh, we should do a headset. And then there's a how do we build that? And then they built a pipeline and then they have been walking down this pipeline for the last decade and it is launching the USDZ, figuring that out, figuring out getting people to understand what it is, getting it into all the apps, getting it into all the infrastructure, getting it support all these bits and pieces that they lay out. I've never seen a product with this much runway. It's almost Apple's.

Manhattan project, or maybe their moon landing project which took 10 years, and I think what people are concerned about is there is an opportunity for someone to come in underneath Apple and you surf all of that using the excitement, like mid-journey did to Dolly, to be honest.

0:48:11 - Leo Laporte
Right. All you have to do is look at all the companies announcing headsets. As you mentioned, Samsung is going to do at CES of XR VR headset in conjunction with Google. Sony has announced its mixed reality.

0:48:27 - Alex Lindsay
This is also at CES, and they've had these. I mean, sony and Samsung have been doing these for a decade. Yeah, a decade. Yeah, always junkie and not anything I was in.

0:48:37 - Leo Laporte
Here's a company called Ocute Trex which is showing off in fact tonight we'll be showing off the Ocute Trex Oculens, which really likes Cuckoo. And then, just in case you weren't sure, ces itself has a whole track on augmented and virtual reality. Whoops, remember all the slates in?

0:48:58 - Jason Snell
2010, because everybody thought that the iPad was going to be called the isolate. I mean, ces is a mecca for the fast follow Me too, movement of tech. Right, you got to get in there. And there's space. Right, there's space for legitimate products in there. And Apple and he's right In my going by sparing no expense, apple has left a lot of room down below. I think Apple must think that down below is not good enough for most people, which might they might be right, I don't know, but there's plenty of space. There's $3,500 worth of space below them.

0:49:28 - Leo Laporte
And, to be fair, ces also has a crypto cryptocurrency track this year, an NFT's track featuring a obviously AI generated person. You know, spend some money on stock stock photos, please do me a favor, but I guess it's blockchain. Oh, wait a minute. This is good news. Blockchain is going mainstream. Hey, congratulations, that's the that's.

0:49:56 - Alex Lindsay
I don't know if I would use Bitcoin, as the blockchain is going mainstream, but that's the but, yeah, the the. I think that that Apple can go back down, but Apple in the Apple's MO has always been. We're going to come in expensive and then we're going to go both directions. We're going to slowly close off all of the options all the way down to the least expensive, and we're going to keep going up as well.

0:50:14 - Jason Snell
And so there was a name for a reason.

0:50:16 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah.

0:50:17 - Leo Laporte
It's kind of interesting because this OcuTrix OcuLens is designed for people with macular degeneration. It's a very specific medical appliance. Macular degeneration, of course, narrows your vision and this thing is designed, they say, for for making it possible for those people to still see, which I think is a very good idea. So maybe there are some specific medical uses as well, for this.

0:50:42 - Alex Lindsay
I think the other scary thing for I think a lot of these manufacturers, is that if Apple gets, if it works, like they're you know, if it doesn't work it doesn't really matter. No, they'll just sell into those things If it actually works. You know Apple's lock on this is so hard to break because they've done so much work on it that it'll make anything that people talk about as far as they're you know, their access, you know the iPhone level control of the market will be much bigger because if they, if they go down and become less expensive, the entry, the table stakes on this is about a hundred billion dollars. Like you know, like if you go in 10 years, you know, like that's the thing is they've done something so hard that if somebody else wants to try to catch up, it's going to be very, very, very difficult to catch up. You know and you have, you have these.

You have a, you have an operating system, you have all these other things that are all tied in. You have all these other devices that are all tied in. You have all these other bits and pieces. It becomes the only you know if they, if it actually comes out of the gate and successful. You know that Apple's number one problem and I've said this for the last five years, their number one problem is antitrust.

You know like and you know like like that's their number one issue, because no one's really competing with Apple anymore. I don't think Apple really, you know they're not really competing with them. You know, and I think that antitrust is their biggest, their biggest challenge over the next decade.

0:51:56 - Jason Snell
Give me a pile on here and just say and imagine if this is actually not a product that anybody wants today, but it keeps it alive long enough.

We all agree that actually it just needs to be a lot less bulky. It needs to be more like a pair of glasses, and that's a thing that the technology is going to be able to do in, let's say, five years or seven years. Who's going to stick it out for five or seven or ten years until we get to that point? And the answer is Apple is because they've got all the money and they can afford to do it. But are the competitors who are putting these products out now in it for the long haul? Are they going to look a year in and be like, oh no, it's too early, and then back out again? And that's part of the game Apple's playing here is, if they put in all this money and all this time, if this thing takes off, there's going to be nobody even willing to try to compete with them until it's so late in the game that it's going to be very hard for anybody to beat Apple's advantage.

0:52:42 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, Also, Apple will have time to do maybe something like what they did with the Apple Watch where remember the first demos that they gave they totally got it wrong what they thought people would be buying this for and what this product was. After a year or so in the market, the marketplace told them that, hey, wow, this is a really great fitness watch. And Apple said really, it's not wearable computing, it's not something that lets you see live video of your garage door opening and closing. No, no, it's a great fitness watch. Yeah, yes, we built, indeed, yes, we built a great fitness watch. Thank you for hearing us Kirkle the messaging that we're saying. So I think people are going to be telling them here is what your vision pro is by 2025, 2026, maybe they'll stop talking about spatial computing and start talking about a shade of that same meeting. That is translatable to a problem that people are actually solving with the device.

0:53:35 - Jason Snell
I guarantee you that in a year there will be some fundamental tenant of the vision pro that Apple has learned through shipping. The product is wrong, right, and at least one, if not many, because you know they can test it all they want on the inside. But, like, the world is different. It's full of weirdos who do weird stuff and people react differently to people who work at Apple. And that's how you got. That's why you got to ship something eventually, like that Apple watch. That Apple watch. On one level, they had huge pressure to ship it. Oh God, apple's doomed if they don't ship a watch, which was stupid at the time, but then that first watch.

Looking back, it's like I mean they didn't really know what people are going to do with it, and they learned.

0:54:14 - Alex Lindsay
And they learned the first iPhone is the same. You look back at it and go, well, that was cute, you know. But you can't, you can't, you can't get here from there without just remaking releases and and again that, yeah, I think you're right that they will continue to learn now at a very high rate, about what people, how do, how do, how people want to use it, and and again. I think it's the integration I do think that you're going to, I, I, I'm very curious to see how things like pages and numbers, and and and keynote looks, because now that they have USDZ support, the ability to get a document from somebody and just tap on it and then just sit there and use your little hands and move it around is interesting, you know, like it's. It's a I think it's an interesting, you know, solution.

0:54:59 - Leo Laporte
All right, let's take a little break A week from Friday. You can order February 2nd. They'll arrive if you were successful in your order. That means we will have our first review of the vision pro problem. I'm hoping on February 6th for our February 6th show. Give you guys enough time to play with it and report back. Zoom's available for it. Yeah, yeah, Do it on. Do your do your call on the vision pro? I know I want to see your spooky eyes.

0:55:36 - Alex Lindsay
I can't wait to see what zoom looks like.

0:55:38 - Leo Laporte
One way we could have saved some money up for our vision pros is Rocket Money, our sponsor for this segment on MacBreak Weekly. If I ask you but this is actually. This is kind of funny because this was our kind of new year resolution Lisa and I wanted to use Rocket Money to go through all of our subscriptions because we know we have a ton of them and figure out what we don't need. If I asked you how many subscriptions you have, do you think you could list them all? Do you know how much you're paying? I'm going to guess you know I would have said yes before I started using Rocket Money. I found out. Let me tell you I would have been so wrong. In fact, Rocket Money has saved me enough money to buy a vision pro actually, uh, through subscriptions. I'd completely forgotten about. In fact, Rocket Money just told me about one yesterday for a company I don't even know I'm. I just I don't know. I'm going to dispute it.

I guess what I love Rocket Money? It's a personal finance app that finds and cancels them for you, your unwanted subscriptions, monitors your spending and helps lower your bills. Rocket money has more than five million users and has helped to save its members an average of get this $720 a year, more than $500 million in canceled subscriptions. With Rocket Money, you see all your subscriptions in one place and if you see something you don't want, cancel it with a tap. They do the work. You never have to get on the phone with customer service. It's worth its weight in gold. Stop wasting money on things you don't use. Cancel your unwanted subscriptions by going to rocketmoney.com/twit. It's also a great tool for budgeting and knowing where your money is, et cetera, et cetera. It's really the best. rocketmoney.com/twit. I know you couldn't. You know you could just look it up in the app store, but please would you do me a favor. Go to the website so they know you saw it here, rocketmoney.com/twit. We thank you so much for supporting MacBreak Weekly. Another way you can support the show this year go to our Twitter 2024 survey. We've shortened it because we just want to make it easy for you. It's the only way we really, really know anything about you. We don't track you RSS feeds, don't know anything about you, so we ask you once a year to go to our survey and take it, and that gives us a good idea of who you are, what you like, what you're interested in so we can do better serve you. And yes, I'll be honest, it helps us pitch advertisers if we can say you know people between the age of 25 to 54 and so forth. The survey is easy to find twittv slash survey 24. And thanks in advance for taking that. You have to leave in the month, but don't wait, just do it right now, get it over with.

So last week we talked about the series of exploits the CVEs at Apple patched. In July, we talked about a Kaspersky revelation about this, which they did at the chaos computer Congress. They called it operation triangulation. Kaspersky had a number of its employees phones, iphones compromised through a very sophisticated chain of four different exploits, ending in an exploit, cve 202338606. That is very interesting. Now, at the at the front end of these chain of exploits, they think it was the NSO groups Pegasus software. Now, I mentioned that because NSO group has said again and again we only sell the nations, we do not sell the individual hackers. So that's one piece of evidence that whoever did this was a nation state.

Kaspersky is a Russian antivirus company. I should point out another piece of information Kaspersky was implicated in 2015, 2016, when the NSA lost a whole set of hacking tools turned out in. A contractor at the NSA had taken those hacking tools home. He had this Kaspersky antivirus running on his machine. It exfiltrated the exploits to Kaspersky's Moscow offices, where from there it went somehow to the Russian GRU, etc. Etc. And WikiLeaks. So Kaspersky, I think, has been under the. This is data point two. First one, remember nation state. Second one data point two Kaspersky has been getting the stink eye from the NSA and the NSA is somewhat motivated to figure out. You know, are they a branch of the Russian GRU or have they been compromised themselves? And in fact, the State Department bans Kaspersky's antivirus, as does most of the federal government, for use on government computers. For this reason there's point number two NSA doesn't like Kaspersky's interested.

Point number three came up right after Security Now or during Security Now on Tuesday. Remember I said Steve would have a lot to say about this. Security Now from last Tuesday. 9.55, was titled the mystery of CVE 2023 386.06.

Steve did a very deep dive on how this exploit worked. In fact, if you don't want to listen to the show, dan Gooden at ours Technica has done a similar deep dive. Now I don't this. I'm not going to put words into Steve's mouth, because Steve did not say what I'm about to say. What Steve did say is that this was an incredibly sophisticated exploit that required knowledge of a table built into all the iPhones for the last four or five years. This not without the information in this table, the exploit wouldn't have worked. So Kaspersky's speculation was that Apple had left in some debugging code for four or five years inadvertently. Steve points out that they have been maintaining this code in every version of iOS since, but that this particular 256-byte table has never changed. You would need this information to use this exploit.

Apple patched it in July in a very simple way. They just denied access Instead of jumping into this table. It just said denied, denied, denied, and, interestingly, nothing broke. Everything continued to work just fine. It was a very simple patch. Actually. Now I'm going to. This is all me. This is not Steve, although when I proposed this to Steve, he said well, that's a pretty reasonable explanation. Remember, nation state, nsa, very, this is security through obscurity. Very obscure table that you would not normally have access to, only Apple would have, and presumably Apple would keep it under lock and key in the utmost way, because knowing this decoding table gives you basically rude access to the iPhone. Well, somebody did this to Kaspersky's phones. It took them a year. They finally revealed it in October.

This chain of exploits, and through reverse engineering we're able to come up with this box and this hash and so forth. It is my theory and I'm proposing this to you guys and you can shoot me down that this is an intentional backdoor built into all iPhones for the last five years. It was built in by Apple, I'm sure kicking and screaming. I don't think Apple would have wanted to do this. I think it's clearly not a debugging tool.

I think Apple put this in here intentionally, secured it in every way possible as best they could. But they did it because I believe the NSA sent them a national security letter using a FISA court. As you probably know, those national security letters require that the company or party receiving it never reveal that they received the letter or acted in any way. That's to make sure that the perp they're investigating doesn't get wind of the fact that this is happening. I believe the NSA, or somebody like the NSA, some agency and probably in the US I think almost certainly in the US, because Apple's got to do it if they get a FISA court subpoena said you must put this backdoor in and you must give us this 256-byte code so that we can at some point use this.

I believe the NSA used it At least they may have used it many times, at least to investigate Kaspersky. Kaspersky, being very smart, figured this out after a year of research and revealed it to the world. I don't think Apple did this because they wanted to. I think Apple did it because they had to. Thoughts. I know that's a lot to unload on you.

1:04:43 - Andy Ihnatko
The difficulty is that it's an incredible charge.

1:04:50 - Leo Laporte
However, if it's unprovable, I understand.

1:04:54 - Andy Ihnatko
It's unprovable, but the logic of your argument is that there are legal apparatuses in place so that if this were something that the government our government decided to do, to force Apple to do, there would be no evidence of it as such. I have no comment. I don't know.

1:05:12 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, this is the very famous national security letter which was part of the FISA court. Here from the Electronic Frontier Foundation is information about these. It's a law enforcement investigative tool similar to a subpoena, most commonly used by the FBI. That's, by the way, another suspect here. Remember San Bernardino happened right about that time frame.

1:05:37 - Jason Snell
There are a few other scenarios here. Right, there's a scenario that this is indeed a debugging tool that was left in accidentally.

1:05:44 - Leo Laporte
That's what Kaspersky thought, by the way.

1:05:46 - Jason Snell
Right, and then so you're like okay, accidentally, but there is also accidentally on purpose right, which is it gets left in accidentally and somebody starts to exploit it and there's potentially a moment there where you know this is against what Apple says, but, like you said, maybe they're held to, like you can't fix this because we're using it for some reason.

1:06:09 - Leo Laporte
Here. What's so bad from the EFF? What's so bad about NSLs? Andy Gags the company from telling anyone they did so. Right, exactly.

1:06:18 - Jason Snell
It's also possible and I don't know all the security rules inside Apple, but we have heard stories before of people working inside tech companies, including potentially Apple, who are actually working with intelligence agencies. So there's there are other scenarios here where this gets you know accidentally left in.

1:06:40 - Leo Laporte
This is like the AT&T special room, where all AT&T internet traffic was directed back to the law enforcement.

1:06:51 - Jason Snell
But you could potentially have a somebody who's an Apple employee but is actually also working for a US or intelligence actor and leaving it in, Because the question is it's not just why did it get in there? Because it could be debugging, like Kaspersky says. The question is how did it never get noticed and did it never get?

1:07:11 - Leo Laporte
noticed and Steve says there have been regular updates to this ever since. So it's, it's. It's not that it was not known. The thing that's really important to this is this 256-byte lookup table. Without this it's you can't do anything with it, and Apple would certainly have had this table right, because they they wrote it into the code. It's in the code, right you? At some point, somehow somebody at Apple gave this away, or it was just it's possible was discovered. Although Steve described the protections and they're pretty darn good it's the kind of thing Apple would have written to to keep it secure.

1:07:54 - Jason Snell
Right. So I think the question is I don't think we can tell from the outside whether no, we don't know how it happens. If it was based on a disclosure, was Apple compelled to disclose it? I think it's safe to say that I don't think Apple offered it right.

1:08:05 - Leo Laporte
I think this was, this was I don't want to imply that Apple in any way wanted to do this.

1:08:10 - Jason Snell
Right. So the question is were they compelled or was it I hate to say it an inside job right when essentially somebody spirited the code away and that would be somebody who was an Apple employee with access and I know this sounds conspiratorial, but we'd had cases of this where there have been people in positions in tech companies and it turned out they were working for a government right. And that they were highly placed, and maybe they were. I don't want to get theatrical and say like a sleeper agent or something, but people who are.

1:08:38 - Leo Laporte
Saudi Arabia had people at Twitter who were who were sending stuff out. It's happened before. Chinese operatives were at TikTok sending stuff out. So yeah, that's yeah. I don't really know how it happened. I'm giving you one possible scenario. I am sure Apple didn't want to do this. I think this was a voluntary backdoor, but the point remains. There is there was for five years at backdoor in the iPhone. It does seem good.

1:09:05 - Alex Lindsay
Go ahead.

1:09:05 - Andy Ihnatko
Go ahead. Andy, I was just going to say it does seem remark. One of the reasons why this is an attractive scenario is that it does seem remarkable that such a low level, down to the metal vulnerability existed without either a Apple knowing about it and patching it, be another security researcher finding it and contacting Apple and getting Apple to patch it. It just the the we've had the time that a lot of people have spent trying to explain how this worked means that this is not just a simple thing. There were multiple vulnerabilities that were being used in combination and with. If any one of those bridges were to fail, then this exploit would not work. It just seems incredible that so many failures of security would have happened at a company like Apple, and I would consider your your theory to be one of many plausible theories, and one of the things that would be interesting is if it turned out to be some kind of inside job.

1:10:05 - Alex Lindsay
You know, Apple is no longer is not constrained by FISA, which means that that they'll let people know how it happened and people will get fired and people will, and potentially a bunch of other things, because it means that they weren't they weren't being told by the government what to do. They the government, just inserted people into that, into that mix, and I think that that probably happens more commonly than people think. I mean, I think that from all different directions, having you know folks that are in the intelligence agencies, working in tech companies, is an obvious exploit, Like, like.

1:10:36 - Leo Laporte
It is a it is a and it's really easy to hide. It would be easy for Apple to figure out who put it in there and who exfiltrated it. I think Right. So I'm saying if, if.

1:10:45 - Alex Lindsay
Apple wasn't important to do it, but they've known about this since July.

1:10:47 - Leo Laporte
They patched it in July.

1:10:48 - Alex Lindsay
I think that the other thing is is that a lot of researchers especially if you have a team that's been there for a long time a lot. I don't know about Apple, but I will say that a lot of hardware and software have backdoors because it's just easier to get into something and a team may decide well, it's really safe and they're not. And I think we think that all things go through a central thing but on a giant code base. A lot of people can can hide a lot of things in there of like oh, and it comes down to I just don't want to have to go through that process to just do the thing that I'm trying to do. I just need something that I can push this button and turn it and I can get in there and work on it and then pull it back out again. That is, that's the most common solution For backdoors.

Is that people, that developers, want a backdoor to fix things or get in without going through the rigmarole that they have to do, and a lot of products have those hidden somewhere in them so that the developers can get in and out of those things or test things or everything else. This seems like it would be bad judgment. The level of this is. It's interesting.

1:11:43 - Leo Laporte
The other thing I find interesting is the timeline of this. This has been in there since roughly the FBI San Bernardino kerfuffle and the NSA tools leak kerfuffle. So look, I guess really the only we will never know unless Apple finds a person and comes forward. I don't, I think they would have done it by now. So I think we probably will never know. Very important point this may not be the only backdoor in an iPhone, this. There may well be similar backdoors in many, many devices and we would never know. Just a point that I guess I don't know, a data point we should all be aware of.

1:12:30 - Andy Ihnatko
Well, that's, that's part of the awareness that I think we all should have that the power of a nation state, including our nation state, to basically do exactly what they want to do, regardless of palatability to the public, regardless of the law, is infinite, and we should not be so naive as to think that our government would not do a certain thing right, Because they certainly would. We just look I mean look how angry and forceful law enforcement agencies have been publicly to try to get backdoors into all hardware legislated through Congress. Imagine what they can do if they think that. Well, no one knows that we have a mechanism in place so that we can make that demand that is legally binding and we literally no public blowback from that whatsoever. So that always has to be something we consider.

1:13:11 - Leo Laporte
It's going to make an excellent novel and movie. That's all I can say. The other thing I would say is that this is such a technical topic. I don't see a lot of like coverage around this because it is so difficult to understand. So if you want to know more, I would listen to Steve's securing now from last week and I wonder what Steve will say this week because he probably is continuing to. He basically devoted the whole show to it. Now again, it was not his speculation that this how this happened. It was my speculation. He said it's a mystery.

And it is it is definitely a mystery.

1:13:44 - Andy Ihnatko
So yeah, no, I mean some things actually, some things actually are mysteries. We don't know if the people, if the three guys who escaped from Alcatraz drowned or whether they escaped. We don't know if DB Cooper landed someplace bruised and battered, but with $200,000, we know what probably happened, but it's going to be a mystery. We have no way of knowing exactly what happened.

1:14:02 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, the good news is, apple patched it very quickly and very easily, interestingly, yeah, and it is no longer a backdoor.

1:14:13 - Alex Lindsay
And also I think that we may find that Apple you know, once you get caught doing this also there could be a bunch of other things that they quietly close up. If there was anything else there, there's going to. If they did do something, they're probably going to close them up. If they didn't do something, they're definitely going to. There's going to be a whole lot of meetings and a whole lot of like people combing through code to find any other ones that look like this. So I think that it'll become. It will become more risk, more secure as a result. Probably not in just this one exploit, there'll probably be four or five other ones that, in your quote unquote security updates are tying, you know, tying shut, yeah.

1:14:48 - Andy Ihnatko
And Alex, you had a good point that it's possible that it was essentially something that was an exploit that was left in place with the knowledge of developers inside of Apple, without any malice, because one of the other possibilities and I've I've been told about this on a couple of different occasions where developers inside a company knew there was a problem, but there were so many dependencies were tied that were tied to this problem that they didn't want to have the bureaucratic fight. Bureaucratic fight If you're the assets we're going to need, here's the staff we're going to need to fix this whole. And so they didn't even get so far as alerting other people about it. They were just so burned out at that point in their careers that they're like I'm done. This is not worth my trouble.

1:15:28 - Alex Lindsay
And oftentimes it's one of those things like I. You know there was a. There was a lot of conspiracy theories about a loud bang that happened during Obama and Romney's debate. If you go back and look and at the time it was like it had a week of people talking about this loud bang that happened there that was me pulling a 1650 over a metal. I didn't know it was going to make so much noise.

It was it was? It was a metal, it was a metal yellow jacket and it with the door to the to the debate was open and I had finished what I was doing there and so I was coming out and I just hit that thing and it made so much noise and Secret Service looked at me right and just went nah, he's fine, and that was. That was it. But watching a week of that of being on Fox News and on all these other things, so there's loud bang during the Romney, you know, and there was, there was the people, someone got shot and there was all this stuff and it was like no 1650, a metal, metal yellow jacket makes a lot of noise.

1:16:23 - Andy Ihnatko
Funny, isn't it, how a lot of these conspiracy theories turns out to be the simplest, dumbest thing imaginable, because you just can't imagine that it's possible for somebody to simply close a door and create a log bang.

1:16:37 - Alex Lindsay
They couldn't close the door because all the cables were going out. So I went, I was like five feet out of the door and probably 15 feet from the Romney, I think was on that side, and so it was very close, you know, to the place when it went over it. But there was no, you know, I was just walking out of the building, you know, and so so the I have a few of those anyway, but can I ask how relieved were you when you saw the?

1:16:59 - Andy Ihnatko
okay, I'm not going to get shot, I'm not going to wrestle to the ground.

1:17:04 - Alex Lindsay
When you make a couple of those. I've had a couple of interactions with the Secret Service where I just go like this I put my hands up. I had, you know, I had one where I was. I was, I was measuring the East room and with a laser measure which a laser measure is really useful, except that if you don't know where it's coming from, it looks like other things, and so I missed the door in the East room. Suddenly Secret Service came in and they're like hey, how's it going? Uh, what's going on here? And I was like, oh, I'm just measuring the room. And he's like what are you using to do that? And I showed him the laser measure. He goes that's not to that anymore, don't.

1:17:41 - Leo Laporte
That's not that's not to have read.

1:17:43 - Alex Lindsay
He's very stressed. He's like. I just I suddenly pictured there's probably like four guys right outside of my vision that were like like with the guns up.

1:17:53 - Andy Ihnatko
Maybe that's when you realized that if they had laser sights they would probably be invisible to my eyes and they were in contact.

1:18:00 - Leo Laporte
You can see the eight different spots that are lighting up my face and chest right now, so I was just measuring the East room. Come on man.

1:18:08 - Alex Lindsay
By the way, what if you hit the little crystals in the chandeliers in the East room with a laser? It just goes everywhere, yeah.

It's not really scared of, by the way, but the uh anyway, um, the uh uh. But the point is is that I've been in a lot of those situations where we something happened very simple, and then everyone makes up all these conspiracy theories, and that was probably the most public one. And so I think a lot of times I look at these things and I go it might just be something simple like or someone just needed a back door so they could get into that thing and they didn't want to go through the, the trouble of of all the, the headaches that they would go through. That's probably the most likely. These other things are possible that it's conspiracy, or that Apple did it, or there was a, there was a rogue agent or all those things.

But the most common thing because it happens all the time back doors in software and hardware is so it's like every piece of hardware and software has pushed this button, turn this button, turn, you know, turn, like with Sony cameras. There's a menu on the professional cameras and then there's a. You hold these two buttons down and you push this one and then you get a whole nother menu, that is, you know how to, how to actually do engineering on the camera. So that's that kind of thing.

1:19:21 - Leo Laporte
It's interesting, by the way, the guy who created a Sahi Linux, which is the Linux that runs on Apple Silicon, hector Martin, did toot on Mastodon. Thank you, Addison. In our discord for passing this along, he says no, no, it's not. It's not a conspiracy that that 256 bite hash is almost certainly ECC code. Yes, it could be. You know it was a bug that they were able to use it, but it was. It was in there for ECC on Apple's cash. Their SOCs have cash. So he and boy, if anybody knows the inner operating operation of Apple Silicon, it's Hector, because he has to. He has to get around a lot of stuff to get a Sahi working. So maybe it's all a tempest in a teapot. I'll I'll just leave you with with that. It's a fascinating story and I'm sure that somebody has already optioned it.

I want to take a little break here before we go on. We have more to talk about, but I do want to mention our sponsor, Ecamm, and I know that's not, that's not a surprise to anybody. It's the leading live streaming and video production studio, and I emphasize studio bill for the Mac. Mikah uses it for iOS today. We know so many people who use it. There's Doc Roc right there in the lower third, of course, he's a Ecamm advocate.

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Thank you, Ecam, for your support. We appreciate it. Let's see. This has been. There's been a lot to talk about. I'm surprised. Let's talk about hey.

37Signals who, by the way, bought the domain heycom from one of our very first, maybe our very first employee, dane. He had heycom and he said someday this will be my retirement fund and I think 37 signals, yes, spent a lot of money To get that from Dane and I hope he got I hope he got a big payday. So they had email for a while at heycom. Then they decided to do a calendar app. This is, this is this was the news on Monday. It's changed a little bit today from David Hannah Meyer Hansen at 37 signals.

Apple waited until the end of business on Friday to send us the formal rejection of the hey calendar app. Now DHH is as conspiracy minded as anybody. He says they love to play these games to drown in a controversy with the cover of a weekend. All right, apple said they rejected it because it doesn't do anything. When you download it. You have to have an existing account with the hey email service. Remember, hey email service also had trouble with Apple when it first came out. But what's the latest they have now? Apple is now a professional, now approved.

1:23:34 - Jason Snell
So yeah, so what? What? What DHH says he did was, despite Apple, he made it. Since it's a calendar, he made it have a not logged in state which shows the data from one calendar and that calendar, he said over the weekend, he had his people work over the weekend because they absolutely had to address this immediately, apparently, and what he did was he had them input in a bunch of dates that are sort of like this day in Apple history and then resubmitted it. Now, while boasting about this on, I think, on Twitter, what he said was he was taking the contents you know, or inspired by it, and taking the contents inspired by a $40,000 Kickstarter, but now you get it for free, which is weird punching down because that's Stephen Hackett's Kickstarter and you know, it's got photography and he did a lot of research and they didn't use his write ups, but it feels like they were inspired by it and then he did it.

Hannah Meyer Hansen feels like it's okay to kind of punch, punch down at a. He's supposed to be fighting for the little guy against the big guy, but he's you know, he's the big guy in this scenario and Stephen Hackett is the little guy. And then also he's boasting about making his employees work the weekend to slap together a calendar in a weekend so that they can run that past Apple. I think really classless move on his part. Not surprised. He seems like a pretty classless individual, but in the end it did the trick, apparently. I would also say that perhaps somebody at Apple is like why are we getting into this with these guys again? Just let it go through. But regardless, it's now apparently been approved, so yay.

1:25:06 - Leo Laporte
I should. I should mention DHH got a lot of good karma because he created Ruby on Rails and 37 signals, which did some. Does some really great stuff with Jason Fried, but in the last few years he's he's proven to be a real dirt nugget. So, uh, yeah, I'm kind of not a fan of how Hayes managed this. Going back to their email, right.

1:25:30 - Jason Snell
At the same time, it's stupid, Like Apple they know what is that. What is that? What is that? If you have a separate service and you have an app to access the service, they don't want it to not work in a logged in state unless you can sell it through the app store it's like they want their 3% the basis rent seeking that they've ever, that they ever do in the app store.

It's ridiculous. If somebody has built a business on the side and then you need to log in in order to use it, like you should just let that app be that way. Nobody's downloading that app hoping it will work without subscribing to the thing. It's really just rent seeking. It's. It's stupid. It is the. I don't know. I don't know why they're still playing this game at all and um, and that's why I'm like you know, maybe the work around that they came up with was enough to get it approved, but I do, pardon me, wonders. If somebody inside the Apple was, like, why are you picking a fight with this guy over this stupid thing? So yeah, I don't know. I don't know the truth of it, but like it is a stupid thing. He's right about that for sure. I don't have any dispute about the fact that his customer should be able to download an app and log in with their customer information and use the app on their iPhone. Like, why are we even talking about this in 2024?

1:26:40 - Leo Laporte
It seems like a lot of apps do kind of have to jump through that hoop and provide kind of a basically a window dressing without logging in, but the real functionality of course requires that you log in with an account that you paid for somewhere besides Apple's platform.

1:26:59 - Alex Lindsay
It's not that big of a hoop, though. I mean, like we, I had to build an app. I built an app that that I designed an app that was built for it and we you know, we it was only for people who had a password, you know, to get in. Right, it wasn't really, we weren't selling. So what did you do? It didn't work.

Put some movies on the front, Like some example movies of what we do. Like when you get there there's a login to get to another piece, but there was like four movies that were available and that was it and we're done. And it didn't go through the first time and two days later we added some movies and two days later it was working. You know, it just wasn't that. It was not that big of a deal.

1:27:29 - Leo Laporte
I'm thinking of my both last two cars I've owned have had Ford has a Ford app, BMW has a BMW app, and they're really not functional unless you have a car which you didn't give Apple 30% for.

1:27:44 - Jason Snell
So well, I mean, there are rules about physical right. You can buy books on physical goods in the Amazon app and they don't care. It's the digital goods that bother.

1:27:53 - Leo Laporte
I do notice, though, that both of Ford and the BMW app have, you know, stuff that you can do without having a owning a car. Not much, but they have some stuff.

1:28:03 - Alex Lindsay
And I guess that's probably related to that Just having a couple of couple little things in there.

1:28:08 - Leo Laporte
By the way, I should. You know I think BMW even now is still the only car company that uses Apple's car key functionality, but but it works really well. I like it a lot and I actually have the key to my car is in my Apple wallet, which is hysterical. So so you know, I the Ford phone is key functionality for the Mustang Mach-E was very unreliable. It was really weird. This one works quite well. I would expect that, right, I would expect that you know. And good on BMW for using the car key functionality. Let's see. Okay, so that's that. We did the Apple's carefully orchestrating vision pro reviews. Have you gotten an invitation yet to a an Apple meeting, jason, or can you not talk about it If you did?

1:29:05 - Jason Snell
if I had, I couldn't talk about it. Okay, I haven't.

1:29:08 - Leo Laporte
Oh well then you can talk about it, I can talk all about how I have not yet been invited to any secret Apple meeting. It may happen, let me deny everything. Yeah, there's your canary. There's your canary. Oh, we need a canary. There we go. There's the canary.

1:29:21 - Jason Snell
I'll ask you every week Next week, get a massive good. Oh, jason's not available this week. That's weird.

1:29:27 - Andy Ihnatko
I don't want. I mean I, I don't want to. I know that you can't talk about certain things, but remember that was like 18 shows ago. We agreed that if the lava lamp and your background was stationary, it meant that you were under an NDA.

1:29:42 - Leo Laporte
Unfortunately, he is using a green screen for his background.

1:29:46 - Andy Ihnatko
So it can't move. Sorry, I got. I got excited there for a minute, forget I said anything.

1:29:56 - Leo Laporte
Okay, Jason, are you still there? Did we lose him? Oh no, you're muted. There you go.

1:30:02 - Jason Snell
Sorry, yeah, it's, it's all part of the green screen. Well, we Opsec was, uh was destroyed by Andy calling out my green screen. So, yeah, um, I'm really bad at at being a liar, so when, when I'm evasive, if you pay attention, you can be like oh, jason didn't say he's not going right, he just said oh, you know, who knows what the future holds and I don't know, you know. So it's there if you look for it, but please don't, don't ask, don't press too much. I, I, I. I think there's been one occasion already that I've been on the panel where I had to send an email to somebody saying don't ask me about this thing because I can't tell you um, but generally not by the way speaking of.

1:30:42 - Leo Laporte
Apple capabilities uh, the new carplay that Apple showed off is, in fact, not. Wasn't merely a speculative thing. Two car manufacturers have said they're going to adopt it. Unlikely that I will ever own. And what is it? An alpha Romeo. Uh, what were the two? There were two companies that I don't think like Aston Martin.

Yeah, aston Martin and Alpha, something like that. And, by the way, byd is another company that does support Apple's car key. Uh, so BYD or BMW, you got to buy a car from a company's name that begins with B? Uh, except Bentley doesn't. Oh, there's the. The Genesis does. Okay, two 2023 Genesis models use Apple's car key as well. Ah, and the Ionic six does. Hyundai has a couple, so they're more and more now. It's a great functionality, and you know this is example. Key is Nero and tell a ride in, sell to us. I think, uh, it's a good example of Apple's going to do better software than you are car company. Just let Apple, just let Apple do it, let Apple do it. Uh, this new car play, though, is not being widely jumped on, probably because the car companies also get a lot of money for the data they collect on you when you use their software.

1:32:02 - Andy Ihnatko
Right, yeah. Also, I wonder, just even as a point of pride, like part of the part of the design language of the car is in the instrumentation of the dashboard. Are they going to want Apple's Apple is shown off? Hey look, we've got, we can do the entire glass dashboard with all of, with all Apple controlled by air, by airplane, apple software, and again, what a especially with a high high end car company, want to say that no, no, no, we don't want. We don't want to let another company, even a design company like Apple, dictate the user interface of our, of our brand.

1:32:35 - Leo Laporte
It's Aston Martin and Porsche, by the way.

1:32:40 - Alex Lindsay
I mean, it's a start. When there's nobody using it, or not very many people using it, then it's easy for you to say, no, we don't want to do that. If a certain number of car companies, especially one similar to yours, start to use it, the problem you get into is that Apple users will go. Well, that works better with my phone and I'm going to go use that car instead Once they get like if I like. For me, I've driven BMWs, for I don't have a BMW right now, but I used to drive a lot of BMWs. I just kick on buying BMWs, but if it got like, oh, it's a Mercedes and a BMW, I would probably pick the one that worked with my phone.

1:33:11 - Leo Laporte
Well, yeah, in fact, in that area, gm's decision not to put car play in their cars, it makes it a non-starter immediately for me. Right, yeah, I got to have car play. Bmw kind of hides the car play they want. They have their own, you know, nav and interface that they really want you to use.

1:33:26 - Alex Lindsay
This is what the car play will look like in the, as a person who's using the ox in on my car right now Like I don't you know, like I have a phone and my phone is attached to the thing and I just use the phone, I don't really care yeah.

1:33:40 - Leo Laporte
This is what Aston Martin's actually. The car drivers confusing me because they give credit to Aston Martin for this, which is the Porsche car play interface, a trio of circular gauges in the cluster and a background wallpaper that mimics the brand's distinctive houndstooth.

1:33:57 - Jason Snell
Yeah, it's, it's. It seems like what's going on here is sort of what we speculated about what two years ago now, year and a half ago now which is the car play system. This new car play has access to some real time data from the car. There's obviously a mechanism by which the car sends real time data to the phone, or the phone is sending data that you know, sending graphics that are updated in real time by the car one of those and that there's a wallpapering kind of a theming system. That's a part of this that allows the car maker to have some control over what the UI looks like, at least at default, which is sort of you know, when people were trying to speculate at how this would work at a high level since it's not a low level operating system thing those were the best guesses and it seems like that's basically what's going on here.

So, for example, your speed is showing in car play, but it's, you know, where is that data coming from? Your car play doesn't normally know that. Well, it's coming from the car, and there's some questions about like, how often is it refreshed? And if you throw on the brakes, is there a delay? And my guess is not. I don't know the details of how it's actually been implemented, but it's either Apple is handing it to the car and saying here's the graphic. You know, you draw the text of the speed here in this font that we've agreed on as our font and this color that we've agreed on as our color, or it's, you know, it's working in real time and it's monitoring a data source that the car is offering and it's updating in real time, but one of those, because there are lots of laws about like actual active information in a car being updated in real time and not like having oh, my computer was a little slow and so it's tell me about this vitally important thing to driving.

But they managed it. They found a way to do it, which is it's really interesting, right, because Apple wants to have more participation in your car UI. But there are stuff that Apple hasn't had access to before, which is why it ends up becoming like an auxiliary screen and you always end up. I just have a rental car for this trip that I'm taking where. It's nice, it's Chevy Bolt, it's great. But like, if you want to, I'm doing car play and then I want to control the heater in the car and like it has to throw up an interface on top of car play that shows me what the thermostat is set to, because car play can't tell me that that only the car knows that for sure, and ideally that would all be integrated into car play and we'd all be happy.

1:36:16 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, chevy's going the opposite direction, which is get rid of car play and be Chevy's interface Exactly Boo to that, I don't like that.

We have a bolt, we love the bolt, and it currently supports car play and Android Auto, but won't in future, not for long. This is the Porsche screen. I've got it now with the beautiful Pepita wallpaper, and so I was looking at the Aston Martin, because Aston Martin is much more minimal use of Apple car play. So that illustrates what you're talking about Really. It's going to be up to the manufacturer to figure out how to implement those pieces in their vehicle. Dr Do in our chat room says you know, your car really is just a fancy case for your iPhone, and I think that's probably the case Most expensive speaker doc you'll ever buy.

Mark Gurman says Apple has an excess of air tags and, as a result, is going to wait until next year to release air tags too, because they want to sell off all the air tag ones they have in stock. Okay, if he says it, it must be true, right?

1:37:30 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, that's definitely not a product, but they'd have, like the air tag pro and the air tag, nothing.

1:37:35 - Leo Laporte
I mean, it does it's, what else could it do, right yeah?

1:37:39 - Andy Ihnatko
It could be cheaper than manufactured. I think that's pretty much the more you make.

1:37:45 - Leo Laporte
Let's see what else. Oh, did you see the iPhone that fell out of the Alaska Airlines airplane? This is part of the kind of the scandal of the 38, the 787 max bolt falling off. Apparently, when that Bolt fell off, a phone was ejected and Somebody found it on the side of the road 16,000 feet later, still open to the baggage claim for Alaska Airlines. According to the, the tweeter who found it here's the picture. The NTSB told him it was the second iPhone that they found and they have since found the door bolt, by the way. So in a yeah, it's somebody's backyard.

1:38:29 - Jason Snell
Yeah, the high school science teacher, the the the door, the the door insert thing was in his tree in his backyard. He kind of couldn't believe it. Yes, love, it's a good story. I mean, nobody died, thank.

1:38:41 - Andy Ihnatko
God, so we can talk about the lighter stuff.

1:38:43 - Leo Laporte
Yeah yeah, you know it's weird because the people who I mean it would have somebody might well have died if there was anybody sitting next to that door, but unaccountably those seats were empty.

1:38:54 - Jason Snell
So the window seat was empty. Yeah, yeah, it's um. Somebody made a joke too that I thought was a very funny joke. That I think was maybe the guy who found that phone who said Well, you know, it was an airplane mode, so that work, it works.

1:39:10 - Leo Laporte
The phone had a ripped charging connector still plugged into it on the bottom of it, so it obviously was plugged in and Not not for long.

1:39:19 - Alex Lindsay
Well, it's, and it's interesting it would. It would, you know, like there's 16,000 feet, a big deal. But what is the terminal velocity? That's right, like you know, and so it reaches, you know, a couple hundred feet, or 16,000 feet would be the same, and if it hits enough things on the way down, it slow down fast enough to Make that happen. So looks like it landed in bushes yeah yeah, soft landing yeah.

1:39:38 - Andy Ihnatko
I don't know, it's more. It's more remarkable, though, that it survived the landing or that apparently the owner did not have it on auto lock or passcode mode.

1:39:46 - Leo Laporte
That isn't that wild at some point?

1:39:48 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, that's why you lock your phone, in case it gets sucked out of the window of an airplane and somebody finds it, you know, I mean your what your mom told you to work clean underwear in case get an accident. And you think, oh, that will never happen. And then sure enough, and a bolt falls off the door.

1:40:03 - Leo Laporte
And there you are exactly Apple's payments are starting to go out in battery gate. In 2020, apple said well, we'll pay half a billion dollars to settle the class action lawsuit. This was when Apple was accused of Secretly throttling iPhone models as their batteries got older and older. In my opinion, apple was just trying to protect you, the user, but people won the case and the payouts are going out, and it's kind of surprising. Now don't get excited, because unless you applied for the payout, like months ago, you aren't gonna get a check. But it's ninety two dollars and seventeen cents per claim.

1:40:45 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, that's like free airpods man. Yeah, that's not bad.

1:40:49 - Alex Lindsay
And I didn't sign up for that because I got a lot of phones I could well, that's it.

1:40:52 - Leo Laporte
Yeah. Iphone 6, 6 plus, 6s, 6s plus or se, that ran 10.2 point one or later. Iphone 7 or 7 plus with iOS 11 point two or later. Unfortunately, you'd had to submit the complaint. 3. Complain 3 3 plus years ago, october 2020, apple apologized for its lack of transparency. They said we should have told you what? We were doing.

1:41:19 - Andy Ihnatko
They kept it. As a result of that, they kept the feature which, as you say, was just Apple trying to try to protect the user's experience, saying well, your battery. If it senses that the battery is super, super weak, we're gonna try to give you as much battery life as possible by not throttling the processor as much as it would ordinarily After. As a result of this, they did what they probably should have done, which is to basically make that a system setting. So if you want to basically have maximum performance at the cost of battery life, go nuts, it's your phone.

1:41:46 - Leo Laporte
Go ahead and they have a nice page where they explain this iPhone battery and performance and how you know Understanding it and blah, blah, blah, so that you know it is not a surprise. Okay, performance management, and if you have a more recent iPhone, you can, you can read about it there and you can also see, as you say, andy, a place to turn off what, where? What is it called? Is it Optimized battery charging? Yeah, optimized battery charging might want to turn that off. It says to reduce battery aging. Iphone learns from your daily charging routine so you can wait to finish charging past 80%, so you need to use it. That's what you turn off. Is that it?

It's something else I don't have the front of me though. Yeah, okay, yeah, actually this is nice, cuz my iPhone doesn't know when I need a hundred percent charge, so I Like to, I like to tell you. Most of the time it's just.

1:42:43 - Andy Ihnatko
There's a there's a lot of really interesting stuff going on in that, in that space right now. Well, a lot of a lot of devices not just phones now have like as to prolong the overall life of the battery. Even when you buy a brand new device, it will only charge up to a certain percent short of the maximum, and Sometimes it's like I'm gonna be covering CES all day if I would much rather have an extra 45 minutes to an hour of Battery life, no matter what it does to my experience four years from now. So it's it's all about like making sure that the person who uses this phone is Aware of what's happening on the device at all times.

1:43:19 - Leo Laporte
And Andy, you had a nice footnote to the story your may room. If somebody Text you, you're entering, you're in the Beijing airport and you suddenly get a Winnie the Pooh Texted to you or not texted. You sent you via airdrop. You might be worried, you understandably. China says we cracked airdrop so we can tell where the Winnie the Pooh came from. But you point out that's probably not what happened.

1:43:47 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, this, this is this came out like sorry, come out yesterday, where, oh well, there is a on the official government, a government webpage from Beijing, like they Government government site. There was a big thing about hey, here's how, like we've how air. We have basically cracked this, this sharing feature on the iPhone, and if you look, dig into it a little bit deeper, it clearly the messaging in the article was hey, remember that we can nothing you do I think you do is private. We can basically be take, make good, make smart choices, because just because you think you're anonymous doesn't mean that the government can't find, find out what happened, and it was sometimes it's being played out as oh, they've cracked, they've cracked sharing.

No, what they did was there was somebody who on a on a subway, who got Airdropped something that they did not ask for, something that we're all kind of familiar with if you've got the settings Set incorrectly and they were able to track down the person who sent that piece of content Strictly by virtue the fact that they were able to. They weren't. They didn't crack airdrop, they. They were able to get a hash, a secure hash, and match it up with an existing database they had of Hashes that were matched up with known IDs, and that's how they found the person who had airdropped that content. The article doesn't say what content it was. It could have been politically bad, or just could have been, you know, nude selfies. But yeah, it's nothing, nothing to worry about, unless you again live in China, in which case they have a database of hashes.

1:45:15 - Leo Laporte
Here is the they can match up to you from the Chinese government. Press release a picture of the lab. By the way, it looks like they have those hex lights in the lab, Completely non-functional. But I wonder if they change colors in shape when somebody sends a Winnie the Pooh.

1:45:33 - Andy Ihnatko
Just like CSI Bet they got purple lasers in there too.

1:45:40 - Leo Laporte
There is some purple lighting. This is definitely an interesting lab, not very big, it's hip, it's a hip, it's a hip, it's a hip lab. This is the. This is. You know, this is the sample. Obviously not the picture that was actually sent, but that's the sample. That was all right. So I mean, I don't know apple. In other words, I guess it's important to understand that they haven't cracked airdrop to be able to identify the center.

1:46:07 - Andy Ihnatko
This is and also again interesting, that they decided to post an official capacity post that hey, by the way, don't don't worry, citizen, we are protecting you by watching sure that even even when you think you're doing something anonymously, our eyes and our fingers can reach out into your device and and and have a conversation with you about being a good citizen, and this was the day of many, many years ago, 17 years ago, that Scott Bourne and Alex Lindsay and I sat at the AirBoebwayna Center watching Steve Jobs Reveal.

1:46:41 - Leo Laporte
We were hoping it was the iPhone, right, alex? Remember that Scott was gonna make an iPhone vest. Scott had speculated, I think, was Scott had speculated that he was gonna be called the iPhone. Nobody really knew at the time. Of course, steve said Something about a communicator, an internet communicator, a phone. What do you say? What were the three?

1:47:01 - Andy Ihnatko
things. It's a phone, it's an internet device and it's an. It's an iPod, a video iPod. Yeah, we have three devices that we're showing off. Do you get?

1:47:11 - Leo Laporte
it yet? Yeah, I play it every year, this, this time of year. I don't want to get taken down. Is it safe to play it? I don't even know.

1:47:21 - Alex Lindsay
There's only one way to find out. I don't think it's taken down anymore. You're gonna strike. You don't want to strike.

1:47:30 - Leo Laporte
That's not a good thing, you get a flag.

1:47:32 - Alex Lindsay
No one cares about flags, I mean unless you're trying to make.

1:47:35 - Leo Laporte
Anthony says don't do it.

1:47:37 - Jason Snell
We even told don't do it, let's, let's not all right bear, is it?

1:47:42 - Alex Lindsay
is it a flag or a strike? Cuz I bet you it's just a flag, it's not a strike, I'm sure what if I don't turn the sound on? Just just do it Just if I think you're probably okay, just don't do it full screen.

1:47:56 - Leo Laporte
As you can see, he's saying a phone.

1:48:02 - Jason Snell
Wide-screen iPod and a telephone, and then are you getting it yet? Yeah, and I remember the audience is getting more and more agitated.

1:48:10 - Leo Laporte
I remember Scott was getting really agitated and then Steve finally says are you getting it? It's all three in one and the audience goes oh, it's an iPhone and Scott said I win the. I win the bet, yeah.

1:48:30 - Andy Ihnatko
And it wasn't a big surprise. There's been like the most rampant rabid, like rumors for the past year that they were working on a phone. I don't think I don't think anybody was expecting it to be exactly like that, given the status of even the really good smartphones are out there right now. But this is my story the room because they knew that something was going on story was the engineers at Googlehood working on the first Android phone.

1:48:51 - Leo Laporte
We're watching them and they went ah, back to the drawing board quickly.

1:48:57 - Andy Ihnatko
We're not gonna make well and be stealing from blackbird.

1:48:59 - Alex Lindsay
We're stealing from somebody else and and I and I and I think that all the articles were like about the rumors we're all like well, apple's gonna learn its lesson. You know like it thinks they can do phones and you know it can't do. You know it's gonna walk in. This is a big, dangerous world out there, the cell phone world. Oh, remember your ST Bummer Rocking it laughing at it.

1:49:18 - Leo Laporte
Can I play that?

1:49:19 - Andy Ihnatko
for the iPhone that was. That's called hubris.

1:49:24 - Jason Snell
I mean keep in mind that the reaction to the iPod and everybody scoffed at that too. You'd think people could have learned a lesson from that.

1:49:30 - Andy Ihnatko
They didn't they Well to be, to be fair, or excuse me, I'm sorry to be a little bit lenient I realized that a lot of With a plan.

1:49:40 - Steve Ballmer
I said that is the most expensive phone in the world and it doesn't appeal to business customers because it doesn't have a keyboard, which makes it not a very good email machine. Now it may sell very well or not. I you know, we have our strategy. We've got great.

1:49:56 - Leo Laporte
Yes, okay, we'll just stop there.

1:49:57 - Jason Snell
Their strategy yeah, you know what?

1:50:02 - Leo Laporte
and Paul Theroux will always say this Ballmer was right, it was too expensive because the price was dropped very, very quickly, right?

1:50:08 - Jason Snell
Yeah, I'm sure that that that's short price job was really what he was worried about.

1:50:11 - Andy Ihnatko
And then yeah, but but yeah, there was a lot of reason for people to be to be skeptical, because Steve Ballmer was making some points that even like a Not really great smartphone in 2006 could absolutely kick the iPhones, but in terms of basic features like I can't it had.

It didn't have cut, copy and paste, it was a slow modem, it didn't have the enterprise features that if you're buying them in bumps of a hundred to it for your company. And also, more importantly, one of the most innovative and important things that Apple did was to browbeat AT&T and to saying, okay, guess what? We are not gonna make the hardware that you want us to make. You are going to sell the phone that we made, that we made and you're also gonna give us a data plan that is not absolutely Choke, that doesn't choke the device, and that we were actually gonna be putting a real web browser on this thing. No, no, no, no WAP apps we are going to get, you're gonna. It's all this sort of stuff that only a company as desperate as AT&T in 2005, 2006, would have possibly agreed to. So there was a lot of short sightedness, but there was a reason for a certain amount of speculators. I'm not saying that skepticism wasn't married.

1:51:22 - Jason Snell
I'm saying, after Apple did what they did with the iPod, where everybody laughed at it and then got called on the carpet later because it was a huge hit that maybe a Little restraint might have been in order. Because, like what if they did it again right and bombers tone there?

I mean like he's laughing- and the blackberry guys were laughing, and I mean I know he is, but like there are moments where where you could have a little restraint and there wasn't noticed by the way, I have not laughed out loud at the vision pro I have shown great Gunpowder dry. You know you wait. You'll wait for your moment the watch.

1:52:02 - Leo Laporte
But I said it was a sidecar for the phone. Do you think I made fun of that? Actually mocked it.

1:52:07 - Alex Lindsay
No, I said, I said you didn't make fun of it, oh.

1:52:09 - Leo Laporte
I didn't?

1:52:09 - Alex Lindsay
a lot of people were making fun of the watch.

1:52:11 - Leo Laporte
Very happy and the first to watch was not good. By the way, if you agree with Steve Ballmer that the iPhone, 17 years later, needs a keyboard, good news. Mr.

1:52:21 - Jason Snell
Mobile has a keyboard for you. I made a dumb keyboard. This is the clicks sticking out of your dumb pocket.

1:52:28 - Andy Ihnatko
Also, the demo and installation video comes on laser disc.

1:52:34 - Alex Lindsay
Did you guys? Did you guys see blackberry, the, the movie?

1:52:37 - Leo Laporte
Oh yeah that was so good and that was a. I don't know how accurate it was. I think it was fairly accurate, except for how they dressed and stuff. But I but I think that the fact that they, they really just missed the iPhone there, nobody, they had no idea. So bad.

1:52:50 - Alex Lindsay
I did, I did. I had to do a thing where I was. I was doing something and I guess I, we I got Sponsored to do something in Brazil where I was. I was already going to Brazil to do something else, and so I they had to do the storm and it was, and I had to use the storm to do it and shoot video me using what I want to do, like whatever, and it was just like the all the cuts in between. We're like how do I get this thing to actually work? And I'm gonna go back to my you know, like I tried to use it the way that I was supposed to be seen it and I got, I used it, but I was like I'm never using this again, like as soon as I got home.

I was like, oh yeah, lisa had one. It was a buggy, like you push on the button and nothing would work. And it was just exactly what the screen was the click button the whole screen. Yeah, it was so bad, so bad yeah.

1:53:35 - Leo Laporte
Um, so anyway, seven. It's kind of amazing. The iPhone is 17 years old today, at least the announcement of. You remember we ran over to McDonald's expo and they had one. Not probably not working in a glass Glass case.

1:53:51 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, no, I mean I get just like Jason's, like eating, getting getting taken out to dinners Like for six months, because he got like 30 minutes with with a vision pro, like I got 45 minutes with a Mostly working iPhone at a briefing after the after the thing, and again I could just Six months of saying I touched it and I used it and and also the great stories that we can tell now about things like you tapped on the Notes app and it was a screenshot of what the notes that was gonna look like.

1:54:21 - Jason Snell
You're like okay, not that one. And I the other thing I really remember from it, other than being blown away by the High resolution, this at the screen and we think of it now and it wasn't retina and it was garbage, but like, compared to another device like a Mac, the high resolution of it, the fact that it was right under your finger, and again now they make these, you know, oled displays and laminated displays where it's right up at your finger and it was way down, but but it felt so direct in a way that it didn't before. So I remember that and being kind of speechless right and the yeah, the whole thing was just so good.

And then the other thing I remember is that it was warm, which At the time I was like, oh, it's like a magical warm object. And now I think back to like Think about how it was burning through that battery. But but still it was. It was a real woman and, and he's right. You know, for six months we were a handful of people outside Apple who could actually say that we used it and and boy, that's nice when that happens and it really did create an era.

1:55:16 - Leo Laporte
I mean, it changed the world in ways Absolutely.

1:55:19 - Jason Snell
I would argue the technology industry's most important product category in its history is a smartphone Right, and I don't think in our lifetimes we will ever see a category like smartphones, not just saying the iPhone, but like all the fact that so quickly, everybody on the planet now has a super computer in their pocket connected to a global high speed and network like that.

1:55:42 - Alex Lindsay
That was obvious overnight right and it's happened overnight and you know a lot of things we think about. You know they might happen. Sometimes you see things where everybody's thinking about the same thing at the same time and eventually it just popped like the car or the plane you know, or radio. Those things were things that a lot of people were thinking about all at the same time. It was all you know, all around the world this one, I mean people were using phones. But because it already, because it had Become so gradual, there was so much already existing weight of where phones were that without someone just sticking a spike into it, it was probably going to continue that way for quite some time before it, before you got away from the Blackberry and and the Nokia's. And you know that full-screen thing was not something that was really a thing Until until Apple made it a thing.

1:56:31 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, I mean even. Even, even if we put the qualifier that smartphones existed before the iPhone, productivity devices, as smartphones were existed before the iPhone. Phones with Ips, app stores, 3g, cut copy and paste that had that were there were work with Microsoft exchange and was VIT river, I mean, I still have, I still have very fond memories of the couple of phones that I used before, before the iPhone. However, we went from every phone Having a bunch of interpretations of what the software should be like, a bunch of Interpretations about what the hardware should look like. Yes, the Blackberry Model was one model, but there were flip phones, there's still candy bar phones or still other Interpretations. But then boom, right after this spike was put into the ground, every phone was a sheet of glass as Small and compact as it could possibly be.

And that wasn't because Apple screwed up the first iPod iPhone. It wasn't because the first iPhone did not. It was only 2g and did not have cut copy and paste. It's because people it proves that and this might be instructional for for the vision pro people are willing to do Forgo and overlook limitations if they get that kind of Basic, when, even when, your spidey sense goes off in the back of your head. That's what happened when I use the iPhone for the first time that tingling sensation from my neck all the way from my scalp. That said, this is right. I don't know. I'm not going to review something that is clearly three months, four months away from being introduced, let alone being a version 1.0, but there's something that is Fundamentally and manifestly right about what they're doing here and I'm on board. So vision pro if it produces that same sort of effect when the first 30 minutes to 45 minutes, people are willing to wait a couple years.

1:58:16 - Leo Laporte
More likely a more practical that. The vision pro is the newton and, by the way, I have somewhere I can't find it, but there's a video of me on KSFO, back and whatever. That was. When is it 1995, 96, when the newton came out Saying, if you just could connect this to the internet, you know, and make it a little bit smaller. The newton was so close to what the iPhone eventually became and the lessons apple learned from the newton definitely Communicated to the iPhone. The newton was the reason apple invested in arm and created an effect arm and the arm processor was for the newton. True. That's of course what made the iPhone possible and still today makes apple silicon possible. So I think if you want to look at the history of the of the iPhone, I don't think that the vision pro is iPhone one so much as newton, like, I think, the again.

1:59:08 - Andy Ihnatko
That's it now. Is it like I said before? That's a, that's a danger, particularly if you extend that metaphor to palm, saying that, hey, that's a great $800 device you have that's way too big and is not really very practical. What we're gonna take all the good ideas from this, introduce, take away all the bad ideas and basically make you obsolete.

1:59:25 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, I think that the. The only difference is that apple wasn't the largest company in the world, or roughly the largest company in the world, when they when they did that's a good point. There's a. There's a. There's a level of brute force that that apple has, that that doesn't exist it for other companies.

You know, in the like, one of the things that I was trying to, I was talking about the fact that, like, companies will see Microsoft competing with them somewhere, and apple did this in the 90s, where Apple wanted to be the Microsoft against Microsoft.

You know, my guy got lots of different products and we got all these things and they were trying to like out Microsoft Microsoft and I was like you should never do that, because they're really big, you know. Like, they're really like the. What works for them is not what works for you anymore. Like you, you know they can't do what you do, but you can't. You know you got to find out what you do. Well, and stop trying to go head-to-head with them, because that's there's way too big, especially like beating with office or 365. That's a horrible idea, you know, and and so so the in the scent in that sense, apples playing a game that only they and you know, maybe five other companies in the world can play. You know, and, and they're gonna, and they're, and they have to spend ten years playing it and they are going to spend ten more years playing it.

2:00:34 - Andy Ihnatko
So you know, you know, remember that the Newton was the pet project of Darth Scully. You know, sworn enemy, and if it had been a project that Steve himself had been backing, had been talked into, have been Ex, really felt behind. Who knows, within three, four, five years it could have been the pocket-sized thing with built-in mobile broadband and we would now be using an evolution of the Newton message pad instead of an iPhone for better.

2:01:00 - Leo Laporte
I hope that they don't take this down, but here is Jason Snell and Leo Laporte at Mackerel 2007 and I don't know. Somewhere in here I'm sure we talk about the iPhone.

2:01:16 - Jason Snell
I don't know, but this is you.

2:01:18 - Leo Laporte
By the way, this is the dining out portion. Jason just shows you.

2:01:24 - Jason Snell
And you know, until we dig into it, until really we all get our hands on them, we're not gonna know, but I gotta give them credit for taking the shot and saying what, like they did with the iPod. Look, there are phones out there, just like there were MP3 players out there. They're not any good and we're gonna do something that's totally different and that we think is actually gonna be much easier to use. Good for them. That is Apple's DNA, right there.

2:01:46 - Leo Laporte
We haven't changed much over the years, have we? Jason? Still the non's? The uncinical fresh-faced Jason Snell. That's actually Mac break 40, giving you some idea of how long we've been doing this thing.

2:02:02 - Jason Snell
There is a podcast on the floor, about 10 feet away from the iPhone, that John Gruber and Merlin Mann and I did that you can. I mean it. Parts of it are around there. But one of the things we did is we all basically invented the app store while we were standing there. This web thing isn't gonna happen. They're gonna have like, maybe next year.

2:02:21 - Leo Laporte
There's a store.

2:02:23 - Jason Snell
We're third party. There's gonna be a third-party developer story and it's just not ready yet and and that it's floating around. But like we did nail it. I actually dug that out of an archive somewhere at one point because it had disappeared from the internet. I was like, no, no, that was a really good one. Like we got it. We got it exactly right a year before it happened, yeah so that was just yes, when he said it was a sweet solution.

And then all the developers we knew already we're like we're gonna find a way to write for this platform and it took them, you know, a year and Three months, a year and five months in order to get it there.

2:02:55 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, there was a. There was a jailbreak app store before a legitimate app store. People, yeah well, just figured develop is just figured out how to write apps that would, that would target an iPhone on their own. That's me, you're absolutely right. That's how much developers were like no, no, no, no, no, no. We want to write, even if we have to do it illegally. Illegally and without the approval of Apple. I'm going to put some effort into developing apps for the iPhone. They would not be denied.

2:03:18 - Leo Laporte
Oh, you found it from Huffer Huff, duffer comm.

2:03:22 - Jason Snell
Yeah, it's like instant paper for MP3 is. There's a lit MP3 link there, but that that's what it was. I don't know where in that clip it is, but we did do it, so I'm happy to have that.

2:03:31 - Leo Laporte
Snow-gruber man iPhone watch.

2:03:33 - Andy Ihnatko
Okay, I'm here with a Jason snow from Macworld and John Gruber from daring fireball. That's the question that I'm curious about the podcast and we've got a podcast. Applications on the iPhone and how we think that'll work. We've seen Safari, we've seen some other stuff. What do you think's gonna happen?

2:03:47 - Jason Snell
My guess is that I can't will eventually let developers onto the platform and the real is gonna be how I don't store brilliant, you get the prize for there for I mean prognostication.

It wasn't a hard prediction, right, like it was so clear. Everybody Desperately wanted to be on there, and I don't even know why. I mean, I think Steve Jobs was just blunting everybody's excitement by saying, oh, it's a really sweet solution. But the truth was like the developers at Apple were barely even at the point where they were. Obviously some of those apps Hadn't even been built yet, like the tools to build apps weren't there yet. So the last thing you're gonna do is let developers have tools that don't exist, that you're building as you're building the apps. So of course it was gonna take a little bit of time, but it it boggled the mind that web apps was gonna be the solution, and of course it it wasn't. It just took them a year.

2:04:40 - Leo Laporte
Patrick tell a hand. He wants to know if you know anything about tomorrow's lottery numbers, jason, because he needs to make it rich. We're gonna take, I mean, 42. We're gonna take a little break and come back your picks of the week coming up next. This is the part of the show where I beg, I plead, I Kindly ask your support for twit.

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Twit TV slash club twit. Thanks to all of the new members, by the way, who don't won't be hearing that ad. But thank you, thank you to our new club to it members. We've really the response has been phenomenal and thank you, I'm very hopeful for the future. Thanks to all of you joining club to it now, in just a moment, your picks of the week. Let's kick things off with Andy and not goes. Pick of the week, andy. Oh, did I surprise you? I didn't mean to, I didn't mean to jump you. Are you ready? He doesn't hear us. Hello, huh, your turn, andy, sorry.

2:07:35 - Andy Ihnatko
Yes, sorry about that. I was giving my ear holes a rest.

2:07:40 - Leo Laporte
Oh, as they certainly deserve, but we're almost done now.

2:07:44 - Andy Ihnatko
Andy, my pick is an app that I've been looking for for a long, long time. It's called PhotosweeperX and it's there to find duplicate photos in your iPhone, in your Apple Photo Library, on a disk folder, whatever. And now you would think this is a simple thing because, yes, if you can find okay, there are a lot of utilities that will find two matching files, but photos are a different thing, like. I'll give you this specific example and why I was looking for this app so much For the past, like five, six, seven, eight, however many years, every time I find a piece of art that I really, really like, I will right click and save it and upload it to Google Photos and, basically, in addition to being like my collection of like point paintings and illustrations I really like, it also feeds, like all the screensavers that all the screens in my house.

And what happens is that, like I'll, I'll find a copy of an image I like that I know I already have, but maybe this one I've come across is way, way higher resolution than the one I found before, or maybe I've forgotten that I already have it and, as a result, I have a lot of like duplicates in this collection. You basically it doesn't. So what? The great thing about Photosweeper is that, yes, you can tell it to only find absolutely identical files, but you can also say find images that are just similar to each other, and there's even a slider so you can define how similar these two things are.

2:09:04 - Leo Laporte
I like this series of shots feature where you could say what's the maximum time gap, and because there's a lot of burst photos that are really exactly the same.

2:09:14 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, exactly, it really lets you fine tune how you do it. My use cases again I've got three copies of the Mona Lisa. Some of them are slower resolution, some of our higher resolution. It will find the matches and also easily let you evaluate which one you want to keep and delete the ones you want to get rid of. But you can also do things like you have a burst. Like you said, you have a burst of photos. You can say treat photos that were taken within seconds of each other as being similar to each other, or even, if you have, if you have, even have that turned off. If you just simply have, like, a bunch of photos of the same stage, where your kid was having their summer concert at school, like it will find, okay, these are the same, these are similar pictures of the same stage, I'm going to say that these are similar photos and again, if it's not, if it's not doing the right job for you, you can simply adjust the sliders and say, no, be more precise or be less precise. So for pretty much any task that involves comparing pictures and keeping some and getting rid of others, I don't know an app that works better than this and it's also it's super fast. I have I have the three or 4,000 of these photos that I've downloaded. I backed up Google photos so I can do this job myself, and it went through every one of those photos in less than a minute excuse me, less than a couple of minutes, and it just burns all the way through it. And also you can download it's 10 bucks, which is cheap for this sort of task, I think. But also you can download a full working demo that will do everything. The only limitation that I've encountered with it is that the demo mode, which you have about a month to use, it limits you to deleting only 10 images, which is more than fair. So you can absolutely see here's what it will do to your folder of 4,000 images, andy, and that's enticing enough to just maybe make me click buy. Yes, please, please, help me with this problem, because I'm it's kind of.

I feel really embarrassed when Google photos, the Google TV, when it does the screenshot, the screensaver mode which I pointed to this Google photos library if it's a portraits, portrait orientation, it will put two side by side and the algorithm and Google in the screensaver looks for photos all complement each other, and every time it shows me two copies of the same photo.

I feel as though I have failed as a curator of an art collection. And so, and there's, there's somewhere I've got like six or seven copies Because, like I said I've done, I've been doing this for like eight or nine years. Let me tell you that if that's the sub pick of the week, the greatest gift you can give to yourself is, every time you see an image that makes you happy, right click, save it. Because it seems like nothing for the first couple of months. But now, sometimes, when I'm, you know, in a mood, I will just look at this collection of art and just the other. Just the other day, I happened to notice that, wow, I really seem to like this artist that I've never heard of but it seems to have.

Over the years, I've saved like six examples of this person art and then last night I wound up on a rat hole that's basically learning about this artist and, oh my God, he was super prolific and oh my God, I love this guy's art. And now I've got I have to load another hundred of his pictures that I collected.

2:12:24 - Leo Laporte
This man is really interesting because of the mirror in the back it's actually. It seems like a simple painting, but when you start to realize what's going on, it's actually fascinating.

2:12:34 - Andy Ihnatko
It's kind of yeah, it's, it's, that's that many is kind of interesting because the optically it's impossible, because you are in the position of that. You are, you're the guy really looking at the bar made and it shows you your reflection in the mirror behind the bar.

2:12:50 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, this guy many, many like.

2:12:52 - Andy Ihnatko
I've been reading about him because I wanted to go to the Met exhibit about him, but I didn't notice things about about his style until they were pointed out to me that again, they make no sense proportionally. Oftentimes they make no sense in terms of depth of field and if you knew about the culture at the time, it makes no sense that this person is wearing essentially lounge wear while picnic, getting outside by a lake.

Yeah, that's a terrible and that's part of why so many people were freaked out by oh my. God, this guy is an idiot, he's an idiot.

2:13:24 - Leo Laporte
Photo sweeper is the pick from overmax O-V-E-R-M-A-C-Scom, and I just saved a note to get that, because this is a great idea and we all have so many of these images and now that really, I think in some ways my iPhone camera is my, my diary, because I just you take pictures of everything and it's really kind of cool. So there's so many pictures, so many, so many. Thank you, Andy. Alex Lindsey. Pick of the week.

2:13:57 - Alex Lindsay
So we actually interviewed Vienna Tran Dr Vienna Tran, you know on on on gray mattershowa while ago and she's been a longtime member of office hours and and she's out of Australia and just the super smart person, and she put together this great little card set. Someone said, oh, vienna, vienna really released the solar system cards that she's studying to basically be a medical doctor in space. So, yeah, so she and she's, she's going to do it too. I mean, so she's, and so super, super smart and and very driven, and she put this together. So this is what the book, this is what it looks like. Someone said, oh, vienna released the solar system thing and I was like what? And so this looks like the old I don't remember the Chronicle books things where they had like little cards. So you pop it open and it's got these little cards that you can kind of look at it. It's got little explanations on the on the back of them here, and so this one's, I think, about the moon, I think, and anyway it's got lots of these little cards in it. I love this. They're, they're really fun and and you know they've got great information, these fun little little bits and little cards. It's. It's kind of a different format for it and just a really, really fun format to learn. I feel like they should be in every classroom. They should be if you're just, if you're just, you know, just having them lay around, because they've got like a little little bit of information on the back that you read through and it's just a fun format to learn things from about the solar system and everything else. And I just thought it was. I love this, I love this format.

I used to love the Chronicle books, my training, when I would used to be on on screensaver screensavers, you know, I used to always do a. I don't know, I don't even know if Leo knew what I did, how I funded a company with it, and so so I would do the three minute thing for you know, the three. I would design three minutes of content and because I knew it would take seven minutes to do it with Leo because he would ask questions and we'd talk back and forth I learned to do that. At first I did seven minutes and then I had to talk really fast and so I learned to talk slower and just do three and a half minutes, but I would make a 20 minute video that I put on the website that you had to give me an email to get to, and so I'd always say, oh, there's a 20, there's a longer version on the website, and that it came with a 20 minute version.

And then it came with a PDF, and the PDF was exactly this format nine by roughly, nine by 16. I didn't do it because I thought of vertical video would be a thing. I just did it because I liked Chronicle books, little cards and and so. But it, it, those are tutorials and that's how you think.

2:16:25 - Leo Laporte
I didn't know that's what you were doing. I mean, that's what. I was very happy that that's what you were doing.

2:16:30 - Alex Lindsay
It was great I spent, but basically Monday through for through Wednesday afternoon. All I worked on was that tutorial.

2:16:36 - Leo Laporte
No effect. I think we would send people to the longer, long form tutorial every single time. No, I love that. A you added great value added and B we weren't paying you, so I'm glad you were getting some out of it.

2:16:48 - Alex Lindsay
I got a lot out of it, yeah good, I'm so glad to hear that we, we, you know we would get a thousand. Like when you think about broadcast, people say, oh, broadcast is going away. I don't remember On tech TV I was getting a thousand emails a week. Wow, you know, would come in that would sign up for that, you know, and it was.

2:17:03 - Leo Laporte
And I get emails from Pakistan and you know, like it was, just it was I bet you there's people in our club right now who who sent for those at some point. That's probably how we got all got together. The solar system illustrated guide to our home in space a novelty book says Amazon, by Dr Vienna. As you can see, I just bought it because that's really cool. Yeah, jason Snell. Pick of the week.

2:17:28 - Jason Snell
One of my favorite Mac utilities for a while now is something called Swift Bar. I've talked about it on the show before it went version 2.0. It is a free, open source app and what's great about it is it lets you put anything you want in your menu bar. It works with plugins, but the plugins can be anything that does output. So, for example, I have like per, like Perl scripts, python scripts, shell scripts, php scripts, whatever you want. I've got like my weather station data and it looks at my forecast on Apple weather and it puts it together in a drop down menu and you can control what's in the menu bar and what happens when you drop down, and you can put SF symbols and you can put graphics and you can do all this stuff. It's really incredibly powerful.

Version 2.0 lets you go further. It's got native shortcuts support so you can also have it run a shortcut every so often and put the result of the shortcut in the menu bar. It's got something called ephemeral plugins, which means like if you're running a script or something you can actually have, or a shortcut even, you can have it pop up a thing in the menu bar as a status report and then it goes away. It's like it's not actually being fed constantly by a script. It's temporary, it's ephemeral, it's just there to say, oh, I'm doing this task and it's task one, and then it's part two and now it's done and then it goes away. Just really clever stuff. It's got some support for light mode and dark mode images and a bunch of other things that I'm happy that the project because it's an open source project the project leader finally kind of cleaned it up and got a bunch of features he's been working on out the door and has declared it 2.0.

It's completely free and what I love about it is if you can script in something that provides output, you can put it in your Max menu bar, so you don't need to find an app that does X. You can do it if you have any skill in any of these areas and it doesn't matter what language you use, as long as there's output from it, especially now that it handles shortcuts as well. As long as there's output, you can say run this every five minutes and put the output in the menu bar and it just does it. It's a great utility. I wouldn't live without it, use it all the time and I love just the accessibility of it, the fact that if you can script in anything, you can write a menu bar app, essentially for your Mac. It's pretty awesome.

2:19:39 - Leo Laporte
Really neat. You've mentioned it before and I keep making a point of getting it never free.

2:19:46 - Jason Snell
It's free, swiftbarapp, if there's ever been a be in your body about something you wish you could just have in your menu bar all the time, like it'll do there and it comes with. There are plugins that you can get for free. That are things like the current song playing or whatever. But, like I said, I use it for weather stuff. I use it for, like, how many people are listening to the live stream of my podcast. I have a little plugin that does that. When it's live, it pops up and shows me how many people are listening. All that you know. As long as you can script it somewhere, you can make that thing live in your menu bar, which I love. I think that's a really great because the Mac menu bar is like a special place that you know. It's. One of the great things about being a Mac user is having that menu bar and it's always there for glanceable information. So it's like a way it's like before there were widgets, there was the menu bar and it's still there and it's still great.

And there's an article you can read about it from a couple of years ago, but still yeah, the screenshots I mean, if you want to see what it looks like in your menu bar, I have some examples there. But basically it's just stuff you can put. Literally anything you can think of you could put in and you're no longer listening to Husker do, I'm sure?

but I was at one. I mean I still do enjoy that, but I don't actually use that plugin. I was for a friend who wanted one of the artists in the song for every track and it seems that's a lot for me.

2:21:01 - Leo Laporte
That's a lot for your menu bar, and Anthony wanted that plugin, so I kind of. I kind of took the current temperature. That's kind of cool. There's a lot of things you can do.

2:21:08 - Jason Snell
Yeah, yeah, I mean my, my weather one is pulling from multiple sources because I control it, so I can have it. Look at my weather station and Apple weather for the forecast, and I can look at, can have it. Look at my purple air monitor for the, you know, for the air quality, and if the air quality isn't good, it puts up an icon and says the air quality has gotten bad and like I was able to build exactly what I wanted for myself, instead of like taking a bunch of different stuff off of the shelf with different apps and doing it so and it's in homebrew, so you can install it directly through a brew.

2:21:39 - Leo Laporte
Mr Jason Stahl's article is that's his website, sixcolorscom. But that's not all. That's there. It's full of wonderful things, including every podcast Jason does. There's a long list for all mankind.

2:21:56 - Jason Snell
Season finale is coming up this week. Nasa vending machine is a podcast that Dan Moran and I do where, if you haven't noticed if you watch the show, they seem to be obsessed with vending machines and they made us obsessed with vending machines. There's a vending machine on Mars. There's a vending machine at a hotel last week. There's a vending machine in NASA, where lots of very important conversations went on in season two, which is why we got so obsessed with it, anyway they used to have water coolers.

2:22:19 - Leo Laporte
I highly recommend it. Times have changed. Now They've got vending machine. It is an alternate history, Mom when they're buying things.

2:22:24 - Jason Snell
They're buying things on Mars and there's a vending machine. We're like what? Who are these people? Do they own stock and vending machine companies? I don't know, but we got into it and it's a great show.

2:22:33 - Leo Laporte
So whatever man goes, vending machines will follow, we'll follow.

2:22:38 - Jason Snell
Yeah, there's a big plot in this current season about asteroid mining and I just I'm so deep down in it now that I'm like what is an asteroid, but a giant vending machine. Full of ice and gold, full of iridium and iron and gold and other things. Yeah, exactly.

2:22:58 - Leo Laporte
Jason, I love you. Dude, Keep going with all the good stuff. It's sixcolorscom. Are you be home next week or will you go on to Cupertino?

2:23:08 - Jason Snell
Yeah, unless Cupertino calls, I'll be at home next week.

2:23:12 - Leo Laporte
Wink, nudge, nudge. Thank you so much, great to see you. Thank you, andy and Akka. When are you going to be on GBH?

2:23:20 - Andy Ihnatko
next, Next Thursday 12, 1235 PM. Go to WGBHnewsorg to listen to it live or later. And Jason can I? I'm pitching it as a guest on that podcast. My immediate theory is that because vending machines are like a cash business, perhaps that's how, like space, organized crime does their money laundering observations.

2:23:45 - Jason Snell
Andy. Well, if you haven't seen season four, that is exactly what goes on in season four. There is a black market on Mars and there is a script that is used because they're paying them like they're oil rig workers, and it's really quite interesting and clever.

2:23:58 - Andy Ihnatko
So you've already, but once the show is over, we're going to have to pivot. Is there gambling or meth? Because that would be exactly how Well there's moonshine.

2:24:04 - Jason Snell
There's gambling and moonshine on Mars. Of course there is.

2:24:08 - Andy Ihnatko
Anyway, space Joe Kennedy is probably operating a laundromat. There's a character named.

2:24:13 - Jason Snell
Ilya, who is very much that guy. Yeah, and when the show is over, we're going to pivot to just being about vending machines. So get ready.

2:24:20 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, excellent. You know, I bet that's a deep subject.

2:24:23 - Jason Snell
Actually Probably is an odd and then related right like an automats and things like that. I remember when I was. I don't want to get too close to the truth.

2:24:31 - Leo Laporte
There used to be an Apple vending machine next to the barber shop at Brown University and I would always get a nice cold apple from the Apple vending machine. I can't believe that even existed, Even in the sixties. I can't believe that existed. Mr Alex Lindsey office hoursglobal is a place to find him when he's not wearing his work hat and you've got lots of good stuff going on there.

2:24:54 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, I mean we're, we're, you know, we. We talked a little bit about creating short form video yesterday, mid journey. Today, mid journey came out with it Six point, six point. Oh, amazing. Let's look at all the stuff that we can create with it tomorrow. We're talking about ambisonic capture, which is probably important if you were thinking about vision pro production, so. So we're going to talk a little bit about that compression, like how do we make the big videos small videos, and what we do to do that is, on Thursday and Friday, of course, backhaul, like how do we get video back from those places? So those are the kind of things. And, by the way, on gray mattershow, jacques Pepin is on on.

2:25:27 - Leo Laporte
Friday which was great.

2:25:30 - Alex Lindsay
I'm so excited Like I've just been watching, I've been like binging on Jacques Pepin.

2:25:34 - Leo Laporte
Oh, you have recorded it yet.

2:25:35 - Alex Lindsay
No, it's start. We're recorded on Friday, so we'll be doing that live. So jealous yeah, and posting it next week.

2:25:41 - Leo Laporte
I love his little his we've talked about last week. His little TikToks are so good. Yeah, so fun. Well. I didn't know.

In fact I made his. I made his Curly hot dog the other day. He mentions in one of them that he used to be the the chef at Howard for national, wide, nationwide, for Howard Johnson's. He was like their executive chef, designing recipes, and he he showed how to make a curly little curly round. You take a hot dog, make a curly hot dog and put it on an English muffin. Man, that was good. I and he didn't make his own relish though, because that's the. That's the pep band difference.

Gray mattershow, the place to go. A great, great podcast. Thank you, alex, andy, jason, thanks to all of you who watch, especially to our club twit members who make the show possible. We do the show every Tuesday, 11 am Pacific, 2 pm Eastern time, 18, I'm sorry, 1900 UTC, and you can actually watch us the minute we start the show. You will put it up on YouTube, youtubecom slash twit. All of our shows that we do in public we we do a live stream on YouTube. Of course, club members get to watch before and after as well in our club twit discord After the fact, on demand versions of the show available at the website twittv slash mbw.

There's a YouTube channel dedicated to MacBreak Weekly. Great way to share clips with friends, that kind of thing. And the best way, I think, subscribe in your favorite podcast app. We kind of like pocket casts, but you pick one, subscribe. That way you'll get it automatically the minute it is available. That's been so good spending some time with you today. Thank you for joining us. Now, I'm sad to say, I've got to tell you it's time to go back to work because break time is over. Bye, bye.

2:27:25 - Scott Wilkinson
Hey there, scott Wilkinson here. In case you hadn't heard, Home Theater Geeks is back. Each week I bring you the latest audio video news, tips and tricks to get the most out of your AV system, product reviews and more. You can enjoy Home Theater Geeks only if you're a member of Club TWiT, which costs seven bucks a month, or you can subscribe to Home Theater Geeks by itself for only $2.99 a month. I hope you'll join me for a weekly dose of home theater geekatude.