MacBreak Weekly 906 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. Andy's here, Alex is here, Mr Snell is here. None of them has a Vision Pro yet. They're all gonna get theirs, or some of them will get theirs on Friday, but the embargo has been lifted and reviews are pouring in from iJustine, Marquez Brownlee, Nilay Patel, Joanna Stern and more. We'll talk about the reviews, the pros and the cons, what we've learned today about the Vision Pro and what we think it holds for the future. That's coming up next on MacBreak Weekly.

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It's time for MacBreak Week. I'm sorry, vision Break Weekly, the show where we cover the latest news from the Vision Pro. The reviews are out, but fortunately we have some pros here to talk about it. Jason Snell, six colors. Did you get your Vision Pro no.

0:02:24 - Jason Snell
If I did, I'd be wearing it now but I am not. I actually spent half an hour with it last Friday, but they didn't let me walk away with it, so we'll see here's our new album, mark, and I think it looks good.

0:02:36 - Leo Laporte
I really do. Andy Ihnatko where's your spooky eyes? Well, I mean, I'm in his head. Builds right in and actually it looks quite good. Sorry, it's very realistic.

0:02:49 - Andy Ihnatko
Well, I mean this is an avatar. So I mean I'm sorry that I get the uncanny valley effect for everybody, but you know, this is new technology human faces and the eyebrows are a little off, I have to say, but other than, that I used a new guy this morning. Unfortunately, celeste was unavailable.

0:03:12 - Leo Laporte
And also Andy WGBH, boston, and also from Osmos Hours Global. We welcome the return of Alex Lindsey. We took every opportunity while you were gone to slam Apple's app store policies in the EU, so you don't have to defend it, it's okay. We just. We just did all the one-sided arguing without you.

0:03:34 - Alex Lindsay
Outstanding.

0:03:35 - Leo Laporte
So Tuesday morning, I guess because I got us on slot of news stories the Vision Pro embargo has been lifted. Did you, did you? It was just, it was the usual suspects. I'm sorry, jason, that you are no longer in the usual suspects, but as somebody who's been pressing his nose against the glass for more than 10 years, welcome.

0:04:02 - Jason Snell
Yeah, I, I'm. I'm a second way of reviewer for almost everything except the Mac. So that's it's. It's not not unexpected, it's fine. I will say this before we break down what anybody has writing so far. I actually really admire Marcus Brownlee for posting an unboxing as his first video. Why is that? You're being facetious.

0:04:19 - Leo Laporte
No.

0:04:20 - Jason Snell
No, I I am, because some, some of these things like. I think Nealey Patel's review from the Verge is excellent His written review, I haven't watched his video yet. It's so good for a product that he's used for five days or six days. But I will say this this is a whole brand. It's a brand new computer platform 1.0 from Apple. I'm not sure six days is enough, honestly, so there'll be much more. There were are plenty of stories to tell for everybody who's going to get it this week, which is everybody who bought it, because Friday is the day.

0:04:49 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah Well, I, I I agree mostly with that. I think that there's going to be two waves of reviews. I think that the reviews that come after the first week are legitimate and very, very useful, because this is what people are going to be experiencing with this, and this is, in a way, the fact that you're that you're dealing with a product that you've never really used before. I mean, even if you have a meta quest helmet, a quest set, it's not as though you've been using it as ambitiously as this. You do have to get used to it.

On the other hand, this is going to be before you talk yourself into saying, oh well, yes, I know it's way too heavy and yes, I know the text isn't really easy, you know, but I'm getting used to it and you're not supposed to get used to it. Ask anybody who's had a butterfly keyboard. But I think I think the second wave is going to in six months, when it's not just the people who've been using it for a long time, but also in the presence of a very rich app ecosystem where they've been able to figure out, here's some people who've created the kind of apps that justify the expense and justify the new technology. That's going to be the second wave and that's going to be probably the most useful wave.

0:05:54 - Jason Snell
Yeah, first impressions are important, but I do think that there is a challenge to get impressions that are initial, that are surface, steep, like when.

0:06:03 - Andy Ihnatko
I spent my 30 minutes with it.

0:06:05 - Jason Snell
Last Friday. I spent the first 10 or 15 minutes having sensory overload and then I spent the last 15 minutes thinking about the UI decisions that they made and I feel like after six days my point was also not again. I think Neelay's review is spectacularly good. I really do, and I think that he's you know, based on my hour with it. I think that he's getting to the core of what it is. I just think there is so much open space for everybody to talk about, write about and think about this thing because it's a whole platform. This doesn't strike me as being one of those things where it's like what more is there to say about a new phone that is a little bit different from last year's phone? After everybody's had it for a week, which is the thing I struggle with with iPhone reviews. I'm not worried about having interesting things to observe about this thing, because there's a huge ocean of things to observe about it.

0:06:55 - Leo Laporte
So, in a way, really, it's more like 40 years ago when the Mac first came out a brand new platform. It's going to take a while to really know what it's, what it's all about.

0:07:04 - Jason Snell
Yeah, neelay came up with a few negatives.

0:07:09 - Leo Laporte
One of his biggest points and I thought it was important point is it's a VR headset that is emulating augmented reality with cameras and not doing the greatest job All the limitations you might imagine with a camera. He says video pass through is still video pass through. You've got motion blur you. You know it's. It's not, it's not perfect and it's not that's a good point.

0:07:32 - Jason Snell
I had that same thought, coming into it with my memory of last June and then seeing it on Friday, I thought, oh, the field of view is less than I remember and the the, the quality of the image, is less than I remember. And that's just because you know you, you're dazzled by a brand new thing that you've seen for the first time. And then, having spent six months sort of like replaying that memory, it was interesting to be in there and be confronted with the reality of it, which this thing isn't magic. It's probably cutting edge, the most cutting edge product that Apple has mass produced in a very long time in some ways, but it's still got lots of limitations.

0:08:06 - Andy Ihnatko
It's like the best, the best airplane from 1911, like meaning. That's not to denigrate like anyone who made an airplane in 1911, but clearly it's going to take a while. For a lot of people it's going to be very useful and very interesting and very fun. For some people they're going to have to wait until 1928, let's say 1923.

0:08:26 - Alex Lindsay
For the ones that have, that it can actually be steered. I can't believe I ever use this Like. I look at this.

0:08:32 - Leo Laporte
I look at this yeah, he's holding up the original iPhone. Yeah, this is not the original, this is. This is version 3GS. This is like the 3GS.

0:08:39 - Alex Lindsay
This is the first one that did video and I can't believe that I ever thought that this and I thought why would you ever need anything bigger? Why would you need anything better Like it? You know when you, when you. So again, I think I think it's limited. I think a lot of us have, you know, seen, played with these for a long time and you know that you kind of live inside of that limitation that it has right now. But I think that you know it does have to prove itself to be useful out for something. I think that one of the things is that only a very small handful of developers have had access to it up until Friday, and so and it's, you can say, well, I can develop for it without seeing it, but it's really hard.

0:09:13 - Jason Snell
Why do you think more developers, not the developers I've talked to the developers. I've talked to they get there because some of them have gone to labs They've had labs in like New York and Cupertino and London and some other places and you get four hours with it. Maybe they lock you in a room for four hours. And what they said is I built something in the simulator and I thought I had it figured out and the moment they ran their app on the hardware they're like oh no, I completely mistaken, and that's why I mean it'll take time.

0:09:37 - Alex Lindsay
I spent. I spent years doing R&D for VR or a variety of companies and, and so, because you had to do it, you had to figure it out. There was a whole bunch of things we learned as we did it oh that doesn't work, oh this doesn't work, or this really works way better than I thought, and so there's going to be a little bit of putting things on and playing with them and seeing what works and doesn't work, and I think that the reason that you were asking Leo about why Apple was super I mean, they gave, they handed out a lot of these headsets to larger corporations, but the red tape or handing them out to have them at your location was incredible. Like it was, you have to have a room that can be as limited as possible.

0:10:12 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, we read way back in the day, we read through that.

0:10:15 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, and that's been the case and so so, so there's.

So it's been really hard for anybody to see it and again, there's no reason to release it.

So I think that you're going to see a fluttering of releases that happened between now and September, the first set being the people who are, you know, going to jump on it in the spring. And then WWDC is going to come out and show a bunch of new things. There's going to be a bunch of new libraries, and then you're going to see a bunch of, you know, updates in September, october, that are probably when we really start to see what the headset can do. You know, the headset is really going to start showing whether it's valuable or not to what Andy was talking about earlier, sometime between October and December of next of this year. Like that's when we're really going to see like, oh, is this a thing or not? Because that's when the developers had enough time to work on it, play with it, have the second round of WWDC, but that's, that's when you're going to, that's when you're going to see it, you know, and it may not. We may get to that and go.

0:11:08 - Andy Ihnatko
Man, it's not going to work, but yeah, I mean, when I was reading the reviews this morning, for some, for some reason, I started thinking about a famous quote by director Howard Hawks about hey, what's it take to make a good movie? And he said a good movie, all you need is three good scenes and no bad ones. And that's got me thinking about a brand new technology, or relatively brand new technology, like a vision pro, which is that for this first generation to be considered a success, all it needs is three good features and no really bad ones. And I know we're going to talk about the, about the, about the, the spooky vision goggles, spooky fake eyeballs thing, but that's not, I mean, that's not a critical key feature.

It's not a user feature, really right, it's like a negative feature, I mean if the, if the, if the displays weren't crisp, if it wasn't pleasant to use, if the, if the 3d effect was not good, if the eye tracking was not good, if the hand tracking were not good, then this would be a bad thing. But I'm not. I'm getting nothing. For if the battery life were, if we're super so uncomfortable to use, that like even you can't expend this battery life without feeling like I need to get this, this hot, heavy thing off my head, I think that it definitely passed the Howard Hawks test again.

0:12:19 - Jason Snell
Yeah, I mean the intrigue, intriguing stuff. I just can't wait to try it. But like there are these examples of you know, you get the big Mac screen in front of you and you've got your Mac laptop, let's say so. You've got the keyboard and the trackpad, and then you've got ancillary apps kind of like around for people who like multiple monitors. Those are iPad apps, but again, they're sort of accessories. That's interesting. I was struck.

John Gruber from Daring Fireball hasn't written about it yet, but he did a his podcast that did us with Ben Thompson, and I thought it was fascinating to listen to his 10 minute mini review because essentially it begins with him saying look, it's like it's too heavy, it's awkward, the interaction model is a little bit weird, it's like remarkably negative about it, and they talk about all the challenges to be a first generation spatial computing device and how a lot of stuff isn't quite there yet.

And then Ben Thompson says so what about the entertainment piece? And Gruber said, oh, for, as an entertainment device it's worth the 3,500. Now I thought that was like well, I mean not for everybody, but I think it's an interesting kind of thing where like maybe that's the good scene, andy, right, like maybe if you want and and are not watching movies with friends and family but are doing a lot of movies in hotel rooms or on airplanes or whatever, and that that immersive video plus the 3d video and just movie watching in general, I can see it like again, is that enough for this product to be a hit? No, but having a niche to hold on to while you build the platform is a good thing.

0:13:51 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, and if we, if we we're not lowering the bar here, but like if we say that this is not like an iPhone, which is something that you're gonna have on you the entire day and being dipping into it, like from time to time, throw an entire like waking day, and it's not gonna be like a Mac, where you're gonna be focused on this and only this, pretty much for a full eight hour work day, if we can accept and we may, and some people may not be able to agree with that but if we can accept that this is a computing device that you're gonna be using for an hour to maybe 90 minutes at a time, depending on how long the movie is, but like you're not, then I think that's another way of putting it in the right context. We talked about this for for a few months now, where we have to find the balance between this is definitely a 1.0 product, this is definitely an ambitious product, and so we have to cut it a little bit of slack. On the other hand, this is a consumer product that they're selling through a store for $3,500. So we do have to ask the questions of where is the point, which we say useful versus not useful and I think that setting that expectation of it's not something you're going to be.

Joanna Stern did, of course, did the wonderful thing of she repeated her, her experiment she did when Meta was first decided they were all in on on virtual reality that, okay, I'm gonna wear this for 24 hours, I'm gonna wear this for a whole day, even though that's absolutely not what Apple is saying you should be doing with this. But that's if we don't expect that. That's what people are gonna be using it for, then I think that that leaves us open to really appreciating it for what it is, not for what we hope it will be two years from now, not for what we wish it was going to be.

0:15:26 - Leo Laporte
After seeing a lot of people explain a 30-minute demo, At what point can we say this is a complete flop and write it off?

0:15:37 - Andy Ihnatko
Again, the first, first on-phase fire of a device which I don't think is gonna happen. I feel like this is one of those things we're gonna talk about a lot for the next couple of weeks.

0:15:46 - Leo Laporte
Then we're gonna talk less and less, and by come September, honestly.

0:15:55 - Jason Snell
Well, no, it's not gonna be a huge hit necessarily. In fact, I think it is in Incapable of being a huge hit at the volumes that they can make. Yeah, they can only.

Apple is deeply invested in the long term, the long term status of this platform they are deeply invested in and you know, having a company with a whole lot of cash in the bank who wants to play the long game with a product is really all you need. So I think there'll be people who don't like it and write it off, but I think that it's gonna be years before we can actually get a read on whether there's a future for this thing.

0:16:25 - Alex Lindsay
I think we're on it. We're in a, we're in year 10 of a 20-year release cycle, and it is that what they're building is something that's a getting out of this business is I'm gonna announce my I'm not gonna. I did not want to be talking. They're not gonna. They're not gonna stop, but they're not gonna stop. They're not gonna stop for 10 years.

0:16:41 - Leo Laporte
They're not gonna go. No more vision pro weekly. You guys can do it. Yeah, I'm just gonna go off and go go ski with my goggles on or something.

0:16:49 - Jason Snell
Well, we do a vision pro segment and you like you. You, you just show up a little late and we'll talk about it. There you go. Oh, I love that idea.

0:16:57 - Leo Laporte
From now on, the show will start at 11 Pacific. I'll arrive at about 11 20, which I do anyway. Yeah, and if for the first 20 minutes you could talk about it and this chair will be empty, or maybe I'll just put some spooky eyes. So this was a pretty funny. By the way, I agree with you. I think nilipa tells a written piece. I watched his video but I think but you know, it's really interesting how many of these reviews, or video reviews? I guess that's the future, I guess I don't know. I find a video review difficult because it's like you have to watch for 20 minutes to get the juice out of it.

0:17:31 - Alex Lindsay
I just want to scan the Text reviews difficult consuming words.

0:17:35 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah, I know you're the future, I'm the past, so I, but I think you know I nailed it and we'll talk about a few things, but there was one, some, a few things in the videos that were worth it, especially with Joanna, you know, doing a FaceTime. So here she is, she's scanning her face. You should watch Joanna Stern in the Wall Street Journal. She did ski with it, which is crazy. She cooked with it, which is crazy. Neither of which are you're supposed to do now that look at her face, because we're gonna then see a virtual version, which she didn't like. Actually thought it looked just like her, but maybe, right, maybe that's part, I don't know. Anyway, that's her, that's her face. And then she joins it's just a little like the Mona Lisa actually and then she joins a video conference. There's no lie Patel.

0:18:27 - Andy Ihnatko
And yes, facetiming with other people in vision pros is as crazy and there's Marquez Brownlee, so this is hey.

0:18:35 - Leo Laporte
One advantage of buying one of these is you'll be able to FaceTime with Joanna Stern, marquez Brownlee and a lie Patel anytime you want.

0:18:43 - Jason Snell
Well, it does mean you can. You can FaceTime and make sure your persona is immaculately dressed and Shaved, exactly Hair to shave done right and all and makeup and everything you want, and then you can just be a slob lounging around in your bed.

0:18:58 - Leo Laporte
She's doing a will be nice and neat. I think it looks pretty much like her. I thought it looked enough like her to work, is it? Is it uncanny Valley? Is that the problem?

0:19:07 - Alex Lindsay
Oh yeah, yeah, it's totally an uncanny Valley. It's gonna be. You know, again, we talked about a little before the show, but you, you, they spent all the money on Princess Leia and still look weird In in Rogue one, and and so the thing is is that, you know, doing it with a consumer headset is never gonna and, of the things that I've seen so far, the fidelity of the movement. The problem is is that for a million years, we have spent a lot of time making decisions about what people think based on very, very small movements, and you know, and, and, and, and, and, and. A resolution that is still way beyond the typical capture systems, and so, as a result, any, we're super cent, we're more sensitive to the face than anything else that we see in the world, because that is Very tied to our survival from a, you know, from a, from a, you know, species, and so so the thing is is that the fact that it's a little lower resolution is super weird.

You know, I don't like. I'm gonna try it. I'm gonna try to come in to an office hours with it. I'm gonna try to, you know, come into this show with it at some point. I'm gonna try it. I don't think it. I actually don't think that part of this. This thing really works. You know, I think yeah for a quick call, like hey, I'm in the headset and I don't want to take it off to answer your call. Fine, or anything longer than that, not fine, like it's not gonna work.

0:20:21 - Andy Ihnatko
Can I say just one thing I don't. I don't agree with you about that is that. Remember that the Princess Leia from Rogue one that was being financed by Disney, this is being financed by Apple, who's not willing to basically cheap out on the digital effects Because they absolutely don't care about the end product. So I think that I have more optimism.

But that is just quickly that. That is a very, an excellent point that, like, if we trans it, it's possible that you that if you are gonna be having like an hour-long conversation with something, someone about something important, where it's important that your point of view comes across and it's important that the person understand that, hey look, when I'm cutting your budget, it's not because, like, this is a political thing, it's because here are the dynamics of what's going on right now. We have total respect for your team. Your teams are very important, blah, blah, blah. Like maybe you're gonna want to turn that off, because the subtle stuff that people are Like you say that we are basically programmed over a hundred and forty thousand years of evolution to figure out is not there, and so we're basically not seeing empathy, we're not able to connect emotionally. What is this person saying? What are they doing?

0:21:22 - Alex Lindsay
But at the same time, maybe you also want to turn off your virtual background and use a camera that doesn't look like.

0:21:27 - Andy Ihnatko
What if you don't want to be a just tower?

0:21:29 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, what everybody in the news looks like on Sunday morning like it's so bad.

0:21:34 - Jason Snell
I think I mean Alex, I agree here. I think it is both a brilliant feature in that I'm shocked at how good it is and it's also not good enough. Right, it's both those things, and that's where you're in the uncanny valley. I don't mind Apple trying to do this. I love that they're trying to do this and maybe they will get it right in a few years. I Am baffled by the. I gotta say it's probably the pride that I all of us, I think assume for a long time.

That Memoji Existed specifically so that you would have a representative of yourself.

When Apple did its VR thing and, as far as I can tell, you can only represent yourself as this avatar, not as something like an emoji. And I think it's a huge misfire because, first off, I agree. First off, what if you're uncomfortable with what you look like as that thing, but also you've got all these other issues of like? What if you're uncomfortable with you, can't get a good representation, or you're somebody who has, you know, body dysmorphia issues and other things like that, where you like you don't like your face and you don't want to use it as your representation. Why, I had a friend to say to me today, says I don't want to see my dumb old face, I want to be like a cool monster or something. I'm like, yeah, exactly, I can't believe. And I, I have to say I think the reason is because they had this tech and they invested so much in it and they didn't want to make it seem like they were whimping out and just having you use a cartoon version, but the cartoon version of you.

0:23:01 - Andy Ihnatko
Something else is.

0:23:02 - Jason Snell
I would much rather be a cartoon views version of me or a fantasy character or something, then a dead-eyed digital replica and I you should be able. Apple should give people the choice to do that, and I cannot believe that they haven't done that.

0:23:15 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, I agree. I think that it's interesting because I I Feel like they're gonna say it at WWC. Here's the emoji now, like, like you know, they're gonna. Yeah, feels like such a Like maybe they're gonna get everyone to try it first with the head or whatever, and then they'll give us back the emojis, because the emojis are really fun and like I don't send stickers where I'm sending pictures of me with my thumbs up like this, like right, you know, like I don't, I don't, man, I, you know the emojis great and it only only egomaniacs and stickers of their actual picture of their face.

0:23:44 - Jason Snell
Don't do it.

0:23:47 - Andy Ihnatko
I'm so sorry. I'm sorry, Go ahead.

0:23:48 - Alex Lindsay
No, no, no. All I was gonna say is that I do think that you know the technology doesn't get better if you don't use it. So, putting it into the product, as Jason said, you know it it allows them to see how it is. I do think that that road is actually longer than you know, longer than the next two or three versions of this to get good at, because, I mean, I've done facial capture for a long time. It's really hard and it's even harder when you're doing it from a headset that's sitting on top of you, like because it's changing how your face is working. It's literally pushing up against your face. So you know, all your muscles are not doing what they're normally doing. It is just it is not a. It's so hard to do what they're doing and I don't think, I think it will take them a long time again.

I, what I see as someone face times me and I need to answer the phone. I need to answer that call real quickly on a zoom or on a FaceTime or whatever it's gonna be supported in zoom that like hey, how's it going? And answer a couple questions and then jump off and go back to what I was doing without having to take my head set off to answer the question. Answer it that I think it's nice to have the feature there to do that thing. I Wouldn't ever enter a meeting that way, but I won't rarely enter a meeting without this studio that I'm in right now, like I'll just turn the camera off all together if I'm not gonna not have it set up.

0:24:58 - Andy Ihnatko
Well, so, because I do think that it matters what you look like when you're trying to make a point, yeah, I thought it was interesting and put in some of the demos that that we saw on videos today that I forget. I forget what it was Nila, nila or somebody else who was basically saying that like it, if you're, if your hands enter like the frame, it will also reproduce your hands in some Fashion. Yes, and they mentioned that and mention that it seemed as though they they were trying. Maybe it was just for the purpose of the demo, but it seemed as though they had to be a little bit Italian, you know, with their really extreme gestures to basic, with your hands don't basically Actually land here, but at least when you're trying to do this or this, like actually for real, thumbs up, like it. But I'm actually through the frame. That's Interesting.

I'm also keen to see, like as as now as a couple hundred thousand people start to use these things, how much variance in faces and heads is that system going to Accommodate like, if I've.

I mean, I have a friend who suffered a catastrophic injury and their, their, their facial structure is very, very, very, very not what a Default avatar would look like. Will it do its will it, will it? I'm keen to see if it will handle that very, very well, because that is that to me. Like if I were on the engineering team, I would almost see that as a deal breaker, or I would argue for on behalf of the idea that if we can't make every Face that is able to that has been, has binocular vision and will be able to be using this headset, if I can't get every face Accommodated, then we shouldn't use this feature at all, because that is a way of basically saying oh, by the way, we're shutting the door on you once you put this headset on. We regard you as something other and so we are not going to Give you this feature.

0:26:57 - Alex Lindsay
It'll be interesting to see. I have a feeling that the I do think that if you're very far out of the I mean if you're in the 0.1% of something it may be hard. It may be harder for it to find that. I think that If we look at metahuman, which is what epic builds, the, the amount of detail that epic can do with just a couple sliders is kind of you can build lots and lots and lots of things that are very Original and I think that you probably match people pretty effectively. So I think that it'll look like.

Most people will find that it may not be look perfect None of us think our CG version looks the same way that we do but I think that it will look close to and it'll look like that person, because there's doesn't take very much to get someone pretty close to what they look like. But but I think that you're right that I think if you have a some some Significant changes from the norm, again, if you're in that point, one point, zero, zero, one percent it's probably yeah outside of the fact that it's a policy, that's that should, that's something that should be accommodated, I wonder.

0:27:55 - Andy Ihnatko
But what do you think like, do you? I'm also like Jason. I'm surprised that, like this is what you get, you can't use something else and you can't really modify it. Like I can see. I can see the argument that Apple says, no, you can't, you, we won't let you get like a video game type avatar where you can basically create a fake Persona because that was. There's a certain truth that gets lost there. But I'm surprised you can't simply say give you. I'm surprised you can't get a set of sliders, kind of like how you on of on the photo editing app that you just basically say I want more detail, less detail, or I Want the ice a little bit more open or a little bit less open. That I don't places.

0:28:35 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, there's that, so there's a. I will say that the concern that I would have in that area is there's a certain way that the motion capture Applies to the face, and so Apple probably needs you know if you start moving those sliders around. That translation can you know? And again, I think that there there's a it and some animation works better or worse based on adjustments that you make to the head, and so if you start, if you know, and again, at some point it becomes pencils down, like this is where we are right now. You know, and and there's a.

You know, steve Jobs, I think, famously said you know people, you know, I don't know what the engineers or people who make things that ship. So so you know, at some point you have to ship it and go. This is as good as we have it right now. I have never worked on a product that I released that I couldn't see two or three versions down, like I can see Two or three versions where that, where I can go with this, but this is what goes out today. You know, and and you know, and. So I think that that there's a lot of things that we're looking at, that that the engineers already know where they want to be three, four, five years from now, and the technology isn't there to do it. And they need the gamma testing. They need us To use it, all those little things they can can we send information back to Apple when things go wrong? Or or, you know, and when they see people using it, all of that's going to affect what happens next, you know, and so there'll be a lot of error correction and there's just no way to do it without putting it out. There's no way to do it in the lab. You have to do it right by putting it in the ground. So at some point Apple has to just drop these in. They're gonna be heavy, they're not gonna work as well, screens aren't gonna work as well.

I already know as a producer that the resolution and the frame rate are lower than what would be optimum. You know. For that experience, and I think folks there know it as well, I think that just that's what. That's where the processors are, that's where we can get things in that, in that package, and so I think that this is very much a you know, version one through three. Like you know, when we compare this to, you know, to this, you know Very different phones and I think that we're gonna have things and Apple doesn't need this to make money for a decade, like it doesn't. They don't need it. They can burn money into the ground for this, this little, this little thing, and they may come out with an entirely different product that doesn't look like a headset at all. It just happened to be. Well, this is the part of the technology that work, and they have the luxury of being one of the largest companies in the world. They can. They can I mean a lot of people like Google makes lots of things that don't go anywhere.

0:30:46 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, oh, yeah, I think. I think that the they have the only the only Countdown timer that Apple's facing is how long will it take before other Sony starts selling these displays to other manufacturers? That's that's another thing that was thinking about this morning that there's one there. Most of the people who were reviewing these have lots of experience with VR and AR, like since the, since, like 2010, 2011, 2012 and they're saying, oh my god, the display is like so many leagues, both leagues above everything else. So, in the absence of a real breakthrough in user interface and here's what a VR app should be like, here's why we're gonna have AR pass through, so that it really so that's really, really relevant to what people are gonna be using for two or three hours at a time. That was, that's. That's still a core advantage how good these displays are.

But it's a good into it into a three and two or three years from now, when, if Sony is now selling these, this to Metta still is selling this to Increasing their own Sony headsets. That's one advantage that's gonna sort of be diminished so, but I'm sure that Apple's gonna have two or three years more of runtime.

0:31:57 - Alex Lindsay
Well, I know, and in three years, they'll release another one. That is, you know, got sure. The one that we have now will become the regular one, and it'd be $1500, and the pro one will be the same price or more, and it'll be better. You know, a k per I, 120 frame per second, flat, that kind of thing, and the. The other thing I will say, though, is that that someone who's worked on some version of a headset for you know a long time that what Apple's doing is super hard. Like it is. This is a. This is a hard thing, and it's not just the display, it is the entire operating system, it is every app, it is all the.

There is an enormous amount of things that like, for instance, one thing they pointed out in the zoom that I'm looking forward to is the zoom supports USDZ. I can throw into a zoom event into it. I can. I can send you I don't know exactly how it is, but I think it's just in chat. I can say here, look at this 3d model and pop open a 3d model in zoom while I'm talking to you about it, and that's now the USDZ.

Apple started eight years ago. I think. You know, like, like, you know, it's like it's a very old format now that Apple started, but Apple was thinking about this headset when they created that format, or when that you know, and when they started pushing down that format. And so the thing is is that it's there's an enormous amount that, even if you could do that, the problem that the advantage that Apple has is they have the OS, they have the I, you know the, they have the, the environment, they have all the other apps that just roll into it, they have all the integration with all the other things that are there, and they have MLS. They didn't buy MLS, so they get into sports for Apple TV.

Let's be clear that the MLS stuff will most likely There'll be a lot of sports features that pop out like, because they have act, they have total control over that, so they can say, hey, we can take you to the last goal and you can just stand on the. You know you can just stand on the, on the on the pitch while they're, while they're playing. You know for that moment. You know you don't have to watch the whole game that way, because they actually looking from above is much better, but you're gonna see them experiment with lots and lots of things around MLS, and what they're doing is they're selling that platform and again, it's a really hard thing to get into and it's an even harder thing to catch up, you know, and so I think that that's gonna be the hard part, you know, for a lot of manufacturers is that Apple and meta are gonna go in head-to-head and it's gonna be really hard To break in.

I think Sony will, maybe, but Sony has not been super successful with their headset so far, and I think that the problem is is that it's really hard and it's really expensive. The development is incredibly expensive and the content development is incredibly expensive, and so this is a very rich person's game. You know, there's not that many people trying to go to space. This is kind of one of those things you know, like that, and so there's like a hand, there's like five companies that have the money to play this game with Apple and that's part of why you do it as Apple is that. But they're playing a game that no one else can play.

0:34:43 - Leo Laporte
I think it's analogous to Jeff Bezos' penis rocket Exactly. All right, I guess I mean at this point we could go through. I mean Neelai raised the point and you actually raised this as well, jason that the eyesight feature is not what. You can now know why Apple didn't really show it. He says the front display on the Vision Pro is an attempt at keeping you from being isolated from other people while you're wearing it. Well, too bad, you're isolated.

In Apple's photos it looks like a big, bright screen that shows a video of your eyes to people around you so they feel comfortable talking to you while they're you're wearing the headset. It's a feature adorably called eyesight, says Neelai. In reality, it might as well not be there. It's a low res OLED with a lenticular panel in front of it to provide a mild 3D effect, and it's so dim and the cover glass is so reflected it's actually hard to see in most normal to bright lighting and when they do see your eyes, it's a low res, ghostly image of them that feels like CGI. The effect is uncanny. The idea that you'll be making real eye contact with anyone is a fantasy, and there are no controls or indicators in Vision OS for this external display so you never really know what other people are seeing. Imagine looking someone directly in the eyes and talking to them without knowing if they could see your eyes. It's weird.

0:35:59 - Jason Snell
Yeah, the initial reactions to this from people like Neelai make me think immediately that whoever won that argument inside Apple that said no, probably Johnny Ive, for one of the other designers on the team way back when of like oh no, we need to keep people present and we need to indicate and and like that whole conversation, that they had that led them to spend lots of money on a separate external display just to let you know that the person could see you and then use the digital avatar and all these things.

Right, that's so clear. Now I think that that's the first thing that you drop on version two, on the lower cost version, on all of them, because, like you can put a, you can put a little thing like at the top of a home pod that sort of indicates that it's in use or indicates attention, without it being a whole display with a lenticular screen. But the sound of this is like all all the video you see and all the photos you see now are just nothing like what Apple had in its PR about what that screen looks like. It's dim and weird and completely it sounds like unnecessary. I admire the idea of like I want you to know when I can see you, but it's. It screams over engineered waste of money now, so it seems like that's going to be a quick one.

0:37:18 - Andy Ihnatko
It's the touch bar of the Vision Pro.

0:37:20 - Jason Snell
Yeah, or the digital touch from the Apple Watch, right, that thing where it was like, oh, you can send your heartbeat to someone else, and everybody was like, no, why? And the next year? They're like, okay, forget it, forget it, forget it, we're not going to do that anymore. I think that that one is going to be a go.

0:37:34 - Alex Lindsay
And I think that you have to keep on experimenting, and some of those are going to work and some of them aren't, and that's part of what they have to do over the next two or three years is to put stuff out, and some of it's going to be dumb, and this is probably one, I think. I still think that you know, I think that the eyes will see what happens. I think that it could be something like again, there's very little interaction with other people that I think you would want to do for a very long period of time. So this is more someone's interrupting your movie and you look over, or someone's interrupting your experience and you're looking over to say something to them, mostly like hey, I'm in an experience and don't talk to me anymore, you know, but, but it but it means that someone's bringing you your coffee at you know in on the plane while you're watching a movie, or something like that. That's where these things are. Kind of the would be the most useful, or a short call, not in any kind of extended use case.

0:38:19 - Leo Laporte
in my opinion, so we did buy one, not for me but for Micah. Micah will be unboxing his and doing a hands-on on February 2nd. In fact, what I'd love it is if he could do a FaceTime with you, Alex, and you, Jason, with yours I'm sure you're getting yours on February 2nd and then we could see how y'all look in your in your FaceTime and we'll let you know on Google the eyes.

Yeah and I'll come. I'll come for the people saying well, how could you, how could you talk about it without trying it on? Believe me, I've tried every one of these on up to now. I can't see anything that's so different in this that would make me go oh, I get it now, but I'll try it on on February 2nd, maybe I will.

You do have to be a member of ClubTweet. If you're not yet a member now, you know where your seven bucks is going. 500 of you paid for for Micah to buy this piece of nevermind. No, in fact, micah's promised that unless there is something magical, he will return it in the two week timeframe. You only get two weeks to try this thing, which is interesting.

If you're a member of ClubTweet, your money is not going to that. It is going to John Ashley's salary, to John Slanina's salary, it's going to the editors, kevin King, and it's going to the light lighting bill in the studio. We need the money because advertising support is dwindling and I'm seeing podcast networks go by the wayside rapidly. Last year, and I'm sorry to say, it's going to happen this year as well. Newspapers are failing. Magazines are going out of business. The advertisers don't seem to want to support quality media, quality journalism. That means you have to I'm sorry to say, $7 a month. I hope you will because I think what we're doing is important and you know you got to support the one guy who really thinks the vision pros a piece of crap.

Join right now, twitter or no. Support the three people on this panel who can't wait to get one twittv slash club twits, and we thank you in advance. It's also going to pay these fine panelists as well, I might add, and I think seven bucks is very reasonable. You get special events. Ios today is in the club now. You get the ad free versions of the show. I think we've give you enough benefits, but mostly you do it because you want to keep to it on the air. And Leo complaining about this, yeah it's entertaining.

0:40:37 - Jason Snell
Honestly, I love this dynamic. I know that people out there are like they're going to say nice things and Leo's going to poo poo, and I think having a dynamic when we have different takes on something like this keeps us all honest right. Instead of getting with the group think of like it's all good or it's all bad. I think it's going to be really interesting.

0:40:58 - Leo Laporte
When you look at the review lineups, everybody pretty much did the same thing, which is this is great, this is amazing, it's going to blow your mind. But and then and, by the way, most Apple reviews these days are that which is this is great stuff. And then there's a few things we don't like, and I think that there are a number of those. Battery life is exactly what Apple said. You might be able to watch a movie but, as Joe Anish Stern showed, you could plug that battery pack into the wall and wear that thing as long as you want. It is a pretty scant battery. It's not a huge battery.

0:41:32 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, it's a little bit surprising, isn't it? Because they took? They took the battery pack off the off of the headset to make it lighter. But so well, so long as we're making this something that's going to be in your pocket or on the table, why not add next trick? Why not? Why not figure out what the longest movie that people are going to want to see, or what? Why not give people more than two and a half hours? Why not? Why not give people three? I'm sure there are lots of reasons why, but it's like okay interesting, yeah, and you can't, you can't hotswap them either.

0:42:03 - Leo Laporte
That you, yeah, it powers it down when you take it off and it's about a minute boot up. Somebody said, yeah, yeah, I. Justine screamed, screamed when she saw her Macintosh display display in front of her. They are pushing it as a productivity tool. Joe said she was very glad to get a real keyboard back, that that hunt and pet keyboard, virtual keyboard, isn't very good.

0:42:31 - Jason Snell
There's a good video. It's long so I don't recommend. I mean, you should watch it if you love it. But there's, brian Tong did a video that's 60 minutes long but in that video there is some really amazing stuff showing.

You know, he takes a Mac and pulls out a giant Mac screen but then lays a bunch of iPad apps around in that accessory way, but he's typing on the keyboard and using the trackpad and then I think in the category we may have to put a universal control, in the category of features Apple introduced that in hindsight were built for a product that wasn't out yet.

Because one of the things Brian Tong shows is that he's using his Mac cursor with the trackpad on his laptop and then he just mouses over to one of those iPad apps that's elsewhere in the in the 3D space and the pointer goes it's universal control works in vision pro and vision OS to. That's really interesting, because then you can foresee a scenario where you've got a Mac and a bunch of vision pro or iPad apps and you got your hands on the keyboard and the trackpad and you're you've got this kind of control center. And not everybody likes to work that way. I'm actually mostly I'm one monitor kind of guy. But it's an interesting idea that I know a lot of people are going to like, and it is like I'm impressed by the fact that universal control truly does work in that environment, that you can take your trackpad right off of the Mac screen and the vision pro and put it over on the calendar you've got to the left or the messaging app you've got above, or you know whatever and it actually just works.

0:43:59 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it is interesting, isn't it?

0:44:01 - Jason Snell
Yeah, I don't know people will like it or not, but it's like this story of this whole thing, right, it's like I think it's so clever and interesting and will you want to work that way? I?

0:44:11 - Leo Laporte
don't know. Yeah, I think there's a percentage 5, 10%. There's people who actually think it's cool to throw a USDZ object into your zoom meeting and for those people this will be a valuable thing. I don't think it's a. It's a mass market product which might be a problem for Apple, because they want this to be the replacement for the iPhone, or at least the next thing for Apple, right?

0:44:31 - Alex Lindsay
Well, I think one of the challenges is that it's so the amount of work it takes to get to this if it's going to be the future. Apple's making so much money now. They could pivot. And they could pivot 10 years from now and still are sometime five years from now I'm not saying they're doing a bad thing by investing in this now.

I actually have always thought that all the money they give back to you, all the dividends, they should be investing in R&D about new products like it. So I think that it's good that they're spending a bunch of money on thinking about new ideas, but they again I think the iPhone's got another 5 or 10 years at least of runway. That's probably going to sell above 200 million units a year, and so I think that it's a good time to try to figure out what might be next, and I think that I think what Apple sees is what's next to the glasses that don't look much thicker than the ones I'm wearing right now. They just can't do that yet.

0:45:23 - Leo Laporte
You know I see flying cars next. Neither one is likely in the next decade.

0:45:29 - Alex Lindsay
So look at how people drive. I do not think you're flying cars Like. I'm definitely a big, you're just scary.

0:45:35 - Leo Laporte
This is by the way, brian Tong has the right title for his review. He says Apple vision pro epic review. Is spatial computing the future? And that's a reasonable? That's the question to ask. Here's I, justine Marquez, brownlee and Brian, on another one of these creepy meanings. Does not look like I, justine. I have to say eyes are too wide open.

0:45:56 - Jason Snell
It kind of does. See, that's the thing, is it kind of does? And there are moments when Marquez Brownlee talks where he doesn't seem like a mannequin and he's real, and then other moments where he seems like a mannequin and it's weird.

0:46:08 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, and we're also, we're also overlooking, we're also focusing completely on, like, the consumer aspect of this, as there's a there's an existing market for $3,500 VR headsets for industry, for for training, for the medical industry, for all these different that the US Army is probably looking for a new supplier for their new VR AR projects. So they can spend until the until the technology, until the technology develops to the point where it can, you can make a thousand dollar headset that lots of people are going to find relevant to their daily use. They can make a fine profit and a fine, a fine long period of time selling these to researchers and selling these to people who are just going to be running mostly software that they have developed for them and for their use case.

0:46:54 - Leo Laporte
Brian will be on a twit, by the way, either this week or I think it's maybe, next week, so we will get his, or maybe not. Oh, I thought we had him on, I guess not. We're hoping to get him on in the next couple of weeks, so he'll have a little more time with us and we'll get his even more thorough review. And, of course, next week I expect at least two of the panel members to join us with googly eyes.

0:47:20 - Jason Snell
Yeah, I'll jump with googly eyes, but not with the happily eyes happily eyes Before we move on.

0:47:29 - Leo Laporte
Anything else you think we should remark upon is there?

0:47:34 - Jason Snell
Oh, I had. I just one thing, which is my demo came with a, the dual strap instead of that single strap, and you want that, don't you and I will tell you I can't.

I didn't try the single knitted strap again, but I will tell you in June we couldn't get a good fit. And I don't know if it was the light shield or the cushion or the strap, but I couldn't get a good fit. I was moving it up and down, I was tightening it and loosening it. Couldn't get a good fit. It was kind of uncomfortable.

For the four full half hour and I will say this for my demo last Friday I used the dual strap. I adjusted it. It's just a little velcro, little fold over thing so you can pull it tighter or looser and I had no discomfort whatsoever for that half hour that I was using it. So I suspect among the things that they're going to pull off of this thing over time, like that front screen, I suspect maybe they thought that super lux adjustable strap, the single strap, was going to be the answer and that the more people who used it, the more they realized oh, this actually much less. It's a low frills dual strap. It's not fancy knit anything, but it's comfortable. So I wonder if the fancy strap will just go away and they'll just say no, everybody needs to use this thing.

0:48:50 - Alex Lindsay
I mean, these go full beanie is, this is a hat, you know? In fact, in fact, I'm ready for helmet just the whole helmet, just bring it down, you know, just put the helmet on. They did, by the way, they did launch actual ads.

0:49:02 - Leo Laporte
You know, the first round of ads were just kind of get ready, the future is coming in a pictures of you know Iron man wearing his mask and you know a bunch of sci-fi stuff. The ads they debuted on the NFL playoffs this weekend were much more lengthy and had, for some reason, a long haired hippie demonstrating these things, even had a friendship bracelet. I mean, I guess they I don't know, I'm not sure I understand what the agency was trying to position this as. Maybe, as like this is the gonna be the cool new hip thing that people are really in touch with the future will be wearing. Anyway, I think that there probably be a dedicated Super Bowl ad in a couple of weeks. I would be shocked At least a couple they're.

0:49:47 - Alex Lindsay
They're sponsoring the halftime, so that's right they are. Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if something. I wouldn't be surprised if there was some way to or a way to watch the halftime thing in Pro.

0:49:59 - Leo Laporte
Wouldn't that be cool. Then you really would have bragging rights against all of us, for unwashed masses is to reiterate Brian's question, which I think is a good one is spatial computing, the future of computing, Not until the hard work catches up.

0:50:20 - Andy Ihnatko
We're at, we're like talking about desktop computing at a time where, in 1964, 1965, we can come, we can come up all these conjectures, we can come up all these demos, but until the hardware matches up to something that is relevant to people's daily lives, I don't think this is gonna happen for a long, long time.

And I think and we're also looking we also can't look, look past the fact that even when we do get these clear, that the ability to have high definition displays are basically based in pass through clear lenses, we're still gonna have to convince people to put something on your face that you're not gonna be putting on your face ordinarily, like, if you're, you're kind of, you're kind of in and you're kind of lucky if you happen to have bad vision anyway, that we can say, oh great, we can put display technology into the eyeglasses that you have worn every day since you were 16 or 17, these people that are wearing contacts because they don't want to wear glasses, because this is another thing to take care of us, another set of lenses to clean, it's another thing to keep an eye on. That's gonna be a hard. I shouldn't say hard, I guess can be.

That's gonna be interesting conversation to have with society to say that how useful can this wearable be if it makes you on your.

0:51:33 - Leo Laporte
I like Alex's idea of having a bucket hat VR. I think that's a good idea just processing, processing.

0:51:40 - Alex Lindsay
You could add to it in the helmet you never gets cold. It's great yeah, you can have that. You could have the the air be. You know there was. I think that Dyson had that thing that goes around the front of you.

0:51:51 - Leo Laporte
That would have your air, so you can be like totally you're going, completely, iron man, you're going to sealed in seal.

0:51:58 - Alex Lindsay
I'm all in on the Iron man. Like just just throw a helmet on and I think they DC cinematic universe, not like a Dyson thing, but yeah, we're also seeing add the headset with the Dyson thing, you'll end up with the helmet like you pull it down.

0:52:20 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah and that's so long as everybody's wearing helmets and nobody can actually see each other wearing this thing.

0:52:25 - Leo Laporte
I'm sold fashion. I like having a 5k screen that I can. It's actually in front of me, by the way you know, and when I go to the movies or I watch movies in our at home, when we have a nice big screen and great sound, I feel like that's very immersive and I can share that popcorn. By the way, notice every single video. It seemed like where they put it on to watch a movie, they brought out popcorn. This is gonna be so great for popcorn sales because for some reason, you gotta eat.

0:52:51 - Alex Lindsay
Well, no, I can tell you why. I can tell you why is because it's really hard to eat. The reason that, using popcorn, as someone who's tested a lot of headsets, it's really hard to eat popcorn with a, with a meta headset. Oh, you can't know, so see what you're going on.

0:53:07 - Leo Laporte
So the reason is really popcorn is they're like hey try to use it on a couch with your loved ones and all watching the same movie at the same time yeah, I try to drink some wine.

0:53:19 - Jason Snell
And she had to say I did a. I did a VR poker session with a bunch of friends using a meta quest and I had my beer and they kept saying, like Jason, why is your avatar staring at the ceiling? And it was because I'm trying to drink the beer but it's like hitting my nose and hitting the goggles and you're like, and it's like so big. What I'm saying is one word straws straws.

0:53:44 - Leo Laporte
Actually, that's a good accessory. Apple kind of missed the boat on that. They could have a $99 straw.

0:53:50 - Alex Lindsay
I think, yeah, as a, as a maturing family, you know that we have what we have a 15 and 16 year old. We all sit around and watch some movies together, but the vast majority of our viewing is isolated like we would not I sit next to my wife and.

0:54:06 - Leo Laporte
I don't think I ever want to, you know, be sitting next to my wife and we're both wearing our vision pros watching a movie.

0:54:13 - Alex Lindsay
I don't think that's the use case, though I mean.

0:54:15 - Leo Laporte
I think that the use case one of the reasons they put those stupid eyes on the front is because they realized the biggest issue with this is it's isolative yeah, yeah, in the ad this bad. All of the sea. I know, see, I know some people go. Hey, that's great in this ad. Almost all the scenes, except for the last one, he's alone, noticeably alone, like he's in the kitchen all by himself. Joanna in the kitchen.

0:54:41 - Alex Lindsay
I will say that we always remember that there's not. Not everybody has people in the house with them either, and so the thing is is that there is a certain level of escape is, if this had been released in 2020 or 2019, it would have been a pretty big hit during COVID, where I had friends that were doing really well and you know, in general, but they're they're stuck in an apartment, that is, you know, they're stuck in a studio apartment in you know somewhere in the United States and they can't go anywhere and they don't, they can't see their friends, and it was pretty isolating and pretty. You know I, you know I had the luxury of having a family and being able to, you know, hang out and so on and so forth, but they did not, and I think that it was pretty hard on them and I think that there's a lot of folks that would prefer it, would love to have the ability, when they're not, when there's not a lot of people around, to step out of where they live and I think it's a mistake to this.

0:55:27 - Andy Ihnatko
This is something that's this I'm trying to remember for myself as I start to write and talk about this sort of stuff. Where this doesn't, this isn't. I think it's a mistake to regard this as a replacement for the phone or as a replacement for a laptop. This is something that can find its own lane, just like the phone found its own lane, just like the Apple Watch found its own lane, and they all work together so well that you tend to see this as part of the Apple ecosystem that you've bought into. And so the times where it's appropriate to use your vision pro, you're gonna use your vision pro. The times where it's appropriate to be in front of your MacBook, you're gonna be in front of your MacBook. And you can't.

And I'm gonna try really hard not to be faulting the vision pro for not being as good for four or five hours of intense work. I mean, I'm not like Jason. I really. I am the sort of person who like, likes to have multiple screens, and for some reason it makes my brain happy to think that, well, your social media stuff is in this window here, that your research is in this, this big, this big screen over here and the stuff you're actually creating is in this screen down here. However, that doesn't necessarily mean that I want to have like as much as it, as much as the vision pro will allow me to put six screens anywhere, I want nine screens, a hundred screens, probably not her screens. That's not the way that I want to use it, but that's not the way that I will use it if I, if I ever were oh, if I, if I, if I, if one falls off a truck and I might sell.

0:56:50 - Leo Laporte
You are only $2,000, andy. How about the king?

0:56:53 - Jason Snell
of completely bananas things that I want to try out. I think it was Brian tongs video. He showed the NBA app. Yeah, it was Brian tong and it he's got like an NBA game going and then another one and another one, and another one and another one. As somebody who is a fan of the quad box on like Fubo TV or the ESPN app, the idea that I could have like a bunch of sports screens all over like oh, that that actually sounds like a lot of fun. So we'll see. We'll see if it's good in practice. But I like the idea that I can bring up the MLB app and just kind of put a bunch of games around and just have them there.

0:57:30 - Alex Lindsay
That's cool, I like it well, and again, I think that that even in a single game I think I've mentioned this before, but some of the stuff that we had done in the past was you're at a golfing, you're watching golf, and we just take all the graphics that we're we see, just send you a clean feed and all you're watching is the golf cut and listening to them talk. But the all the stats, the stack board is always there for you with all the information that you know one side, your social media, your email, everything else is on the other side. You just look over and or whatever you want to throw over there is over on the other side, and every once in a while you can go into an immersive thing and stand on the green while someone is is putting and all of those things are things that we'll probably see within the first year. That are there and I think some people will enjoy those.

You can show you the man while the wall is being put, without making yourself look like a total to everybody on the green and watching and again, this is an edge case I think that Apple couldn't make more than 10 million in the next three years if they tried, and I think they'll sell everyone that can make. Yeah, yeah, sure they will, yeah at a loss right sure, yeah, sure, yeah. That's how you get things started. The ability to absorb a loss is why big companies are big companies, right?

right right that'll make the antitrust regulators real happy yeah, well, I mean, we have to remember that all the fights that we're having with iOS do not apply to the headset, so you know. So Apple is building a whole new place, and everybody that's that they're in a fight with now, you know, will probably so just have a bunch of development partnerships you like this idea of having five games going on the same time.

0:59:09 - Jason Snell
Oh man, I do that, I do that.

And not only is there NFL Sunday ticket where you can yeah yeah, you have to do the octobox and things like that, but I use on Fubo TV and especially college football season, I will put up four different games on my TV. I love that and I would like that for more things. So the nice thing about this is, unlike the Apple TV, which requires an API that nobody like nobody you can't mix and match. I can't take ESPN and an Apple TV stream of an MLS game and my Fubo TV of an of a like a Fox Sports channel and put them all up there. Vision Pro every window this is something that Neelay made the point about too.

Which I think is interesting is we think about what Apple has done with windowing. There's no windows on the, on the iPhone. The iPad, windowing is extremely constrained because they're like afraid to do like what the Mac does. The Mac is chaos, right. The Mac is put Windows wherever ad monitors we don't care. So the trend from out for Apple up to now has been all these new platforms. Apple wants complete control and neatness and once everything in its right place, and that is it.

And with the Vision Pro, apple's philosophy is put Windows wherever the heck you want. Put them on the ceiling, put them on the fridge, we don't care. I think as a Mac user, I really like that, the fact that Apple is like put them wherever you feel comfortable, because that's how I use my Mac and that's where I feel constrained using an iPad. So, yeah, if I and it means there doesn't need to be a magic API I can put theoretically, if all the apps are there, I can put a Fubo TV window here and an ESPN window here and an Apple TV soccer game here, and they don't need to know that the other ones are running because I control the windowing. It's great, I love that idea.

1:00:58 - Alex Lindsay
That's great and I have to admit that and I'm assuming I can take multiple Macs and put their, you know, put them in the monitor.

1:01:04 - Jason Snell
No, I think it's one at a time right now and I don't know what the limitations are, why they don't. They also won't let you do a multiple monitor, even though you could do that in the screen sharing, so there must be some reasons there. I hope they do that a little bit better, because wouldn't it be nice if you could put multiple Macs or multiple monitors from one Mac?

1:01:21 - Alex Lindsay
Well, as someone who has six Macs and eight screens on my desk right now. Yes, like I'm used to Windows, I'm used to lots of Windows and they represent different Macs and different Windows on those Macs and everything else. And I realized that part of my incredible distaste for laptops that grew. I mean, I literally lived on a laptop for 25 years and now I will barely open one and it's because I'm so used to all these screens. Like every day, all day, I'm sitting here with screens all around me and I'm not, and I go to a laptop and I feel like I'm like looking through, like a little pipe.

1:01:53 - Leo Laporte
I predict in 25 years there will be this special twee bespoke device that you can buy at great expense, that has a single screen on it, and people, people, all the hipsters will go. Yeah, yeah, man, I'm simplifying my life, I just want a retro.

1:02:09 - Alex Lindsay
I like to take pictures of it with my Polaroid and listen to my eight track tape and my Ralph albums.

1:02:15 - Andy Ihnatko
I guess, I guess, I guess some writers can't handle a mono space font. But you know, when you're just in tune with your words, as I am, you don't need these frills like, let's focus man Like let's focus and be mindful about where you are.

1:02:30 - Leo Laporte
Our club members in the discord are asking if the M2 is underpowered for this, what do you think, jason? I guess they could put an M3 in the next version of it.

1:02:42 - Jason Snell
Yeah, yeah, I think I think it's probably fine, right Like I'm sure there are limitations. The M2, I don't know if M2 to M3 would have made much of a difference. I'm sure the next one that they do will have something even more advanced. Keep in mind too, it's not just the M2. It's also that whole R1 sub processor that they're using. That's taking a lot of the load here.

1:03:03 - Leo Laporte
What is the R1 doing in this.

1:03:05 - Jason Snell
I think it's doing a lot of image signal processing and IO. I think it's stuff that on a Mac you might have, you know, using the onboard chip, to do. And they have offloaded all of that Because, remember, according to I think it's Nile the camera processing happens so quickly that Apple says that by the time your eyes see one frame of the pass through, the next frame is right behind it, like it's taking the next frame. They've minimized the lag. You have to have custom silicon to do that, but that is offloading that work from the M2.

1:03:34 - Leo Laporte
12 millisecond photon to photon latency, to be exact.

1:03:37 - Alex Lindsay
Well, yeah, it's latency is a big deal and it's really hard to do. It's like I spend a lot of time working on latency and it is getting. That kind of latency is incredible. Well, you need that.

1:03:48 - Leo Laporte
I mean, gamers want four millisecond response time in a CRT, so you need that if you want to play games, and I think there'll be people trying to do that too. Anyway, the reviews are out. Friday we mortals will be getting ours. We'll do an unboxing 1 pm Pacific, 4 pm Eastern, 20, what is that, I don't know 2100 UTC. We will be opening Micah's, unboxing it and maybe we'll have a FaceTime group hug in it. So we'll stay here.

1:04:26 - Andy Ihnatko
It'll be chilling and awkward.

1:04:28 - Leo Laporte
Chilling and awkward, but still Our show today brought to you by. We're going to move on to other topics, but there's your Vision Pro segment, amir Aour.

1:04:37 - Jason Snell
Leo, you can come into the studio now, Leo it's okay, we're safe.

1:04:41 - Leo Laporte
I don't know, I feel. I feel like, honestly, I feel like maybe I'm just too old for this, maybe I'm too stuck in the past. And this is that there is such a thing as spatial computing. It's more than just a marketing term and I'm somehow missing the boat. And if that's the case, that's fine, you know, but I guess I'm the wrong person to comment on this. So you all enjoy your spatial computing. I'm just be here in the corner with my cracker barrel and my checkers yelling at the clouds.

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Cachefly, let's see. We are seeing some interesting drum beats about iOS 18. I know it's hard to believe, but WWDC is coming up in just a few months and there is evidence that there's going to be a lot of AI built in. That's what Samsung did with its new S24 Ultra. They're using the Gemini models from Google, at least for the, everywhere but China, china. They're using Baidu Apple. Do we know what iOS 18 will be? German's saying it will be the biggest update in a long time.

1:07:44 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, that would track. If they put a lot of AI into Shlomo, that would be pretty big. For the past two or three years, the things that have transformed my phone have always been the things that are AI based. The ability to simply say I've got two seconds to get you to understand what I want you to do, phone, please do it. And the ability for Shlomo to simply be able to interact, not just simply respond, would be a pretty big deal. I think they said they're using ChatGPT, but I can't believe that they have to be developing their own model, would you agree?

1:08:17 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, they have a model. In fact, there was some leak that they had a model and the evidence that they perhaps have three different sized models, depending on whether latency low latency is important. You get a quick response but maybe not as full featured. It's kind of a small, medium and large model, depending on the task ahead. I think it'll be very interesting. I presume we'll learn all in June at WWDC.

1:08:42 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, I mean people are saying that Apple has fallen behind in AI. I mean, let's forget about the fact that they've been doing like AI visual processing for years and years and years. It's not just because I'm at the front and center, it doesn't mean that I've been doing it. But this could be an advantage for them, because I think there was a story last month, very recently, in which they're actually approaching the New York Times and others to actually appropriately license content to train their AI models with. Yes, they weren't first out of the gate with something like Gemini or ChatGPT or Bard, but they have learned from the mistakes of like.

Maybe the pitchforks and the torches will not be coming for Apple because Apple said, okay, we're going to start from where. We don't know when we're going to start with our large language model, but we're going to make sure that we've appropriately licensed or sourced every single scrap of data that this thing was trained with. And even if it winds up being not quite as muscular, it doesn't have to be as muscular because we're a hardware company. We're not selling this as a service. We're not selling this for programmers as hosted AI LLM. So we're going to our stakes are lower and our profits are going to be higher for it.

1:09:50 - Leo Laporte
It's probably worth noting that, as the Financial Times pointed out, apple has acquired in the last six years 21 AI startups. They may not be in public, but they are not avoiding AI, they're working hard.

1:10:04 - Alex Lindsay
Well, apple has a long history of coming out of the gate a little late and then giving it a new name, treating it like it's brand new, and so this is nothing new for Apple. It's very rare for them to do anything first. They do everything.

1:10:21 - Leo Laporte
They also want to do it on device, and Tim Cook has explicitly used the word responsibly, so they're trying to do their own thing. I think it's fair.

1:10:35 - Andy Ihnatko
Also when photo starts to get gendered. Of AI. I'm not talking about, oh, I want a kitty with a hat on that skateboarding on the Parthenon, but just simple things like yeah, I want my friend Justin to be a little bit more to the left and I don't want that garbage can to be there. Those are starting to become like table stakes, features for photo editing, like on in stock photo editors. So I'm keen to see what Apple decides to do with that, if and when they decide to do that.

1:11:02 - Leo Laporte
I guess we probably should talk about Apple's response to the Digital Markets Act. I'm going to give you your chance, alex, but we should first mention that Tim Sweeney says that Apple's plan to Tim Sweeney, of course, is with Epic. So okay, consider the source. Apple's plan to thwart Europe's new Digital Markets Act law is a devious new instance of malicious compliance. Apple wants 27%, even if you do sell it in an alternative store. That's part one. Mozilla has said it's impossible for Mozilla to do what Apple is offering, which is a version of Mozilla in Europe that uses its own browser engine, but a version of Mozilla everywhere else that uses Apple's WebKit. Is it, is Apple being malicious? Oh, yeah, I mean it is, it is.

1:11:59 - Jason Snell
What kind of malicious I mean look, we can, we can, we can call it what we want, but what is clearly happening here is Apple wants to make a construction that one fulfills the DMA, because they need it to be legal and accepted. Two reduces the impact on users as much as possible in terms of security issues and platform security issues. And three, minimizes the net over time amount of change that will come to its platform in ways that it doesn't like. And I think that the third one is what Tim Sweeney would probably call malicious compliance, although I think he would also say things that are legitimate security concerns that he'd say no, no, no, no, they're just being malicious there.

But I do think some of how this is structured. It's structured in a way where, if you read the letter of the DMA, you can build this thing so that it meets all those concerns and yet, at the same time, nobody will want to participate, which is, I think, ultimately what Apple would like to be. The case is that the the some of the terms are onerous enough that Apple's like well, sure, you could leave the store, you could, but most companies even Apple said 99% of companies most companies will look at it and go, oh, no, no, I'm not going to do that, and that's ultimately what Apple wants.

1:13:23 - Leo Laporte
Sebastian DeWitt is channeling Alex Lindsey saying the EU is once again solving absolutely no problems and making everything worse in tech.

1:13:32 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, I mean, and that's pretty typical for a government agency.

So, so the I mean these are digital children who don't even use email from the most part and I'm saying that out of a lot of experience working with them and and so they're just not, they don't know idea what they're doing. You know, when they come to these kinds of things and they're then, you know, given people to advise them, that are children, children who don't have any life experience. So the, the mixture of that is always going to create this problem. So, anyway, but the the issue is is that I mean Apple. I mean like we don't we hire I don't know about you, but I hire consultants to make sure that I pay as few taxes as I'm required to pay, like when I follow the law legally. So all of us, but all of us want to look at the letter of the law of what does the IRS say that I'm required to do and how can I set things up so that I minimize those things. And so Apple is looking at what is the required, what did they write into that law and what are we required to do, and then how can we do what we want to do inside of that? And so what they're doing is what any company would do, being forced to kind of. You know, when people are trying to wedge it they're not going to go. Okay, here everybody gets flowers, you know, like, like everyone's gonna. You know we're not going to give everybody flowers. That's not going to happen and no company would do that.

And I think that the again, I think when we look back at this. You know, I asked my wife what she thought of this whole thing. My wife, you know, uses chat, gpt every day, runs virtual events, not a Luddite, and she was like what is that? And I said welcome to 99% of the world. 99% of the Apple users don't even know that this exists. So we get caught up in this bubble of talking about, oh, this is horrible or oh, this is great, and most of them just don't know or care. They might care a lot more if there's 18 stores that suddenly they have to keep track of and they make the chances of the users thinking this is better is pretty low.

1:15:19 - Leo Laporte
The chance is a risk by saying, oh, we'll start a Spotify store and then your wife saying I'm not going to put a new store on my phone, just to use Spotify. I guess I'll go to Apple music.

1:15:31 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, and that's and the and the. I think that Fortnite found that, I mean Epic found this, when they, when they left Fortnite, they thought the world would come up and you know it would come to their defenses and Apple users were like, oh, there's no Fortnite because they're not you know like they're like even on Android, where they did side loading, it was a massive failure and they went back to the Play Store.

And the thing that all of these developers miss in this thing is that Apple users and, I think, android users some some degree as well, but Apple users are Apple users like. There's Apple users and then there's little apps that they get to put on their computers or on their on their thing. They're not Fortnite users, you know. They don't care like, you know like, and what they want is for their environment to be smooth and easy and everything to work for Apple beyond the the, the big that they get for people buying things I don't update like. As an example, I don't like my Apple TV very often. Why? Because I do all that fiddly little registrations with my apps. You know so. And why do I put off updating my, my computers? Because I have to reinstall applications. Apple having things get more complicated. Actually, it doesn't just affect them on the percentage that they're taking, it affects you know how how often we want to do new things. Because and I think that you know I think that people are and this is to Apple's detriment of their own, of their own volition is like when I see a get sign now, even on on the iPhone, on the iOS, chances of me, but clicking on that app is almost zero and it's far lower than if I see a number, like if I see, if I go for a clock app, let's say, and one says 399 and the other one says get, I'm going to pay 399 every single time because I know get means something weird. There's going to be ads, there's going to be subscription, there's going to be you know. And so the thing is is that as we create this confusion for the, for the, for the user, they'll buy less things. You know, like those, it just like it just becomes harder and doesn't take very much friction for them to go I don't want to play anymore and I think that that hurts the user, the user having a more complex environment. It also hurts small developers, you know, because right now the small developers benefit from people just going oh, that looks like a cool little app, I'll just download it and I don't have to think about it very much and I don't have everything's really smooth. If it starts to become confusing and frustrating, then people will just not take everything at face value and just buy things because they look like they're interesting, and I think that.

So I think that for the big developers, all of this, almost all of this perfluffle, of course, is for the 2% probably half of the 2% that are really upset because they have to pay those big numbers, because you know, 98%, 2.5 million developers do not have to pay this, you know. So they're paying 15% at, you know, if they're, if they're part of the 2.5 million developers that are under a million dollars of revenue, the that's 2.5 million versus about 50,000. So there's 50,000 and of those, a handful of them that are that are thrashing around, you know, doing all of this stuff because, as a small developer, at 15%, I mean, I've been a small developer. I've never been a big developer, I've been. I've released lots of little apps over many platforms over the last 20 years. I would never hit that, get anywhere close to that million dollars. 15% to manage to make sure that no one's pirating my software, to manage on all my e-commerce, to allow me to update, to do all those things Pretty good deal, you know, and so so that's a, that's not a. So I think that the real problem is that the small developers don't really stand to gain very much from this and the user doesn't stand to gain very much from that, and that is 99.99% of everyone affected by this, and there's a handful of people that are really upset about it, that make a lot of money.

This is a rich person's game. This is countries fighting over. This is Henry the fifth fighting over France. You know, like it's not. This isn't like the average per the. You know this isn't a legislation that helps the little guy. This is all about big companies trying to make sure that they can make more money. You know, and so I think that that's the thing we have to realize is that when we, when we have all of this stuff, number one is most people don't know or care. You know about this. And number two is the people who are doing this are very big companies who really like the Netflix's and the Facebook's and the epics and the. You know, they're the ones that want to make, that want to make more money. They want to. They don't want to give as much to Apple and so on, so forth.

But this is a rich person's game. It's the 1% fighting for more of the 1%. It is not them fighting for the, no matter what they say. Anybody who says this is for the user, for a small developer, is either naive or lying, you know, and so the so the thing is is that it is not for the little guy, it is for the big guys to make more money by making our experience as users worse. Like there is no version of this that I think having multiple things, unless you want to watch porn, there's not a lot of other good things you're going to get. You know, the average and again, the average viewer, the average user out there using their iPhone, is not going to have a better experience because they they cut up the store. You know, like the, you know that's. I think that's the issue.

1:20:29 - Jason Snell
I think you're right, you know. I do think you're right that that Apple's goal here is to retain a certain amount of money from the big fish right In the end. That's what this is all about. I think that the bottom line is Tim Sweeney wants not. Tim Sweeney talks a lot about freedom. Tim Sweeney wants all that money he's giving to Apple to keep for himself. That's what he wants and that's the bottom line here.

But I will say this the fault, when you talk about the law being written by people who don't understand technology, apple, I mean, they did Apple a huge favor here, because this is a law that is not about sideloading. This is a law about other gatekeepers, alternate gatekeepers. So I would actually say that, from an end user perspective, if you ended up in a situation where it was more like the Mac, that might be beneficial, right, you go to a website using the existing things that they announced last week, which we haven't really talked about, but there's a whole bunch of things that they announced. There's a huge part of iOS 17 that was just beneath the surface until last week. That is, a new API and all sorts of things, new systems of getting apps approved that that work outside the app store. But you know a user in a scenario like on the Mac, where you could go to a website and there was a developer who had an app and you could tap to install it like you can on other platforms, and it uses Apple's API is to slide up a sheet that says that we've verified with Apple that this is what it does, and then you can choose to download it and pay them separately, and all of that and they have a system.

Well, that, I feel like, is a thing people understand and it might be reasonable, but that's not what this is. What this is is the ability for other deep pocketed companies to set up alternate app stores that will also take a cut from the developers and that will also approve or disapprove of things that go into the store, and what you will end up with is more gatekeepers. So what the EU's rule has essentially done because they said it, you could either do side loading or more gatekeepers and Apple's like, oh, that's an easy one, because how many more gatekeepers will there really be? So you end up in this situation, which is like, yay, now you could choose to have to beg to be in Tim Sweeney's store or in you know somebody else's store or an Apple store. I don't think it's a good deal for most developers, even or users in that scenario.

1:22:53 - Alex Lindsay
Well, and I think that the other thing is that you have one of the largest companies in the world in their entire marketing company marketing division, ready to go, because starting up a store even Apple had trouble starting up their own store and starting up a store is going to be hard and the first time you make a mistake you're just going to get ripped along the asphalt. You know like it is going to be. It is going to be full on every time someone makes a mistake in their store, every time there's a security problem because there will be. Every time that there is all the you know, all of those things that we can say, oh, there's going to be those problems and Apple is going to use them as a cudgel to beat everybody into the ground. You know and so, and so that's going to be. The other thing is that you're opening stores into a very rough environment, which I think Tim Sweeney is ready to do. I think he's. He even got mad at me last week, so I felt like I had what did.

1:23:36 - Leo Laporte
Tim Sweeney say to you Gold star.

1:23:39 - Alex Lindsay
I said something that you know, I don't know what I said on Twitter, something that made him upset. I think I said which is what I've said here on the show before that if I start seeing people doing you know, start doing all this outside stuff, I'm going to give them one star, like which is, which is what I'm going to do. And he said that's poison, you know, so, so anyway. So I felt oh good, I got, I got under a skin, it was good. What about Steve?

1:24:00 - Leo Laporte
Trott and Smith, so I think I respect anyway. Unmasked on points out that free apps are going to be massively, disproportionately, affected by Apple's core technology fee, which is why I don't think it'll stand as is. If you have just two million users on a completely free app, you're looking at $45,290 monthly to Apple half a million a year. This is based on the calculator that Apple put out the core technology fee.

1:24:29 - Jason Snell
Yeah, our friend of the show, james Thompson, who does Pcalc. He he says that he's got more than two million users of Pcalc Lite, the free version of his calculator app, in the EU. So he would have, if he opted for that, he would have to pay. I think the counterargument is a free app doesn't necessarily need to take advantage of this. You can stay within the old system, but in a way that proves the point, doesn't it? Which is, apple has has made this technology fee the way it is, and the first million is free. But it's a low enough bar that somebody like James can can fall into it. So so they're. What they're doing is saying you don't want to be elsewhere, you only want to be in our app store, and if you are, then everything is completely free.

1:25:13 - Leo Laporte
What are the chances the EU will see this as malicious compliance?

1:25:17 - Jason Snell
This is John Gruber made the point on daring fireball last week. I think it's great. Is this is an app submission right? This is essentially Apple submitting to the EU the EU remittal mission. I think that, that, please. This is what we want to do. What do you think, sirs, they?

may get rejected, huh you know they may get rejected, which is exactly what every app developer goes through with Apple is you submit it and you hope that they say yes or no, but you can't check with them upfront. You need to actually submit it and see what happens. I do think, look the the the technology fee, this 50 cents per user, over a million per year, and it's not per download or whatever it's done by. It's the first download on an Apple ID. It's basically per user per year.

It hits a lot of free apps that will probably not want to risk going viral, although I would argue that if you have a free app, presumably you have a business model where you're trying to convert them to paid and your your average revenue per user should probably be more than 50 Euro cents per user. But believe me, that doesn't mean why is it really there? It's really there because, again, it's about the big boys. It's about how many free users Facebook has of Facebook and Instagram and WhatsApp and Messenger. It's about how many free users Spotify has of the Spotify app. That's what Apple's really kind of trying to get with this.

1:26:35 - Leo Laporte
I loved MG Siegler's post at spyglassorg. Apple's deliciously dripping with disdain press release and he annotates it, and I won't. I'll leave this as an exercise for the listener if you want to read it, but it but. Mg did a great job on this.

1:26:54 - Alex Lindsay
I think that the interesting, the most interesting thing is that Apple lowered the price for the EU, for developers, you know, from 30 to 17 plus three, I think, so 20 for their own thing. I thought that was interesting, that we did it only in the EU and didn't do it for everyone, that that to me seemed even more odd than the whole process.

1:27:14 - Andy Ihnatko
I'm sorry, not even for the iPad. Just as an aside, like after every that no, for Apple said, for these new apps were changes for for side loading apps. They said that the EU's ruling was that iOS was a gatekeeper.

1:27:28 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, iPad is a gatekeeper.

So, well, but what I'm saying is is that iOS, though, if I believe, if I read it correctly is that iOS developers now pay if they use the same thing that they were doing before. They're they're paying 20% instead of 30% and 13% instead of 15%. I think that that's what happened, because it went down to 17 and 10 plus three if you use Apple to do the credit card. So it's actually so if you stay in this store, there's a little bit of a step towards and this is to Andy's point that all of these conversations continue to benefit everybody, because those prices are going down the 15% that everyone gets under a million dollars because of this. But it looks like Apple pushed this down a sweet in the pot even more for EU developers to be part of that. What I was surprised at is that they didn't just sweeten the pot for everybody, and maybe they will. I think that that's unsustainable but they don't end up dropping it. So what's going to end up happening is that if you do, if you use Apple the way you use it right now as a developer, it's going to be 13 and 20, not 15 and 30. That's what it feels like it's. It's. It is from that, from that press release, and so it'll be interesting to see you know what this looks like.

The other thing is is that, if the EU doesn't agree with what Apple did, what is the? What is the process of adjudication Like? So they don't agree with it? How long? The question is, how long? Is it something that they can go? Well, we're going to now penalize you a month later, or does it have to sit in EU courts to argue about this for the next two years? You know like, did Apple get something close enough that they just drag it out? You know, you know for another two years, which is I just don't, and I don't know what the answer to that is. I don't know how the EU works. It's a mystery.

1:29:07 - Andy Ihnatko
I just, I mean I, I, I agree with. Oddly enough, I agree with like more than half of of what you're saying, alex. I think the only thing that would add is that, like, when we talk about this is, this is not necessarily about small developers. This, of course, is about people who have the ability to make noise for Apple, against Apple, and get the, get the EU and other regulars to actually take action on this. However, so long as we include Apple as one of the huge corporations that's just out to protect its own money and undermining the usability of a device or service as a result because, I mean, it's, it's been years, but every single time I have to leave, I have to leave the Kindle app to go buy a comic book, that just kills me. Every time I have to leave an app to to do something, all because, like Apple, has decided that yeah, well, we, we, we deserve 27% at least above that copy of Amazing Spider-Man, that's like that's not a user positive thing, and I don't think Apple can make the case that they have earned that big of a cut. The only the only other thing I would say is that it's. I don't think this would ever result in a true competitive app store environment, where I don't think that if I were to create my own app store in which I create the better terms for developers, I think that it would be.

It might turn into that net positive for small developers that we're all hoping for, but I think that in your, as you said, no one's going to want to sign up for Andy's app store just because, even though there's, they're spending the exact same money for these apps.

So I agree with you there. But nonetheless, a lot of the people who are corporations that are pushing for this are doing so because they feel like look, we're Microsoft, we've created what I, what we think is one of the greatest games app stores ever. Like we, why should we have to like create? Why should we have to sell through someone else's app store when we are? Our main business is this wonderful games app store that we think is specifically fine tuned for gaming and specifically to fine tune for our Xbox customers over the the for the tiles that we develop. So I think I just think there's some balance to be seen there, but I agree that's mostly God's ill of versus King Kong, well, and I also think that for Microsoft, I would say, because you gave up on the phone like the caught.

1:31:30 - Alex Lindsay
You gave up on the platform and and, and the cost is that somebody else owns the rails, you know and so, and so the thing is, and to say that you know that that Apple doesn't deserve any money, that's basically. I mean, I agree with that.

Yeah, so the thing is is to say that they're not, they don't deserve any money for the fact that you're using their hardware for this. You know, because people say, well, we had value again at what. What Fortnite proved was that they don't really add as much value as they think, because if they took their app away, the app user, the, the users would just go well, they're not there anymore. I'll go somewhere else, like you know. And so the thing is, is that that? That's the problem is, is that that for an Apple user, the primary value to them is the environment and the environment staying the way it is. For a small developer, again, as I said, if you, you know, going out to some other, you know other platform would probably be pretty rough. You know, even if you got a better number, the number of sales, you know, would be much lower than you had there. 15% is not that bad, especially 13% is not that bad for all the things that you get inside of that environment. So the chances of them going so this is not a fight that's going to affect them, and I think that, again, where the pitchforks and the and the, where the pitchforks and the torches are going to start pulling up, is when Netflix goes. You can only, you can only download our app as a separate thing, and if they do that in Europe, it'll never get to the US. That's the whole thing.

Is that, if they, because that will give Apple what it needs, which is that, hey, we're only going to release this outside of the app, because what that does is it takes choice away as a user. I already got Netflix on my phone, so you're taking something. You're forcing me to go outside of the environment that I already paid for to go to go do something. That's where I think that it really becomes a user problem is when I have to go out of the the secure, comfortable, easy to use environment as a user to have something that I already had.

You know, like you know, you're taking it's essentially taking that away from me, and I don't want to necessarily, and I think a lot of users aren't going to want to give it up and they're going to be frustrated, and frustration by itself doesn't doesn't cause a lot of. You know can be just people just get frustrated by things. I get frustrated a lot of things, except when you have people like me and other people who will focus those torches and pitchforks. You know that's when things become more uncomfortable, because it doesn't take millions, it takes 10,000 willing to cause trouble. Like it doesn't, you know, like it really takes 10,000 willing to rumble, to rip up stores and cause all kinds of trouble. So if they actually do that, it doesn't. You don't have to get a lot of people to damage the stuff that's. It's really sad that you want to do that.

1:33:57 - Leo Laporte
That's just pathetic. Oh I will. It's vandalism. He's ridiculous.

1:34:01 - Andy Ihnatko
You're there with you're there with a can of soup. You're ready to throw that can of soup? Throw it at the motor. Lisa, Go right ahead Alex. That's just BS.

1:34:07 - Alex Lindsay
That's the ultimate.

1:34:08 - Jason Snell
BS.

1:34:09 - Leo Laporte
And I really wish you wouldn't advocate that, at least not on our shows. I think that's all appalling. That's such bad behavior.

1:34:15 - Alex Lindsay
I view it as a user. I view it as an existential threat to my, to the way I like to have my life. No, it's not a threat. Do whatever you want, but don't do that. What do?

1:34:24 - Leo Laporte
you think about? Let's change the subject. What do you think about what Mozilla's saying? Would we not, as users, love to be able to use alternative browsers on iOS that aren't really just reskins Safari?

1:34:37 - Alex Lindsay
I don't care, but I'm sure, like it doesn't really, I mean I don't. I use the, I use the, whatever I use, I mean I don't really. I think browsers aren't that important to me. I think is the problem, it's just the browser. So I don't really care whether Mozilla is up there or anything else. I mean I use on the, on the, on the Mac, I use Safari, or Do you use ad blocking?

1:34:54 - Leo Laporte
or any any privacy controls on your browser.

1:34:58 - Alex Lindsay
No, no, no. That's what I saw I don't go anywhere, I care about.

1:35:00 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah. Well, if you wanted to, you can't. Unless you know you. Eventually I would love to see them support privacy first, browsers like Brave, or, if you want to use Chromium or Firefox, if you want to use their engine, mozilla, I'm sure will not do a you version of their browser. They say it's just untenable. We can't. They say their browser rules, apple's new browser rules, are as painful as possible for Firefox. Yeah.

1:35:32 - Andy Ihnatko
See, that's, that's why we get getting back to the original question. I mean, I think that the EU was hoping for to create competition and diversity. Unfortunately, the rules that they created only ask for compliance, and I mean Groovers, groovers, take on, it is very, is very fun. Like, okay, we're going to see, we don't think that you've actually regulated what we didn't, what we didn't want you to regulate. We found a way to sort of slip under the door a version that is so painful that it will, in effect, be a maintain the status quo. But yeah, so Apple, apple is going for compliance as opposed to let us create a diverse ecosystem of competition and free marketplace that the EU is so much in love with, and I think that they did it in a very, very petty way, and I'm not a fan, by the way.

1:36:24 - Leo Laporte
I mean EU has done plenty of stupid things. The browser cookies is kind of the perfect example that, that silly banner that every website has to put up, of a ridiculous regulation that has not enhanced anything in any way.

1:36:41 - Andy Ihnatko
I will quickly disagree only in the sense that I kind of train myself to. When that comes up, you know what? I will click the button and say please, the default is set to turn everything off and I feel as though, once I've trained myself to do that, it takes one second. I don't really notice it anymore and I choose to do that, and so that's fine. But I agree that people who don't care or don't think about that, that's an extra step they have to do and that could be super annoying. But I'm glad that that regulation exists. Again, it's one of those things that would not happen if regulation did not create the importance for that to happen.

1:37:15 - Alex Lindsay
And I will say I agree with Andy that I, when it came out, I was like this because it was a real problem for a lot of us doing work on the web. But I and but the GDPR stuff has I think part of it was also showing sites that were sharing my data that I didn't think like a government site, like PG&E Can we share your data for, like, and I was like PG&E selling my data really, guys, you know, and and so I think that there's the the flow, definitely, and I do the same thing that Andy does. I just turn everything off, I hit project, project, project, and then I make some pretty hard decisions about websites that make it hard for me to reject their cookies. And you know you kind of feel like their user forward when they just let you hit reject, all right at the very front, and their user, you know, antagonistic when they make it like well, there's an argument for you having Chrome on your Apple device, because Chrome, in fact, no will soon no longer support third party cookies.

Yeah, I guess it's just not. I guess on my I don't, I guess I don't use my iPhone very much for surfing, browsing, so I don't I think, I think it's just not a use case that I, that I that I use very much, so I'm care yeah. It's not very good viewing experience.

1:38:30 - Leo Laporte
So if I need to go look at something on the web, I go back to my computer and I jump on the iPad benefit, I think, from having a third party browser engines.

1:38:40 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, I mean the mobile, because mobile browsing is just such a sewer. I mean, for whatever reason, I've been doing a lot more like reading, like on my phone and again, famously I have Android but I have this accessibility feature turned on that I can't remember where I read about, but thank God I read about it where it puts this floating button. Float, this little phone floating button on the top of the screen, this everywhere. That's designed to make everything on the screen more readable. So you tap the button and it will put it to the simplest one scroll of text with with big white on black text. But for me it's like it turns a news item on a news page from. I've got this tiny, tiny little stripe of four lines of text with a moving video of something on below it and a huge ad on top of it, and every time I scroll to two pains I get a new ad that covers up something has to be dismissed. But if I tap this one floating button, suddenly it becomes just 800 words of plain text to read.

And if they were like an? If, if Apple ever really opened up for alternative browsers and there was an alternative browser engine that basically had for use on the phone, the, the, the primary idea of. We will try to reject everything we can possibly reject. That is not content. It would be terrible for for sites that rely on advertising. I'm very, very sorry about that, but but that's the only the only time that I would ever enable. It is when I can't read this thing because there is too much advertising on the page. Well, and, yeah, to agree with you.

1:40:04 - Alex Lindsay
I think my browser for news is Apple. News and Flipboard are the two that I have that I use the most and I I don't like. I think it's to exactly to Andy's point. I don't really consider the web on a mobile phone to be a browsable like to something that what I, that I would do, because it's just so painful to try to read anything there. It's it's hard to look at people's products, you know, on their, let alone anything else, and so usually on my phone, if I find something interesting, I'm immediately going to go to a desktop, you know to, to figure it out, and a lot of it has to do with cutting and pasting and clicking and all those things. So on an iPad I don't find it particularly fun either, because selecting text is still a problem, like you know. Just just just getting things quickly is not as good as a mouse, and so I think that that's also part of it.

1:40:55 - Andy Ihnatko
Oh, Alex, you should switch to Android. You just went up and then you have a system level tool that says select stuff on the page and will automatically select things by touch. Oh, it's a wonderland, Alex. By the way, Gruber has now just published his I would say about 2000 word review.

1:41:14 - Leo Laporte
I'm sure you were reading this during the during the conversation, jason. I'm reading it right now. Yeah, one thing he said that no one else has said the speakers are simply amazing. He says they're better, far better than the AirPods Pro or Max or any headphones he's ever worn which I have. That's an interesting, that might be a killer app.

1:41:37 - Jason Snell
He also says and I think this is really important.

1:41:40 - Leo Laporte
I have also suffered neither physical discomfort nor nausea in long sessions. So there's that, Go figure. Did not make him go up. He can wear it for a couple hours. He says, yeah, he wore it for three hours he says the battery life is actually is good, is very good. There's a lot more to it, of course, but he has had it for six days, like the other early reviewers.

1:42:05 - Jason Snell
So where do we go? I mean, I guess we wait to see if the he's got a respond to this right. They're not just agrees or disagrees with what is going on here.

1:42:16 - Leo Laporte
Yeah Well, we'll see. Let's change the subject, shall we? We have a fine panel, alex Lindsay from office hoursglobal, wgbh's Andy and Otco, who is imminently going to release his newly updated and beautiful I'm sorry I shouldn't say that, that's mean that's like taunting Detroit.

1:42:37 - Jason Snell
Lions fans.

1:42:39 - Leo Laporte
I'm just, I'm in a mean today and from You're encouraging me, that's good. It's encouragement, it's friendly encouragement, and from the San Francisco Bay area, where we are in fact celebrating today, it's Jason Snell.

1:42:55 - Jason Snell
That's right. I am the I don't know what. I'm not the Joe Montana. Well, let's do modern. I'm kind of a.

1:43:05 - Andy Ihnatko
Jeff Garcia, I'm a Kyle, use check.

1:43:11 - Leo Laporte
I'm not a Debo. You could be an.

1:43:13 - Jason Snell
IUC. Maybe I'm one of the weapons, but Leo has so many weapons, so many weapons, and me I mean.

1:43:22 - Leo Laporte
After all, it's pretty clear that I'm just a system player and that's all that I'm good for. Let's see what else.

1:43:31 - Jason Snell
Yeah, that's what way to be humble, saying you're the Brock Purdy of the show Way to be.

1:43:36 - Leo Laporte
You know I bought for Christmas I bought Lisa a Brock Purdy poster signed and and I said your, your poster just got a lot more valuable today. I was really happy for it.

1:43:47 - Jason Snell
Well, if it was signed by Brock Purdy? Yes, oh yeah. No, I wasn't saying no value at all.

1:43:51 - Leo Laporte
I didn't mean to imply that I signed it. No, no, he signed it. I think he signed it. I hope he signed it. You never know these days, do you? You never know? You never know A funny. Okay, that was our pause, by the way. Sticking out in there. Okay, thank you, and take that part out where I say sticking out in there, cause on video there's no ad to be stuck, so we don't want to tell anybody that there would be an ad here.

If there isn't, oh, they wouldn't see ad, or? Yeah, right, so just this never happened.

1:44:23 - Jason Snell
None of this ever happened.

1:44:25 - Leo Laporte
Why do you that men in black thing that they do? What are they? No, no no, no, no no no dangerous tool, Meta, by the way, just to, parenthetically, meta says welcome Apple and, and, and, seriously, seriously, and we are. We plan to be the Android of a VR headsets. You know they kind of are. They're the low cost leader now.

1:44:50 - Alex Lindsay
And that's good for both Apple and Meta.

1:44:52 - Leo Laporte
Like oh, it's very good for Meta. I mean it establishes the category.

1:44:55 - Alex Lindsay
Right, yeah, it establishes the category. There'll be a lot, a lot of developers that are jumping into it and they are going to come in under that price for a long time. What Apple did is create actually a huge window under $3,500. That is acceptable, you know so. So you know Meta putting out a $1,500 headset or $1,000 headset I bought, you know, I got a Meta 2 for $250, you know so.

You know, there there's a lot of things that people can do that are, you know, less expensive. That Meta is going to be able to do. You know, put in there and maybe it also gives Meta, who's done a lot of R&D in this area, the kind of the okay, like if Meta went out and said we're going to charge $3,000 for a headset, I think a lot of people would have been like that's crazy and you can't do that, and Apple has established that market, and so I think Meta come in with a more expensive headset as well as capitalizing on the less expensive ones. I think is is is good, you know, and I think that it'll also the higher expense, the more expensive headsets just mean we'll have a lot more resolution and frame rate. You know, I think Meta has done really well. At $250, what you can get with a Meta 2, you know and at $600, what you get with a Meta 3 is pretty impressive, but it's, but it's a lot better if you have more money to have more processing.

1:46:04 - Andy Ihnatko
It's pretty. It's just pretty cool that you can say, okay, 35, I don't want the whole wheel of cheese. Like, could you slice off just just the BML watch movies on a big screen on the without having a big screen in front of me and the real good gaming. How much did that cost? Oh, that's about a quarter pound. There you go.

1:46:24 - Alex Lindsay
You know I've been, I've been playing with Supernatural, which is that you. You know it's this boxing game that you can play on the Meta and man, I gotta tell you it's good workout.

1:46:31 - Leo Laporte
They bought that company. They liked it so much. They bought the company. It's a really good.

1:46:35 - Alex Lindsay
It's a really good workout and you are just just try, like I did the low intensity, and I was like, wow, that's a workout, and I was like this is low intensity Like what is medium, medium and high is like death, you know, on on the thing. And so I think that there's a, you know, I think that there is a, a lot of utilization that can be done at a lower cost as well. So I think that it's going to be. I think it's going to be good for both markets and that's a person who generates content for these headsets. It's going to be a great time. Do you mind that they get a little sweaty?

1:47:02 - Leo Laporte
when you work out in them and they're like that. It's kind of a gross. So there's a there's a rubber.

1:47:08 - Alex Lindsay
I do it right in the office right behind here If I didn't need to take a break. There's a rubber piece that now comes with the Meta quest the quest. So this is a rubber thing that goes over the soft area. So if you're going to work out, you put the rubber thing over it and, I'll be honest, it doesn't really affect the. It doesn't lower the experience of using it, but it does increase the length of time you want to use it before it gets really smelly, cause it's. It's a good rubber. You can take it off, wash it, put it back on, so it works well.

1:47:35 - Leo Laporte
Good news for the apple card. Actually, I don't know if this is good news or not. I don't have any metric with which to judge this. Apple card has 12 million users, according to Apple. They finally released a press release. It tells us how many, with $1 billion in cash back paid last year. Of the 12 million customers, 30% use the card actively, that is, making two or more payments a month. I am definitely one of them. I am now. I pay with every with apple card for everything. Now Maybe Apple's touting these numbers because they are right now shopping the card. Goldman Sachs wants to get out of it and Apple's looking for somebody to buy it, so maybe that's. Although in the press release, goldman Sachs says we're committed to continuing to develop, deliver an excellent experience for apple card customers. Yeah, well, okay.

1:48:29 - Alex Lindsay
If you say so, well, they're still under contract. They have to like they're committed, they're, they're stuck with it. Like Apple doesn't want someone complaining about it. So. So they said we're looking for somebody else. But but Goldman Sachs is still stuck in a two or three, two or three more years on the contract, whether they like it or not. So they can hope that, like them, making it hard for Apple is not going to, and their Apple's ability to move away no point in no point in complaining.

1:48:54 - Leo Laporte
And of course, apple says Apple card is helping 12 million card holders live healthier financial lives. So good on you, spend, spend more money. I, you know, I, I, it's just convenient. That's the thing, and and but. This is a really good use for the Apple watch, by the way. I just I, and now that everywhere I go you can pay with the I just we were at Benihana for at least his birthday yesterday and I, I paid for it with the watch, it's like it's free, yeah.

1:49:23 - Alex Lindsay
You don't, even, I don't notice. Yeah, I think that just the Apple pay in general, like you just get so used to it and being able to pay with your watch, with your phone, whether it's with the Apple pay or not, with the card or not, it is so convenient that I mean I, I pay for stuff at the farmer's market with it, like everybody's got like a little you know everyone's got a square or something, but they can take your payment.

And you know, I also I only feel bad about the poor folks that are like busking on the on the street because no one has any cash anymore. Like no, I've seen some. I saw one on Saturday in Petaluma. We were walking around Petaluma on Saturday and there was a guy with Venmo. Like he's like I don't have Venmo. I was like I don't know how Venmo works, and so I was. So I, I was like if you put Apple pay up there, I can, I can.

1:50:13 - Leo Laporte
I can. Actually I'm counting this. I used the Apple card eight times yesterday because we went down to San Francisco we did the tourist thing. I used it eight times yesterday everywhere, for parking, to buy coffee, to buy a San Francisco 49ers NFC championship hat.

1:50:32 - Jason Snell
Incredible. You use near field communication, so use the NFC to buy the NFC championship thing. I think that makes you the NFC. I am the NFC champion.

1:50:44 - Leo Laporte
I'd like to add in there, somewhere there's an ad.

1:50:47 - Alex Lindsay
There's a. There's a. There's a super bowl ad for you, the true NFC champion.

1:50:54 - Leo Laporte
Anyway, I'm sorry that Goldman Sachs isn't happy, but I think Apple really has made tap to pay, at least in the U? S. I think it was already big in the in the EU, but it's really made tap to pay happen in the U? S, I think.

1:51:09 - Alex Lindsay
I think part of it is is that you know Goldman Sachs isn't making any money on it, so they're not happy with it. That's why they're out. If you make it great for the users, users use it all the time, right? So you know. So while it's not hasn't been profitable for Goldman Sachs, it makes everybody want to use it more and be very comfortable with it. So I think Apple's gotten that part down. They just have to figure out the profitability part of it.

1:51:29 - Leo Laporte
New car play will debut this year Car keys and car play, a smarter ride from start to finish. And, jason, you were saying there was a lot of stuff that's starting to come out in 17.4. One of these is some updates to a car play.

1:51:47 - Jason Snell
I think, yeah, most of it's the EU stuff, but they are also rolling out that next gen car play because they're going to start. They're going to start being cars that support the next gen car play, which is talking to the car central computer and showing live data and letting them, you know, providing theme so that the cars can be themed by the car maker. So that's good. You know, the new, new iOS version that just shipped adds the shared playlist editing thing and they've got that road trip like in your car car play shared cue thing going on. There have been a bunch of those kind of things going on in the Apple Music app that we've seen a lot of. But yeah, the new car play.

Stuff is in there.

1:52:26 - Alex Lindsay
Is there anybody with that long? Leo was just showing that the long. Is there anyone with that putting that into their car? Alpha?

1:52:32 - Leo Laporte
Romeo is going to do it. The fancy ones are going to do it, not fancy ones are going to do it, but I'm sure they'll customize it thoroughly, right, but the fact that car play then has, like that, speedometer, is car play, not your car, the car plays access to that car has its own version.

1:52:48 - Alex Lindsay
That has their own version, but if you plug it in, your phone takes over and I think that's a pretty for Apple again 220 million people buying Apple big factories. It's a pretty. You know, most of these cars are not selling $220 million. In $220 million cars. If they sell more than a couple of million a year, I think they'd probably sell hundreds of that. So one of the advantages of it of course is that Apple?

1:53:11 - Leo Laporte
updates its technology yearly. Cars do not get updated yearly, so you can really have the latest thing you know. So I recently bought my Mustang. Mach-e-lease ran out and I got a new BMW i5, which supports car play and Android Auto. But BMW really wants you to use their nav, for instance, like they don't let car play take over the driver's console and then and their nav will show you charging stations. They don't use the car play. You know the Apple map features for that, and so you tend to be kind of in this weird hybrid world where you're most of the fact they even have their own voice assistant and you can tell the car's voice assistant. You can literally say, hey, I'm cold, and it will start to turn on the heat warmer, the steering warmer and turn up the heat. But you can't get car play to do that. But I guess in these, in these cars that support it fully, you will be able to. Yeah, I think BMW, which which was an early supporter of car key, still doesn't want to give up the dominance of the console.

1:54:17 - Jason Snell
That's important. So there's two things, so car key is different. So car key is the NFC based car, so, and that works great, by the way.

1:54:23 - Leo Laporte
I love car key.

1:54:24 - Jason Snell
It is really good, so reliable, it's so good and the car car play next gen, whatever you want to call it. It really is this thing where Apple's working more closely with car vendors to use their flat screen, you know, their LCD screens throughout the vehicle, and this is one of the challenges is the car play? Old, classic car play does not have access to vehicle data. Right, they don't talk to the car, so they can be in a little window, but, like then, the other LCD screen that's your dash, is whatever your car maker wants it to be, and so this new technology will talk to the the real time data from the car and display it in real time, and it allows the themes to, you know, match whatever the car maker wants to do and have it feel more like their car instead of like Apple. And you know this is Apple's way of not but not having to build a real time car base level operating system and get people to license it, because they want this to be more universal than that.

And I think Apple saw where it was going, where the car play was a great idea, but if, if you don't update it, it's going to be just a little phone projection in a box amid all of these other things that are being run by the car maker software, and I think that's Apple's ultimate goal here is to just have it be that the car maker feels comfortable that the user is getting their phone stuff and the car stuff in one place and yet it's also playing nicely with their, their, their car. Now some car makers are going to be like no, we finally got Apple in a box. I want to keep them in the box or even kick them out of the box and have no box like General Motors. But I do think that there's going to be an appeal among a lot of car makers to sort of like embrace the fact that their users have iPhones and actually want to have that data. And it's a big step for Apple to be able to show you speedometer data, for example, because they can't.

They just can't do that now and they can't, you know. They can tell you how fast you're going based on GPS and stuff, but legally the car has to be showing you real time data and Apple needs to be able to display that using car play.

1:56:26 - Alex Lindsay
And also the Apple.

There's a, there's a version of this that could be the real time data, but collecting all that data and giving it back to you Like this was your average speed, this is your, this, this is you know, and analyzing all that data is something that eventually it could do as well.

I think the real thing between Apple and all these car manufacturers is deciding whether people are car people or whether they're Apple people, and there are a mixture of both. So if they really want to BMW or they really want a GM car, they're going to buy the car and they're going to say, well, I don't need Apple car play or, like Tesla oftentimes wins that battle. People buy a Tesla even though it won't support really support car play, and so you know Tesla wins that one will GM win it. I'm not sure, like I don't know if there's a lot of people like, oh, I really have to have a GM car over top of another competitor that will match up with my phone more effectively, and I think that that's the question it depends on, like Alfa Romero, little company, you know, and so-.

1:57:20 - Leo Laporte
Porsche, that's a little. Porsche is a big one.

1:57:23 - Alex Lindsay
Right, but I'm just saying but both of them are niche products, you know. So they benefit by Apple users going. Oh, this is great, and I wanna have this as part of my thing. Gm, you know, wants to turn this into a profit center, you know, like. So let's be clear. Like they wanna have a whole bunch of things and so they wanna charge you $129 a year for a car. That you know cause right now they're only getting whatever you lease it for. They want a little bit more, they wanna make a little bit more money. So giving that up is not something they want and they, you know, they wanna control that space.

I think also, I think some of them are probably concerned that Apple eventually, someday, maybe in a decade, will come out with a car and all this data is super useful to Apple, you know, like figuring out how to make it all work well and do all those things. So it's gonna be, it'll be, yeah, it'll be interesting to see, but I think they really are playing against. Is the user an Apple user or a person that really has to have a Corvette or really has to have? This is their model, you know, and so I, yeah, I think that's the question usually of where it's gonna matter.

1:58:22 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, it's also gonna be. It's an interesting bit of financial politics going on because car makers are making a huge amount of money off of the driver data there's been. The last time I looked into it was a few months ago and I think that they're speculating. Excuse me, analysts have been speculating that the market for that data is gonna be in the hundreds of billions of dollars in the next five years. So nobody wants to. No automaker wants to allow Apple's privacy policies to overlay whatever they want to monetize it from. They also don't want to hand that opportunity over to Google so that they can monetize it.

So there's gonna be some interesting balancing acts between we know that our customers want Android Auto and they want CarPlay.

However, we want to get the benefit of them without losing any money off of it, and it also makes me think that I would love to see if, like I know, there are a lot of car guys inside of Apple like imagine if they did something like HealthKit, only with cars, with all the data that CarPlay is collecting, so they can figure out that, okay, your fuel efficiency was this or your e-vehicle range was this.

Here's where you kinda screwed up and here's how you can sort of improve your next time, or even okay, according to you, as part of a pain in the health app is you spent a lot of your driving driving less than two miles and here are a bunch of routes that you drive a lot that don't involve a huge change in elevation and, according to what we know from Apple Maps, has sidewalks and great places to bike or walk. It'd be interesting, given that Apple's best and I wanna say worse, but less best thing is how it tries to make sure that you are in an Apple world and that everything you do with Apple software and hardware benefits you, because not even if you're not using that same screen in front of you the idea that it could have an eye on what I'm doing while I'm driving and use that as a way to improve my health or improve productivity or make my desktop experience better I really wish that. I really think that Apple could do some interesting things by leveraging that.

2:00:31 - Leo Laporte
All right, let's take a little time out, a breath, Although I will. I think, andy, one of the things you were talking about was this Mozilla Foundation report from September, which card called cars a privacy nightmare on wheels. Yeah, it was really. It really is pretty amazing how much data cars collect we are. Yeah, if you wanna read it, that's a good thing to read. I also I'll just put in one more plug for car keys, if your car supports it. I just I realize that. So my I have a fob for my car, like any normal human. I also have an app for the car, but I also have my key in my Apple wallet and I just sent it to Lisa. I said, yeah, here's the key if you wanna take the car. It's amazing and it's unlike the Ford phone as a key thing which I had for three years with the Ford Mustang Mach-E. This thing works every single time. It's really reliable.

2:01:29 - Andy Ihnatko
It's very, very reliable Keys as a service is one of the most transformative things to something that we've been using in our civilization for hundreds and hundreds of years. The idea that you can give your kid not the keys to the car but permission to use the car between the hours of 3 pm and 5 pm Only if you're activating the key in the certain geopin location which is between the school and your house, and it expires every week or every day. That is transformative, just like the smart lock on my door where it's like I have visitors come over and I trust them, but I just can't duplicate a key and mail it to them. I can simply say, like next time Alex comes over, I can say, oh, if I'm out of the house, here's a digital key, just let yourself in Again. A door lock is fundamental human technology and the idea of giving people not just unlimited access by giving them a key, but I'm giving you conditional access. That's a good concept, that's a power expanding thing.

2:02:40 - Leo Laporte
All right, Pics of the Week coming up next. You watch a Mac break weekly. Let's kick off our Pics of the Week with Alex Lindsey, your pick, my friend.

2:02:50 - Alex Lindsay
So we had a great session with Michael Cione last week on office hours about this new tech called stratatech. So that's the website of stratatech, or strata. Michael Cione comes out of Adobe and, before that, frameio. He came to Adobe through frameio and before that he's worked for Panavision and lots of other ones. He's been part of these pipelines for a long time and really looked at what is the pipeline of building production, doing production, and what he's really looking at is using AI, as, instead of gender of AI, this is really what he's calling utility AI, which just makes a lot of things easier, and so a couple of the things that he showed in our show last week was the ability and there, by the way, they're doing the announcement Thursday.

So this is. The embargo ended this morning, but we got a little preview of it last week and so but this is the software basically lets you, if you're a producer, upload a whole bunch of videos, for instance, with a whole bunch of time code. It'll lay all that time code over top of each other. You can see how they all line up. You can make choices of what you're looking at. It'll even analyze all of the. This is in the cloud. It'll analyze all your footage and say show me the part where the woman is in the kitchen talking. And it's just gonna show you that section.

2:04:07 - Leo Laporte
Like you know everybody, and that's AI doing that.

2:04:10 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, it's analyzing all the frames and allowing you to say you know, this is. He's looking at all of the you know, adding AI to these and again, not AI, that's gonna generate something, but take a look at all the things that are happening in a scene or in the production and how do we make those things easier for the user. So grab all that data. Imagine looking at all your footage, generating all that metadata and then delivering it back to your editing tool. That's my tool, yeah that's from Office Hours.

2:04:40 - Leo Laporte
S-D-R-A-D-A dot tech.

2:04:43 - Alex Lindsay
So yeah, yeah, absolutely, yep, and he's one of the smartest guys in the industry, I mean, and one of the most. We could have done that for two hours watching him talk, but he's just really, it's a really easy. He's a really easy person to listen to. But this is gonna be coming out again. They're gonna be doing a launch on I think it's Thursday morning and where they really show more of this, but it's and the other thing that he's doing is he's really showing how, on their YouTube page because they didn't have anything else to shoot because they were still working on the product they're talking about how there is a lot of other great content, how they're building up their company from scratch. He's got a little bit of funding, so it's talking about that process.

Really really great YouTube site. So, but I think it's gonna be something that a lot of us are gonna be talking about a year from now, and this is I remember you see these little things pop out and you're like, okay, that was a good idea, yeah, and so anyway. So that's so stratatech is, and I would take a look at the website, take a look at what. I think they're gonna release something on Thursday. Thursday, all right, okay, yeah. And then the only other thing I wanna mention is that we had I just was super excited we had Glenn Phillips from Toad the Wet Sprocket on our show Monday yesterday and it was probably one of the best office hours we've done. Like you know, he played some Toad songs, he played a Toad song, he played one of his own songs and he covered Peter Gabriel's Mercy, which in my opinion, is better than the original.

From his studio too, which is cool, oh yeah, from this is so cool. And he's just so like him talking about the industry, talking about his journey, talking about you know how he approaches. Everything was a. It was a pretty amazing hour.

2:06:31 - Leo Laporte
So if you could take me down if I play a little bit of this. No, no, no, no, I don't like. You know PJ Harvey records where it's like a drum not even a drum set a bass, and so he gets out. He gets out his guitar Bigger than any here and when we lie. How fun Office hoursglobal. I don't even know what Toad the Wet Sprocket is, but I could see Jason Snell's eyes.

2:06:57 - Jason Snell
It's a great 90s band. I love them.

2:06:59 - Leo Laporte
I've definitely seen them many times live and I want to see, whatever this is, captain Disillusion's graphics breakdown. I don't know what that thumbnail is, but that is wild.

2:07:12 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, captain Disillusion is a really big YouTuber and we looked at some of his videos. We have a couple of issues with that video, so we'll see if it comes back up again. Nothing like playing somebody else's video a lot to talk about it, so anyway, but yeah, it's a lot of fun.

2:07:29 - Leo Laporte
He wears. This is like the kiss of YouTubers. Right, this is his makeup.

2:07:33 - Alex Lindsay
The funny thing is, I guess the story behind his face is that he decided he wanted to be a superhero, so he started painting his face. Then he found this paint that he thought would be great, and as he got up to his eyes he was like you know, this is gonna be a real mess to take this out of my eyebrows and eyelashes. He just stopped. He's like, okay, and we're done. So one, two, three.

2:07:56 - Andy Ihnatko
I love his videos, particularly like when he shows like a fake U-Day Well, look, I just hit this three pointer from halfway the side of the mood and he's not just debunks but also shows how it's done and other things to look for. And so great videos. But I honestly I can't get over the makeup. It's like as I'm watching I'm just sort of, oh, I don't understand what this makeup is about. It makes no sense to me. I don't know why he's wearing it and it's making my brain like resist watching this.

2:08:25 - Leo Laporte
But it certainly you know who he is right.

2:08:28 - Alex Lindsay
I mean there's no. It makes it really clear of who he is when you see his.

Anytime you see a thumbnail of him, you're like oh, that's one of his I will say his new one on shutter speed, which is up at the top. There is probably the best explanation of. I've had to explain shutter speed a lot and this is the best explanation of shutter speed and why it's important in rolling shutters and global shutters and everything else, and I think that it's. I think it's actually pretty entertaining and I think that as an educator, it's definitely worth us tracking people like him because he's really creative and exceptionally good at what he does as far as adding graphics and little bits and pieces Nothing super complicated. There's no really hard things that he does here, but they're. What's his background? He's I think he was an avid editor before that, like, I mean, he comes from the industry, he's not you know, and so but he's done pretty well because he's pretty good at what he does.

2:09:26 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, two and a half million subs, and it's all because of the face paint. Let's be honest, andy, you should consider it, I think the face paint makes it easier to find.

2:09:35 - Alex Lindsay
I'm gonna do it, not come in, I'm gonna. Here's the thing is I'm gonna come in with vision. I'm gonna figure out how to do come in over vision pro with the silver. Okay, I'll put the silver in the eye of the silver, Okay.

2:09:46 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, I'll say one thing that channel really rebounded after Buddy Epson had to quit in the third video because of the aluminum foil, the aluminum foil.

2:09:56 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, terrible, terrible story. That is Office Hoursglobal and that is where Alex lives day and night and they break down the graphics. Actually that would be interesting to see how he does that and so forth. That'd be very interesting. Andy, you're not gonna pick of the week.

2:10:14 - Andy Ihnatko
My pick of the week is Prompt 3. It's a new but not quite new terminal app for the Mac made by Panic Software, which is how I got my immediate and interested attention. So they've had a terminal app for iOS for a long, long time. I actually had it installed for a while, but they just recently updated to Prompt 3 and now it also includes a Mac client. So the same subscription, annual subscription, will get you both apps.

I like it because I'm not like a terminal ninja. I'm not like an SSH guy. I don't spend all this time in terminals and SSHing into stuff. However, I do have machines on my network and machines I have to deal with where I do have to terminal in just to handle a couple of maintenance, things like to do an R-Sync, to do a backup to a little maintenance check, user logs, things like that. I like Prompt 3 on the Mac because number one it syncs all of your logins and all your settings between all instances of Prompt on mobile and on the desktop. So I no longer have to let go. When I'm using the built-in terminal app on Mac, I basically have to remember, oh, what's the? Okay, what's this, okay, what's the login here? And oh, I need to have this set to 80 columns or whatever. But the other thing is that, again, I'm not a command line ninja. There's stuff that I kind of remember, but when it comes to the R-Sync command to get things from one server to a backup drive on another server someplace else, it's not it's something where I have to go into a notes app and basically take that long command line thing and copy and paste it in. Prompt 3 basically lets you essentially create little cheats like that, so I know that's not unique to terminals. However, I think that they do it in a very user-friendly sort of way.

The only problem there are a lot of really great terminal apps out there. I term 2, is one that, like a lot of people who do spend lots of time in the terminal, will use when they're using it to remote into other places. However, it's designed for the typical audience, for a terminal app, so it really is for people. I need to have like four panes inside each window and I need to have, I need to support this standard that I've never heard of and all these other little things that if you grew up in Unix, then you absolutely. These are like table stakes for anything For me, however, prompt 3 is the one for the person who has a need to SSH in other places but never really has to spend so much time that it becomes.

I wrote where they prefer to type things in or have key bindings for everything, so it's good stuff. It's a seven day free trial, one, I think the I can't remember whether the annual fee is 10 bucks or 20 bucks a year, but one's license will get you both apps, both a mobile app, ios, ipad and desktop, and if you are just looking for iPad based apps, I don't know if you can do better than Prompt 3, than the original Prompt. I did get that installed because there are times when I'm traveling and I need to get back into again my office to do whatever, oftentimes just to turn on a remote access feature that I did not leave on on the desktop and so worth looking at. Seven day free trial, you can rock and roll for the whole thing and $20 a year for the annual.

2:13:28 - Leo Laporte
You could buy it one time only for $99.99. But there are a lot of free terminal apps available on the Macs, Like I use Kitty now, but I used iTerm too for a long time, and of course Apple gives you a terminal app with the Mac. Now it's a little bit different on iOS, and so it's nice to have something. I use Blink, I think, on iOS, but that's not free either. I don't think there's anything free on iOS. Maybe there is Panic. We'd like to support them anyway. Prompt 3. Jason Snell Pick of the Week.

2:14:01 - Jason Snell
This is gonna be. I'm cheating a little bit here because I wasn't feeling super moved about anything this week. But hey, later this week is gonna be a big day. We all know it. We've all been thinking about it. Yeah, that's right. February 1st Apple's gonna release their quarterly results. Ooh Is excited for financial. It's color chart time, financial data mandated by the government Woo. And then the next day the Vision Pro comes out, whatever.

Anyway, I had a realization the other week. I was doing the MIT Mystery Hunt with a bunch of friends Very fun solving puzzles. Everything happens in Google Sheets or a spreadsheet. You're solving things and I had a moment of realization. I opened Excel to do something.

I've used Excel for longer than half the people who watched this show have been alive. I realized I am now a foreigner in the land of Excel, that I have used numbers and Google Sheets so much that Excel is actually kind of frustrating and baffling the way it does things. It does things in a certain way that hasn't changed, because that's actually the virtue of Excel Is the way you learned it in 1995 is still pretty much what it does, and I'm not mocking it. Continuity is incredibly important with that stuff. But what I discovered is I have gravitated toward using other tools Google Sheets for collaborations, numbers for charting and simple basic stuff to the point now where Excel is the third of three spreadsheets I turned to and I realized I don't want to use it anymore. So this pick is numbers, because I do all my charts in numbers, which comes with my Mac and my iPad and my iPhone, but I mostly use it on the Mac. It has all the calculations, it has beautiful charts that are better than anything I can get out of Excel.

It is a legitimately great spreadsheet app and we don't, I think, give Apple enough credit for having done a great job with keynote and numbers and, I suppose, pages. I don't use pages, but I'm sure people love it too. But I can say that with all of the work that I've done on all the six colors spreadsheets that I do for Apple financial charts and data which I'll be doing again in a couple of days I use numbers. It does incredibly well and it has taken me to the point that I don't think I need to be a Microsoft customer anymore, which I kind of hard to believe because they built up so much muscle memory in me over decades.

But even Excel, the one that I still think in Excel for so many different things. I think I've reached the point now where I just I have better options with Google Sheets and with numbers. I don't need to turn to Excel, and so I don't so numbers. I know this is kind of an anti-pick almost, but I use it. It's good. If you have a Mac, you have it, so use it.

2:17:07 - Alex Lindsay
It's all I use. I use Sheets when I need to collaborate with other people and usually I build it in numbers because it's way faster to build in numbers than Sheets and then import it via Excel. The only reason is I import it in there to get it back in there. But the big thing for me with numbers is white space, like I don't have to have all those cells that I'm I just moved. I have a whole bunch of tables, I move them around where I want them and I can present them to clients and they think that I built a presentation when it's really just a numbers doc and it looks so much nicer than Excel.

2:17:41 - Andy Ihnatko
Jason, can I tempt you with another option?

2:17:46 - Jason Snell
Oh, you want the Lotus 1, 2, 3. You know, andy, I think at that point I would probably rather just use Appleworks in emulation on an Apple 2 emulator oh, but there's not even one to go. Pfs calc, huh.

2:18:00 - Andy Ihnatko
It's funny though I mean that was my first spreadsheet I still have the finger the slash built into my fingers, you know, to start entering some.

2:18:09 - Leo Laporte
So I kind of you know, lotus 1, 2, 3 was pretty dominant in the world. Wait a minute, we have another sign. We have another sign. I'm gonna hold up. You recommended Lotus 1, 2, 3. I am gonna hold up. Give me a single Multiplan, no.

I don't think so. I don't think so. Actually, it's, in a way, it's a comment on how free stuff that comes with your computer doesn't get the attention it deserves. I think if they charge 150 bucks for numbers, people would sing its praises, but because everybody's got it, it's like yeah, so what?

2:18:47 - Alex Lindsay
I'd love to say that I have lots of apps, but the two apps that have made the most money for me in the last 20 years is Keynote and Numbers Like you know some of them.

2:18:55 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, they're great apps. Yeah, those are the ones that have generated the most revenue they deserve a lot of us. And I think Page's is pretty damn good too. For that matter, Apple would like to audit you, Alex, and take 30% of that.

2:19:05 - Jason Snell
Yeah, they would.

2:19:07 - Leo Laporte
Hey, did you go to Boston for the MIT Mystery Hunt?

2:19:10 - Jason Snell
Is there a virtual no, no, no no, there are lots of teams that are either partially or entirely online.

2:19:15 - Leo Laporte
But somebody has to go right.

2:19:17 - Jason Snell
But it's like you don't have to go. Actually, that has changed, but we do have some people who are in Cambridge and Somerville and could get over there pretty easily.

2:19:24 - Leo Laporte
Well, how could you get the coin? If you're not there, how do you get the coin? We don't want to win. We are a non-competitive team.

2:19:29 - Jason Snell
We don't want to win because we don't want the work of building the next year's Mystery Hunt. We don't want to win, oh yeah. During the Mystery Hunt, the rule is if you're on our team, if you see any coin anywhere, just don't pick it up, don't, do it, don't risk it. We're not in this for that.

2:19:44 - Andy Ihnatko
It's just like Eurovision. There are countries that, oh my god, that's so lame. Yeah, because they know that. The country knows that if they win Eurovision, they have to host it next time and they don't want that trouble or expense. No, thank you.

2:19:55 - Leo Laporte
Gentlemen, thank you for your time. I really appreciate it. Jason Stelz is going to be busy this week. Make sure you check out sixcolorscom. Those charts will come out on Thursday.

2:20:07 - Jason Snell
And then other things that fly at your face. All of that is going to happen this week.

2:20:10 - Leo Laporte
Next week will be a very interesting week on this show, I think. Thank you, jason, I appreciate it. His podcast is at sixcolorscom. Jason, anything exciting coming up or are you all focused on that?

2:20:23 - Jason Snell
This week's episode of the Incomparable is episode 700 came out last week with a milestone. Rather than do a self-focused thing like we do sometimes, I made it about the latest Miyazaki movie, the Boy in the Heron, because we've watched every Miyazaki movie and talked about it on that podcast, and so I felt it was a fitting 700. And for 701, we are doing one of the two subjects that I have put off until there was a readily available high quality version that was publicly out there, and that's James Cameron's best movie. I said it, oh, don't say it. The Abyss oh god no.

Which is now out in 4K.

2:21:07 - Leo Laporte
Because of you, I watched it in 4K.

2:21:09 - Jason Snell
Episode 701 is all about the Abyss, his best movie and an underrated classic adventure movie. Don't listen to Leo, he doesn't know what he's talking about.

2:21:19 - Leo Laporte
The ending was now that's the new ending right On the 4K. That's somehow new.

2:21:24 - Jason Snell
It's not that new. It's the original intended ending and when he cut a half an hour out, he took it out and you could choose between the 2010,. Use them together, use them in peace ending, or you can choose the wait. That's the end of the movie ending, which was the original ending, which is like what? That's it what. That's all and those are your choices, but it's a three hour thrill ride. I love that movie so much, so anyway, the incomparable, check it out.

2:21:49 - Leo Laporte
We couple of really banner episodes last week in this A dark torturo. This week, next week, we dive into the Abyss.

2:21:57 - Jason Snell
Into the Abyss With our friend Todd Viserie from ILM, who it's his first time on the Incomparable, and what a special time.

2:22:04 - Leo Laporte
And the boy in the heron get nominated for an Oscar. I think it did.

2:22:06 - Jason Snell
It did Best animated feature, absolutely did.

2:22:09 - Leo Laporte
I know it was up for Golden Globe as well.

2:22:12 - Jason Snell
If you're asking yourself, is the boy in the heron sort of in the vein of the charming movie Miyazaki movie like Kiki or Totoro, or is it more of a super weird movie like Spirited Away, that one? That's what it is. It's one of those. It's super weird. It's good, but it's super weird.

2:22:31 - Leo Laporte
And there's some amount of bird poop involved.

2:22:33 - Jason Snell
If you don't know who Hayami Miyazaki is, he is one of the great directors not animation directors directors of all time, so check him out, but it's all animation, let's point it out.

2:22:44 - Leo Laporte
But to give him credit as a great director without the absolute genre.

2:22:49 - Jason Snell
He's one of the great directors in the entire medium, not just anime.

2:22:52 - Leo Laporte
So, having literally not seen any of them, although I went to Kiki's house in Tasmania, so I have some. But which one should I start with? Spirited Away, right.

2:23:06 - Jason Snell
I would actually say well, I would say Kiki's delivery service, because it's nice and cute and my neighbor, Totoro is also delightful and those are incredibly accessible. After that it becomes super weird. But there's a bunch of other, I don't know. There's so many you could just spirit it away, is good, it's weird, but it's good. I actually kind of like Ponyo now, which is weird because that is a deeply weird movie but also sweet. And yeah, there are many others. He's a genius, that guy. So yeah.

2:23:38 - Leo Laporte
I've been surrounded. Castle in the Sky is good yeah.

2:23:40 - Jason Snell
There's a movie about a flying pig. That's good, porkaroso.

2:23:44 - Leo Laporte
When we do the, he plays a plane.

2:23:46 - Jason Snell
No, he doesn't fly.

2:23:47 - Leo Laporte
He's a pig. He's a pig. He plays a plane. That would be silly. A flying pig. No, no he uses a plane like a normal pig.

2:23:53 - Jason Snell
The pig is his. He's a pig because of his low self-esteem. Anyway, there are multitudes from Hayao Miyazaki. Oh, they're all on max in the US. You could just. You've got max. You can see all the Miyazaki's. They're more accessible than they have ever been for American audiences. Now's the time.

2:24:11 - Leo Laporte
I will find my pictures from Kiki's house in Tasmania and show them to you next week. I didn't know what I was looking at, but everybody was so excited, especially the Japanese photographer, so excited to be there. Andi and Akko GBH in your future.

2:24:29 - Andy Ihnatko
Yes, thursday at 12 45 pm Eastern. Go to WGBH newsorg to listen to it live or later.

2:24:36 - Leo Laporte
A vision pro in your future.

2:24:40 - Andy Ihnatko
Not unless there's a lottery win in my future.

2:24:43 - Leo Laporte
I when you get the flying car, you're going to need the vision pro to drive it.

2:24:48 - Andy Ihnatko
It would be. It's a safety thing, you're right. Yeah, definitely get one in anticipation of the flying car.

2:24:53 - Leo Laporte
Thank, you, sir, and of course we mentioned it, but we'll mention it again. Office hours, doc Lobos, where you find Alex Lindsey, and don't forget the gray matter show with Michael Krasny. Got some good guests.

2:25:05 - Alex Lindsay
It was such a fun one. Last week we had Lewis Ferrante on he's former Gambino family oh my God he's writing and man Tim Talk was pretty great. Wow, he sounds a lot like Christopher Walken, but he is talking. Him talking, no nonsense, talking about you know what it's like to be in the mob, you know and how. Yeah, yeah, like he really like.

2:25:33 - Leo Laporte
I notice he has the power broker on his bookshelf behind him, Like every, like everybody on MSNBC to reger, but really really, really good guy and he's, you know, reformed.

2:25:44 - Alex Lindsay
He, you know he said that going to prison for eight years was the best thing that ever happened to him. He learned how to write.

2:25:48 - Leo Laporte
He learned that he was sure it changed his life.

2:25:50 - Alex Lindsay
But he but it's really, if you, if you have any interest in the mafia, it's a pretty great conversation in like getting inside view of what it's like. What she says is not glamorous. He's a bunch of people doing business, killing each other. He's like. He's like it's not, it's there's nothing glamorous about it, but he he talks to about the process. So I think it's it's really to get an ear, to really get a view of it from the inside is something that's really interesting. So absolutely.

2:26:16 - Leo Laporte
Absolutely, and good on him for getting out.

2:26:20 - Alex Lindsay
That's not an easy thing to do, yeah, except feet first, I guess he didn't take the oath, you know. So he didn't take the oath and he went to prison before he didn't take the oath. When he got out of prison he didn't want to take the oath.

2:26:30 - Leo Laporte
But he did. But the reason he went to prison is because he didn't squeal, so he gets respect for that He'll talk about that a lot Like he's like I didn't.

2:26:38 - Alex Lindsay
I never, I never read anybody out. I think he said it. Nothing, that was.

2:26:41 - Leo Laporte
I never read, but I would like to tell you who killed JFK. Apparently that is also. He's writing a whole book about that.

2:26:48 - Alex Lindsay
He's writing a whole book about it, yeah.

2:26:49 - Leo Laporte
He gave us a little breakdown. I think we're starting to understand now exactly that that was not as advertised.

2:26:55 - Alex Lindsay
I don't think anybody thinks it was a lone gunman at this point.

2:26:58 - Andy Ihnatko
Oh, don't get me started on that.

2:27:00 - Leo Laporte
Please, Are you? Are you you still think it was just Oswald, all by himself?

2:27:04 - Andy Ihnatko
I think that I think that in order to I'll try to condense this into 30 seconds or a minute, please, because this could go on you start up, I'm saying you start off with what happened at the elite plaza, at the show, at the, during the shooting, okay, and then you ask yourself what is not explained by these events? Okay, and that's the lens through which you look at every single conspiracy theory about oh, they're a lone gunman, like on the, on the grassy knoll, or no, there was never anybody here or there. Like, okay, but does that you only? You only look for okay, but what if there was a second person there? In other words, Occam's razor.

2:27:47 - Leo Laporte
What's the simplest explanation of what happened?

2:27:49 - Andy Ihnatko
Not, not, not, not. Not just the simplest explanation, but what fits the facts and what you said. And you're and I've again. I could, I'm going to cut myself off here, but every single time I hear any kind of conspiracy I think about yes, but if that had happened, there would have been evidence here, and there is no evidence here.

2:28:06 - Leo Laporte
We're going to have to get them to listen to the interview and see if he agrees. Hey, thank you all. You're great, you're wonderful. Thank you for joining us. We do Mac break weekly Tuesdays, 11 am Pacific, 2 pm Eastern, 1900. Utc. We stream it live on YouTube youtubecom slash twit. Right when the show begins we're about to turn it off because the show's about the end. It's like that. Of course, if you're in the club, it's a kind of a continuous ongoing stream. So join the club. Twittv slash club twit Last day, I think. Yes, to take the survey. It ends at the end of the month. So if you haven't yet taken the survey, I want to get a good representative group from every show, so every show's audience is well representative. Twittv slash survey 24. It's quick, it's fast, it's painless and it really helps us. So we appreciate that and thank you for joining us. Now I have to say I'm sorry, but you've got to get back to work because break time is over. Bye, bye.

2:29:05 - Rod Pyle
Hey, I'm Rod Pyle, editor in chief of Ad Astra magazine, and each week I joined with my cohost to bring you, this week in space, the latest and greatest news from the final frontier. We talked to NASA, chief space scientists, engineers, educators and artists, and sometimes we just shoot the breeze over what's hot and what's not in space books and TV. And we do it all for you, our fellow true believers. So, whether you're an armchair adventurer or waiting for your turn to grab a slot in Elon's Mars rocket, join us on this week in space and be part of the greatest adventure of all time.