MacBreak Weekly 909 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. Jason's. Snell is here. Jason's Mac Apple report card is just out. We'll talk about that. Of course, both Alex and Jason have vision pros. Are they going to return them? We'll find out. And what about that thing Mark Zuckerberg said about the meta quest being the best VR helmet out there? Period All that and a lot more coming up next on MacBreak Weekly Podcasts you love from people you trust.
0:00:35 - VO
Podcasts you love. From people you trust. This. Is TWiT.
0:00:40 - Leo Laporte
This is MacBreak Weekly, episode 909. Recorded Tuesday, February 20th 2024: A $3,500 Cheeseburger. MacBreak Weekly is brought to you by DeleteMe. Have you ever searched for your name online and didn't like how much of your personal information was available? Didn't like it. I blew my stack. That's why we subscribe to DeleteMe.
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DeleteMe's privacy advisors. Make sure you get the support you need when you need it. Protect yourself, reclaim your privacy. Visit, joindeleteme.com/twit. Use the code twit for 20% off. That's joindeleteme.com/twit. Offer code TWIT. It's time for MacBreak Weekly. Look, I plucked it from the air. MacBreak Weekly. You're presenting it to you now. Uh uh, the show that covers everything. Apple with that giggling Andy Ihnatko. I'm thank you for laughing at my joke, Andrew. I appreciate it.
0:02:50 - Andy Ihnatko
You saw it right on the tree, you plucked it and you put it right in your pocket. I don't know why I did that.
0:02:56 - Leo Laporte
There was a gesture If you're watching a video, you you got.
0:03:00 - Andy Ihnatko
I don't know what I was doing, but I got it and then I gave it to you, it's, it's, it's like, it's like you're the audience's uncle and he just found a quarter behind your ear.
0:03:10 - Leo Laporte
That's basically it.
0:03:10 - Andy Ihnatko
That's how you connect with the audience.
0:03:12 - Leo Laporte
It's only a matter of time before I pinch their cheeks really hard. Also with us, jason Snell six colorscom live long and prosper. Oh, look at that. Something or six colors I remember in the one of the early Star Trek's, one of the cast members had to have the fingers taped.
0:03:33 - Jason Snell
The old lady who plays the the Vulcan altar in the in the first time they do it. She, she, uh didn't know that she had to have it like below the camera and then she brought it up and she couldn't do it. Not everyone can do the Vulcan salute.
0:03:44 - Leo Laporte
No, I can only do it weirdly. I can only do it with my right hand. I can't do it. I can't do it with my left hand.
0:03:49 - Jason Snell
Turns out, if you're five years old and you're watching Star Trek every day, you learn how to do the. Vulcan salute. You learn how to do the Spock eyebrow raise. You do all these things. If you get them young enough, you can get them in there.
0:03:59 - Leo Laporte
Get them young Also. Uh, we got them young. We've been happy with us now for almost 20 years.
0:04:07 - Alex Lindsay
Alex Lindsey, Uh, otherwise otherwise uh, in, in South Park it's Moo, Moo, moo Um. The very first episode when Cartman is, uh, you know, abducted. Um, they were talking to the cows. We're talking about being turned inside out. The aliens are like my bad.
0:04:29 - Leo Laporte
This one's gone right over my head. I am an old man, as I have recently discovered, uh, much to my shock and dismay. So who still has a vision? Pro Turns out Micah does, because there is a loophole in the way you do it. Uh, he's got his till February 29th, although it was all packed up and ready to go.
0:04:52 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, so. So basically you announce, you declare your intent to return it, and then Apple gives you two weeks to actually send it in, so you get next week bonus week and a half. Right, but that's playing with 30. I would, I might do that with a MacBook, but with a 35, like a $4,000. I would say you know what? I'm driving that thing back to you personally to make sure you can catch you.
0:05:12 - Leo Laporte
You can, even if you bought it online, you can bring it to the store and they have a whole process. Yeah, Uh, but you need to have to save your packaging. I'm sure you all uh, no, you probably didn't. I know Alex Lindsey went. I'm keeping this. I'm throwing away the packaging.
0:05:27 - Alex Lindsay
I have a bad habit of keeping Apple uh packaging in general. It's just so nice, it's so nice. So there's a, there is a, a, a storage area in my garage, all boxes, all empty boxes of stuff. Um, so I and I, carefully, I have a tendency cause I do send so much back from other things I have a tendency to open things very carefully. So the only thing I usually pull out is I pull out the device and I pull out the sticker.
0:05:49 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I always leave the charging cables in there because I know I have plenty of those. And why rewrap those? And you know, when you get to be my age and you go in the garage you go oh look, all the new Mac stuff's here. You'll be very happy until you open the empty box.
0:06:04 - Alex Lindsay
I will say, I will say the cables that Apple sends out with the newest stuff right now, finally braided uh, power cables. They are the. They're beautiful.
0:06:14 - Leo Laporte
And they're soft somehow. Yeah, they're, they're. How about you, jason? Uh, you're going to keep them, of course.
0:06:20 - Jason Snell
Absolutely.
0:06:21 - Leo Laporte
I mean.
0:06:21 - Jason Snell
I think it's worth. I think there's a lot there in detail uh to spend time with and I want to learn about and um see where this platform goes. I'm excited about it. I you know, I know a lot is being made of uh people returning uh. I didn't propose but, like w, was that not going to happen? It's a very expensive product and Apple will let you return it for no penalty within a couple of weeks. Of course people are trying it out and I I'm not surprised that many of them are returning it cause it's $4,000 and they probably don't want to spend that money on a 1.0 product. I, you know, I I'm not sure. I think a lot of people try a lot of Apple products and return them after two weeks, honestly. But you know, sure, I'm keeping mine Absolutely and I kept the box, although it's a lot of box. I don't know if I'm going to keep it.
0:07:03 - Leo Laporte
But it's a lot cheaper than the $200 travel case. So you just use the box and then you're good.
0:07:07 - Jason Snell
I bought like a $30 case on uh on the Amazon. A lot, of, a lot of cheaper cases for it.
0:07:12 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, as it turns out.
0:07:14 - Jason Snell
Yeah, yeah, but not quite so perfectly. Mine's got a little Velcro bit, so you can just fit it. It's actually just fine, it fits perfectly.
0:07:22 - Leo Laporte
I've seen people do a Pelican case with pick and pull so you can make it just match perfectly. That's a good choice. Probably not, not exactly the least bulky, so the only I mean obviously. I'm asking because of the plethora of articles claiming all sorts of things about the number of returns. Apple does not reveal that information, and so I think what? What happens is people people call the stores or have friends at the stores and they base it on what their friends say. Bloomberg, which I think is probably the most trustworthy, says it's average to maybe slightly above average return rate. Yeah, yeah, I can believe that.
Yeah, I yeah, I mean that. Yeah, if you bought it, you're pretty all in, just by virtue of forking over the 3500.
0:08:08 - Andy Ihnatko
I feel. I feel as though everybody is doing exactly the thing they plan to do with it when they bought it. There are those who for whom hate, like Jason, saying you know what? I have the money, I'm going to buy it. It looks like an interesting adventure. I know it's a 1.0, but I want to be here from the start. And there are people who said I want to borrow one for a couple of weeks and try it out. If I like it, I'll start saving my money for next year, for the next or, excuse me, a couple of years from now, for the next version. So I I do think there's no surprises here.
0:08:37 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, as for the number of people who go in for a demo and buy it, I saw a number which I thought was from Apple, but maybe I'm wrong was something like 15% of the people who go in and try it and up buying it.
0:08:52 - Jason Snell
I'm sure Apple didn't release any information, it couldn't have been the default, yeah, but if so, I mean, I honestly I'm amazed if anybody can go in and be like yeah, okay, here's my credit card 4,000.
0:09:06 - Andy Ihnatko
On the other hand, that demo, like it is, like it is neurologically designed to make you think this is the greatest thing ever, and you are going to be missing out on something that's going to change and improve your life. If you don't get this and I think that if there's, if there is any like disappointment, it's that you get home and then now you're just somebody wearing goggles on your head in your living room very awkwardly answering emails and trying to be amazed by the dinosaur in the room.
0:09:35 - Jason Snell
And you realize that compressed within that 30,.
0:09:37 - Andy Ihnatko
What you want is that 30, that 30 minute experience. You try to chase that dragon, literally and figuratively, and you're not going to get it with the suite of experiences that are that you're going to get with it right now.
0:09:48 - Leo Laporte
Chasing the dragon is an apt description for it, because the first time you try it, just like heroin, it's a really good high, and the more you wear it, the more the high you know you need you know, by any chance are you sponsored, or heroin from bearer corporation. They actually made the name heroin right Bear. Makers of oxy content. Yeah, no, that's somebody else.
0:10:15 - Alex Lindsay
I think it also depends on the culture that you're in. I think that one of the things that that I we were talking about who sends it back and who wants to keep it and I think that for folks who are kind of half in, half out of the Apple ecosystem, I think it doesn't, it doesn't have the same impact because you know you've got a bunch of things somewhere else, you've got all you know. Everything's kind of mixed in match. If you're all in on the on the Apple ecosystem, it's a pretty great device because all your movies are there and your notes are there and your messages are there and everything else is all kind of integrated in and and I think that that is a. I think it has a much bigger impact on people who are using the whole ecosystem, as opposed to people who treat it like an external device.
Cause I know that, like I use my quest almost every day and but my experience is there are things that I want to do on the quest, I go do them and I go, and then I, and then I set it down and, and so um, and so I think that that's a different experience, that's a different relationship that I have to that headset, as opposed to the Apple one, where I get in there and I just find myself doodling about, you know, downloading new apps and downloading the old iPad apps and and seeing how they work and, uh, watching movies. I watched the arrival last night. I meant to only watch one little piece of it and found myself watching like half of it and um and so it. You know, I think that it it really depends on whether you're you're all in or not as to whether you're gonna, whether you feel really tied into it. Yeah.
0:11:40 - Leo Laporte
You can watch 70 millimeter films in it in their full original aspect ratio.
0:11:45 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, I mean, you get, you get whatever. Yeah, okay, go ahead, jason. I mean, I saw the article and it was an applet.
0:11:53 - Jason Snell
Jason has feelings. It's easily overhyped because, I mean, the beauty of any of these things is, if the app is written properly, you don't need a letterboxing. But the story that says you can get the 70 millimeter super wide screen format, it's not actually 70 millimeter. The red thread is great because somebody immediately it's like well, actually, unless it's projected on film 70 millimeter stock. It's not really 70 millimeter film.
0:12:15 - Andy Ihnatko
Thank you, red, but the point the point stands.
0:12:17 - Jason Snell
It's an ultra panavision, you know ultra wide format and it just shows ultra wide. There's no letter box. The problem is, like my guess is that it's still the probably 16 by nine, with letter boxes, 1080 or maybe 4k source. But but the truth is that, yeah, a good vision pro app respects the aspect ratio of the video and is not a box with letter bar, letter box bars on it. Now, that said, some apps do that and I'm I'm very disappointed in them, but the good ones don't do that. The TV app on Apple TV does not do that. I think that would be a very extreme letter box.
0:12:54 - Leo Laporte
I remember. I remember I had a laser disc of Lawrence of Arabia and the original aspect ratio and you it was like it was hilarious.
0:13:03 - Jason Snell
Yeah, it was really. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you could. You could literally watch that movie, I think twice, just in a stack, oh easy.
0:13:10 - Leo Laporte
Oh easy, Probably three times.
0:13:14 - Alex Lindsay
And I and I think that the the funny thing about the image that they showed there, that you showed there as well, is the one thing that I have found is that watching film on a without a background is it shows up, you know, 24 frames. Second is kind of low frame rate, like it's. It's kind of a sluggy frame rate and so you don't notice it when something still is behind it.
So when you're wall or a theater or whatever is behind your, your screen, you don't notice that 24 is slow as soon as you're, but when you don't have something behind the screen you have a 90 frame per second background, moving around with your head and the you know, and then you have the, the screen on top of it, and I find that to be you, really, I to me, I really noticed the frame rate when the, when the screen is floating. Now, the only question I have related to that is whether it's properly taking the entire environment and not change it up to 96 frames a second, because that's what it needs to do to have an even increment for the 90, for the 24. Or if it's doing 90 and then for some reason we are seeing some kind of weird version, because I feel like the 24 is very choppy, yep, and then you put the theater environment in and so, and so I find, oh, it's really like it's unwatchable to me, but when I put the, when I jump into a theater or I jump into Joshua tree or whatever, I find that to be a much more pleasing experience. The other thing is is that I find that my experience of movies is because the field of view is limited horizontally.
I don't really like the widescreens as much as I like the IMAX version of 143. Oh, interesting, and then you go into 143. So, like the latest AJR video, for whatever reason, is like 144 or 13 and a half, 143 and a half or something, and so that one, as well as like Wizard of Oz, is 133. And those because the way your field of view works inside of the headset they look great Like they're full screen and they're filling up everything, the widescreens. I find myself looking back and forth a lot more than I would in the normal environment because I, because I don't have the full, you know, field of view horizontally to make it A little pro tip, though if you sit in the first five rows at an IMAX, you're also looking right.
You should never do that I know.
0:15:32 - Leo Laporte
I don't even think that those seats should exist.
0:15:34 - Alex Lindsay
Like you know, like I, like I have, there are like in an IMAX theater. There are like eight seats that I will sit in and, yeah, the rest, once those eight seats are full. I'm, as far as I'm concerned, like that, that was the only way I could get taken.
0:15:45 - Leo Laporte
Stop in Heimer. But the the the one at the Metreon does have like an orchestra pit where you mean you can't sit right up front. There's an orchestra pit for some reason, I don't know why. Maybe I don't know why, cause the screen goes below the floor. I guess.
0:15:58 - Alex Lindsay
Oh yeah, the screen goes lower. Yeah, it goes down below. Most of the most of the larger IMAX screens all have that kind of huge drop off in the front Right, Like you know that that you have there, yeah, Absolutely. And then the smaller ones have the but.
0:16:11 - Leo Laporte
So I thought you were supposed to look around, so you're not supposed to go like this.
0:16:15 - Alex Lindsay
Well, you can look around, but I'm just saying that.
0:16:17 - Leo Laporte
Wow, silly, and Murphy's got a lot of nose hair.
0:16:20 - Alex Lindsay
Holy cow, the nice thing. Yeah, exactly, if you're sitting right up front, you are definitely looking around a lot. Yeah, the. But you know, if you're, if you're about, you know six or seven rows from the back, you'll get this nice big view of that. And that's what you can kind of reproduce in the apple and you know, the apple theater lets you jump around. You can sit in the front if you want. Leo, like if you want to Really.
Oh, that's cool, you can. You can choose the front row, you can choose the back row, you can choose. I choose the middle. I mean, the middle row is at a knob, you turn or it's like a little, it's a setting, the controls. That's cool yeah. This is to say what row would you?
like to sit in. It doesn't say what row, it just says front, middle, back, and then I think you can sit to the right or left, which I don't know why you would do that, that's that I'm buying a vision, the main level or the balcony.
0:17:05 - Jason Snell
I'll be at the apple store tonight.
0:17:07 - Leo Laporte
Hold one for me, guys. Yeah.
0:17:09 - Andy Ihnatko
No, does it also simulate the date next to you? Who's complained to you that if you hadn't taken so long with dinner, you wouldn't be sitting?
0:17:17 - Jason Snell
one full week and the sticky floor. They do have the stick 2.0 feature, just like Carrot has Just like Carrot.
0:17:22 - Alex Lindsay
Carrot should make their own theater version, you know where it's like a carrot level thing, where it just it has annoying people around you and people eating popcorn and people talking on the cell phone, to really reproduce the entire experience of actually going to a theater.
0:17:36 - Andy Ihnatko
Except you can also just basically explode a can of shaving cream right in their face. If they don't shut up, you can eject that that would pay your dollars, that would pay your dollars yeah.
Like it's, it's, it's, it's, it's really. It's super interesting because, like when a film was trying to compete with television, the reason why Lawrence of Raby was so super white screen was that they're trying to create that enveloping experience. And even if you do have, even if you do have a really really, really big, even like by cons, by expensive standards, like a big, like 80 inch TV in your living room, you're still going to be able to take in the whole scene. And it wasn't until the first time I was watching movies with a, with a VR headset, that I again just simple hey, here's something, here's a Blu-ray rip from a library, but now it's, it's really is on the proper size screen.
That would have been like in the sixties. And I realized that, oh, the director set up this shot so that I would have to turn my head from this way to another to catch what's happening in the background while people are talking. Oh, he was more clever than I thought and I already liked this movie. There's gotta be a lot of people who are going to rediscover what movies were meant, how it was meant to be enjoyed.
0:18:40 - Leo Laporte
I remember going to see, when I was a kid, circus World with my grandma and cinema Cinerama, which is even wider right Then 70 millimeter. It's really wide.
0:18:52 - Alex Lindsay
I remember lots of wide formats yeah. There's two, three, five, then you get to like two, seven, six, and they didn't make a whole lot of those Cinerama. Yeah, they're hard to make. Well, I mean, those are anamorphic, so you're stretching it back onto the film. Is it 70 millimeter? Or also anamorphic? Well, so there's, there is, you know, and there's two different kinds of center, of center of 70 millimeter. So the, what you saw up on high, what you probably saw Oppenheimer with, is 70 millimeter, 15 Perf, you know.
0:19:22 - Andy Ihnatko
So, yeah, yeah, and those are square, so it's 15 per 70, because what they did is they turn it all.
0:19:27 - Alex Lindsay
It's a 70 millimeter but they turn it on its side. So it's still the same width so that it can run through, but it's a bit. It's a much bigger frame to work with but still and I don't think in a true form, in a true IMAX format, I think that would still be one, four, three. I have to look at that. I'm not sure.
0:19:44 - Leo Laporte
Duncurt was shot IMAX 65 millimeter. No one likes that weird film. Stock Lawrence of Arabia, super fan of Panavision 70.
0:19:54 - Alex Lindsay
It's also the equivalent of 18 K. You know an 18 K image. Wow, shooting IMAX. Wow, I will say that's one thing that you notice I've noticed more on my Vision Pro than I've noticed ever before is the quality of the film stock that different movies were shot on. I can definitely tell the difference on a Vision Pro. So I don't, you know, notice it as much on my TVs, but when I watch it on a Vision Pro I can, you know. You can definitely tell, oh, that's really grainy or lower resolution. They shot that. You know. You can tell what they're not. I can't tell yet what they're shooting on, I don't know that well, but I can definitely see the difference of, you know, older 80s rom-coms or you know, like you know, that look much different than they, than than what we see now in a modern way.
0:20:40 - Leo Laporte
This reminds me a little bit of the early days of Hi-Fi, where people would listen to music not for the music, but just because of how it would you know, challenge their amplifier. I mean I don't, I don't. I mean, these are fine movies. I wouldn't want to watch the big, the hateful eight again in any format.
0:21:00 - Alex Lindsay
I used to watch the guitar. I like to watch the guitar scene only because of what?
0:21:05 - Andy Ihnatko
Oh you, oh you, sick man.
0:21:07 - Alex Lindsay
I'm just looking for the. I'm looking for the real reactions that are going on with that in the, in the.
0:21:12 - Leo Laporte
Was it not planned?
0:21:14 - Jason Snell
It was. It was an antique guitar Like, so it was.
0:21:17 - Andy Ihnatko
It was the Martin company like loaned an authentic, like 1850, because they were told, and of course they made a reproduction. For him to smash, oh, thank goodness. But he picked up the wrong one either, either either knowingly because he's an actor, or unknowingly because he's an actor, and so that's why. That's why, like, a lot of those reactions were oh my God.
0:21:38 - Alex Lindsay
And I think she said I think even the, I think I can't Lee, even she, she's going. No, no, no.
0:21:46 - Leo Laporte
She that wasn't acting folks that she really didn't. Yeah, she goes when?
0:21:51 - Alex Lindsay
so, when she reacts here, this is not because this was not marked.
0:21:57 - Andy Ihnatko
Oh, that's the real deal. That was actually that was actually because he just took a really expensive guitar and spiffed it Not just expensive like historic price sort of a kind from him from the museum, a library of the company that made the guitar. They were not pleased.
0:22:15 - Alex Lindsay
Wow, that's what insurance is for Film insurance.
0:22:18 - Andy Ihnatko
So well, that's what kind of say. That's why why I would worry about lending or letting any film company because I'm like, okay, well, I mean, if you really think, I mean it would be an honor for this to appear like as a hero prop inside. But you realize that my grandparents, my great great grandparents, are the only one of his kind. And then when they're on set, like a director says what's in the shirt? For how much would we have to pay if we just like toss this an acid? For real $80,000.
0:22:45 - Alex Lindsay
With my, with my, with my, I had the 950 that I shot a lot of stuff on and I had a film partner that was doing he was doing a, they were doing a film, you know in Japan or whatever, and they wanted to rent my camera to add to the F-23s that they had. And I was like no, I've been on film sets.
0:23:01 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I remember when we were shooting the open for the screen savers with Patrick Norton. They had like an old classic car movie car barracuda or something, and I said don't turn the wheel too hard, cause the tires don't fit. I'm sure Patrick paid no attention whatsoever to that advice. All right, well, so would you say watching the hateful eight in vision pro would be a superior experience to seeing it in the theater.
0:23:36 - Alex Lindsay
I don't know if it'd be superior to seeing it in the theater, but I will say that theater, that it.
0:23:42 - Leo Laporte
Better than on a TV? I guess right.
0:23:45 - Alex Lindsay
You know it depends on you know, I think that for me, yeah, I think that at this point by my, if I'm not watching, I watch almost all my TV stuff with my family, so the vision pro isn't really the thing to watch.
0:23:57 - Leo Laporte
That's my first reaction is that's kind of sad and lonely.
0:24:01 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, but. But but you know, my family's, the kids are old enough now that everybody's got their own thing to do. It's not like, and so and I definitely have movies that I like that I don't think the rest of the family yeah.
0:24:12 - Leo Laporte
I will watch a movie that Lisa's never going to watch, just when she's not around.
0:24:16 - Alex Lindsay
And so, and so I find myself, you know, I would say at this point, it has to be a really good I mean, it's gotten this point already but in my home system is good enough that the movies already have to be really good for me to think about going to the theater, and even going to the theater buy tickets.
And then I find myself canceling because I'm just too busy. Like I just go, you know, and the last time I went I went to see Godzilla plus one and you know, a bunch of teenagers sat down behind me and I was like, okay, this is why I don't go to theaters. Like this is, you know, like and it's like all the quiet scenes that are all giggling and dropping stuff and everything else. And I was like, you know, I could have this would have been a better experience at home, you know, and I think that I mean I went with a friend, so it was fun to watch and talk about it later and everything else, so it was worth it in that sense. But but I think that if I would never go to a film by myself again, like I really have to go with a family or I'm not going to bother, so I think the big question with this stuff is what will Apple's presence in this market mean in terms of upgrading the media?
0:25:16 - Jason Snell
right, because I think that that, for example, the the stuff that the Reddit poster was talking about is is, like I said, probably the same source as you would get if you bought it for an iPad or your iPhone or your Mac. But, like with Vision Pro, are some studios going to be prompted to get an offer out of other digital libraries? You know a different version? That is like, because, believe it or not, there are different versions for different aspect ratios. Hbo often is broadcasting a 16 by nine version of a movie that isn't in 16 by nine, right, like? So there are these questions Will they dig some things out of the archive and maybe make them available digitally on something like Vision Pro, where you could actually have a better experience than the stock, and we've seen that with the 3D, where I think, like we're going to talk probably a little bit about Mark Zuckerberg's comments about the Oculus Quest, but one of the things that's going on is Apple has this film library and it has not been a particularly pleasant experience to say I would like to watch a 3D movie on a Quest, because the library is not there.
So I wonder if Apple will spur more availability of digital 3D. I think it already has, and then maybe that'll also go to other platforms. And then my question is are there other formats? Like I mentioned last week, the 3D version of dial in for murder, which is looks amazing and is available now.
So cool and so like. Are there other things that just never really made it to digital because all the devices were shaped the same way and they all had the same features and so it wasn't really worth it. But now that Apple has those relationships and has the Vision Pro, will there be some more movies and TV shows that kind of they pull that other version that they just never bothered putting out? But maybe it's worth putting on a hard drive somewhere for Vision Pro. That's beyond just 3D, but I think 3D is the start of it.
0:27:00 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, and I think that it's. What's amazing is that Apple successfully didn't make us buy it again. So my, you know, again this gets back into when you're in the ecosystem, when you own over 600 movies on Apple TV because that's just the way you've been buying your movies. Jumping onto the Vision Pro is amazing because I've got 600 movies that I can go through and of those 600 movies, probably 50 of them are 3D and so I can, you know, I was able to just kind of jump on and immediately I have this huge library to work with. That I think is was compelling and I will say that you know, like they're the.
I do think that these extra formats and I think people will get more experimental with the formats. But what I do find right now with the current version is if someone said what is the perfect format to shoot on, and I would say IMAX, you know 143. Imax is what I would shoot on because of the aspect, the feel, how the aspect ratio feels in front of the headset. You know, I find myself, and it's just because the field of view isn't all the way 100, you know, it's not the same field of view horizontally as the, as you, I find it to be much more comfortable to watch 143, 133 than I would normally, you know, and so I'd be tempted to shoot 8K and then crop it to 143 if I was going to do a show right now.
0:28:17 - Leo Laporte
So let's talk about Mark he. He felt compelled to post on Instagram my tried vision pro. Here's my take, shot with quests high resolution mixed reality pass through which, as I understand, is actually a little bit misleading because this is not what you see in the quest three. This is a pass through high quality version of it, but at least they shot it and even showed the poor geek who had to sit there wearing the thing. It's coming up in a second, his take on it. He says the quest. There he is. There's the poor guy. Oh the poor guy he's. He's smiling, but you know he's. He's dying inside Nice house. Mark, where should I sit? The? The point of it was the as not surprising, the quest three is a better VR experience period. To say, I mean, semi colon, semi colon would be a better choice, absolutely. There's the writer in you, uh-huh. Also, he says it's one. What is he saying? One seven times less expensive, which actually is a math problem. Park you with him there. Yeah, it is a lot less expensive. One seventh the cost.
0:29:31 - Jason Snell
I remember saying, like last year, while we were talking about these VR Apple rumors, that the one person who really really, really really wants Apple to do this is Mark Zuckerberg, because it's a validation of all the money and time he spent making products in this category. So when I saw this video, I mean I chuckled a little. Right, because some of his like, oh, it's a better product period. He's like well, except for this and maybe except for that and depending on what you want, and they are different products. But the quest three isn't a bad product at all. I've got one. It's good. It's much better at some things than the vision pro, because Apple didn't focus on those things like there's they. They relied on hand tracking and their hand tracking is way better than Facebook's or Metas or whatever. Mark Zuckerberg's personal hand tracking where he watches your hands, whatever it is, but it's a different product.
It's the work tracking always a little challenging, I mean I would actually I might even place a bet that somebody, whether it's Apple or not, in the next couple of years will make some sort of hand tracking thing for vision pro, because there's so much you can get out of that extra precision. So but bottom line he's got a product in the market. He wants to compete with Apple. I get it. Trust me, he's really thrilled that Apple is in this market. It lets him talk about the quest three, lets him sell people on the quest three as a much more affordable alternative to the vision pro. It validates him in so many ways. There's nobody who is a bigger winner at the release of vision pro, regardless of the quality of the vision pro, than Mark.
0:30:56 - Leo Laporte
Zuckerberg. No, I admit I actually considered putting the quest pro on again and I didn't, but I considered it.
0:31:03 - Alex Lindsay
I. I do think that that Facebook could theoretically make more money this year from the quest, or maybe or this year from the quest than Apple makes on the vision, bro, because Apple can't make as many and they're way more expensive. And what they've done is they've created this shelf of hey. Vr is coming and we're doing all this stuff, but there's this huge amount of affordability underneath it, which is really good for Facebook.
Rising tide raises all boats, yeah, and I think that you know if they had come in at $500, that'd be the end of Facebook. You know, like like a Facebook's a little triad, this, but that's, you know, not mathematically possible. Again, I think it really comes back down to the ecosystem of. For both the developers and for the ecosystem is relatively simple for the development, relatively easy for the developers to move into. I can say, as someone who has developed for the quest, that that's not quite as easy on on that side to develop for, and the other, the other side of it is for users who have really bought into the Apple ecosystem.
It's, you know, it's a very different experience. On the quest of you really have to think about what you're going to get and it's all new world and it's not connected to anything else you're doing, like the fact that while it may seem uncomfortable, like I haven't written a lot of emails on my, on my, on my vision pro, but I do a lot of texting while I'm in there because that means I don't have to leave, you know, like I'm sitting there in it, someone texts me, I look over, I tap on it, I say some something and generally it's correct enough and it sends it off and I go back to what I was doing, and so I find that to be pretty, pretty compelling yeah.
0:32:32 - Andy Ihnatko
I mean, it's the difference between, like, a $35 cheeseburger and a $10 cheeseburger where, like, once you realize it, wow, these are these two. I'm the $35 one. The cheese is nicer and the beef is the grass fed beef is kind of nicer but, gee, it's not like three times as nice as this $10. And now your $10 cheeseburger tastes so it seems like a lot better than maybe it was on its own. And until Apple can and the developers can start to roll out experiences on the vision pro that are really solidly unique to that device not not just it can do this, but it can do it better but here is something that this other platform is just not capable of. That's going to be something that that they're going to have to deal with.
0:33:13 - Leo Laporte
Wait a minute. I have the $3,500 cheeseburger handy that will change your, your, your idea of cheeseburgers forever.
0:33:22 - Andy Ihnatko
Steven Spielberg comes and delivers it to you and hands you the best.
0:33:25 - Jason Snell
It's got gold. It is Steven Spielberg Actually that's what it's called. It's got a lettuce.
0:33:29 - Leo Laporte
It's called actually, mark did make a point at the very end, which I I think it's a great, maybe kind of think. He says that the meta quest platform is open, compared to Apple's platform, which is closed. Does that to him? To him, yeah?
0:33:47 - Andy Ihnatko
I mean, I mean like the low and lower case. Oh, this is very lower case, oh yeah, I mean the, the.
0:33:54 - Alex Lindsay
I guess I would say that it's open, but in the sense that you do need it. If you were, no, we'll ask, I think, to really operate it. I think you still need a Facebook account, so there's that.
0:34:04 - Jason Snell
Yeah, meta account.
0:34:05 - Alex Lindsay
So that's for the user. That's not that open. So you still need the same thing with an Apple. So again, this is for if you're in an Apple ecosystem, it doesn't feel like it's closed and again, you can develop pretty openly if you're a developer already. An Apple developer developing to the further vision Pro is a pretty soft jump, you know, from one to the other. So we've talked to a lot of developers that are developing it. We're having some of them join us on the show and we talked about it and they've been pretty happy with the development process there. So I'm not sure. I think he just doesn't. You know, obviously Facebook doesn't like paying the 30%.
0:34:40 - Leo Laporte
So yeah, that's what they meant by open.
0:34:44 - Jason Snell
Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean he's kind of making a pale shade of the Android argument and even the Android argument it's open, but not it's more open and I'm not sure it's the quest even more open, but it doesn't really matter. I think that it's interesting that he's got you know, he's got an advantage right now in that he's had apps out there for a long time on this platform and Apple is just getting started. But you know, apple's advantage is that they've got their ecosystem, including their developer ecosystem, and a lot of apps that can come straight over, and I would argue that that's one of the reasons that Apple made a $3,500 thing and called it a productivity tool is that they know what apps they've got that can come over and it makes more, and that's where they can beat what meta is doing right now. But on the gaming side, mark Zuckerberg is absolutely right. Like they have a game library and it is vastly superior and probably will be for a long time especially given the controllers.
0:35:35 - Leo Laporte
What do you say to people who say, really, the only good use of this thing would be gaming, and since Apple isn't promoting gaming, get the quest. I mean that isn't. I mean it really is a gaming. It feels like gaming is the best use of this.
0:35:49 - Jason Snell
It's not. I mean, I think the entertainment stuff is better and I think there's a question about the productivity stuff. If all you want to do is play games, you absolutely should buy a Quest 3. It's really good and that's bottom line right.
0:36:03 - Alex Lindsay
But like.
0:36:03 - Jason Snell
I said, I've watched some movies on the Quest but, like with a third party app and files that I have provided by ripping them from a Blu-ray, and so they need to do a better job with their media library. It still won't be as good a movie viewing experience as the Vision Pro, but it could be decent, and I think that that's a place where you had a new role.
0:36:23 - Leo Laporte
What if they made a deal with movies anywhere or somebody that would solve that right? Because then you'd have access to all the libraries.
0:36:32 - Jason Snell
There just needs to be more stuff like that.
0:36:34 - Alex Lindsay
And after complaining about the I think I might have mentioned this last week, but after complaining about the avatar, I found myself spending an hour talking to someone on over FaceTime through avatars on headsets.
You get used to it and we, you know, after about the first 10 minutes I was totally used to it. Looking at it, talking to him about it, we were handing back 3D models. Hey, look at this model, look at this model, look at this model, look at these things and we're like sending them, just popping them over to each other to look at. And so I do think that there is a productivity argument there. You know, especially when it comes to, you know, the 3D, some of the 3D experiences I think are gonna get a lot better. I have to admit that my for me, as someone who does a lot of things where I'm visualizing things and people have to look at them in 3D, and it would make a lot more sense if they could walk around in them. The moment that, in Jigspace, that I could circle something in 3D, like going in front of behind the object and talk about it and do things like that, you know, I was like, okay, I'm looking forward to this.
0:37:38 - Leo Laporte
I'm looking forward to this going on. I'm looking forward to this going on. There are experiences like that. There are some specialized experiences like that, that VR or Helmite will never be beat, but those are fairly specialized. Watching a movie or playing a game is less so. If you want a mass, I mean, maybe Apple doesn't care if this is a mass appeal product, maybe that's the answer At this price point.
0:37:59 - Alex Lindsay
I think that there's some challenges there, but there's an awful lot of it At any price point and sales opportunities.
There's an awful lot of educational opportunities and marketing opportunities. I think that there's gonna be a much larger draw as you, if you go up to. You know there's some websites where you can start downloading all these apps I mean all these 3D models and when you start imagining being able to look at the products like, for instance, you know, I know that you might find them for this, but on Amazon, if I'm gonna buy something from my house and it doesn't have a 3D model, I'm not gonna. The chances of me buying it are almost zero Because like an 80% of the furniture, like I had to buy something a couple of weeks ago and I needed to buy it and I was like, which shelf should I get? And I can just visual. I can just have the shelf on my phone. It doesn't work on the Vision Pro yet, but on my phone I can literally just have AR. It just smacks into my room and I can make sure it's high enough and I look at how it looks in the room and I make decisions about it.
I'm not gonna. You know like it gives it a huge inside advantage. It's not a 100% chance. I won't buy something I can't do that with, but it's pretty low if I'm buying it from Amazon, because Amazon has that built into the store and I think you're gonna see more and more things like that. I'd rather do it with my headset, that'd be a lot better, and so I think there's gonna be a lot more as this gets a lot wider. I think you are going to see people use it more for education, more for marketing, more for you know, those types of things.
0:39:22 - Andy Ihnatko
So yeah, also for the first couple of years. It's an important. 2024 is still a critical year and this is a critical product for Apple because this is gonna help them design the product they know they can make in five years, the one that is actually mass market, the one that will have all the stuff that doesn't work for people fixed, removed, thrown away, the stuff that's irrelevant and people just didn't care about. That's parts off the list. What we're buying it's really the people who are spending $3,500 to $4,000, they really are pioneers here and they're helping everybody who waited a couple of years to get a much better product.
0:39:57 - Alex Lindsay
And I think that you know the we did a lot of R&D that never went.
It never got to the public.
But the R&D that we did of things like we built a virtual museum experience that you can just walk around in and inside of that virtual experience you can sit there and walk up to sculptures, you can walk up to images, you can walk up, you can get all the things you would get with that little weird thing that they give you at the museum that you put in your ear, like all of that stuff was reproduced virtually, you know, and does it replace being in the same room?
No, but if the thing's on tour and you only you get one chance to take a look at it and it doesn't come to your city, it's not a bad experience there, and so I think that those kinds of things are making them more accessible and I think you know accessibility, by the way, for all of these things is a huge factor. You know of things as you're gonna, as we move forward, of people being able, who have limited mobility and limited sight, little limited, lots of things that it can help. It can help a lot of things there that would be very hard to do in the real world.
0:40:59 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, there are a bunch of really nice articles this week or in last week specifically about accessibility, written by people who have used the accessibility features of everything. Stephen Aquino, who's one of the persons that I always look to when it comes to accessibility on the Apple platform, makes a couple of good points, some skeptical ones and some positive ones, including the fact that this is all one ecosystem means that the accessibility features that he uses on the iPhone, on the iPad, on the Mac, are also being used on this device too, and that makes it really really. That makes it really helpful. But others are making the point that I think her name is Jim Knox I couldn't find her first name off the post, but she's saying things about how, like, getting the device aligned on your face perfectly just so is a big issue, and if you have certain dexterity problems, putting that on yourself and making sure it is on your face exactly the right way is going to be a problem. But you're absolutely right.
I'm very, very impressed that a lot of people who are like Shelley Brisbane, who is extremely near sighted, wrote a piece for six colors. Another user who has only use of one eye again, you can simply tell the Vision Pro. Oh, by the way, I'm gonna be using this in monocular mode. Someone who doesn't have use of his arms. You can do the points and the clicks like with noises that you're making. It's a combination of things that Apple is doing a really great job of addressing and other things that make me and some other people wonder is this even addressable in a product like this and what does that mean?
0:42:30 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, and I think that Apple has the advantage of having Apple TV, so I think it'll be really interesting to see how hard. There's a huge opportunity there and the question is will they take advantage of it? Which is doing some scenes for the Apple TV, for the Apple Vision Pro, from the many TV shows and movies that they're doing. We've already seen rumors or seen behind the scenes photos where we see those stereo, that R5, the Canon R5 inside of some kind of blimp or box that's been on sets.
0:43:02 - Jason Snell
So seeing immersive experiences.
0:43:04 - Alex Lindsay
So immersive experiences from it. So, again, it's not we're gonna do all of Ted Lasso in 180 degrees, but what if we did a locker scene or one of the field scenes or something else where it's an add-on, it's not the again, it's not the replacement of it, but it's something that you can kind of find or seen behind the scenes or seeing, or models. Their O-Toy released, I think all the Archive Plus is on the headset and it's like models of the enterprise, like those kinds of things in the deck and those kinds of, and so I think that these add-ons also will be really interesting to see how they progress.
0:43:45 - Leo Laporte
Let's take a little break. Come back with more. We're talking about Apple, not just the Vision Pro, but that was our Vision Pro segment, which we'll probably have for the next month or two, and then everybody will lose interest and we can go on to more important things. I'm still skeptical. I'm still skeptical. You've yet to convince me. No, no, good reason for skepticism still no.
Andy Ihnatko, Alex Lindsey, Jason Snell will be back as soon as I tell you about our sponsor, wix Studio Debate time. Who gets more out of Wix Studio: designers or devs? Well, first of all, if you don't know about Wix Studio, it's the web platform offering the flexibility agencies and enterprises need to deliver bespoke sites hyper-efficiently. But now back to the debate For designers. You can create fully responsive websites, starting with a blank canvas, or choose a template for any layout, or tweak per pixel with your CSS If no code's your thing and you just like to move fast. There's also a ton of smart features like native no code animations and responsive AI that adjusts every breakpoint. We need to try that. It's super cool. For devs, wix Studio offers a powerful site of homegrown web APIs and REST APIs so you can quickly integrate, extend and write custom scripts in a VS code-based IDE. Nice huh Alongside an AI code assistant too. Plus, it's all wrapped in rock solid, auto-maintained infrastructure AI that writes your code or fixes your breakpoints, fully responsive editor or a zero setup dev environment no code animations or no code animations. Designers or developers, search Wix Studio and find out for yourself Wix Studio, or just go to wixstudiocom slash. I'm sorry, wix.com/studio. wix.com/studio and click on the link, or click on the link we have on our show notes. You'll find out more. wix.com/studio. We thank you so much for supporting Mac Break Weekly.
Other Apple news. I guess we it's much less fun than Vision Pro we have to talk about the EU. Eu hit Apple with a half billion euro penalty. This is not over the Digital Markets Act. This is not over the App Store Well, I guess it sort of is. It's over Apple's music. It was a complaint brought by Spotify back in 2018 saying you're out of? Apple has a pre-installed music app. They don't have to pay 30% for the songs. This is inherently anti-competitive. The EU agreed and has now fined them half a billion euros, which is not an insignificant fine. This is, by the way, this is not official. This is the financial time, saying that you're gonna hear about this in a week or two, but what do you think? Apple will appeal?
0:46:53 - Andy Ihnatko
no doubt yeah it's too bad, because there are really deep and delicate discussions we can have about what antitrust regulations should do and if companies like Apple should be punished by virtue of the fact that, look, we have a very successful product, and one of the reasons why it's so successful is that we keep a tight reign on making sure that things can't go very, very wrong, and so it's sad when something like this happens because of what I consider to be some of the dumbest things, some of the dumbest App Store policies where, again, it's not that oh well, we're suing you, you have to pay $500 million because you're not letting Spotify do this.
It's because you are forcing every person who has an app on your store to not tell their own customers about better offers and better deals, whereas you can do whatever the hell you want for subscribers of your own service, and it seems like something that really does need to be revisited Again. There are lots of very, very good arguments about lots of other aspects of things that EU is going after Apple for, but this is the one area of the App Store where it just seems like Apple is being chintzy and a chiseler and just really scroogey and all those other bad-timey movie people. It's like just give up, be a little stank, stunk right, it's not 2008 anymore. Just you know, deal with it. You got how many billions of Sorry? Go ahead.
0:48:18 - Jason Snell
I think the worst part of Apple's whole kind of control and we've had some very nuanced discussions here about why Apple exerts control and why they say that it's good for users and why it is good for users to a certain extent, the ones that kill me are when Apple has decided to compete and also apply these rules to a competitor, thereby making it an unequal playing field, and the best examples that I've got are with Amazon for books. They start Apple books, ibooks, and they don't need to cut in a middleman for 30% for every book sale, but Amazon does, so Amazon can't do that. And then the other is music right, where they launch Apple music as a competitor to Spotify and say well, spotify, on our platform, you have to follow these rules, but Apple doesn't have to follow those rules because they're the platform owner, and that's, I think, the worst of it is when Apple either already has or launches a competitive service that gives them a huge advantage because they are the home field platform player, and this is one of those.
0:49:21 - Andy Ihnatko
They can't stop thinking of Spotify, as no, no, no, no. These all these millions of people that are using our phones with your app, they're not Spotify customers. You have no right to have any access to your own customers because they're not your customers. They're Apple customers and we're going to protect our Apple customers from their irresponsible way that they customers might have of using a competing product. We care about our customers that much.
0:49:46 - Leo Laporte
Apple had a larger fine from France a couple of years ago, a 1.1 billion euro fine, which they appealed also for anti-competitive behavior, and it was revised down to 372 million euros.
0:50:02 - Alex Lindsay
So Apple's going to appeal a couple bills off the outside, and he had a two of them.
0:50:07 - Leo Laporte
You know it is. You know Apple could reasonably say even half a billion euros. Ah, it's a cost to do in business. We're doing pretty fine.
0:50:13 - Andy Ihnatko
How much can an antique guitar cost? Just smash it.
0:50:16 - Leo Laporte
Exactly what is our insurance?
0:50:18 - Andy Ihnatko
They'll complain, we'll just pay them off. It's never about the thing, it's about the money, trust me.
0:50:24 - Leo Laporte
There is. I mean, this is about as clear a case as you could have of putting your thumb on the scale by Apple, or is it? I'll give Alex a chance.
0:50:34 - Alex Lindsay
Well, I think that it's just a matter of. I think the issue, really I think that where Apple's coming from is that they invested heavily and built a superior platform for this. It's their platform and they should be allowed to operate it Like you know, like, and so they're not. They're not a monopoly of the phone ecosystem, you know people can. This claim only works if you say that Apple's the iPhone is its own ecosystem. Doesn't look like every other phone. That looks exactly like it, so every other phone looks like the iPhone.
Now Apple has much, especially in the EU, has a much lower percentage. So I think that their argument is more about from a percentage perspective. I think there's a lot of things that Apple does related to the, how the store is closed and everything else that has that does have to do. That's much more user centric and not necessarily developer centric. But in this case, where they're talking about the charging, I think that Apple's saying well, we built the. You know, we built the entire thing from scratch, we. This has been the deal since people got in, and now the people are making you know, and again, this whole argument is a very aristocratic argument. You know like. This is all about rich companies wanting more money from other rich companies. This is not a fight for the little guy from anybody's perspective. And, of course, the EU is more cavalier because none of their companies are in the top 10. So they're like, so they're, they're much more like whatever you know, and so so I think that it's.
But I do think that you know Apple will continue to have to do this, but they're going to stretch it out because it's worth billions to stretch it out, you know like, and they don't agree with it. Again, there, you can look at it as what's what's the right thing to do, or whatever, but the bottom line is is they have an opinion, and you as an opinion, and they'll keep on scrapping it out until because they're making billions while they scrap it out, and and I think that they fundamentally just don't agree, because I think they, you know, and I think that there is a valid case for the fact that you know they built the house that everybody is living on. I mean, spotify wouldn't exist in any way, shape or form without the iPhone. You know like it's. You know like it wasn't going to ever make it in a desktop Like as a desktop app. Spotify was never going to make it Like you know, so like that wasn't going to be Facebook.
0:52:50 - Leo Laporte
This is a related story For a long time, I guess, was selling boosted posts on Facebook and when they were doing it in the you know, on the Facebook app in on the iPhone, apple updated its review guidelines in 2022 to say that that should use the in-app purchase system, giving Apple 30%. Facebook's resulting response was oh well, well, they just will mark that fee up 30% when they purchase it through the Facebook or Instagram apps for iOS. We'll offset it. I think actually, spotify does something similar, right? If you buy a Spotify subscription on on the iPhone, it costs more than if you buy it through their website or on or somewhere else. Apple's response is we've always required the purchases of digital goods and services within apps to use in-app purchases. Boosting, which allows an individual organization to pay to increase the reach of a post or profile as a digital service. So, of course, in-app purchases required.
0:54:02 - Andy Ihnatko
Well, that's that then.
0:54:03 - Leo Laporte
That's that, that's that. And so if you say, well, you know, so what? What doesn't affect me? Well, it does if you have to pay 30% more for goods and services purchased through Apple.
0:54:14 - Jason Snell
So I mean I don't entirely agree with with what Alex said about Spotify, but this is an example where I'm actually kind of completely on board, which is you want to use?
0:54:24 - Alex Lindsay
if you want to use Apple's, well, I mean it's.
0:54:28 - Jason Snell
I have. I have not a lot of love for Spotify either, honestly, but this is a pure digital product that exists inside an app, inside the ecosystem that is doing nothing other than essentially boosting a post Like this is as pure a digital transaction as you could possibly have. It's not even a subscription maintenance or a relationship maintenance. It's literally like I want to boost this post, boom, and you're using Apple's system to do it. Now I know that there are some counterarguments about like, well, there's no other system you're allowed to do. That's true, but you can also go to the web and do it, and you're choosing to do it in the Facebook app. And so if Apple's saying, well, there's a pure digital transaction in an app, so we want our 30% in Facebook.
0:55:06 - Leo Laporte
That's a convenience fee, okay, yeah.
0:55:07 - Jason Snell
It's a convenience fee for the user at that point to stay in there and not go to the website.
0:55:12 - Leo Laporte
I mean there's an argument to be made. I'm less worried about that one. Is it reasonable for meta to pass the cost along to the consumer? I think so.
0:55:20 - Jason Snell
Yeah, why not? Yeah, 100%, I mean. And meta is what's meta, is what's meta's profit on that too, what's their margin on?
0:55:28 - Alex Lindsay
that it's infinite right, it's 100% right.
0:55:30 - Jason Snell
So like we're divvying up essentially free to the corporations.
0:55:34 - Leo Laporte
It's different for Spotify because they pay for the music they have to and they're being, frankly, constantly pressured by the music labels.
0:55:44 - Jason Snell
And I agree with Alex that there is this argument that Apple built it and so Apple should benefit. That I agree to a certain extent, but I do think that at some point you do have to draw a line and say we can't have it be that whoever owns one of the two dominant operating systems for smartphones in the world, those are company towns, and there's company town A and there's company town B, and so everything at you know, on Apple's platforms must be Apple or go through Apple or pay a tithe to Apple, and everything on Google's platforms must be Google and you have to pay a tithe to Google. And I think that's what's behind a lot of the at least the motivations of the EU is should it not at some point, in some point in the process of that ecosystem? Should there not be some competition? That goes on, and I think that's where the crux of the argument can happen.
And that's how I feel about Apple, like going to the trouble of building a competing service for books or for music and then having rules for them Because, like it's not like Apple pays 30% to a mysterious middleman somewhere, they just keep the money. They just keep the money in Spotify, doesn't.
0:56:47 - Alex Lindsay
Well, and I, but I think, and I think, I do think that when someone gets to a point where they have 75% of the global market, or 80% of the global market you have, you have a monopoly issue that starts to become up, you know, but I think that at 25% of the market which is about what an Apple's global market is it's a lot bigger than the United States 50%, but it's 25% of the global market People still have a lot of choices about where they, where they want to go, and you know, most likely Samsung is going to split out from Google, and so there'll be, you know, other ones that are that are coming out at that point, and so so the you know.
I think that again, I do think that that's the case, I think that, but I think we have to be very careful of starting to decide.
Governments can just start clipping people, you know, clipping companies that have been, you know, put a lot of effort and a lot of effort in it, because a lot of it has to do with, you know, apple is a much, much more of an adult like when it comes to how they run products out, and everybody else's products have been substandard, you know, and that's why these there's a lot of other stores that have been out there that didn't work, and it's because they're the way that they do those, the way that they build their products, often at least lack taste, if not like when you look at it, when you open them up, the way that the interface works and the way it, you know, and a lot of the stuff is frustrating, that's. I mean, apple has one on that, on one on taste for a long time, and I'm still, when I open up windows, I'm still like no taste is still missing, like you know, like it's still. It does the thing, but it's still ugly and it's still wonky, you know, compared to what the Apple does.
0:58:18 - Andy Ihnatko
Well, I think you acknowledge that it's a matter of personal taste. Like I use Spotify instead of Apple Music because I just think the Spotify interface is better, I'll take the quick access to what it is that I came there to listen to over the higher quality music, even though I'm kind of upset that Spotify has not deemed it possible to get like the higher quality music anyway. But for me it's. It's just that there are, there are times where I just want to ask figuratively Apple like what are you doing to earn this 30%? Or why are you? Why are you protecting? How are you protecting consumers and creating a better product by refusing to allow a developer to tell you oh, by the way, I can't afford the 30% tariff, I don't have 30. If I wish that I were making a 30% margin on the service that I'm making, but if you come to my website, I will be able to sell it to you at a much better price.
And Apple saying Nope, you can't do that, we don't, we're not going to allow you to do that. And if you do, if you sell it at your own site for a better price, you have to sell it the same price through our apps Like that is, to me, bullying behavior, and I do respect your opinion about a lot of this is really about and I trust it really does come to these simple but baffling questions like what does constitute a market and what constitutes a monopoly of that market. So I absolutely hear you when you're saying that the Apple is. The is by far the, not the not the number one mobile phone operating system out there and by virtue of that fact, there are lots of options out there. But that is a little bit like saying, oh well, yeah, there's one family that owns every single business in this town and basically also owns the railway and the bus line going out of this town, but there are other towns.
Just pack up, sell your house, move to another neighborhood, make new friends, and basically having to switch from an iPhone to an Android phone on that kind of a point is not a frictionless thing, and so I don't think that's a slam dunk answer to your position, but I think it's part of the discussion.
1:00:15 - Jason Snell
We should also. I want to clarify it If you've been a Spotify subscriber for a year, it's 15%. It's that first year, that's 30%, and so there's a churn penalty.
1:00:22 - Alex Lindsay
But to be clear, by the way, I agree with Andy.
1:00:25 - Jason Snell
I think one of the arguments we often have in monopoly discussions is are you using your power in place a to exert power in place B? And there is an argument to be made, at least. That saying you need to change your phone operating system because you want to buy books differently or listen to music differently is kind of an extreme example of how much you have to do in order to see this and that there's some competition. But I agree, this is, this is why I think different countries are approaching this thing differently. Because is this that should they intervene? You know and it is a duopoly really I mean, it's Google's rules plus Apple's rules are effectively the whole smartphone market.
1:01:06 - Leo Laporte
So yeah, by the way, that 15% I misunderstood for a long time isn't that the Spotify app has been on the store for a year. It's that you have been subscribing for a year. Yes, so every new subscriber pays 30% until they've been a subscriber for a year.
1:01:23 - Jason Snell
Year two and for an onward, if you keep your subscription to anything in the app store is 15%. It's just the first year that's 30. Or individual transactions, right, individual transactions? If you're not a small business in that small business program, all that stuff is 30. But the year two of all subscriptions in Apple system are now 15. Have been for some will say.
1:01:46 - Leo Laporte
Besides that, they will also say well, spotify doesn't allow you to buy on the iPhone anymore, and that's precisely why because they don't want to give Apple. Actually, I think Spotify used to charge 13 bucks If you bought it on the iPhone and 10 bucks a month if you bought it on your on their website, so they were actually passing that along to the customer. But I think that the real issue is if Apple does this, isn't that a disadvantage for Spotify?
1:02:13 - Jason Snell
Because what right? Because what it's doing is it's saying pretend that there's no website and pretend that nobody can ever sign up for your app because we can't put a web link in that says you can't subscribe here, go to Spotify to subscribe. And Apple says no, no, no, we can't do that. That's too terrifying and dangerous to let people know that a website exists.
1:02:31 - Leo Laporte
You can't even say cheaper elsewhere.
1:02:34 - Jason Snell
You can't like, you can't apply in any way that the 1299 you're paying for Spotify per month would be would be $3 less if you did somewhere else, but regardless saying you can, you know, just not having a link to your website because that's too dangerous and Kindle works the same way, right, where Amazon's not supposed to even say you could go to Amazon and buy books. They're like, well, how are you going to get some books?
1:02:56 - Leo Laporte
I don't know. I'm signing out Apple's regular excuses as well as security, but this is the second time in as many weeks that Apple has allowed a fake app on the app store that was taking people's money before. It was a fake last pass app. That was last pass but had the same icon now and, by the way, apple's taken it down, but it was there for a while. It was approved a fake crypto wallet on the app store. Apple has removed it, but you got to wonder if Apple's saying, well, we'll see how much more secure we are, why? Why is this stuff getting through?
1:03:31 - Alex Lindsay
Well, because because developers complain if it takes too long. You know, apple, you know, you know like the, so the, you know, that's why I guess, some of the stuff gets through, because Apple has to balance it. Nothing's ever going to be 100% secure, but Apple, if Apple makes it, if Apple tightens too far, then then they get complaints on hey, it's taking too long to get this through, because it takes time to get these things through, and if they go too fast, they'll, they'll, some, some of those go through. I think that it's a you know. I think that it's hard to argue that it's not a more secure platform. I mean, it's definitely not a completely secure platform though. Okay, true.
1:04:05 - Leo Laporte
More secure, but not completely secure.
1:04:07 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah.
1:04:09 - Leo Laporte
And Apple certainly would want you not to make it less secure by putting a link to your website on your in your app. Yes, that would be terrible.
1:04:17 - Alex Lindsay
Well, I think that also. That again, I think that there's a ease of use thing that affects the users, you know. So, like I think that, like I don't subscribe if I get a link to an act, if I get something that I have to pay for externally, I tend to just not do it anymore. Right, I did it for a little while, but I can't remember the passwords and I get mad Convenient as a user, so I have a. So from from Apple's perspective, it's a lower quality experience. Like I don't subscribe to Spotify anymore because it required me I got it expired for some reason a credit card or whatever, and then it said, oh, you can't do it. And I was like, no, I'll stick with the free version.
1:04:48 - Leo Laporte
That's exactly.
1:04:49 - Alex Lindsay
Spotify's point. I know, but, but, but. But you just made your point. No, no, but I'm just saying that that that I would happily pay 30% more, like I don't care, like I don't care, because to me I don't care about that, like all I care about is that everything sits inside that ecosystem, that I don't have to remember what my credit card is and I don't have to remember, like I haven't put Disney on my Vision Pro because I don't know what the password is. So, so the so, like you know, and so I watch it on other things. And I'm already considering, like with both Disney and Netflix, like, yeah, do I really need these? Because they're, they're outside that ecosystem? Where on max is not, it's I bought?
1:05:23 - Leo Laporte
it. You know, it's so true. I I last night almost bought some Instagram underwear, but they didn't have Apple Pay on the site, so I just stopped, and so I agree that that's you know that convenience.
1:05:34 - Alex Lindsay
Oh, I'm brutal Like they don't have Apple Pay. Like like Home Depot is like. I almost stopped going to Home Depot because I don't people as well think no Apple Pay. I'm like what? What tells us?
1:05:44 - Jason Snell
what do they do instead?
1:05:46 - Alex Lindsay
Go to Peony? Oh no, you have to get, you have to go to give my credit card. Is another 20? What?
1:05:51 - Leo Laporte
you do at Home Depot, they take credit credit card.
1:05:55 - Alex Lindsay
Take a credit card, but you, but you can't. What's? What says you're stuck in the past. Tell me that you're stuck in the past without telling me that you're stuck in the past. No Apple Pay, I'm just like what.
1:06:08 - Leo Laporte
Supreme Court has given Apple a victory in the Vernette X lawsuit. Vernette X widely agreed to be a non-practicing entity, aka patent roll had been suing Apple for 13 years. Back in 2012, they sued over a patent related to vase time VPNs and I messages that the Vernette X said Apple infringed. And, of course, apple paid a $454 million settlement to them in 2020. And then another lawsuit at jury in East Texas. There's your hint awarded Vernette X are half billion dollars in damages. Apple appealed, of course, and was awarded a ruling in March of last year by the US Court of Appeals for the federal circuit that the second set of patents, the half billion dollar payment, were invalid. Vernette X then appealed to the United States Supreme Court. Obviously they weren't paying Clarence Thomas enough, so they they.
1:07:14 - Andy Ihnatko
The Supreme Court has declined to hear the $503 million I was about to say he must, he must have been, he must have been on some oligarchs year off when they're, when they're voting on that.
1:07:22 - Leo Laporte
Did you see John Stewart on Sunday, Holy not John Stewart, uh, uh, John Oliver, Holy cow, who did he give it to? But you know what His offer I thought was very good. I want to see if Clarence Thomas takes it. At the end of the show, John Oliver says here's a ironclad document that if you retire right now from the US Supreme Court, I will pay you $1 million a year until you or I die.
I guess it's coming out of John's John Oliver's pocket, yeah, and then he goes backstage and there's a giant pro frivo top of the line land yacht RV a foo, a foo a foo.
1:08:00 - Andy Ihnatko
Fighters grade like yeah like the best million dollar tour bus and he said I will throw this in as well. I was looking for some sort of a follow up because I was. I know. I know that John Oliver doesn't have like 18 million dollars like set aside for this. Like what happens? Did he find an insurer to like underwrite this?
1:08:20 - Leo Laporte
to say he's pretty. It's a pretty safe bet that Clarence Thomas will not take him up on this.
1:08:26 - Andy Ihnatko
Well, he's got sticky fingers for the griff.
1:08:29 - Leo Laporte
We also know that, so like he can make a lot more than a million dollars a year as a Supreme Court justice. Okay, good point.
1:08:36 - Andy Ihnatko
Well, he probably make more than five million dollars a year as an independent consultant.
1:08:39 - Leo Laporte
I think it's just for any evil organization that cares to this list of it's a bargaining chip for Thomas Justice. Thomas just goes to one of his oligarchs and says, I don't know, I got this offer from John Oliver, I don't know, and he'll get a much nicer motor coach, I'm sure. Anyway, sorry, I didn't mean to get political, sorry, that was just anyway the Supreme. So let's edit that all out and we'll just say the Supreme Court denied cert and base, which means Apple's won, it's over. Yep, there's no, there's no. You know, world court to go to? You can't go to Europe on this one it's done and remember that the real exit for the car right.
1:09:16 - Alex Lindsay
You don't need a majority for the two. You don't need a majority in the Supreme Court to have it seen. So I think it's like three or four justices have to.
1:09:23 - Leo Laporte
So it's not just Clarence Thomas, it's a lot of things I understand, right I understand, yeah, so. Yeah, I shouldn't take this opportunity. We're still a little bit salty about what the Indian Hill thing.
1:09:37 - Alex Lindsay
It's just that you lost. I mean, they lost by a lot. Yeah, the Supreme Court's not willing to see it, it's a patent it's a patent.
1:09:44 - Leo Laporte
It's ridiculous. All right, little break and we will continue on with our wonderful panel. You're watching Mech Break Weekly, brought to you this week by Kolide with a K. Now when you remember to what last time you took a trip, when you go through airport security, there's the first line where you go and the TSA agents they look at your ID and they look at your ticket and they go okay, you go on through and then, but you don't just go right to the plane, you then go to a machine that scans your bag. Well, the same thing happens in enterprise security. We're not talking passengers and luggage, we're talking end users and their devices. Unfortunately, it may not happen as well. These days. Most companies, while they're pretty good at the authentication part that first part where they check your identity, but user devices they often just go right through authentication without getting inspected. In fact, 47% of all companies allow unmanaged, untrusted devices to access their network. Now, that's bad news if that's your company. It means an employee can log on from a laptop that has a firewall turned off or hasn't been updated in six months, or has an unpatched version of Plex running on it, or, worse, that laptop could belong to a bad actor using employee credentials. Kolide solves a device trust problem because Kolide ensures no device can log into your octa-protected apps unless it also passes your security checks. Plus, you can use Kolide on devices without MDM, like your Linux fleet contractor devices. Every BYOD phone and laptop in your company. Kolide is such a good idea. Visit kolide.com/macbreak. Watch a demo. See how it works kolide.com/macbreak.
Actually, speaking of court cases, this is kind of peripheral to Apple, but Cox Communications was being sued by the music industry. Sony, warner and Universal all said it's Cox's fault that their customers were pirating music. Cox initially lost in court and there was a $1 billion jury verdict. But an appeals court has thrown out that verdict. Not that the record labels don't need the million dollars. They acknowledge that the US Court of Appeals in Richmond, the Fourth Circuit, ruled that the amount of damages was not justified and there should be a new trial to determine the appropriate amount, not worth a billion.
1:12:34 - Andy Ihnatko
I remember that case and it seemed to remember that it really was based on the fact that, yes, you tried nominally to stop piracy but you didn't prevent it and therefore you're on the hook for we need to sue somebody. We're not going to sue the thousands of individuals, for I guess this is a money. Yeah, you got the money for it, and I kind of agree with them. It's like, unless you're promoting your one gigabit home service, saying look how fast you can download the entire Beatles catalog in seconds at high quality and without going through iTunes, then I think they got them, but they don't got them.
1:13:10 - Leo Laporte
They don't got the money either, probably because you know how the cable industry is really suffering these days.
1:13:16 - Andy Ihnatko
Because they got too big a heart. You know, people call them and say, hey, I can't afford. I really need gigabit, but I can't afford those fees. I say, hey, you know what? How, about five bucks a month? Can you handle five bucks? And you know, I keep telling them I used to go to school with Ernie Cox and he always had like old hand-me-down shoes. The family is just that way.
1:13:40 - Alex Lindsay
This is the public service announcement. Is once your service runs out of its term the one year to your term you should not sign up again until you shake them down. Oh yeah.
1:13:53 - Leo Laporte
Always shake them down.
1:13:55 - Alex Lindsay
I went from 150 for whatever 30 by 20 to 110 for one gig by 50 or something like that with Comcast, and as soon as I get frontier in here I will shake them down again. I'll probably keep both of them because I do a lot of work out of here, but I'm gonna. But you know, like, don't feel bad. Yeah, don't feel bad, because they A lot of margin.
1:14:15 - Leo Laporte
They don't have to pay that billion. Yeah, so there's some. There's a little extra cash in Ernie Cox's pocket.
1:14:24 - Andy Ihnatko
There you go. They're drop-offs at the food bank. I'm sure they're gonna triple now. And that russet old truck that Ernesto Cox came to this country with opening his little fruit stand in local broadband company.
1:14:38 - Leo Laporte
All right, one of you I don't know who, but one of you put this article in. Rice is not included in Apple's official guidance for a wet iPhone. I put that in. So don't do it and don't put it in the oven or microwave either.
1:14:54 - Alex Lindsay
Apple put out an announcement that said don't put your products in Rice to drive them Comma you idiots. It's a pretty common thing that people will say Rice. Now I will admit that I have desiccant, specifically if I drop something in my bag that I put it in, and so I think the I didn't dig into it too deeply. But the challenge really is that you can get there's a lot of things on, especially white rice, that will not be good for your phone. That can be sticky and become kind of cement and ruin your inputs and fill your speakers and all kinds of other things. So if your product is too wet or if it was leaking, it could create a goo that turns into cement that's inside of the holes inside. I'm sure this is what Apple was going to was like dudes, what are you doing?
1:15:39 - Leo Laporte
Don't bring in your white rice dried iPhones.
1:15:42 - Alex Lindsay
Don't microwave it or put it in the oven. That was the other.
1:15:45 - Leo Laporte
Don't dry your iPhone using an external heat source or compressed air. Don't insert a foreign object how many times have I heard that such as a cotton swab or a paper towel into the connector.
1:15:59 - Andy Ihnatko
It's. Clean the outside of the connector. Don't go inside the canal. Don't do it as wise for the phone as it was for us humans.
1:16:05 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, never put anything bigger than your elbow in your iPhone or smaller.
1:16:09 - Alex Lindsay
But I will say that I was on the phone and clean my pool and fell in, and I will say that all I did was take my phone and set it. I just set it on a towel and left it there for a day. It's pretty amazing, isn't it Working?
1:16:23 - Leo Laporte
fine it was. It's pretty mind boggling. So the desicc I want to follow up on this desiccant After you open up the thing with the vitamins with the little desiccant packet in it.
1:16:42 - Jason Snell
You can keep those packets.
1:16:43 - Leo Laporte
You can still use it.
1:16:44 - Jason Snell
It's not all full of Jesus don't eat it, don't eat it, don't eat it. I understand that it says it.
1:16:49 - Leo Laporte
It's not, it's not, it's not. I have a bag.
1:16:54 - Alex Lindsay
When I see desiccants I have a Ziploc bag that I just throw them in together and just throw them in, and generally they never absorb as much as they're capable of when they're put into a box, so you can just throw them into things if you want to keep things dry. You can also get. I have I don't know where I got it, but I have this jar of desiccant that is. I think it turns blue when it's wet and gray when it's not and you put it back in the oven. Then you just pour it into the oven. You pour they're slightly larger balls and you pour them into the oven, heat them and then they get rid of all their moisture.
If you put them back in the jar Too hot, what temperature do you recommend? I don't remember. I think 350?. No, 250 is probably enough. No, I think it's like 200 or something. Low, low, just to let them dry out. Yeah, it's low, but I can't remember. I follow whatever the instructions are on the jar. I don't have it right in front of me, but those work pretty well. You can get these jars of them in there. Again, they're bigger balls of something else, they're not silica and you can heat them and get them dried out again, and then you put them in there and we use them to put them in with equipment because they're larger. We actually want them to be larger so that they don't get into crevices.
1:17:59 - Andy Ihnatko
And if you don't happen to have those handy when you fall into the pool, there's, if you, kettle litter, if it's the, there's a kind of crystal-critical kettle litter. That's not clay, it's not powder, so it won't infiltrate, but they are actually crystals of silica. You have to look for the packaging to find what's on it. That stuff is pretty easy to use. If you can put it into cheesecloth, that's even better. But I have actually done that once, like years ago, and it didn't cause any problems. The problem with these home remedies is that if they don't work, oh well, look, what do you expect? I dropped in the water anyway. If they do work, it's not like you're going to expect that. Gee, if I had done absolutely nothing at all, it also would have just worked out just fine if I just simply had left it turned off until it all dried out. But anecdotally, that's.
1:18:47 - Leo Laporte
I'm going to go buy 60 pounds of these Premium orange indicating silica gel desiccant beads, and then you could. We should have them in the studio, right? Mmm? They look tasty. Should I eat them you? Can see why they put that warning. Those really do look like they'd be good.
1:19:05 - Alex Lindsay
Put them in your rice, that'd be a battle between they're like yeah, they look like a curra.
1:19:13 - Leo Laporte
They changed to dark green when 50% or 60% absorbed with moisture. So once they get dark green then you pop them in the oven at 200 to 250 or a microwave for 10 minutes at defrost mode. Don't use over 250 in the oven, but we should have some of these here, John.
1:19:31 - Andy Ihnatko
Please consider what these crystals might have absorbed before you decide to put it in an oven that you're going to be cooking food in later, that's all I'm saying oh really, oh really.
1:19:38 - Leo Laporte
You have some experience with this.
1:19:40 - Andy Ihnatko
No, no, no, no, no. I'm just saying that if it's used for all kinds of spills, all kinds of moisture, I'm not sure if I would like to make my morning pop tarts in a toaster oven that had taken swamp water from the bottom of a bass boat. I'd be fine losing the phone, frankly. Okay, that's a good point. What we're depending on, depending on whether the phone or the countertop oven, the toaster oven, more expensive, Did we mention last week that Apple has apparently shooting the NBA Slam Duck contest for Vision Pro?
1:20:14 - Leo Laporte
No, that just happened. Oh yeah, that's right. How could we have mentioned it?
1:20:18 - Jason Snell
Yeah, there it is I actually got a tweet from my friend Will Carroll, an injury expert on Twitter, who had the same still. That has now been turned into various stories.
1:20:28 - Leo Laporte
Oh, I should go to his original tweet. Is what I should do.
1:20:30 - Jason Snell
There's a little binocular tweet.
1:20:32 - Leo Laporte
Injury expert on Twitter.
1:20:34 - Jason Snell
That's his handle. Yeah, he's a sports writer who writes about mostly about injuries and stuff Like the King of the DL list.
Is that really his yeah, I'll draw the knife is the name of his newsletter. Anybody who's interested in sports and fantasy sports should check Will out. He's really smart. But he's also really interested in the idea of using things like Vision Pro as a future of sports entertainment and he and I have been talking about this and we tried to spot like we were talking about spotting the little kiosks in the Alicia Keys video and we he's the guy I was talking about about like can we figure out when they shot that baseball shot for their demo reel of immersive video? And we figured out it was a Friday night baseball game.
1:21:12 - Alex Lindsay
That Apple was already at.
1:21:14 - Jason Snell
But we couldn't quite spot the binocular. You know the stereo cameras, but he saw that shot and he was like aha that is. You know there's probably more than one there, but that was at the slam dunk competition. And I absolutely is a stereo recording unit Most likely.
1:21:30 - Alex Lindsay
It probably is a little bigger than it looks, but it's most likely the what. When I saw it there it looks like the R5, the Canon R5 is like the the go to inside of the enclosure.
1:21:40 - Leo Laporte
You're right, you could see there's a DSLR or whatever inside a mirrorless.
1:21:44 - Jason Snell
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:21:46 - Alex Lindsay
I think they're hiding it to not show what it actually is, but that looks exactly like an R5.
1:21:51 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's just the lenses, except they're, aren't they going to catch way too much of this screen right here?
1:21:57 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, I mean, I think the question is whether they're moving that out or in they roll it out. In its current position, I don't think that that's a great place.
1:22:05 - Leo Laporte
Also, doesn't the guy in the middle look like he's on a green screen? He's just being projected, he does. Yeah, that does not look real.
1:22:13 - Alex Lindsay
It's very odd, but you know we've had issues where a lot of times you have you put those back there when they're playing until you need it and the reason for that is that you don't want to get hit by a basketball and so so those are shielding it. And then when we've done we've done some 360 and 180 stuff on at NBA games and they're kind of touchy about those being seen as well. So when you need it, you kind of pull it up and get it to where, into the position that it needs to be in that side position. I don't know if it is a great one. I think that there's probably the hard part with any of these sports, and why MLS is so important to Apple is every time you'd want to do something interesting in a sport. The negotiation about because broadcast is where all the money is the negotiation of using your little device inside of their system is like well, we'll see, you know like we'll see what we'll give you to do that.
The NBA, I think during the All Stars, is a lot more aggressive. They had an LED floor.
1:23:11 - Leo Laporte
That floor was wild Whoa yeah, very strange.
1:23:16 - Andy Ihnatko
I'm not sure. I think that's okay, but anyway, how does that affect play? I kept wondering. That must be. It must mess up with your mind the fact that it's glowing and that it's changing as you're open.
1:23:25 - Alex Lindsay
The question I have is that, like, how much can you see it when you're on the floor? Because it could be something that you don't really see very well at that angle, and so it may not actually, because it didn't seem like it was affecting anybody when you watch them play. So it did feel like it should, it should totally freak them out, but it didn't seem like it was doing anything, and so but the NBA is testing that. The NBA is testing, you know, both the NBA and NFL and Major League Baseball to a little bit it's the least innovative of the bunch, but the other, I mean what they're really innovative is MLB figured out how to stream games better than anyone else in the world. So what they figured out is how to deliver their product reliably to everyone all the time, at every game and let you and their interface, for that is great.
But what they? They don't change gameplay, that much you know, except for speeding it up, which I don't think is the right direction. But the but football, NFL and NBA are always trying to figure out the next thing, and so I think that that that that stereo. So MLS, you know you can see it right in that little demo for the, for the vision pro. They put a stereo camera right over top of the net, you know, and you can see the players playing and that's a pretty. I mean, if you're going to pick a space, the net is always the place you go because that's where all the action is. And so I think that that's why it's really important for Apple to have MLS and have complete control over that broadcast, because they can now innovate with those cameras. You know, every year, all year, every game, I gotta talk to anybody about it.
1:24:53 - Leo Laporte
Free MLS subscription last year from somebody at phone company or something and it I've been bugged ever since by Apple TV saying you want to watch a soccer game, don't you? You want to watch a soccer game on your phone.
1:25:03 - Alex Lindsay
You know, here's a funny thing you don't pay for it, you get bugged, even if you don't pay. Even if you don't, it's a, it's a whole shelf and they have to stop doing that.
1:25:11 - Leo Laporte
That's awful. It's awful. It's there, by the way, this is the, just in case you want to start shooting some spatial video. This is the camera the Canon RF EOS R five $3,000. There's a, there's a and then you need this lens, though, right, the $2,000 F 2.8 L dual fisheye. Is this what you use for the VR system? Oh, he's getting it, he's setting it up. Get ready, he's going to. Alex is suddenly going to have dimensionality. Oh, yeah, yeah, hold on. He doesn't know.
1:25:41 - Alex Lindsay
We're saying he didn't have his ears. All right, I was like my ears are out, yeah, so this is the. This is the R5 there. So this is this is probably it.
1:25:52 - Leo Laporte
So this is probably what they're if you look at it, it looks exactly like what it looks like yeah.
1:25:55 - Alex Lindsay
It looks exactly like that, and so it's a pretty small little camera.
You've got a rig on that that may probably don't have in yeah, I mean often, you know from, for most of us, as soon as you buy a camera, you put out, you buy an external rig because it protects it from falling Right as well as you can. You tend to attach a lot of things to it, and so on and so forth. But so what this does is this this puts two 4K semi-circles onto one 8K sensor. That's the big. That's why the R5 is so interesting. Now, it won't do live, but it does record. And again, I think that if you look at the Alicia Keys, you probably will see something that has almost an identical orientation. Yeah, I think that you know no one. I don't have any inside information, but I think that this is the obvious.
1:26:41 - Leo Laporte
And it's only five brands all in, yeah, and I mean, I remember what you paid for that well, the Osmo or whatever it was that.
1:26:49 - Alex Lindsay
The Oso. I had one back there.
1:26:50 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I know that's on your shelf.
1:26:53 - Alex Lindsay
The first one was 60,000. The next two were 30,000 each and the last three were $7,500 each. Wow, and I paid them all off. You know so it was. So they all got paid off in production. So it was fine. But, but the but, I think that you know there's other ways to do it. So there's the. There's Raptors, you know so, using using red cameras, and those can deliver live. And then you have to remember that Apple bought next VR, so they have the patents and the tools and the engineers to probably build their own cameras. I don't think that we don't. We haven't seen anything like that, but they have the internal capacity to do a lot there too. Nice.
1:27:37 - Jason Snell
How fun.
I love the idea of that LED cord, because the next step of that is not only does it mean that you can change your court design by the second, let alone sort of between, and apparently the company that designed it originally, their realization.
They built, they built glass courts that are that can last for like 70 years. And then they said, hey, we can put stuff under this. And their first thought was, just, we can put screens under it so that when it's a volleyball game, it'll have the lines for volleyball and basketball, we can put the three point line. And then somebody said, you know, if you've seen LEDs, we can put and but the idea that they they actually are talking about like using you use those three, the multiple cameras to that already mark everybody's place on the court and you can start doing things like showing, showing the route that the player takes, coming up the court behind them as they're going, or showing all of the shots, all the three point shots that have been made and while they're playing, and then they make the shot Like it's this, but it's just and it's real. This is not a VR overlay or anything. It's like literally embedded in the court. That's hilarious, as long as it's not too distracting to the players, that can be super awesome for fans.
1:28:44 - Andy Ihnatko
When I saw that that court for the first time, I reminded it, reminded me of like a really cool act, a really cool thing that the flying car Montza brothers, the juggling group, did in collaboration with the MIT media lab, where so they had they. They had cameras basically tracking five jugglers positions in real time on the stage and they also have the stage marks that they can put it like again, wherever they are. They had a translucent juggling balls that had radio receivers inside them and could change color, and so what they, what they had one of the things that they had set up for this to do, one of the main things they had set up for this to do, is for the computer to basically make up puzzles and challenges for the jugglers to solve on the fly. Like you've probably seen, like the car Montza or other jugglers were, there is basically in a circle and they're like basically juggling pins and throwing things to each other, but basically on the fly, like oh, this, this, this, this ball in my hand changed from green to red. That means that smarger called has to catch it. No one else can catch it, so he has to move himself into the circle.
And so it suddenly made me think about. Obviously, this is not something that should be added to NBA rules, but there would be a wonderful set of games that says oh by the way, if you're, if you're on a red circle, you are not eligible to receive the ball. So you thought that you're going to be passing to him, but you're not going to have to. So if you're in the red circle, you may as well just move into a better position or a computer that will actually coach you and say you're not open here, but if you go to this spot, I'm marking for you. All this sort of stuff. That could be an evolution of new games I would love to see with something like this.
1:30:18 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, we've talked about we. I scanned my family. My family has a golf course in Pennsylvania and we scan the whole golf course, cause the idea was we could play other games with AR, like you could play other games, eventually, where you're playing a game that's on the golf course but the rules are different and they're, you know, like, have you hit in this area or are you hitting this area? You get more points or whatever it is. But you could do a lot of things that are Honeyballs, yeah, like much different than than the, than the average game.
But I think that the other thing that you don't think about until you're at a court and they start doing things like this cause we've done somewhere where they're doing projections against the court which way is up, you know, so half the half of the audience is going to see it upside down, so so you have to. So you have to kind of think about which way, and typically the way up is the side that has the television cameras, so the you know there's one side that has the concrete for all the television cameras and that's usually the upside. But often, oftentimes, the other place that this is going to be huge is going to be for the halftime, halftimes, timeouts, you know all that stuff. They're just going to go crazy with it because you know a bit for a lot of the teams in the, teams that will put these courts in first will be the teams that don't win very much, because they're the ones that specialize in making sure that being there is incredible because they don't winning is not why you're going.
You're going for the experience. You're going to see LeBron, or you're going to see, but are you going to or you're just going to have a great time at the thing, and so they're actually way better at creating. You know, like when the, when the Kings were doing really well, they had it was kind of like a double whammy, because they're really really good at making it fun to beat, to go to the, to the case, because they hadn't won a lot. Then, when they started winning, they actually it was actually really, you know, packed, you know so, so, but that's so. I think that the courts will be really interesting for the audience that's there, um, especially in half time.
1:32:03 - Leo Laporte
Usher has dropped a shot with iPhone mini documentary of his 2024 Super Bowl halftime show. I doubt it's Usher that's actually dropped it, but he does give you he does give you a tour.
1:32:16 - Alex Lindsay
I think it's on the Apple. You, yeah, yeah, it's on, it's on, it's in there, made from, made with iPhone. And I will say that very quickly. You just get into watching a documentary about how it's made and you don't think about it being shot with an iPhone. It's, it's amazing.
1:32:30 - Leo Laporte
Like it's just really it's a good camera, isn't it? I mean it really is a really good camera. It's a really good camera, yeah, and you're a pro, I mean you, you, you know you're using very expensive cameras I'm.
1:32:42 - Alex Lindsay
I'm kind of amazed at how often unless I'm really, you know, there's there's definitely some workflow issues, especially if you're doing live, that make more sense to do with a real, you know, with a bigger camera and so on and so forth. But I've taken out my, you know my camera. I'll take out a still camera, thinking I'm going to shoot with it and I get a little ways into it and I just pull out my iPhone, like I'm not going to have any GPS on that, on those photos, and I'm not going to have, you know, and I have to figure out how to transfer them and I have to do all those other things. So I find myself taking some with the digital still camera and then I go back to the iPhone and I, you know, my, my daughter's, in two bands, two rock bands, and so she's playing the same, two different bands one night and the same night, and and so I was shooting with her with the iPhone and I couldn't believe the footage I got. Like I, just like I'm, I'm at a concert by a stage, shooting the stage with, you know, dark lighting, and getting. I shot both spatial as well as 4k 60 and just looked great, you know, and I think that that's the, that's that's what's really amazing about it, but it's, by the way, it's worth watching the documentary outside of the iPhone. It's really cool, right, yeah. You get to see how heavy, how big these, these events are.
Like, some of those rehearsals that they're showing were probably done three months before, two months before the the show. I don't know if they show, but I wouldn't be surprised if they were working all that stuff out. You know 60 to 90, knowing Apple. You know 60 to 90 days before because they have to make decisions about where to put the stage and it could have been six months before in the reality because they have to design the stage around what they're doing, what they're doing there. You can see the circles on the ground. You know that they already had an idea what, what, what they were going to actually build. It's pretty cool, yeah, but. But I believe that I believe Tate does those. Tate is the company that does a lot of infrastructure for, like, taylor Swift and everything else, and so I believe they work on those ones as well, and they and they, so they're probably building that all out and lit. It's Pennsylvania figuring that out six months ahead.
1:34:36 - Leo Laporte
You've told us about them. Yeah, yeah, they built out this whole. It's like a town almost.
1:34:45 - Alex Lindsay
It's a pretty big bunch of there's. There's two huge warehouses there that Rocklid it's that. It's just funny because I got my first day that I was going to Rocklid. It's for some, for some work. I got stuck behind a, an Amish cart.
1:35:00 - Leo Laporte
So anyway, it's interesting, it's right.
1:35:02 - Alex Lindsay
It's just like this is so classic, cause I'm stuck in a farm, stuck behind a cart, and then I get there and then it's all high tech.
1:35:09 - Leo Laporte
So do you know that it was, the rehearsal was Rocklid's, that that's where it was, or and I don't know that?
1:35:15 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, no, and you wouldn't need to be there for that. You would need to be, you would. You could do it in LA, cause that looks like a big sound stage. What I'm saying is that they're probably building and testing it there. You know, the hardware is my guess. If Tate was involved, they would do that, and then the, and then they would. He could be in LA or wherever he wants to be. If he's, I don't know where Usher's based, I don't know whether he's LA or New York. If he was in New York, it could probably be easiest to fly. You can fly Fly to Philly. I think it's like a. I think it's like 30 minutes from New York to to the Littitz Right, so on a helicopter and about two and a half hours on train, which is what I take. I take the train, so, so anyway, so the, I'll have that kind of it's really I mean this is it's fun to see behind.
1:35:57 - Leo Laporte
I like behind the scenes stuff. But it's really fun to see this the video because you really can see it. But they must rehearse for months to do this, oh yeah.
1:36:07 - Alex Lindsay
Oh yeah. Well, it's not just it's rehearsal, it's then redesign, it's been planning, it's then figuring cause. What happens is when you're in rehearsal you think of new things like, oh, it'd be really cool if we did this. Or you can see it in some of those behind the scenes of them thinking about that, like, oh right, playing with it, yeah, and so there's a lot of you want to have the time to do that and figure it all out. I'm hoping that we see some spatial video. I'm hoping that they put some of those R5s somewhere in the in the event, so that we they they post some spatial video at some point.
1:36:38 - Leo Laporte
So the it's interesting cause. I suspect that a lot of the behind the scenes stuff it says all of it was shot by well, not all of it, but well it says it's funny. It says all shot on iPhone by director Mike Carson. But then you see Shao Long Lu also shot some stuff. But I'm wondering if maybe Carson shot this while they're rehearsing for his own use and then said hey, by the way, you could be great behind the scenes.
1:37:02 - Alex Lindsay
Here's some footage. I think they probably planned it out for him to shoot a lot of this stuff, but I the. The interesting thing is, what I couldn't quite figure out is how are they doing when they do the shots of him? They, when they say, all shot, there are shots from the actual event. Right, oh, that's probably didn't shoot that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or they shot it in rehearsal. So they, you know, so they could have. They could have simulated it with lights in the background and shot it, cause that's the only thing it did look a little bit more regular in these shots. The audience looked more regular than they did during the show. So I think that they may have shot. Yeah, that makes sense. They may have shot all of it in rehearsal. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:37:42 - Leo Laporte
Really cool and they made the, they made the behind the scenes stuff black and white, which I love. I'm a big fan. Yeah, that way you know which is real and which is real. Let's see what else. We don't expect a vision pro sooner than later. Mark German doubles down and says no, no, it's at least 18 months, despite rumors that you might have heard to the contrary. So we're not going to see vision pro two for at least a year and a half.
1:38:14 - Alex Lindsay
Oh, of course, Thank you, I'd be surprised if it was I'd be 2025. It would really surprise me Like they have a lot to evolve. If it was, if it was before 2026, I'd be really surprised, yeah.
1:38:25 - Leo Laporte
And Jason is reminding me as I completely forgot the apple six colors report card is out. Look forward to this every year, you guys are all in it, you see.
1:38:36 - Jason Snell
thank you for asking me.
1:38:39 - Leo Laporte
I've never done it before. I was very excited to be asked and then I saw that everybody wrote like a thousand words on every, every question.
1:38:46 - Jason Snell
So I was like wow, that was a lot of verb, verbos bless you, bless you for following the instructions, where I very clearly say to everybody you don't need to write a lot, yeah, cause I don't want to post a lot, but the long responses that I thought wow, someone's been a lot, I don't feel so bad. Then I thought well, they're all professional writers and I I didn't? I cut stuff out too, but still it's people are ready People write the way. Here's a thousand words.
1:39:15 - Leo Laporte
It's a lot of words in here. Leo Laporte wrote Okay, that's a paragraph, here's a. Here's some other people I won't name names. John Gruber was a little.
1:39:25 - Jason Snell
Syracuse and who I'd expect that from.
1:39:29 - Leo Laporte
Syracuse because he writes 18,000 word reviews to write 18,000.
1:39:34 - Jason Snell
Christina Warren, Christina's a lot.
1:39:36 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, the writers go on and on.
1:39:40 - Alex Lindsay
The radio people go a paragraph.
1:39:42 - Jason Snell
The radio is what happens with three fingers and the writers type with 10 fingers, so a lot of what happens is that then they they post their responses on their own blogs too, right, which is good, like good. Yes, do that, that's I like. I like that, but I put them in there even though it's a, it's a lot. If you don't want to read them all, it's fine, although I will say cause I randomize it per section, but the unintentional juxtapositions are sometimes hilarious, where people are like everything on Apple TV plus is great. I really liked Apple TV plus. There's nothing on Apple TV plus. I'm like wow, wow, hilarious.
1:40:13 - Andy Ihnatko
So you know All the time couldn't get no one.
1:40:17 - Jason Snell
It's just. It's just, some of that stuff is amazing. But the point of the of the report card and I'm sure I said this last year is it shouldn't actually come as a surprise Anybody who's been listening to their conversations about Apple. The point is more to get that down and say like here is sort of the general vibe in the room of how people are feeling, who who think about and talk about and write about Apple on a regular basis, how Apple is doing in the last year and then comparing it to previous years as well, and then, everybody gets their own say in the, in the article, to say whatever they want.
And you can see there's a you know a lot of categories, a real diversity of opinion, where some people think this is great and there's no problems and somebody else says it's terrible and it's never been worse and it's yeah.
1:41:01 - Andy Ihnatko
That's one of the things that makes it so valuable is that you've been doing this for years and years and years, but also you hit up the same people. You add people to the list, but a lot, but usually the same bulk of people see the same point of view, the same rules, the same expectations, filtered year after year after year after year. It's a very interesting thing to track.
1:41:21 - Leo Laporte
So what is the? I mean? It's many pages of content, so many pages. I noticed that the iPad got a D. I mean not doing well, not doing well.
1:41:32 - Jason Snell
The big movers. There's a chart about like the change since last year. The big movers Apple Watch and Wearables actually were down the most almost one point out of and this is on a one to five scale that I asked people to rate on and then iPad, apple TV down about a half a point and services down about a half a point. So those are the ones that moved down. Mac was static and then some of the other categories iPhone was up a tick, not a lot. Iphone HomeKit hardware and software developer relations was actually up a little bit, which is surprising given how much we talk about this issue. There's pros and cons and they're sort of environmental, social. Is Apple leaving the world a better place? Actually, they got some credit for the carbon neutral products. I think is really what pushed them up a little bit there on their average score.
1:42:20 - Leo Laporte
Okay, you must read it because there's a lot here. And I think it's a good or skim it.
1:42:26 - Jason Snell
I mean, even if you just read the section.
1:42:28 - Leo Laporte
Just look for my name. Just look for my name you see trends, search for our names.
1:42:32 - Jason Snell
You see the trends. You can see like the iPad is kind of was doing really well and has trended way down. The iPad had the lowest score in the entire survey 2.4 out of 5. That is a yeah, that's a bad grade. It's not quite an F, but it's real close and so interesting to see the places where, like Mac and iPhone, are riding high. That's the truth of it. Hardware reliability is perceived to be extremely high.
Apple has given mostly a lot of credit for environmental and social stuff, although, like I said, for every comment about something like the zero, the carbon neutral planning that they're doing and that they're holding other companies to account by making an example of themselves, there are also lots of comments in there about Apple not doing that when it comes to dealing with union organization in their own stores.
Right, and it's in the eye of the beholder for a category like that. So you know it's kind of it's not shocking to see. Have people in the Apple Silicon era guess what? The Mac scores are really good and the iPhone scores have generally been really good for a while now and since the butterfly keyboard went away, the hardware score has actually been really good. These are things that we know, but there's still some unrest. I would say the iPad, because it didn't release anything, even though I thought that there were some interesting milestones like final cut and logic on the iPad no new iPads. And then I feel a general and you can see it in the financial numbers too, speaking of charts a general malaise over wearables in general and the Apple watch in particular, that it feels like there's just kind of not, with AirPods and the Apple watch, just kind of not a lot going on right now there and people are very impressive group of Apple experts and aficionados.
1:44:16 - Leo Laporte
You mean, these are the people who are, you know, in the front lines of Apple reportage. But also usership. Do you think there is a trend line in general for how these people feel about what Apple's up to?
1:44:31 - Jason Snell
I would say in general, I would say no, because I think some of those things that scored very badly at the beginning have actually come on. I started asking about developer relations at a point where I think they were pretty low and they've actually gotten better. Services perception has gotten better over time. The iPads perception got better and now has gotten worse. Hardware reliability you know, we started in the butterfly keyboard era or just before it, and so it really took a hit, but it's come back. I think what you see is that people have different views of Apple in different areas, and it's very rare that you get a moment where everything is bad or everything is good, and maybe some of that is that we're comparing the two. But I think it's also true that there are times when Apple you know, as we've been doing this for all the years, that we've all been watching them there are areas where they're hitting on all cylinders at any given time and there are other areas where they're not, and those areas change over time.
And, of course, no Vision Pro in this year's report card, but there will obviously be next year, yeah, and people were anticipating it because of the announcement, but nobody had actually seen one yet, Cause these were this was all surveyed in January and they were supposed to limit their thoughts to 2023.
1:45:43 - Leo Laporte
Speaking of John Gruber. He could have said this earlier. I fell for it. A lot of us said, oh, apple had to put in RCS because of Europe, because of the DMA. John waited until the Europeans said, oh, by the way, messages has nothing to do with us, it's too small to even care about. So go ahead and Apple and pursue your own truth. He says, interestingly, that he believes it was China and the Chinese governmental requirements that brought RCS to the iPhone. I mean, actually that makes sense. I was pretty uncritical when I said it's the DMA. That actually didn't make a lot of sense.
1:46:21 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, it is interesting because, like, why would Apple do a turnaround? I foolish. I thought that it was a number of factors known and unknown. I thought that at some point they just there was some architectural reason why this was previously was not the time to do it. The fact that they acknowledged, kind of under their breath, that they were going to be implementing RCS and essentially solving the solving most it's arrogant to say most, but what I would consider to be most of my arguments about why Apple should be supporting RCS. Excuse me, sorry, I'm gonna rewind and go back again.
I had a lot of complaints about why Apple was intentionally, it seemed, nerfing the experience. When you create the massive transgression of having friends and relatives who don't own iPhones and wanting to talk to them. It seems as though it was a simple thing to fix this by supporting the standard, and I thought they were being petulant by not doing so. I was wondering whether there was an architectural reason why they couldn't until a certain release came up, whether there's something we didn't know about, whether it was just look, we're gonna do it eventually. Now is just the time when we have the staff and the time in order to do it. But yeah, I should have known better that again, they move best when they're forced to do stuff.
It's like who does it? They're not gonna realize that all of a sudden at some point in 2024, if the tracking is correct everybody is gonna get better. Everybody's gonna get better photos sent on the group chat. The group chat is gonna be more alive and interactive Again, assuming that you don't, you don't, you aren't just like inbreeding with iPhones everywhere. So much of the experience that I messaged is going to be so much better at no sacrifice to the security, the privacy or the safety of the device. And it's always. It's only because, begrudgingly, apple acknowledged that. Okay, well, we have to comply with this rule. If Gruber's correct in China, actually let's. And I think they probably did the math and say would it be too much of a middle finger if we only did it in China, or is that gonna create so much blowback? We may as well just flip the switch for the entire world.
1:48:30 - Jason Snell
So there was seven months ago and credit to my Six Colors reader Mehear, super fan reader Mehear who posted this in the Six Colors Discord seven months ago China's proposed regulation could force Apple to implement RCS and it's a very specific 5G-related regulation that says basically, we're gonna give you a transitional period after which you will need to support RCS. So the writing was kind of on the wall seven months ago. It is interesting that this came up now and I actually kind of enjoyed the speculation, including in the TWIT member discord, that maybe this was a leak to Gruber from somebody at Apple who said don't give the EU credit for this. Come on, it was China. We all know it was China. It was China, that wasn't the EU.
1:49:12 - Leo Laporte
I'm surprised the Chinese would want RCS. Because is it not end-to-end encrypted, not by?
1:49:17 - Jason Snell
default. It can be, but it doesn't have to be. So what?
1:49:20 - Leo Laporte
the Chinese are actually gonna do is say, oh yeah, put in RCS, but make sure you don't do end-to-end.
1:49:26 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, RCS is run by the carriers like SMS.
1:49:28 - Leo Laporte
So essentially, if you China has a backdoor, all the carriers, exactly if you own the carriers.
1:49:32 - Andy Ihnatko
Or basically, if you control the carriers, you control yeah, you control the encryption If you want to. I'm not saying they would.
1:49:41 - Leo Laporte
Anything else. Before we go to a break and get your picks of the week, I am looking through all the excellent things you guys put in here.
1:49:52 - Jason Snell
Accessibility in the Vision Pro there was a you mentioned that in passing but there were a bunch of good articles this week about it A bunch of good articles about this.
1:49:59 - Leo Laporte
This is one from upload Rebecca Rosenberg analyzing Apple Vision Pro as an accessibility engineer. Summarize for me, jason, it's good.
1:50:07 - Jason Snell
That one was put in by Andy. I was writing about the Zach Knox and Shelly Brisbane articles.
1:50:11 - Andy Ihnatko
Oh, okay. So she explained the experience of putting it on and giving it a trial. She also explained that she has problems. Her vision trouble has to do with convergence of her left and right eye and she found it difficult to use on that basis. She's also the person that noted that Of course.
1:50:31 - Leo Laporte
Well again, but well no, she's it's not good if you're blind either, I mean if you have poor vision.
1:50:40 - Andy Ihnatko
Well, everybody has to report like what their experience is gonna be yes, I guess. So, again, apple's doing. Stephen Aquino has been doing a good job. Can't wait for him to get his hands on one, or if he has that's the one where you were saying-.
1:50:52 - Leo Laporte
You don't need hands to actually get to the touch Right exactly.
1:50:56 - Andy Ihnatko
Again, it's a lot of people who have differences of ability have been trying this out and reporting. Again, I have one eye. All I had to do was basically tell Vision Pro I'm gonna be using this in a monocular fashion. It worked fine, oh that's interesting.
She also has a problem because, again, this is why a lot of these problems Apple is very well invested in solving, but some of them might be unsolvable, like, again, another problem that she had is that her vision, her eyes, tended jitter a little bit and, of course, vision Pro is not gonna be able to really do the eye tracking well that way. So is it, given that on the iPhone and pretty much all the other devices that Apple makes, they are able to accommodate nearly every person who wants to use this device? What's the difference going to be when you have a device like this? That might be an even larger physical and engineering challenge than anything else.
The USA Today had a very, very I think it was published just today or yesterday that explored this issue from many dimensions, not just people who use accessibility features. But what happens if you have a hairstyle that is like long, thick braids that are on top of your head? What if you can't get this headset on over your hair, and that's a problem? What if? And also the question of like dudes are gonna be dudes are gonna be a lot more comfortable walking around with the $3,500 device on their head If you are a more vulnerable person in our society. You might feel as though I shouldn't do this at all.
And these and this is not an attack on the or a fault of the Vision Pro. It's merely calling attention to the fact that the people who design these devices, for the people who buy these devices, tend to, without even knowing it, introduce certain biases that aren't gonna be visible until everybody tries to use it. And then you point out that, look, this is how I've worn my hair since my mom used to braid it when I was eight years old, and I can't use it simply because of the fact that it won't stay on my head. So what's the problem here and what should I do?
1:53:02 - Leo Laporte
A couple of new features in iTunes. There's a replay that goes month to month now instead of just year to year, and there is a feature and now apparently Apple's gonna put in a feature that will see how well this goes that will let you import your Spotify playlists. Yes, Just like okay Spotify. And export right.
1:53:26 - Jason Snell
Yeah sure, sure.
1:53:28 - Andy Ihnatko
So supposedly in a beta, someone has spotted support for I can't remember the name of the service, but there's an existing service that acts as a break between oh, I think it's only on Android right now that Apple's doing it. Right, but there is a central, it's not, so they don't have a solution FunShift is on iOS too, something like that.
I'm afraid I don't have it in front of me, but yeah, so the cagey thing is that no one is reporting on whether it is obviously it's to help you migrate from Spotify to Apple Music. There's no hint so far as to whether it also help you sync Apple Music to Spotify or other services, but of course I mean, apple is not necessarily going to be invested in helping you switch to those services.
1:54:09 - Alex Lindsay
It is a great spot.
1:54:10 - Andy Ihnatko
It's Spotify's job to make it easy to switch to Spotify.
1:54:12 - Leo Laporte
It's a gripe I have, which is Spotify is such a default everywhere that people you know group some in and stuff, they'll share Spotify playlists and if you don't have a Spotify, I guess you can always do with a free account. But I want to put it in my Apple Music campaign for Apple Music, so that's why you song shift.
1:54:30 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, I mean, oddly enough, whenever I recommend music like, the one default I will always go to is, believe it or not, amazon Music, because I know that everybody can click on this and at least get a 30 second sample, and then they know they're going to have to go to wherever they go to get their music. But whenever, but as I can, as I recommend music in the future, I do have to do at least the triple threat of I do have to feel like I have to give a Spotify link and an Apple Music link, because, yeah, you feel like I just, you know, jab my thumb in your eye saying, oh, by the way, here's something's you can be teased by it, but then you're going to have to go do a search yourself.
1:55:01 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, I will say that song shift was like that's what got me off of Spotify was that once I had it, I had moved all those. I have like I don't know 60 or 70 playlists, and so you know that held me to Spotify. So I was using Apple Music for a long time. Is just like Siri works. When I asked for her to play, you know, when I asked Siri to make it to play something, it would play. So that's what I use Apple Music for. And then I use Spotify.
And then at some point I was like, okay, I got to figure this out and song shift allowed me to move everything from Spotify to Apple Music. So then, when the Spotify thing happened, I was like, okay, we're done, you know. And now I have to admit that I will build things. I still have the free version and I will build things on Spotify for somebody who's using Spotify, but I'm now too far down them. This is what happens with these playlists. I'm too far down and my kids all use Spotify, which is really where I mostly trade playlists. So we're all in the same thing.
1:55:55 - Andy Ihnatko
It is tough. I subscribe to both, and the main reason for doing so is because you know I write about all this stuff and so I need to have both of them sort of ready to go If I need to check out updates and stuff like that. But nonetheless, there are so many times when, like the end credits of one of the early episodes of Bob's Burgers this year ended with a really obscure but beautiful Stevie Wonder song. It was actually only a single and you can only get it through a singles collection, that is, I can't remember if it's only available on Spotify or only available on Apple Music, but it was only available in this one place. And so, yeah, everybody can get you the latest hot album from whomever, but there's always that little. There's like there's that 2% that only has. It's only available on one service or another, and when you really wanna listen to it it frustrates the hell out of you.
1:56:43 - Alex Lindsay
You know the video version of that Drives me absolutely crazy. There was this documentary called why we Dry what Drives Us, which is a documentary that Dave Grohl did about bands getting started and touring. It's incredible lower budget than some of his other stuff, but incredible. Incredible interviews with Ringo and Steven Tyler, and then all these everyone else in between. But you had to go to Amazon and then you had to order Kota as at least a demo to actually get it Like you can't buy it anywhere and I was like I feel like I shouldn't support this methodology, but I still did because I wanna see it.
1:57:22 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, so Couple of things from our club, alex Howard has shared something called Song Link, which is a way to share songs with everybody, regardless of platform, which I think is a really a great idea. Song Link and then you can listen to it on the platform that you choose. And we have that lovely club Twitch shared playlist which maxed out pretty quick and 100 PS but has a lot of good songs. I wanna thank everybody who does that and, if you're, I guess we should start it. Maybe, andy, you should start one next or something, because you did that just one song playlist, which was the inspiration, and some people put in multiple songs, but it's fun. I listened to it in the car when I'm on my way home, because I appreciate all the people who submitted and I hear a lot of stuff I've never heard of before. There's now 104 songs in there. I don't know what the max possible is.
1:58:18 - Andy Ihnatko
I saw the playlist and nobody was putting in okay, tequila, yellow Submarine. It's like no, it's good you got one shot to give someone a new experience, like maybe not something off of the Pink Floyd album.
1:58:31 - Leo Laporte
I really appreciate it. And here's all the wonderful people who collaborated. I see Mike is in there. Oh, there it is. It's slowly populating, thanks to all of you. Jason, do you have a? Because I follow you on iTunes because I like your music choices. Do you have a shared playlist or using anything like that?
1:58:54 - Jason Snell
I experimented with it, but I haven't done more than that with it. I haven't opened it up to a collaboration. Dan Moran and I made a six colors playlist that was literally just songs with colors in the title. That's fun, but that's about all I've done so far.
1:59:08 - Leo Laporte
I wonder if we should. Every week we should do a shared playlist with some sort of topic. That's an interesting idea. My funeral playlist is on Spotify. I have to migrate that over to iTunes before I die. Just make a note of that, would you All right, let's take a little minor break and then we will continue with your picks of the week. You're watching Mac Break Weekly, jason Snell from sixcolorscom, andy Inoco from GBH Boston and soon thefabulousinococom, and Mr Alex Lindsey from officehoursglobal Time for the picks of the week. Let's kick it off with Alex Lindsey. Hi Alex, what do you got for us?
1:59:50 - Alex Lindsay
So we had Moog on. So I heard Bevan from Moog on last week on Office Hours and he was showing us the Anamog Galaxy and kind of mind blowing. So this is an Apple Vision app. Now Moog has been pretty good at adding a lot of iPad apps that are out there as well. So and Hirt is part of that he leads the group, I believe, that does that and so they started experimenting with the Apple Vision and so he kind of walked us through what he was doing.
But it's one of those apps in Apple Vision that it opens up and you realize, oh, this is gonna go somewhere. Like the world of music is gonna go somewhere, which is that there's this little thing that you can experiment with. So that little what you're looking at there, that is like something. That's like a little player and it plays a little bit of something and you can open up some areas and set it over to the side somewhere in your vision world and you can hear the music as if it was playing and you can kind of build things for it. But when you go into the galaxies, there's a little thing of galaxy here and I think that this is it. So now you have this interface and you're able to use both your fingers and your eyes to play it and you can move that thing at the top. You can actually move it around and it will change how it's playing and how that simulation happens. And you have a lot of the tools. What's interesting is this is really coming from a company that knows a lot about synthesizers. They kind of invented the space, so they come from a synthesizer background and then ties it in. Now you can also take this is the part that I didn't understand is you can take Bluetooth keyboards and tie it into your headset and you can tie it. You can tie IO from this to the iPad apps not just their iPad apps, but any iPad apps that can be shown up here, so you can have them it interacting with other and he didn't show that as much on this one but and it's something that I'm just downloading all the synthesizers apps I've ever bought to start playing with. But the idea is you could build that kind of synthesizer experience where you have a bunch of synthesizers and you can start tying them all together, and I think that in many ways in the area of synthesizers, we've seen a lot of innovation in what you can do on an iPad, but it always felt like you were dealing with this like 2D screen and there's something about in the Vision Pro being able to start grabbing onto things and moving things again and having a slightly more organic experience. It does cost money. This is like a $30 app.
I put it off for a while. I put it off for a couple of you know like a week. I was like, ah, I'm not gonna, I have all the other Moog stuff. So I was like I'm not gonna get it, I'm not gonna get it. I finally downloaded it and it's just, it's really, really cool and we had a great, great hour with him last week. But it's an incredible application and again, it shows you. What's exciting about it is is it shows you this there's this place that we're gonna about to go with music, especially with synthesizers. That is gonna take us to another place in VR that we didn't have before. You know like we're building music that in a way that we couldn't build in the real world and I think that's gonna be. They're doing a lot of R&D there right now.
2:02:59 - Leo Laporte
Jason Snell Pick of the Week.
2:03:02 - Jason Snell
I've got a really quick one. It's a camera. So I have been using a lot of different cameras around my house and I decided recently I bought a and I made it a Pick of the Week. I bought an indoor camera that used HomeKit secure video and I have to say I'm so impressed with the reliability and the ease of use of HomeKit secure video. If you were an iCloud plus subscriber, you have access to a certain number of cameras. It's encrypted, it goes to Apple Apple stores. You don't have to pay another.
I was paying for one of my outdoor cameras to be 24 seven through the hardware of that. You know that provider. They have a service. I was like, why do? Why am I doing this when I have HomeKit secure video? So I bought a Logitech circle view camera for $160. It's waterproof, it comes with a mount. You can stick it outside. It's wired, it's not wireless. I fortunately have it like right by my garage and it kind of like sneaks inside and plugs in. Don't tell anybody, but it is.
I've been using it for a couple of weeks and it is great to have HomeKit secure video. It is recording all the stuff. I have it set to record any movement, basically that it sees, so essentially I get to see everything that's going on for the last 24 hours. I can see that cat that comes by at 2 am, whatever it is Just. I have bought some Logitech circle cameras in the past and not been impressed by them. My biggest endorsement about this one is, once you connect it to HomeKit, you don't use any special Logitech anything, it's just the Home app and that's good because I don't want to use special camera software or websites.
I just want to use the Home app and it works. So far so good, I will probably buy more.
2:04:36 - Leo Laporte
Google just doubled or something. It's a subscription for the Nest Aware, yeah.
2:04:43 - Jason Snell
I'm an Apple. I'm an Apple one and I think I get like five cameras at 24 seven with this. That's like it's yeah. So I was very happy to cancel that other subscription instead of just use my existing HomeKit.
2:04:55 - Leo Laporte
secure video from my Cloud Plus 159.99 on the Logitech site the Logitech circle camera Good quality good video.
2:05:03 - Jason Snell
Jason, we're gonna let you go. I know you need to get out of here.
2:05:05 - Leo Laporte
I appreciate it. Thank you for your sixcolorscom All the great podcasts he does is sixcolorscom slash Jason. Oh, before you go, though, I did want to show you this because I know you're a Pythonista right, you like Python. I ask indeed. So there is a great book about. I'm not a Python guy, I'm always- the language, not the snake.
I'm a common-less guy, but there is a very, very good book that is now coming out in the third edition, called Think Python. One of the things I've always loved about Python is the Jupyter notebooks, and this entire book is gonna be published as a Jupyter Notebook, which means you can read the book but also will have interactive code and quizzes that you could type in. I think the Jupyter Notebook is an amazing feature. This is actually running on Colab, google's free Jupyter Notebook platform, but you could also move it to your own Google Drive if you wanted to. Anyway, if you wanna learn Python, great book to do it and what a great way to do it. So that was gonna be my pick, but I'll let you go because I know.
2:06:06 - Jason Snell
I love it. Thanks for that, I appreciate it.
2:06:08 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, have a great day. We'll see you next week on Mac Break, briefly, and we'll wrap things up with Andy Nacos. Pick of the week.
2:06:17 - Andy Ihnatko
I've got a good one and it might be time critical. Nemona is an animated movie that was released on Netflix Recently. It is amazing, it's wonderful. It's based on a graphic novel by Andy Stevenson that was released like five or six or seven years ago One of my absolute favorites and the animation is beautiful. Very, very high recommendation. It also had one of those like very modern, very difficult births where it was originally being produced by Fox and then Fox got bought by Disney and then Disney decided, eh, maybe not.
And so basically Netflix picked it up and they were able to make it, and basically shows you that maybe you should not be throwing out really great movies well before they're actually finished, before an audience can get at them. Now, again, normally you'd need Netflix for it, but lucky us and lucky for the film, it got nominated in the category of for an Oscar, in the category of best animated feature. So I think not coincidentally, voting for the Oscars is either it's already open or it opens on the 22nd, it ends on the 27th and today Netflix posted the entire movie for free on YouTube. Oh, you don't have to have YouTube premium. I mean, it is just a video they posted to YouTube. So I 100% recommend that you see it, if I've interested you in it at all. Maybe see it before the 27th, because maybe I don't know, but it's possible they decided to put it on Netflix to make sure that any Academy of Voter who wants to see it doesn't even have to email anybody or open an email or look for a special code or anything, so it might disappear.
The Academy Awards are March 10th. Maybe, if it's still there on the 27th, it'll be there until they actually give out the Oscars. I'm sure at some point they're gonna want to actually get that audience back on Netflix. But very, very highly recommendation and you can't beat the price. Is this an anime movie or it's an? I don't know if you call it anime, it's not a Japanese production. It's not a Japanese writer or Japanese story, so that kind of like real. It's a really cool like modern medieval sort of story with magic and like Frank Schifter.
2:08:21 - Leo Laporte
Looks like she's an episode too, which is pretty exciting. Yeah, exactly, that's the main character.
2:08:26 - Andy Ihnatko
And I will promise you, at no point does an orphan burst into song about there's a great big role out there and they can't wait to get out there to be in it. There's nothing like that. It's actually very, very modern. It's really really great.
2:08:38 - Leo Laporte
Namona, I'm perfect for kids, but very, very good, oh nice. And if you do have a Netflix subscription, maestro, which is nominated for a best picture, is an awfully good film. I know Oppenheimer everybody says is gonna sweep, but I think Maestro might sneak in there because it's an awfully good film. Bradley Cooper Wow.
2:09:00 - Andy Ihnatko
Anyway, that's that Everyone, it's like every actor has that one movie, that one role where it's like I can't die until I make this movie and I'm gonna make this work.
2:09:11 - Leo Laporte
Sometimes it's good and sometimes not. Sometimes it's good. Remember, kevin Spacey always wanted to.
2:09:16 - Andy Ihnatko
Exactly, it's exactly.
2:09:20 - Leo Laporte
What did Kevin Spacey always want to do, bobby?
2:09:22 - Andy Ihnatko
Darron A biopic of Bobby Darron when he was like three times too old to play Bobby Darron and of course he wanted to do all the singing and dancing himself. And that was even before we had very, very, very big reasons not to like him. That was not a good moment for him. That was the epitome of he's shut up green light this. He's making us so much money on all the good movies. Let's have him have a really bad one.
2:09:47 - Leo Laporte
It's okay, even in the Vision Pro. Beyond this, in fact, it might be worse than the Vision Pro.
2:09:52 - Andy Ihnatko
You don't wanna be, maybe the thing will short circuit. You can't get it off. You'll be stuck with Kevin Spacey as an 83 year old Bobby Darron Ugh ugh, but I did think Maestro was pretty amazing.
2:10:03 - Leo Laporte
I know you're a music fan.
2:10:06 - Andy Ihnatko
I meant that sincerely. Like you can always tell when there's like, and also, should I, I'll add the code as well that they've been listening to good advice, not just simply saying, hey, this is a good idea because I've always wanted to do it. It's like no, let's try to be something good.
2:10:18 - Leo Laporte
It's a little hard to get used to him in the big nose, but he does a credible job he did.
2:10:25 - Alex Lindsay
I think he practiced or he was trained in doing conducting for like six years.
2:10:30 - Andy Ihnatko
Like it was like six years that he by. I can't pronounce his French name, but the conductor of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra actually trained him personally.
2:10:39 - Alex Lindsay
It's very incredible. It makes a big difference.
2:10:41 - Andy Ihnatko
When you see it.
2:10:43 - Alex Lindsay
Those are the little things with any movie that you can tell that someone has the muscle memory to actually do it. They're not just waving something around.
2:10:49 - Leo Laporte
Oh, I agree, it wasn't acting Tar was pretty good too. I thought she did a good job conducting those movies back to back. It's both nominated for Best Picture. It's very interesting. Anyway, thank you, andrew, andy and Ako. Gvh in your future.
2:11:07 - Andy Ihnatko
Not this week but next week, the. Actually I was offered any day on the schedule next week and of course I chose leap day, so Thursday, the 30th at 1230. It's a free day anyway, so it's only like I can waste it, like that day was not supposed to happen anyway. So I think that's a good use of scheduling WGBHnewsorg to stream it live or later. Thank you, andy.
2:11:33 - Leo Laporte
Mr Alex Lindsey, is it Office Hoursglobal? That's where you go to get the best information about production, about technology, about cameras, about 3D, about Vision Pro, and it's every day of the week.
2:11:48 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, we're just crazy. I would not recommend that if you're doing a show, but we can't stop now, so we keep going. So we were talking about today we were talking about we had a great Mickey Black was on yesterday. He's from an ad agency talking about AI and advertising oh, interesting how it becomes part of and it was really really a great session. And then today we were talking about building USDZs and how we do that for the Apple Vision Pro and so on and so forth. Such great stuff in here.
2:12:15 - Leo Laporte
It's amazing how much stuff you do Office Hoursglobal. If you wanna join in the conversation, you can. We actually had a caller and asked the tech guys, who had a pretty yeah and I thought you should go to Office Hours. They will help you with your audio question and I hope you did. I hope you did Also Gray Matter, which is the show that you do with Michael Krasny what you got coming up there, I think we have it should publish today.
2:12:40 - Alex Lindsay
We were making one last little change, but Joey Zillinger, who's he is the founder of Alberg- oh, I wear his shoes, so he's yeah, so he's really great.
2:12:49 - Leo Laporte
I love Albergs.
2:12:50 - Alex Lindsay
He's got a really really great interview about sustainability and what it takes to put these things together, and so he's a really really good episode interview with him, so it's fantastic.
2:13:00 - Leo Laporte
He put wool shoes on my map. I had never really even considered it. What?
2:13:06 - Alex Lindsay
I really loved about what he was talking about is he goes you cannot have people buying. People are not gonna buy shoes to save the world. You have to make great shoes that people just want and then you make them sustainable. But you kinda have to sneak up on them. You can't. Just it has to be about the quality, not about what it does for the environment or anything else. And so they have a very sustainable shoe and they're kinda on their way to becoming, you know, a net zero by 2030 on the, which is shoes is really dirty business and so anyway, so it's really-.
2:13:39 - Leo Laporte
In terms of pollution, not in terms of cutthroat.
2:13:42 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, exactly, it's just the waste created. There's so much you're cutting. There's an enormous amount of waste that's generated by shoe production, and so they've really worked on making that sustainable. Anyway, he talks through that and talks about making it something. You know about that process, gray.
2:13:59 - Leo Laporte
Matter dot show. And that is it for our show. Oh wait, a minute, I have. You were talking about volumetric lighting. This is gonna work.
2:14:08 - Alex Lindsay
Smoke I have the smoke alarms, here we go. I have the smoke machine. Oftentimes this will puff for a little while and then suddenly it will become very productive.
2:14:20 - Leo Laporte
If I remember correctly the haze, you can say that.
2:14:23 - Andy Ihnatko
From the dead forward shot. It looks like you're really really angry.
2:14:28 - Leo Laporte
Hey, ayana, we should make this. Let's make this the-. Get back to work. Yeah, I find-.
2:14:33 - Alex Lindsay
Break. Time's over.
2:14:34 - Andy Ihnatko
Oh.
2:14:38 - Alex Lindsay
Usually with that one it takes a little while to heat up and it kinda comes out and puffs. And then suddenly it fills the room with smoke Like it's I should have been doing this all the time, cause it's a manual.
2:14:48 - Leo Laporte
I have to push the button for it per puff Once per puff. Is it right behind me, john? Oh man, I said where did you? Where? Cause it used to be up in the ceiling. We got this for the New Year's Eve. Shows this, it's a smoke machine, but now, after a while, it's gonna settle down. In fact, you could see that now, in the longer the wide shot Do the one the over and my over the shoulder shot, you could start to see it's getting a little hazy.
2:15:14 - Alex Lindsay
You know, what you need is the one. The other one that I have in my garage has got a DMX control. That's the really the key.
2:15:20 - Leo Laporte
It's gonna send it to come in. Look at that. See, it's getting a little hazy.
2:15:23 - Jason Snell
Forget that volumetric lighting that you talked about last week.
2:15:26 - Alex Lindsay
This is why, I didn't want to run it Sticky.
2:15:29 - Andy Ihnatko
It's now sticky, it feels it doesn't feel much more. Now you need green lasers Exactly Pew, pew, pew.
2:15:36 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, you need some. I got some. You know, I have some lasers laying around, I would probably bring them up.
2:15:41 - Leo Laporte
I think, john, we've used up all the. The solution it's not. Oh, wait a minute, there it is. Oh, I should just hold it. Oh God, it's starting to smell.
2:15:51 - Jason Snell
terrible, it smells like you've been vaping all day, that's exactly why oh. God all right.
2:15:56 - Leo Laporte
They said wait till the end of the show. Now I understand why. Thank you Andy, thank you Alex, thank you Jason. Thanks to all of you for joining us. We do MacBreak Weekly Every Tuesday, 11 am Pacific, 2 pm Eastern time, 1900 UTC. You can watch us do it live on YouTube, youtube.com/twit. You can also watch live if you're a member of our fabulous club. In fact, if you're not a member, can I import you new to become a member of Club TWiT?
Club TWiT is the future of TWiT and you know, with more and more crap coming out everywhere, both in print, on the web, on YouTube, more and more technology coverage, that is really just link bait I think what we're doing becomes more and more important and I'd like to keep doing it. I really would, but we need your help. Seven bucks a month helps us pay for smoke machines, studios, hosts, all the stuff we do doesn't go into my pocket, but it really does help us stay on the air and if you are interested, you get all our shows ad free. You get access to the Discord. You get additional bonus content. Please do me a favor go to twit.tv/clubtwit and see what you can do. I would like to continue to do this for a long time. I think we're needed to be honest. Honest tech coverage. You know it doesn't pay. That's the problem, so that's why we need you. twit.tv/clubtwit.
You can find this show on the website twit.tv/mbw, ad supported and fully free. Of course. You only pay if you want the ad free version. There's also a YouTube channel dedicated to the show, MacBreak Weekly and, of course, you can subscribe in your favorite podcast player. Once you subscribe, you should get it automatically every time we're done and you can listen at your leisure. Thanks for being here. Thank you all three of you and to everybody out there watching. Have a great week. Now I gotta tell you time to get back to work, cause break time's over. Thank you guys. Oh, there it is. Thanks. There you go.
