MacBreak Weekly 910 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 Ihnatko is here, Alex Lindsey is here, Jason Snell is here and there is big news they're canceling the car. We'll talk about that in just a bit. Is your fine woven case starting to look pretty ratty? Well, maybe there's some other choices. And Google says, yeah, yeah, we were gonna, Microsoft was gonna sell Bing, the Apple, but we made a better product. So there we'll talk about something we think's even better. MacBreak Weekly coming up next.

Podcasts you love. From people you trust. This. Is TWiT. This is MacBreak Weekly, the episode one after nine, oh nine, episode nine ten. Recorded Tuesday February 27th 2024: Patina and Scuzz.

This episode of MacBreak Weekly brought to you by my little doggy, my little doggy on my watch, DC Labs and their Apple Watch app. It's called Step Dog. Step Dog is a virtual pet that lives on your Apple Watch face and helps you track your steps. Your Step Dog moves around with you throughout the day. It's so cute. He's actually doing it on the modular face, so he's got a little dog bowl. He's showing the weather as well, and I can have my other complications too. I've named my dog Ozzy. He moves around with you. He falls asleep when you hit the step goal that you said he rests. The app is free, but for 99 cents a month you can upgrade, like I have, and choose from over 30 dog breeds, including Labrador, husky, german Shepherd and more. Plus, it has cats for you cat lovers, I should probably have a cat, shouldn't I? You can also name your Step Dog. This upgrade includes weather forecasts for dog walks, which is nice to know, and a leaderboard to compete with nearby Step Dog users or friends to see who has the most steps, winning gold, silver or bronze medals.

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It's time for MacBreak Weekly, the show. We cover the latest news from Apple joining us from officehours.Global and Point South. Mr Alex Lindsey, oh, you've got a nice sweater, what?

0:02:25 - Alex Lindsay
is your sweater made out of? It's made out of cloth, some kind of cloth, I think it might be wool Quite possibly I only asked because I'm wearing my seaweed sweater.

0:02:39 - Leo Laporte
It's very nice.

0:02:41 - Alex Lindsay
As you can see, I have a lot of distinctions about clothes I wear. Some are made of cloth and some are not made of cloth.

0:02:49 - Leo Laporte
I think it's made of cloth from a sheep. I think this is sheep cloth.

0:02:55 - Alex Lindsay
I can tell you that it's very comfy.

0:02:59 - Leo Laporte
Andy Inako from WGBH in Boston World.

0:03:03 - Andy Ihnatko
Champion San Francisco.

0:03:06 - Leo Laporte
Giant hat on which I like.

0:03:08 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, from 2010. There you go. I want to point out that I'm wearing a shirt that's made out of recycled plastic fibers, which is both cruelty free and also, as we know, with the most durable, long lasting, looks fresh and new, no matter how much wear you put into it. Fibers anywhere, and that's never been disproven.

0:03:31 - Leo Laporte
And it's recyclable. We hear.

0:03:34 - Andy Ihnatko
Exactly so you feel. You know it's a shirt that feels good while it makes you feel good.

0:03:41 - Leo Laporte
And finally from SixColorscom, jason Snell Hello Jason.

0:03:47 - Jason Snell
Hello Simple cotton tea. It is a cotton tea. It's a nice one, but it's just made of cotton, a renewable resource.

0:03:54 - Leo Laporte
One of those Instagram things middle of the night. I'm very susceptible and I'm watching and they show us how their. Once every five years, they harvest the seaweed in Iceland and we turn it into these fine sweaters.

0:04:11 - Jason Snell
And I thought well, you know, let's give it a shot and there it is.

0:04:17 - Leo Laporte
These are all from C-Cell, which is the C-Shells, c-shells by the C-Shore, the fabric that they make these out of. They're very nice, it's very nice.

0:04:27 - Andy Ihnatko
I hate to admit it, but the number of times that Instagram has surfaced an ad for something that made me think that is not an impulse buy, that is immediately relevant to my problems or interests, but then I'm like I don't want to give them the satisfaction of clicking on that ad.

0:04:43 - Leo Laporte
I just stopped, I gave in, I just gave in. By the way, the same company that sells seaweed sweaters also sells yak wool. So, andy, I mean Alex, you may, you may want to look at the yak wool.

0:04:56 - Alex Lindsay
I have actually looked at yak wool and it's actually quite comfy. I mean, I've actually I actually can distinguish that, because there's something I was just looking at.

0:05:02 - Leo Laporte
Something about yaks. I looked at it.

0:05:03 - Alex Lindsay
I was like I thought wow, this is very soft. I wonder what this is. This might be cashmere. It was yak wool.

0:05:08 - Leo Laporte
And.

0:05:09 - Alex Lindsay
I was like okay, Interesting.

0:05:11 - Leo Laporte
The reason I'm interested in all this stuff is that Lisa is allergic to wool, really truly allergic to wool, and I have nothing but wool because I grew up in New England Exactly, and so I'm replacing I'm trying to replace my wool sweaters with something she says this is scratchy but hypoallergenic from her point of view.

0:05:29 - Alex Lindsay
So I think it's all cashmere and just go.

0:05:31 - Leo Laporte
No, she loves the feel of cashmere, but she same thing. Oh, she's still allergic to it. Yeah, you can tell right away. Jason Snell has breaking news.

0:05:41 - Jason Snell
Leo, I I this just in this, just in. Yes, I hope you were not planning your financial future around buying an Apple car. What? Because Mark Bloomberg, as we like to call him, mark German at Bloomberg, short shortened to Mark Bloomberg Maybe he's been put in the will, I don't know has reported that Apple today canceled their car project after spending you know more than a billion dollars, several billion dollars, on it and for more than a decade.

They have finally thrown in the towel and said you know what? We could probably use these resources better on places that are relevant to our core products and where they're behind, maybe like generative AI. But and they do have a bunch of people working on machine learning stuff because they were trying to build, you know, automated self driving cars that they then started backing off of and, as German reported, I think a month ago, they really were at a point where they were trying to basically make a break. Is this going to be a product? And let's run the numbers and when can we release a product and what? What can we make? And it sounds like their analysis was I got to be honest here what all of our analysis has been for the last five years, which is that it doesn't really make sense and they shouldn't do it. So they have killed that project.

0:06:55 - Leo Laporte
Mark says Apple made a disclosure internally today. Didn't take long for him to get the memo. Just surprising the nearly 2000 employees working on the project said the people who asked not to be identified because the announcement wasn't public at the time, the decision was shared by Chief Operating Officer Jeff Williams. Kevin Lynch, vice President, charge of the effort, they're going to wind it down. As you said, employees may move to the AI division. There are 2000 people, several hundred hardware engineers and car designers. I don't know if they'll. I mean Elon, it's probably hiring across town. Maybe that's the. That's where they'll end up. They often seem to end up over there at the Tesla.

0:07:37 - Jason Snell
I'm disappointed. A lot of them end up at the core car, the traditional automakers too, because they want that, that talent.

0:07:45 - Andy Ihnatko
Well, not only that, but they might be sending that talent back where they started.

I mean, one of the few things that got me thinking that maybe this is they've got something they're committed to was that from the beginning, all the way to just a few years ago, they were hiring people like top executives with amazing careers away from BMW, away from away from Mercedes, away from like major car makers, not Apple people who had gone into cars.

But hey, why don't you leave the stable job at this real, at one of the best, best motor works known to mankind, and come to work for a company that has not even officially committed to making a car and always made me thought that whatever that pitch deck was, it must have been something incredible. So I wonder what those executives are thinking about right now. I mean again, if anything they're foray into. Apple probably made them more valuable because they can now I'm sure they signed lots of stuff, but you can't make them forget discussions that they were having with Apple about, like, what a platform needs to be. So now they can bring all that expertise from the consumer electronics and back into BMW, back into GM, back into God forbid Tesla. Oh, actually they could use it.

0:08:53 - Alex Lindsay
When you really, when you do the math on that 2000,. By the way, that's like, conservatively, three to 500 million dollars a year, like like. Think about how much they've been spending on this Just the staff, and that's just the staff and that's not the. You know everything else, so you're probably talking about at least a billion a year, but they were spending on on trying to figure this out and, um, yeah, that.

0:09:13 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, at the end of this piece mentions that the board was also concerned about continuing to spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year on a project that may never see light of day.

0:09:21 - Jason Snell
So I mean we said I think here we've talked about this quite a bit and I think what's happened is, as time has gone on, I have gotten less and less enthusiastic about this idea, because it feels like they had a moment right. There was a moment where the car, the major automakers were not really getting it and Tesla was on the move and it felt like Tesla was doing it right and nobody else got it and there was a place for another technology company like Apple to come in and insert itself. But boy, it feels like that time passed like five years ago and everybody else has sort of gotten on board with more electronics and with moving toward electric and and, and other companies like Rivian have kind of come up in the meantime too, and like now you think what could Apple contribute to the auto industry in 2030. And I just I don't, it would just be another car, and like that's the last thing Apple should waste its money on.

0:10:18 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, and also remember that when even when this story first broke I think it was the Wall Street Journal that broke it in 2014, something like that. At least, that's when we first started talking about it I think, johnny, I was in his ultimate ascendancy. He was maybe. I imagine that his voice was also saying here is something. We are a design company that works in electronics and consumer goods. The car is the ultimate design statement, the ultimate consumer good. Here is a place where we can make an amazing statement. I mean, again, this is the same shop that came up with the 2018 MacBook Pro, so maybe that was another force that was at least causing this to get a good launch, to launch to orbit initially.

0:10:59 - Jason Snell
And then one alarm bells went off when there were those reports about how they were only going to launch it without a steering wheel and with complete autonomous driving. It was one of those moments of like what are they? You know? What are they smoking inside there? Because it is not. It was never going to be like it was. That's like a worse delusion than Elon Musk. Elon Musk has these delusions of full self driving that he keeps saying is just around the corner, just around the corner and it has never come.

But at least he builds cars with steering wheels, right Like he's got at least a little bit of realism, that this needs to be a real product. And Apple, I don't think. I think that Apple, in the early days of the car project, was a victim of some people on the inside thinking big dreams like they could magic it into existence and not being real about what needed to be done to make the product happen, and I think that that's why they missed their moment.

0:11:47 - Alex Lindsay
And I think that when you take away the steering wheel you have to. It forces you to solve the last mile, and that is just the most brutal last mile. I think that most of us would be really happy if you just solve the highway. Like if you just said this is always going to work on a highway, I would be all in. But there's so many vaguerities once you get off the highway of all these weird intersections and things and people's driveways and all these other things, that it becomes very difficult, and so taking away all ability to make that adjustment makes a really, really high cliff to go over. I think that's the challenge there Don't go over a cliff, don't do it A bad car experience.

0:12:28 - Jason Snell
Tesla has a patent on that technology.

0:12:30 - Andy Ihnatko
They're pretty litigious about that.

0:12:34 - Alex Lindsay
When I was in Rwanda. This is the problem is the maps. I think that there's things there. I was in Rwanda just blindly following Google Maps and came up to a cliff and the water had washed away the road in between and it was at night and I almost went over it. And that's a human following that, Not a machine doing it in kind of an unparalleled experience.

0:12:57 - Andy Ihnatko
I do think that we're in chatbot AI and generative AI, where we might have been in 2013, 2014 with self-driving cars, where it was early enough in the game that nobody, I think, was 100% sure how easy or difficult this was. Kind of like how, in the 60s, like we had, as it turned out, nasa had a very linear path to landing people on the moon, but they had when they committed in 1959, 1960, they weren't sure could we make these engines work? In theory it could work. We don't know. Can people live and work in space? Can they spend two weeks in microgravity? And, as they went out, oh great, no, it turns out this is easy. It turns out this is solvable. It turns out this is very linear.

I think that in 2013, because so much investment and so much talk and research went into this, they were at that stage where we don't know if this is a linear set of problems that we can simply throw enough money and experience at and solve them, or whether we are going at some point hit a brick wall that is insurmountable, and I think that there was a time when everyone realized that no, level two is a perfection zone. We might make the level three, but self-driving is a fantasy that requires a breakthrough. That is unpredictable and unforeseeable, and I think that AI is in the same level right here, as we're seeing with, I mean, gemini is getting all the punchlines right now, but it's true of every single large-scale project to create a very functional and useful AI. They're still struggling to figure out how do we make this thing so it's stable and doesn't wind up spitting out 2,000 words about how it is a God and you must bow down before it and honor no God before chat GPT.

0:14:40 - Alex Lindsay
Well, I think that also there's pre-COVID and post-COVID in the sense that when city a big argument for self-driving is the commute, and when cities are 30%, with 30% vacancy and downtown, it's not clear that that commute is going to return at the same level again, or if it will remain Like over time, more and more people you saw this kind of it jumped, obviously during COVID.

Then it backed up people coming back to the office. But I talked to people who were, if they're being forced to go into the office, they're linked in as fresh and moving, like they're looking for remote, they're not quitting, but they're looking for the next place that they go. And these are people that love their job, they love the people they work with and they love the company they work for and they're still looking at moving Like because I don't want to drive. And so I think that the other thing is is that the next generation I mean my kids are in no rush to get a license it's hard to get, you know like the next generation just isn't interested in cars, you know. And so I think that that's the other thing is, if you're not going to get this done, in 10 years the industry market for the cars may be a lot smaller than it was, you know, when you started doing the development.

0:15:49 - Jason Snell
Yeah, it's just a different world too. I mean, not only are you know, there are issues with electric car sales, sort of like slowing down, although I do think, in the long run, electric cars we're in a transition from electric to gas. There are some challenges there involving the marketing of the cars. You need cheaper electric cars and you need used electric cars. There's lots going on and you really need a charging infrastructure that is for everybody, which has not happened yet. But I do think all the major automakers are like they're on it now. They all have sophisticated computer systems that they're building that let you do late guidance and, if not, full self driving, some level of autonomy and, like all of the like Silicon Valley secret sauce that was there, is, is, is everywhere now. It's spread out everywhere and you know.

It's true also that this is a real, not invented here moment, because Apple is a big company. Apple could have. I believe at one point Elon Musk wanted Apple to buy Tesla from him. Rivian was a startup that probably could have gotten sniped. There are some other like. Lucid is a company out there that is very Apple like but is an electric car company that they could have probably gotten at some point Like if they wanted, if they believed in this, they could have bought somebody. But I really think that in the end they had this dream that they were going to make the car that nobody else could make, and then they hit reality, and so you know, at that point you just walk away, I guess.

0:17:08 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, it just.

It just never made sense to me at all. I could. I could see if Apple was a kind of company that at CES or at some flashy show would say, hey, we made a concept car like Sony has made concept cars of here as a Sony badge, sony design, sony interior, sony electronics project, and of course they build it on a chassis that someone else provides. They would have been a very interesting design project and and but of course Apple never does that.

But when you, if we wished into existence an Apple car that was a functional, practical, wonderful car that hit all the buttons, you'd still wind up with okay, apple, but you're going to have to put in, someone's going to have to service these things and someone's going to have to sell these things.

That's not going to be the mall in Lemonsta, it's good, it's it's. You're going to have to have a dealership. You're going to have people who know how to sell these things. And again, how much money do you think you can make off of every single copy of this car that you can get a hold of, all the real estate you're going to have to acquire just to make this happen? And it's just something that this is. This is why I always settle into the phrase I don't understand this decision, because as soon as you say, oh, this is stupid and it's going to be a big mistake and they're going to rescind this, that's when, oh well, it turns out that Apple knows something that I don't which is a lot of things, but, nonetheless, when things don't make any sense, you hope that Apple comes up and say no, we figured something out, but it turns out that they didn't.

0:18:30 - Leo Laporte
How soon before we see the same memo on Vision Pro?

0:18:35 - Alex Lindsay
No, 15 years. No, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not. They won't really, but they will, they will.

0:18:46 - Jason Snell
This is a product of shit.

0:18:48 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, I mean, but once Apple ships product, I mean it is Apple's notaries. You talk to people that are used to work at Apple yeah, spending hundreds of millions of dollars and billions of dollars on products that never get out the gate. They just go, man, you know, and it just the Titan was so big that they had to do it on the street so people could see it. But there's those buildings in there that are top secret and you know all the other things that they're building, all kinds of you know products. I mean, they're been in one of those buildings but I've heard about them my first exist and and that they have tons of products in there that are never, you know, that are a big reason that they're super secret is because that stuff may never leave the building, you know. But they go through the full production process and figure things out and everything else.

I think we've heard stories about that happening with the vision. You know the vision pro. But a vision pro is is there's at least three or four versions they're going to release before they even think about whether it's successful or not. Yeah, and I got to say, as a user, I think that the only thing that worries me about the vision pro right now is how much time I spend in it at a time and I just forget that I'm in there for so long and I and I was just in there hanging out and then I suddenly realized, oh my gosh, I lost four hours, you know, like you know, and, and so that's the thing that I'm having.

You know, I watch movies in it all the time now and and I, I anyway, I just find it to be. It's a fascinating. I'm more concerned about my health. I've given it on for so long, but it's a very comfortable experience and I think. I think that they're on a pretty good path, that they're probably going to keep on expanding, so but they're not going to change course for 10 years. Like there's no way they're changing course for 10 years. This is where we're, 10 years into a 20 year curve and there's no way they're going to stop.

0:20:24 - Jason Snell
In fact they may be.

There was another report I forget who made it that they may be working backward to this as well that there's some talk that they're also experimenting with other wearables that would be more like glasses and the idea there is not glasses to cover your vision, but glasses to give a perch for cameras so that you could have, if you imagine, like a camera plus AirPod or cameras on the AirPods.

But that's tougher because of where they're, where your ears are. I don't think there are any big human ear upgrades coming, like where they're going to move to a better location, so they may have to do something else, so they may start working the other way too, if you can imagine putting a computer interface that can you know, can see and can hear and can talk to you and maybe even can notice your gestures and respond to them. That's not Vision Pro, that's a very different thing, without screens essentially, but is still like an AR product of a sort, and I think that they're pretty committed to the idea of finding ways to get computing into you know these other spatial environments by you know whether it's outside, outside, inner, inside, out.

0:21:26 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, I mean, I've said it before, but I think that every company is missing a trick by the idea of one Bluetooth earbud. That is a really, really good assistant that can simply talk to you, be a fully immersive Excuse me, be a fully reactive interface to software to do simple things that you might want to do in the real world, with an optional like sort of like tie-clip size button as a camera, so that if you want to give the assistant the added advantage of be able to see your environment and being able to ask hey, where is, where is my lunch date, and so the and so the earpiece, and then tell you oh well, it's the, it's the look for the red building. There's a door to the left. That's number 12, that's the restaurant you're trying to meet at, and when you need privacy, you take it off, take the camera off and put it in your pocket where people can't see it.

And the ironic thing is that I do think that the more, the more I read about Again, I still don't have a vision pro, but the more I talk to people who have it, the more I read about experience about it, the more I think that Google Glass had roughly the right idea, not the right time, not the right technology, certainly not the right understanding of how such a device would be perceived by the general public, but the idea of a very lightweight device with, as you said, it had a camera, it had bone-conductive audio, it had a microphone and, in terms of giving you a layer into reality, it was just a tiny, tiny little like three by five card at the, at your peripheral vision.

That would simply put information that you were Asking for. That might be helpful at that moment. It's, I think, that once we can get that technology into a pair of eyeglass, in in obtrusive eyeglass frames, that is a product that a lot of people are gonna be very, very interested in, especially matched with a really good AI. Okay, you guys are crazy but all right if you think so.

0:23:15 - Alex Lindsay
I mean, you know the. You know there's a lot of. We'll see what happens at NAB, but between NAB and WWC we expect to also see a lot more support, hardware and so on so forth, of shooting stuff for it, which is interesting because the market is so much smaller than than met us and people weren't going to certainly building a lot of tools for that, but I think that might have been also met of building its own cameras and stuff like that. But I think that we do see a fair bit of excitement related to you know how do we generate content for it. So so it'll be interesting to see and that you know they dribble new things out. We got a one of the I don't know, jason, did you see the? The die, the new dinosaur, the new thing from there? You know their dinosaur documentary. There's like a now five. There was the one where that walks over and looks at you, but now there's like a five minutes of an interaction.

0:24:05 - Leo Laporte
Fascinating. Can't wait. Wow, apple will never ship another vision pro. This is the only one, so enjoy it. So I see right there. Okay, all right, I'll put my money on it.

0:24:17 - Andy Ihnatko
Mark that clip for future use.

0:24:22 - Jason Snell
Button on, on the, on the supercut of all of your vision pro negativity. Don't be a great last shot and then it'll dissolve to a future where everybody's wearing them on their heads.

0:24:34 - Leo Laporte
And they're like if that's the future, I don't want to live there. Yeah, really don't.

0:24:38 - Jason Snell
Oh, that's an even better button right there. Let's put that in the clip. Put that in the supercut.

0:24:42 - Leo Laporte
Well, you could be sure my bit you were, you know, and then he died.

0:24:48 - Jason Snell
It's gonna be in a hologram hovering over your tombstone.

0:24:54 - Andy Ihnatko
To be fairly like I. I want 100% agree that the hype of last year, the product did not match that halfway. This is Apple Deliver again. We were all speculating. So this, a lot of this, is on us, but what Apple delivered turned out to be a very Simple and obvious Device whose only real distinction at this point seems to be that the components they put into their vision of this, the version of this thing, are way better than the components that existing had products already had. But they didn't like, they didn't fault, they didn't solve any problems, they didn't figure anything out. They just said what can the, what can we do? That's really, really great. If money were realistically almost no object whatsoever I mean, there was, I was.

I was always hoping that the great demos would not be hey look, there's a dinosaur in your room or hey look, you've got floating virtual screens in front of you. I've always hoped that would have been. We figure out a way to make augmented reality, virtual reality, more relevant than simply Education, training and inter and entertainment, and I don't think they've demonstrated that yet. Maybe in a couple years, maybe in three years, I don't, I'm not writing enough yet they could. This is, this is an Apple TV trajectory where it's a very simple, boring box that simply gets progressively better and Keeps making enough money or being interesting enough to Apple that they keep making it. It's not. It's not good. It's not the next iPhone. It's not the next Apple watch. I don't think it's the next AirPods either.

0:26:20 - Leo Laporte
I think it's a nice apple high-five.

0:26:24 - Alex Lindsay
That's what I think it's. The next. It's the next 80 inch monitor. I don't think Apple's doing any monitors at this point. I think that they are they're building tour again. When I want to watch with my family, I take it off and I watch a big screen and we all have fun watching some rerun of something that was made 20 years ago, and but when I'm actually watching movies, I just put this on because I can see. I can. I'm getting to the point where I can tell what kind of film it was shot because I see it's so much sharper in in the Apple TV than I see on my TV. You know, and I think that that's the. That's the thing that that I'm getting used to, and it's kind of burning up my I'm now shopping for a bigger screen for the family Because the screen I have now is not keeping up with the Apple TV's movies.

0:27:03 - Leo Laporte
So Apple has added Quantum Safe, quick crypto to its eye message, even though there is and there's another thing, by the way, that will never ship is a quantum computer. But okay, now you're safe.

0:27:19 - Jason Snell
You almost a crypto and I love it.

0:27:25 - Andy Ihnatko
The whole check of steps ships into the center of the table. I'm going all in Well.

0:27:32 - Jason Snell
Great for the editors because they don't need to consult through hundreds of episodes of MacBreak Weekly. We're gonna get it all here and it's got all of Leo's pronouncements in it. It's great, perfect.

0:27:43 - Leo Laporte
Actually, it was interesting signal. The CEO signal said that this is good for Apple Because we were already doing it, which I didn't know. There have been the National Institutes for Standards and Technology has been working on crypto technologies that would, in theory, survive quantum decryptors, quantum-based decryption computers, and they they're actually. It's not settled yet. Ironically, there are a number of different choices. One has already been picked off, but the idea is that your communications may survive, for you know, decades, and if a quantum computer is, even if it's 30 years off, you don't want your messages to be decryptable then. So it makes sense they're putting it in. It certainly makes it what it I'll tell you what it does, which is probably even more important is it says it sends a message To world governments, including our own. No, we're serious about end-to-end encryption. We're putting it in. Pq3 is the Cryptography protocol they chose for iMessages. It will launch an iOS and iPad 17, 4 and macOS 14 for yeah.

0:29:01 - Andy Ihnatko
This is. This is a really good move. I mean, yes, it's unnecessary right now, but, as you say, I mean we there. There, science has progressed to the point where they can take a scroll that burned to a crisp in Pompeii. It was buried for a thousand years. Such a great story text off of it.

0:29:17 - Leo Laporte
There's, but I gotta. I gotta guess that the people who wrote that scroll at this point don't really Care that their secrets have been revealed. Who knows, maybe they do.

0:29:26 - Alex Lindsay
I don't know. This is their legacy. This is their legacy.

0:29:29 - Andy Ihnatko
Well, again, there's that, their number. There's a reason why, like so many, like World War two, ciphers are still top secret because we don't. We don't want their. We're just protecting information from the Nazis we were also protecting information from general knowledge of. Here is what we were doing, here is what we were thinking, here is what our opinion was about this world leader, though in public we were very, very chummy chummy with, and here's some people that in the press we were slagging off, but behind the scenes we were very, very chummy chummy with. So these are there, a lot of secrets that never want to want to be revealed.

And although the technology for quantum computing, for this kind of decryption, is still pretty far off, the technology for beating it has been around for, I think, about five or six years now. So it what a wonderful statement that Apple is making by saying look, in principle, if we can have stronger encryption for iMessage, we're just gonna do it. It. We don't have to, we don't have to see a perceived immediate threat in order to Harden our heart and your messages against, against future technologies. One and unless it let's, unless it will, I guess.

0:30:30 - Alex Lindsay
I guess they also did the math and figured out that quantum computing will not Cause people to switch to Android, so that made it safe to make iMessage stronger well, and and I think that the I think there's also a pressure, as some of the a lot of countries, particularly the five eyes, are Trying to push regulation to limit what you can do.

It's much harder for them to take something away from an operating system that already has it than it is for them to say you Can't keep on going down this path. So this may not be useful right now, but you could see them making it illegal. You know in In the UK that they're talking about that kind of thing right now, but they're trying to say but it's much harder for them. So I think that there's a lot of pressure on the companies that want to do encryption to do it right now, because then publicly they're saying well, we, we already put it in there, you know like, and then people also have the choice of not upgrading If they really want to keep it, and so. So that's the. So I think that there's a. One of the reasons to keep that apple probably keep on rushing down here is, as long as they're allowed to do it, they're gonna keep on ratcheting that system up.

0:31:32 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah and it's an ongoing threat. Nevada Just, I think they filed like an emergency order to to get Facebook to turn off and ended an encryption, again with this long stupid screed about oh, the children, the children. Your Facebook is invested in the abuse of children. Because they won't, law enforcement can't take a look at their private communications, and that's. This is something, that is, that their weak points are still being sought after, still being exploited. So I'd more bricks to the wall.

0:32:00 - Leo Laporte
Take out your fine woven cases. We're going to compare in just a bit as we continue MacBreak Weekly with Jason Snell, Andy Inoco, Alex Lindsay and that Schmuck who hates Vision Pro. There's actually a strong rebellion going on in the Discord. I don't want to hear any more negative about the Vision Pro. I've said my piece, but where is our Vision Pro segment? We haven't done the normal half hour on Vision Pro.

0:32:33 - Jason Snell
New developer beta came out today. Should we talk about that?

0:32:36 - Leo Laporte
The personas are better in the 1.1.

0:32:37 - Alex Lindsay
There you go, we come back.

0:32:41 - Leo Laporte
All of you are disheartened by the negativity on Vision Pro, we're going to spend the next half hour talking about the Vision Pro. Stay tuned. Does that mean we can't?

0:32:50 - Andy Ihnatko
talk about the glass cracking? Yeah, we can talk about that.

0:32:53 - Leo Laporte
But not too negatively.

0:32:54 - Andy Ihnatko
I hope we're in a positive way. It's a great thing. It's now easy. It's like the OVW Beetle with that split window in the back. That's a very, very good design choice and they gave you that upgrade for free. You didn't have to bring it in

0:33:06 - Leo Laporte
Our show today brought to you by ZocDoc. Now I have to say that I'm not negative about this, because I have used it and it is great. We know you've got to compromise sometimes in life. You've got to get an apartment that fits your budget, even if it doesn't fit your dreams. You know you've got the upstairs neighbor who's a drummer, and on and on. But when it comes to your health, we cannot compromise. We should not compromise. We do not have to compromise. Check out ZocDoc Z-O-C-D-O-C. It's an app, but it's also a website where you can find and book doctors who will make you feel comfortable, who will listen to you, who will prioritize your health.

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Go to zocdoc.com/macbreak. Download the ZocDoc app for free than find and book a top rated doctor today. That's zocdoc.com/macbreak. zocdoc.com/macbreak. We thank him so much for supporting MacBreak Weekly. All right, we're very excited for our big vision pro segment. It's been you know it's funny it's been getting shorter and shorter as the weeks go by, but we now know there's new dinosaur material. That's good. New developer edition just just came out. Andy and I co. Okay, mr negativity, how? How? By the way, as long as we're talking about this, I've seen it on Reddit and stuff, but I don't it's it's. Do we know how many of these have cracked?

0:35:41 - Andy Ihnatko
more than a few, it seems like yeah, it's, it's enough that it's kind of a syndrome and it's not like they're cracking spontaneously or because of the heat of the device when you're, when you're using it for a long time. Um, apple insider, I think for the first people to talk about this as a phenomenon uh, that apparently a lot of times, uh, if, uh, temperature changes will cause almost perfect vertical line to appear like in the middle of that of that top level of coding, doesn't seem to affect the, the screen, doesn't seem to, uh, affect the operation of, and gadget said that they saw the same thing happen on their review unit. Nobody is saying anything about, no, it hasn't been dropped, hasn't been hit, nothing like that. Uh, and so it seems to be some sort of thermal thing. That is very conditional, because if it were happening everywhere, we would have been, it might would have been a much bigger story that this. But the fact that, like in gadget, and in gadget has been seeing this, means that, okay, this is certainly a thing.

0:36:43 - Leo Laporte
There's no question. I'm sure that apple will replace that without question and charge that that that would be disaster.

0:36:52 - Andy Ihnatko
No, no, they're not wearing it wrong, they're not holding it wrong, right, it's just cracking two weeks. I mean, this is exactly the sort of thing that anytime apple introduces a new product, even a new version or new build of the of the iPhone, in the first two weeks, engineering back in Cupertino is looking for odd problems like this. Because you're not, you're not going to figure out what all the, what all the defects of this design are until a hundred thousand people are beta testing or a million people are beta testing.

0:37:17 - Leo Laporte
Is this just like a glass cover on top of a screen? It's, or is it a fun? Yeah, it's a piece.

0:37:23 - Andy Ihnatko
It seems no, it seems to be just the, the glass that protects, like the rest of the, the screens inside, so it doesn't. Again, the reports that I'm that I've saw on Reddit and elsewhere said that it still works fine. It's just that there's obviously a very perfect linear crack. I mean, looking at pictures of it like if you, if you, if this were for the promo photo, you would think that this is a two piece design for for the glass. It's just such a perfect like bi section.

0:37:48 - Leo Laporte
And it probably doesn't affect functionality. How's yours, Jason? Is it holding up pretty well?

0:37:52 - Jason Snell
It's all fine.

0:37:52 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, and yours too, alex. Yeah, yeah, it's fine. Okay, so it's impossible to know how widespread this is?

0:37:58 - Alex Lindsay
I mean, and I have to admit, after someone who owns a lot of electronics, I have a tendency to put everything back. You know, like it's got its own little place. I put the cover back on it when I'm using it. You know I'm not taking it. It's not like I'm taking it on the road, so it's probably the brink in my, in my purse.

0:38:14 - Leo Laporte
There are fans in it. How, how hot does it get? Is there a thermal? I?

0:38:19 - Alex Lindsay
don't really notice it. I don't know if there I mean I've been in, for I haven't been in as long as some other people, but I've been in there relatively often at three or four hours and not felt any heat.

0:38:29 - Jason Snell
No, you can. If you hold your hand right above the front of the, like the visor part, you can feel the heat coming out of it if it's been working. But, like literally, that's an unnatural movement you wouldn't do. You can't hear the fans, it's, it's a non-dissue.

0:38:47 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, Dr Dew says no cracks here. I keep mine in my backpack and my trunk every day, so it may. It may be just as a manufacturing defect in some number of these glass panels.

0:38:59 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, I mean, it's possible. The panel is too tight in a very few number of these panels and that's makes it susceptible to these things. I did. I did a little bit more reading while I was listening, and apparently at least a couple of people on Reddit have said that Apple Apple wanted to charge them $300 for under Apple care coverage or $800 without Apple care coverage. I don't know if I, I don't know if they I would have to. I'd have to see a lot more statements like that before I would absolutely believe it, though.

0:39:29 - Jason Snell
The way the way it goes is that first off they say the glass cracked and they're like, well, that's a repair.

And then eventually Apple realizes oh no, there's a whole set of these that are cracking and then they change what the rules are, and that's all part of the process of a new product. It's just. This is, I mean, it's amazing. It took like three weeks for the first gate to appear for the vision and today no one has bought it in a blender, which is amazing, although Jerry Riggs everything did take a knife to it, as one does.

0:39:58 - Leo Laporte
Bill of materials from Omdia, which is a research firm, says they say. Now, these are wild guesses, but they say it costs Apple, just for the materials alone, $1,542, which is a lot even for a device that costs 3,500 bucks at retail and it also assumes that they used every time they didn't throw any of them back.

0:40:20 - Alex Lindsay
So in something at this precision they may be losing 20 to 40% of them. Like, just to kind of put it in the reality, when they did the first trackpad on the iPad, on the Mac Pro that was not a physical trackpad they were losing 40% of them. So when you calculate that in that's assuming it's full usage they're probably not making very much money on this headset. When you put in the labor and you put in the loss and you put in all the other bits and pieces around it, it's probably not as much margin as some of the other products that they make.

0:40:52 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, omdia says that Apple pays $228 for the micro OLED displays it uses and the H1 needs to. They buy those from Sony, which had no comment for CNBC. That's where I'm getting the story, andy.

0:41:07 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, oh, no, just that kind of echoing what Alex said. There are a lot of costs that aren't in the bill, the bill of materials, and that includes trading. That includes really the fees have to pay for testing. It's a good chunk of change. So, no, they're not making like $2,000 worth of profit on every one of them?

0:41:26 - Leo Laporte
No, exactly, Probably not any profit. I would bet right.

0:41:33 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, exactly, Apple's typical profit margin is between 35 and 40%, so I'm guessing that it is much lower than that on this product. Because, again, when they're only company like Apple, when they're only making a few hundred thousand copies of something there is no, they've basically lost a lot of the advantage they have by buying components and manufacturing in bulk. So, again, this is all. This is something that this is the launch edition Hopefully they'll have. They'll be able to sell a million in a couple of years.

0:42:01 - Alex Lindsay
I love how companies make these wild guesses about how much something costs and then make them precise down to the dollar.

0:42:06 - Jason Snell
Yeah, Well, sure.

0:42:08 - Alex Lindsay
You know, like there's a thing, there's this lesson in precision and accuracy that someone didn't teach them.

0:42:14 - Andy Ihnatko
Well to be. To be fair, it is. It is a guess for certain definitions of the word guess. Obviously, they're not getting information straight from Apple. However, this is a specialized industry where there are analysts who want this information, there are competitors who want this information and, just like picking horses, if you are really, really great at picking horses, you're still, you're still, guessing. However, the sources of your guessing are very, very fine pointed and a lot of people are willing to put a lot of value in that. So it's, it's, it's. I'm thinking of the line from the Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy where it says whereas, whereas the Hitchhiker's guide is often incorrect, it is at least definitively incorrect.

0:42:51 - Jason Snell
Yeah, I think the problem with a lot of the bill of materials articles and it's not just this, it's all of them is they are they people who know, know, but they also imply to a lot of people who don't know that uh, oh, apple makes this thing for X and it actually costs Y and they just walk away with that in profit. And of course it. It doesn't talk about creating the factory, creating the machines that assemble it. Uh, doing all the R and D, uh, designing the chips that are in it, their custom chips that are in it, and they don't cost what the chips may make cost to make them right.

And then all of the software that's going on behind the scenes. None of that is in there, uh, and so it can lead to a misleading view about it. Now, the truth is that over time, all that stuff you know assuming you sell a lot of these it amortizes out like the building of the factory. Uh, yeah, it costs a lot of money up front, but then then, for every one, it just eases the pain a little bit. But like that's, my big problem with it is that you get this sort of like simplistic view that you know, apple uh makes something for $200 and sells it for $400. And, as a result, they're walking away with $200 profit on every one, which is never the case. Right? It's way more complicated than that.

0:43:57 - Leo Laporte
In fact, that's kind of what Tim Cook said in February on the analyst call. Somebody asked him, uh, how much uh it costs to make. He said there's 5,000 patents in the product. It's built on many innovations that Apple has spent multiple years on, from Silicon to displays and significant AI and machine learning. All the hand tracking, the room mapping all of this stuff is driven by AI and so we're incredibly excited about it. But yeah, it's expensive and they've been doing this for a long time. They've spent billions. It'll be a while before they make that money back.

I remember the uh Microsoft saying we've not still not made money back on the Xbox after years and years, and the Xbox is considerably simpler product than the vision pro. All right, to show us your fine woven cases. I, uh I have actually abandoned my, my case, but I still have the wallet that gloms onto it and it's looking pretty ratty. Uh, not as bad as a Joanna Stern. So it's hers really looked awful. Um, her tech newsletter says. There it is everyone. My iPhone 15 pro max is fine woven case. After five months of use, the edges are peeling, the fabric is scratched up like an old CD and it's browning like a rotten banana. I've been waiting for the CDC to show up at my house and declare it a biomedical concern.

It doesn't wear well, but we know so much, we knew that it wasn't going to wear well because people scratched them in the stores, right, I mean exactly, uh, but it has it.

0:45:29 - Andy Ihnatko
When the display unit Apple. Who's so persnickety about the best presentation? We even walk in an apple in the Apple store and saw a really horrible looking display unit.

0:45:38 - Leo Laporte
This is, I mean the discoloring along the edges of the wallet. Uh, there are plenty of scratches. It's not as bad as Joanna's describing, but it's. It's not pretty. I did replace it with a, with a leather case, which is going to have the same kind of wear and tear, but but at least it's leather, right, you kind of expect that, um, and it ages in a kind of a more appealing way than plastic threading.

0:46:00 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, A lot of people were making that point. This is really taken really exploded on social media because, as soon as this came out and soon as a group or asked for like hey, show us, show us your, show us, your, your cases, like everybody who's had, who's been burned by this case, had to show exactly how horrible these things look, and and and. A good argument was that this is, this is why making an environmentally positive product is tricky, because, yeah, we don't like to see. A lot of people are very, very opposed to harvesting of animals for for leather. However, a leather product is really, really durable and could last for the life of the phone. If you've got a really nice, environmentally friendly, recycled plastic interwoven thing that looks so crummy that you're going to be landfilling it once a year, you have to pick your poison, yeah.

0:46:47 - Jason Snell
Yeah, the um. So my wife has a fine woven case. I I said look at this and decide if you really want to do this. She's like it's, it looks fine, I'll put it on. And what I I've been struck by is the others. There's a mag safe circle around the Apple logo now that is. That is sort of like gotten embedded in it from being on a mag safe charger, so that's bad. The fine woven material itself is okay. It's not in great shape. It's certainly not like a leather case. That would be uh sort of like. Look, look almost nicer, being a little more rugged.

What struck me about it is the plastic ring, the plastic bumper around is is battered, it is, it is smashed, it's got chunks out of it, it's got it's got marks on it and, like her leather case which she used prior to this, like it never looked that bad around the outside. And that was one of those things where I thought, oh, this is, this is one of the concessions they made is they've got this fine woven material but they've also got kind of a more aggressive sort of just plastic edge to it, and the plastic edge, uh, maybe it's taking some beating, but it's like it doesn't look good. It looks real bad, yeah.

0:47:50 - Andy Ihnatko
Just just whatever. It's one of the great things about this this wallet is like 17.

0:47:55 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, 17 years old. It's like dad's wallet.

0:47:59 - Andy Ihnatko
It's looking better and better every single year. I don't ever intend to like, I don't expect to ever throw away this wallet until we, until I never have any more money which either technology or my livelihood is going to ensure.

0:48:11 - Leo Laporte
Gruber put a poll on masted on. A third of the people says say it. Uh, their fine woven held up. Well, 28% said okay, 40% said a piece of junk. And then there are a lot of a lot of images. Uh, it is $60. Um, and Apple did it in lieu of a leather case.

0:48:30 - Jason Snell
There's a four, four year old or four years of use Apple leather case and it still looks good. It feels good and yeah, it's got a couple of marks in the corners, but even those marks look better than the marks, the equivalent marks and fine woven after five months.

0:48:45 - Andy Ihnatko
That's patina. There's something between patina and scuzz. This is patina, yeah, so.

0:48:50 - Jason Snell
I, I mean I feel like Apple, I mean I don't know. I love that they did something that's more in vinyl, environmentally sound, or at least seems like it, but it didn't work. It just didn't work.

0:49:00 - Leo Laporte
This is patina, this is scuzz. Don't confuse them. Patina, scuzz.

0:49:06 - Andy Ihnatko
This fall at ABC. They turn, they run the streets there with it.

0:49:11 - Jason Snell
It's highlights for children. Andy is like you know, patina says hello, madam and sir, and scuzz says yo, what up, dogs, Don't be like, don't be a patina.

0:49:21 - Leo Laporte
I mean don't be a yes.

0:49:23 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah. I do have to say, though, like there, there you can get your. You can get your cases from just about anywhere, and so I'm glad to see Apple at least taking a risk with this. They, they, they, they did something that I'm not going to use the word courage. I am not going to use the word courage, but if there's a company, if there's a company that can afford to say here's something that's never been done before, we have faith in it. We are going to put it out there, knowing that if this is an abject failure, it will not take down our entire company. Unlike like a company, like in case of a company who just does nothing but cases, it is known that all of your 20, 24, $60 cases are terrible. That could, that could be a blight, that could be bad.

0:50:05 - Leo Laporte
Yes, uh, all right, that's the bad news. Here's the good news. According to Apple, your iPhone 15 battery is better than we thought, so you don't see that very often.

0:50:19 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, so they were there, you know, especially if you don't have any meta apps on it.

0:50:26 - Leo Laporte
Apple did not say that. By the way, I want to point out that's that's Alex Lindsey.

0:50:30 - Alex Lindsay
I don't say that, but it is a night and day difference and I'm not worried about the privacy or anything else, and I don't have anything about meta, really. I just the battery life is just way higher. So when I jump on Facebook or something like that, I do it on my cadet stop, because I like my phone to be able to last for two days after I, which is about what I get it. What about what it lasts for me? So I can easily forget to to uh charge my my 15 and be like six or seven. I was like, oh, I said 20%, but that's after two days since the last time I plugged it in Um, and so I think that it's a it does last a long time.

Typically I charge it every day, so I don't have a lot of um those. But you know, usually every evening I'm I charge it up and I'm done, you know, and so, uh, it has, which is a big difference between a lot of the older phones. I mean, they've gotten better over the. I think the 14th and 15th. The 14 and 15 specifically felt like they have a lot, of, a lot more battery life than I, than the previous ones. Um, well, definitely now, but. But even even at their at their heyday, I think that that the uh and also the size of the phone helps. So if we're talking about a max, there's a lot more battery there.

So, it does, it definitely lasts longer.

0:51:39 - Leo Laporte
Um, the improvement is due to Apple making continued updates to battery components and power management systems over the years. Apple says this change in battery cycle lifespan which, by the way, apple originally said it would retain 80% of its capacity at 500 charges. Now they're saying, oh, that's more like a thousand charges. Apple says this change in battery cycle lifespan only applies to the 15, 15 plus 15 pro 15 pro max. So upgrade today. Previous iPhone models continue to be rated at retaining up to 80% capacity at 500 cycles. However, the company says it is currently investigating older models as well. That's bizarre. Do you think it's a hardware thing or a software thing? Or why would it only apply to the newest models? Did they do something? Yeah, apple needs to come in and stay some time they changed some hardware.

0:52:35 - Alex Lindsay
They said battery software, the battery, the components are changing, so you know so that's why it's 15.

0:52:39 - Leo Laporte
Yeah except then they're investigating what they can do for the older phones.

0:52:46 - Alex Lindsay
You have to say that trying to help you, but the newest one is the best one.

0:52:51 - Leo Laporte
Well, it says that the improvement is due to Apple making continued updates to battery components and power management systems over the years. So it could be there's it's both hardware and software, I guess Right. Anyway, kind of know this is rhymes me a little bit of when Apple had problems with the antenna gate and they just changed the indicator on the screen. You know it's actually better than it looks or it sounds. So you got good news and you got bad news. You got, you got, you got ripped off on the fine woven case, but your battery life is twice as good. So there, google says Microsoft tried to sell it Bing to Apple. I don't know how Google knows this, but Google says they know this. No, yeah, they offered itself being the Apple in 2018, but search quality issues gotten the way. This came out in a court filing earlier this month from Google's antitrust case unsealed on Friday.

0:53:57 - Jason Snell
Yeah, we already there are been a report.

0:53:59 - Leo Laporte
I thought so too, I guess this is the verification of that, yeah, it came.

0:54:03 - Andy Ihnatko
This is what happened on three days ago, the 24th 600 pages of unredacted filings came in, so we know a lot more details about it. For instance, apples, like God, actually was such. It was such a good quote, I actually pulled it up, but I can't find it now there. So, essentially, apples had a current head of AI, was in charge of taking a look at Bing, like in 2018, when this was a serious consideration, and he just found this so terrible. One of the things, one of the things it's an actual testimony that.

So, apparently, one of the things that kind of disillusioned him was when he did a search on. He did a Bing search and a Google search on who was Annie Lennox's first band, and Google search got it like, got it right away and also provided all of his responses were like links to actual other websites being said that his her first band was the arithmetic. That's wrong. And he also found that, at least consistently, while he was doing all this testing that, whereas Google tried to send people out into the internet after realizing that you were searching for something on the internet, not trying to become a better customer of Google, microsoft was constantly trying to keep users inside a Microsoft ecosystem, when it was finding answers and sending it to places like shopping, like product information, stuff like that we do have some quotes from the filing.

0:55:26 - Leo Laporte
Eddie Q said Microsoft search quality, their investment in search everything was not significant at all and so everything was lower. So the search quality itself wasn't as good. They weren't investing at any level comparable to Google or what Microsoft could invest in, and their advertising organization and how they monetize was not very good either. Now should point out, apple might have some vested interest in that, because there is, you know, some question this is what, why this comes up in the Google antitrust case as to why Apple continues to pay Google I'm sorry, google continues to pay Apple all that money to use their search engine. In fact, sachin Nadella testified in October that he's a CEO of Microsoft. He has focused every year of my tenure as CEO to see if Apple would be open to doing the same for Bing Q testified if Apple now this is interesting, if Apple did not, maybe Q shouldn't have said this, or else it's a misquote in CNBC said that if Apple did not receive the massive payments it saw from Google, apple would have developed its own search engine.

But fortunately we did not have to and we got paid billions not to. Wow. Actually this is the Justice Department saying this in the filing. So this is the Justice Department's quote of any Q saying that it's a good document.

0:56:54 - Andy Ihnatko
John G and Andrea, who we talked about because he was in the head of AI for the car project, sums up Bing's problems trying to be a portal not linking out to the web when it thinks it has a vertical experience video recipes, etc. And just further behind the curve on freshness and spam quality. It's what you would expect from a much smaller investment with a different differentiate and verticals thesis.

0:57:14 - Leo Laporte
I think, when it comes to freshness and spam, it's important, at least to me, that the spam be as fresh as possible.

0:57:21 - Andy Ihnatko
You don't want to eat old meat. That's not a selling point, though.

0:57:24 - Leo Laporte
No, it's not Okay. Actually, you know, I've been using ARC. Have you guys tried ARC on the iPhone? It strikes me that Google and Bing are both kind of in a perilous situation with the advent of AI. Yeah yeah, the idea that instead of searching, especially on a mobile device where you don't have a lot of screen, instead of searching for individual websites, that I can read. I just want an answer. And so ARC search has a button that says browse for me and it generates a page based on usually it's half a dozen other websites that it's then synopsized and gives you the answer, so you don't have to do the surfing, it does the surfing for you. I think now there's problematic for the page, the content creators, but it's what the user wants.

0:58:13 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, I mean, this is Google's whole thesis for years and years and years to lots of complaints is that we drive traffic to sites we are not stealing. We're not stealing content from other people to boost our own profits. So the news corp and other news organizations have been trying to get Google to have to license content for search. You're just based on the fact that it's finding things in search results and I think that Google is playing very, very fair with this. As a user, I do mostly like that feature. As a content creator, I don't like the idea that someone might ask a question and something that I spent hours, maybe days or weeks researching and then communicating correctly is just a data element that'll be thrust into an auto-generated AI blurb of text. I mean, they have a really nice feature where you can be on a webpage and then you do a pinch gesture and it will summarize what you look at, I like that too.

Yeah, which is really nice. But again, when I read this, I'm like is there a robotstxt line I can put in there to say don't do this, because once again I might I mean, I might this might be ego and arrogance, but I don't again if I spend. I spent a long time turning like 1600 words into 820 words that were presented a point of view and a story that I really really worked hard on to say that, oh well, that's not important. Just January 12th, $1800, 16 gigabytes of Merriam.

0:59:37 - Leo Laporte
Well, it isn't for a certain type of searcher. That's what they're looking for. I mean, I don't, you're not going to go say tell me what Charles Dickens Tale of Two Cities is all about and then say good, I don't have to read the novel, unless you're a student writing a paper. But you know, so I might read your prose, because I like your prose, andy, but if I'm just looking for what's the price or is it good, that's that's what I'm looking for, and it's given me what I'm looking for, Jason.

1:00:02 - Jason Snell
Right, right, and that person, I mean I, as a content creator on the internet, I have the same feelings that Andy does, but I, I also admit that you know we can trick ourselves into thinking that that person is a lost reader, but a lot of those people are not going to read, they're just looking for a utility, they're just looking for an answer. And what I would prefer is a presentation that doesn't matter who it comes from, that basically says I got this information from this source, which has obviously a lot more than the five word answer I gave you. If you want to know more, so it you ends up. Your content ends up being the why, not the answer, but the why. Is that the answer? Or what's the story behind that? Like I can look up Andy Lennox's first band and find out it's not your rythmics and think to myself I had no idea she had, it was in a band before your rythmics. What's that story about? And so having a prominent link that says I got it from this source or these sources and you can read a lot more, I want that because I may just want a quick answer, I may want to delve in deeper and and like I'm okay with people who don't want to actually read me writing 5,000 words about the Vision Pro when actually what they wanted was an answer to a trivia question about some aspect of the Vision Pro when it shipped, you know, last month, and that's okay. But but you've got to cite your sources and I agree, leo, with you that this is a moment of real danger for Google.

We've all talked about and seen how bad the internet is getting in terms of search engine optimiza, optimized AI, built content that is just garbage and echoes other garbage that echoes original sources. Google should be. You know, I don't. When I, when I do a Google search, I want an answer, not a chatbot. I want an answer and I want Google to be able to detect oh, there are eight new sources, new sources that have taken a quote from an original source and turned it into this, like you know, a 2000 word rewritten thing based on the original source. I want Google's AI to be able to read them all and say oh, they're all citing this original source. What you want is the original source. That's what Google needs to be doing and right now they're failing at it. Arc offers both.

1:02:07 - Leo Laporte
So I just did a normal kind of Google style search, blah, blah, blah. But I can also do a browse for me on what was Annie Lex's first band. It goes through a bunch of sources and it lists them Wikipedia's I can cycle.

1:02:19 - Jason Snell
Wikipedia Britannica and so forth. It's building up a page with answers and images it's got.

1:02:25 - Leo Laporte
It's got the answer right, the tourists which I didn't know the answer to? Yeah, it's got a lot of, I think, kind of great stuff. Now, admittedly, this was created by a machine, from real humans writing, so for that reason, it's probably pretty bad. It does give you all the actually more links than it used to generate the page at the bottom. I just feel like this is what people want and this is what they're going to get. And, yeah, use your robotstxt, but you do that at your peril, same as the French news people who said well, google, you may not use our snippets, do not refer to us. And that didn't work out so well. It was Spain. It did not work out so well.

1:03:10 - Alex Lindsay
Well, and I think that, I think that if, if it gives me the answer as someone who's doing research, if it gives me the quick answer and then says here are some other reading suggestions for reading later, next to it.

you know, a lot of times I'm digging into those Like if I start research, like here's some, here's some highlights. And I think that the biggest thing that has me not read folks posts is often because they're burrowing, they're, they're burying a lot of stuff into the text. And so for me, like I want to read the thing most, of the time.

1:03:39 - Leo Laporte
Google's known that for years. That's why they do the knowledge graph and then, next to it, do the search results. They know that you want the answer.

1:03:46 - Alex Lindsay
I want the answer, but then a lot of times I'm like okay, well, how do they, you know? And like for me blog posts that are not structured well, so they have to have headlines If they're going to have a list, put a list. If they tell me there's a list at the top, I got to see a list, you know, I literally scanned for the list and then I just go, okay, it's not here, and then I go somewhere else and or they just have to put big headers on things so that I know where in the sections that I'm looking for. And I think that, you know, I think some writers get really good at doing that. Other writers like to just bury a bunch of pros in there without a lot of headers, and for me it's just like if you read any recipe articles lately on this.

1:04:19 - Leo Laporte
No, I don't know the funny thing is it's 18 paragraphs of the history. By the way, that's because that's in response to Google. That's in response to.

1:04:26 - Jason Snell
That's SEO.

1:04:27 - Leo Laporte
That's SEO doing that, and so by the way I've replaced, I don't even have Safari on my homepage. On my doc I've got ARC. You know, I thought at first, well, that's silly, why are they making it? Why aren't they making a browser browser? But now I understand and I think they're actually very smart, because you can't do an alternative browser really right on iOS.

1:04:48 - Jason Snell
But you could do this as a content creator, I'm going to say something that you might not expect me to say, which is not all content creators on the internet right now should exist. In fact, I would say most of them should not exist, most of them. You mentioned the recipe websites. I wish they go.

Most of them are garbage and the reason they exist is because they have ginned up these things with ads on them, in order to get search engine traffic to come to their site, in order to make some incremental money on ads. And that is not, you know, most of those sites. Oh, those aren't really people who care about the subject matter. They are chasing dollars at the edges of Google's algorithm because it's a place where they can make some bucks.

1:05:28 - Alex Lindsay
That's what it is.

1:05:28 - Jason Snell
And that is why the web is broken. And so I am very sympathetic to worrying about AI eating the lunches of content creators, but some of the content creators out there I would say maybe lots of the content creators on the internet right now are not interested in making content. They are interested in exploiting failures of Google, and they should go.

1:05:50 - Alex Lindsay
And I think the unfortunate thing is for some of those we'll just talk about recipe sites a little bit is that I think that they started by loving what they did, but they had to figure out a way to make money. And then they started adding and they were told like oh just put out the first recipe sites.

Yeah, and so they slowly just just junkified their entire thing to make, to make them, to make it, to make money, just to make it work.

You know, and you see this everywhere and so, but but I will say that I've realized and I didn't realize this until I mentioned it on the show, like I hadn't really thought about my behavior, and I realized I barely use the web on my phone, like ever, like I just don't use it very often. I use it for a couple little things and then I jump back into apps, and the reason for it is all these ads. These ads are so much harder to ignore or to go past on a phone than they are on the, on the desktop, I mean, and I mean I'm not, I don't have any blockers, I just scroll through them quickly, quickly. But on the, on the phone, they're so slow and they're so, like, painful to go through. I realized I just had stopped. I hadn't, hadn't occurred to me, but I've kind of stopped using the, the browser. Very much you know online except for searching for, like Wikipedia, or searching for something that is pretty well known to me that isn't going to have a lot of junk on it. Yeah, yeah, it's interesting.

1:07:00 - Andy Ihnatko
I mean, it's a multi dimensional question, and what users want and the experience that they want is not always an important driving force. I'm not equating what we're talking about here to piracy, but everybody would love to be able to simply Google the Barbie movie and then be able to screen the Barbie movie immediately without paying for it. They can't have that, and if there's a site that decided to provide that for you, they would get sued and the courts would tell them to stop doing that. So this is one of the things that we're going to have to navigate as a society, like I did again, I did, I'm, I'm, I joined the group.

And what was the Annie Lennox's first ban? Using the search generative experience on Google? And I think that they're. I do like the way that Google's approach to it. I agree that if someone just wanted the answer to a trivia question, they are not going to spend eight hours, no matter how fascinating my biography of Annie Lennox is. They just if, that's if, but so for that people you get. Annie Lennox's first ban was the catch, which she formed in 1977. The day of Stuart blah blah, blah, blah blah. The band's name was later changed to the tourists, but underneath that is, here's a Britannic article, here's a Wikipedia article, here is, and you click on things that will take you to that article with that information already highlighted for you.

1:08:15 - Leo Laporte
But did it tell you that the tourists original name was Dragon's Playground? I don't know. This is the I can. By the way, what's else as cool as I can send you? And I just did the and he had texted you.

1:08:27 - Andy Ihnatko
if the search results, which I think is this is for Mark, and I think it's very, very interesting In 1976, lennox was a flute player with a band called Dragon's Playground, leaving before they appeared on ITV's talent show New Faces. Yeah, I mean this. The thing is like this. This really shows, like, how difficult it is to slay that particular dragon known as Google search, that there are a lot of systems that can punch in a question, question about the solar system. It will tell you like the what, the what, the weight, what, the what, the length of a day on planet Mars is. They're not a whole lot that will.

That does a subtle search of figuring out what it is you actually want, but also trying to figure out what sources are considered to be authoritative in this field. Also, even within those sources, is this a valuelably, valuelably written piece? Or is this a brownie recipe that starts with 800 words about? Every time I look at a bag of chocolate chips, I think about my gap year in Provence. That's no, so it's. I think that it's. They're every. All these industries are going to have to figure out how to do this without being just simply a plagiarism machine, without being a piracy machine. Well, really, the creator, that's most, and Google's done it.

1:09:37 - Leo Laporte
The creator that's most damaged by Google's approach is Wikipedia, because it's almost always as it is in this case, from Wikipedia.

1:09:44 - Andy Ihnatko
Right, I think, I think. But I think Google gives them. Has, has subscribed to their commercial service. They, they, oh good, so they give them some money. I think they they're not just scraping, and also I think we're going to see a lot more things like like what Reddit did, which is to say, the look, we're, we have a database of user provided answers to questions, and if you want to, you could, we want, you'd be able to use it, but you're going to have to pay to license that information. There's again a lot of these things are in motion and we don't know where the ball is going to finally land, but I do think it's not. I do think that ArcSolution is a little on the cowboy side and I don't think it's going to stick. It's going to be a point where it gets too successful and then they're going to get choke-holded into into making some changes. I think.

1:10:30 - Alex Lindsay
And my primary way of getting to Wikipedia is I search for something in Google. It shows up at the top. And then I click on Wikipedia. But that's how I get. I find that that feels much cleaner than going to Wikipedia and doing the search. I do it in Wikipedia and it gives me like a thousand versions of my search on on on Google. It generally gives me the one that I was looking for. I'm very happy with Arc.

1:10:54 - Leo Laporte
That's all I can say and you're right.

I understand. I'm also happy with my leather case, and many cows have died for it, and you know life is tough If you're a cow or a creator. Sorry, I need the milk. I don't know what that. I don't know what that means. All right, let's take a little break here. I do need daddy needs some advertisements. That's what daddy needs. But we'll go milk the cow, milk the cow, so to speak. But we will have more in just a little bit with Andy and not co GBH. When are you going to be on GBH next?

1:11:31 - Andy Ihnatko
Actually this week Thursday at 1230. Nice, Great.

1:11:36 - Leo Laporte
Alex Lindsay, who is at office hoursglobal, always covering fascinating material. I'm giving you your plug in the middle of the show, guys, just in case people don't make it to the end of this vision pro less show.

1:11:50 - Alex Lindsay
We have our. We have Renee Ritchie on the gray mattershow this Friday. Oh, awesome, yeah. So we're pretty excited and you can actually go to ask gray mattershow and put a question in and if you listen to it, next week we might use it. So we're we're, you can collect them there. So if you go to ask, ask gray mattershow with the E.

1:12:11 - Leo Laporte
I know there are lots of people who want to know more about Renee Ritchie.

1:12:15 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, he's he. It's fun to talk to Renee about YouTube now. It's always been fun, but it's really fun.

1:12:20 - Jason Snell
now he's an expert.

1:12:21 - Alex Lindsay
Now he's very articulate and very good at telling you what you need to know.

1:12:25 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, gray mattershow. And you said it's ask gray mattershow. All one word, all one word. So no askdot, it's ask gray matter, got it? It's just ask gray matterdot. There you go, renee Ritchie, thank you. Creator liaison YouTube. You got till March 1st. Ask your questions, thank you. And of course, six colorscom is where Jason Snell makes his home, resting in between the multi-colored graphs. That's right.

1:12:53 - Jason Snell
What are the big?

1:12:53 - Leo Laporte
colors. What are the big stories coming up at six colors?

1:12:58 - Jason Snell
I don't know man, it's quiet now. I'm trying to take a little nap, get a little rest. After vision pro and the Apple report card, I've been busy this is tough time for you, I'm going to curl up a little bit and just kind of re-energize myself If you go to six colorscom, says Jason.

1:13:13 - Leo Laporte
You can see what he means by re-energize. Only 40 podcasts this week. You know it won't be too, won't be too crazy yeah.

1:13:21 - Jason Snell
I think, I think, yeah, I think I'm only recording. Let's see one, two, three, four, five podcasts. This week it's a light week. Oh yeah, You're a punter. I guess I curled up resting.

1:13:32 - Leo Laporte
Good, you deserve that. Our show today, brought to you by those fabulous fellas, but also our sponsor, Wix Studio. All right, we love debates here at MacBreak Weekly. Right, we got a debate about Wix Studio. Who gets more out of Wix Studio designers or devs? When I first, all I should probably explain 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. Let's get back to the debate.

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Search Wix Studio and find out for yourself. wix.com/studio Click on the link at the show page. You'll find out more. Thank you, Wix. We love you guys. We love your man. Let's see I you know you guys have put in a lot of links here. Let me see. Oh, jason, you were talking about Apple sports. Now I am using an app that you recommended some time ago that I'm quite a fan of. Let me look at my news, because I can't.

1:15:36 - Jason Snell
The name is generic sports alerts Sports alerts right, and I really like early ones yeah.

1:15:41 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I'm sure apples is prettier. Sports alerts is not exactly an aesthetic masterpiece.

1:15:47 - Jason Snell
I mean Apple has the advantage that it's free and there are no ads and they don't care Right Like they. They they are doing something different with it and that's an advantage that they have, but there's no F one in that one.

1:15:58 - Leo Laporte
There is F one in the sports.

1:15:59 - Jason Snell
There isn't, there isn't. It's really limited, a limited day, so day of source. So yeah, a couple weeks ago I got to go talk to eddy queue, which I had never done before. It was pretty fun.

Yeah, you, lucky you were fresh, fresh from the Superbowl, no less. He had some opinions that I'm not going to share about the Superbowl coaching decisions, but you could guess what they were. Anyway, but he's a sports fan and it was. This is clearly his baby because, you know, not everybody in the tech industry understands the sports, but eddy does, and he said that he literally was standing court side at Warriors games comparing the beta of the sports app to the scoreboard and getting on his team for it, the data source being too far behind, because he really wants it to be a fast experience and as close to real time with the scores as possible. So they launched it.

It's free, it's got, you know, nba, nhl, ncaa, basketball men's and women's, it's got Premier League and a bunch of other top level European leagues, as well as MLS. It launched the day of the MLS season kicking off because, of course, apple, and so it's an interesting product. It's a, I would say, a starting point. It's very clearly a passion project for eddy, but I think it also maybe as a stake in the ground. I mean, it's not called scores, right, it's called sports.

1:17:13 - Leo Laporte
I think we can see that it's going to be more than it is, actually a Howard Stern's favorite strip club, so that probably this is also true, but Apple scores.

1:17:21 - Jason Snell
they could have called it Apple scores. They did not. They called it Apple sports, and I think that there'll be a lot more, but it's all scores all the time.

The data source is not news. No, the data source is actually has been there. You've been able to add live activities of many sporting events in the TV app for a long time, but nobody knows it because, especially on iPhone, to get to the sports interface of the TV app you've got to like go to the main page and scroll down until you get to sports and then tap and then there's a sports page. It's bizarre. Anyway, you can also tap open in Apple TV in the Scores app, the sports app, and it will take you to that game page and from there you can either play it if it's on any service that is linked to your TV profile, so it's not just for Apple TV. I jumped to Max to watch an NBA game on TNT, for example. It knows where all that stuff is or if it's got the data source. The button next to it is start live activity, your live activities. If you set your favorite teams, by the way, live activities for your favorite teams just fire off automatically.

I came out to get my cereal one weekend, like last weekend, and the Arsenal score was on my phone in standby mode because it's one of my favorites, and so it just automatically kicked into live activity mode. So it means that right now, apple's experience is scattershot. I heard somebody say I expected the experience to be more like stocks, where you pick your stocks and then you see the articles. It's like it's got a news interface. Well, if you pick your favorite teams, there is a favorite teams news interface in the news app. So you've got like the news app has that, the TV app has this and then the scores app. Apple Sports has this and it's all like.

I get why it's like that, but it also probably should be more integrated than it is. It keeps it simple, but and that's why I feel so early days to me it's like they've been slowly building the pieces together. But I think this part of it was any cue, literally saying we've got all of this great live data and no app that showcases it. Let's get that into an actual, proper app. And so they built this and I think there are going to be lots of updates. I mean, he told me that there will be a March Badness update right, where they will add features that will be more tournament appropriate, I think brackets and who you play next, and stuff like that.

They'll do an update for baseball season where they add a proper baseball view, obviously, things like F1, I think the challenge there is it's a different way, it's not a game and so there's a different way of displaying data for that that they're going to have to work on. They've committed to football in the fall, but they don't have to do it now. I mean again, perfect timing, right after the football season when MLS starts, means they can take the NFL and college football and be like later we'll just do that later but I think it's a passion project for him, but I think it's also strategic. I think Eddie Q, as the head of services at Apple and somebody who's a huge sports fan, is really motivated to make Apple do some good stuff in sports and honestly, I think that when we talk about, like ABC, espn and Warner Media, the Turner companies and Fox are all talking about building their own streaming service where they combine their sports things into a thing that most of the industry is calling Spoo-Loo, which is short for sports Hulu basically.

Spoo-Loo makes me laugh so much because it is like, wait a second, you just got out of your joint venture with your competitors and you're starting a new one about sports. But anyway, the challenge there is that those are all competitors. Apple, although it does have some sports, could position itself, especially with the power of the iPhone, as the top level. It's like, whatever services you've got, it will be the springboard and you start there and then you jump off to whether it's the ESPN app or it's Max or it's Spoo-Loo or whatever it might happen to be. So I think Eddie Q is actually the right person to be in charge of services for Apple at this weird moment in sports rights history, because he does care about it. So I think there's a bigger picture here, but right now it's just a. You know, it's a simple scores app, that's all it is.

1:21:35 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, and that's actually what I like about it. I like that. I feel as though it's like a weather app for sports, where and there are great sports apps that are for people who are really into sports Me I want to know did the Red Sox play yesterday? If so, what was the score? If it's ongoing, is there a reason for me to turn it on and watch the game? I want to know. So it's just simply the ability to be.

The central truth of here are the sports leagues and teams that I'm following. If there's something interesting happening with any of these, please action this appropriately. Whether it is, let me take a look at this in news, let me change, let me watch it on my Apple TV box or whatever. And the advantage of a built-in app that comes for free is that how many times have any of us had the problem of we find an app that's version 1.0, like a third party commercial app?

It's 1.0 and it's perfect. It's elegant, it's streamlined, it's fast, it's responsive, but then, eight years later, the simple list app is now like a multi-corporational project tracking and chat tool with VR and AI components to it, because they still have to keep it commercially viable. They have to keep people coming back to subscribe. The idea of the simple app that could maintain its simplicity over years is also super, super attractive. There's only one thing that really surprised me, and kind of disappointed me, was the integration with draft kings. There is so not only as part of the data you get, is it's also what's the line on each of these games, on each of these teams.

1:23:15 - Leo Laporte
People want to know that I know.

1:23:21 - Andy Ihnatko
I do appreciate that. That's part of how people interact with their favorite sports teams. Now, however, I mean bad timing too. I'll just say, like two weeks earlier, the Wall Street Journal had a really great feature article about a psychiatrist who got into sports gambling apps during COVID, and here's what the experience of how draft kings was exploiting her and cultivating her to keep.

I'll give you free money if you keep gambling, and even when, and assigning hey, wow, you're gambling a lot, so we're going to assign you a VIP host to again keep you gambling. Because the whole business model of this like in the main gaming industry, like in the lottery, like in pay-to-play games is that your a single digit percentage of your audience is giving you 70% of your profits, so you have to keep these people in. So all I'm saying is that it's unnecessary. It's a lot of the same questions of what I was asking, like why does Apple want to get into commercial consumer card debt at a time when commercial consumer debt, according to the federal government, is at record high levels and continues to go at record high levels? Why does Apple? Why does I don't know why this?

is something they want to get involved in.

1:24:42 - Leo Laporte
I really wish that they had said that we don't need it. It's like a. It's part of growing up, andy, when you realize that the people you put up there on the pedestal are just normal capitalistic enterprises like every other. Oh well, I mean sports.

1:24:55 - Andy Ihnatko
I know, but honestly, sports.

1:24:57 - Jason Snell
This is betting in the US. For people who are not in the US and don't know, this betting has just been recently.

Sports betting has been made legal in about 20 states Since 2018, something like that, Not in California thank goodness, not in California yet, maybe not ever, who knows, but so it's a there's a gold rush. The truth is, though, a huge portion and I'm not in this subculture either but a huge portion of people who are interested in sports are interested in gambling, and it is something that is part of it, and I think, by the way, I'm going to clarify something you said. You said they're partnership with DraftKings or their oh sorry.

Or something. They display odds on games. There's no branding, there's no linking. If you go to the Settings app to turn off the odds. Ironically, to turn them off, you will see that the data source is provided by DraftKings, but that's it. That's the only place that there's DraftKings branding and you can turn it off.

I am a little baffled why they don't either ask at launch or put it in the app, but they decided to make you have to go find it or to turn it on. But I kind of understand why they want to tell people who care about odds that they'll show them the odds. That said, if you really care about the odds, would you not want to use your gambling app to do it instead of the scoring app? But it's one of those things that I have to come to accept is that gambling is a part of sports and it's not a part I care about, but it is a huge part of sports in the US, increasingly in the UK, for a very long time now, I've heard a lot from people in countries where gambling is seen as really disgusting and awful and, like I get it, I'm kind of on your side about this, but I think you can't turn your back on the fact that it is an enormous portion of the value in sports in the US is money from gambling. And I'll also point out because I definitely saw a bunch of people who are clutching at pearls this week about this that when the MLB Friday Night Baseball launched on Apple TV Plus their studio show, that kicked it all off.

It was a branded sponsored by a casino studio show right out of the gate. It was, I think, mgm sponsoring Apple TV baseball. So this is not the. You know. Apple and sports and gambling all kind of go together. That said, I don't think you're ever going to like get a direct link to a gambling app or be able to place a bet in Apple Sports. I don't think they'll go that far.

1:27:21 - Andy Ihnatko
I'm not and, by the way, and I'm not pilloring them for this I'm just disappointed. I do feel as though, like they've made these kind of decisions on other issues in the past, like they've said, that again there's they could actually create a much better experience for a lot of their users if they didn't care so much about privacy, but they've made the choice that privacy is something, that this is one of our defining things. I do. I'm not a gambler myself. I also appreciate the fact that people have to make their own mistakes and make their own choices, that these gambling apps, they're illegal, for I think the most states the legal age is at least 18. Although there are again, a lot of the coverage about these things is that it's, there are ways around it, and DraftKings is interested in tracking it, but not terribly interested in tracking it, so to speak.

My feeling is that if people are gambling, they've got a much, much more sophisticated app that they would like to, they would want to use anyway. I feel as though Apple had an opportunity to say let's make this clean, let's, not even let's, and they declined that opportunity, and that's pretty much it. I do want. I do one last thing, though. I do want. I do want to know if someone is an underage user. Is it automatically off by default, or?

1:28:37 - Leo Laporte
if the NC, I don't know your age.

1:28:40 - Andy Ihnatko
Well, they know you're an age-lc user, but do they. Do they?

1:28:46 - Jason Snell
Disapple the whole difference.

1:28:47 - Andy Ihnatko
If the Apple ID is to someone that they know to be under 18, I want that off by default. That would be a big problem.

1:28:55 - Leo Laporte
The thing is you're both right that I'm sure serious gambling addictive people have their own app, but maybe they're avoiding that app, Maybe they deleted that app and there's that little hint. I think I can beat those odds and win is enough. It's a trigger.

1:29:14 - Jason Snell
I honestly am so beaten down by the prevalence of gambling stuff in my sports. These days. I was just relieved that you could turn it off. But I agree, ideally they shouldn't be there, or they should ask, or you have to go turn it on.

1:29:27 - Leo Laporte
Apple is a capitalistic enterprise and I'm sure they're always doing the calculus, not from a moral point of view. But what can we? What should we not have and what should we have based on revenue projections? I think that it's not moral on their part. They may want you to think it's moral that they're carefully weighing whether we should have alcohol, tobacco and drugs or gambling or not, but no, it's a purely economic decision. Come on guys, these guys are good managers.

1:29:58 - Alex Lindsay
I think that from a sports app would be hard. I mean, I think that it would be seen as prudish to not not have that, not at least have the odds in there, given that, I mean, we've been that, this has been odds. You know we had Jiminy. Greek Sports have been tied together pretty tightly for a long time and I always had Budweiser ads, and Naples has so far resisted that what do you so when any, when you met with Eddie Q?

1:30:24 - Leo Laporte
Was it to specifically talk about this app, jason?

1:30:28 - Jason Snell
yeah, One-on-one with Eddie Q the day when he just flew back from Vegas from the Super Bowl to talk about. I mean, if anything says this is his baby, oh, yeah, that right that he did one-on-ones with press when he was presumably pretty tired from the Super Bowl, and yeah, yeah, it's, that's, that's the case. I don't know, do they have liquor? I know Amazon doesn't do liquor ads in their Sports broadcasts. I don't know if Apple does or not, but the gambling stuff is in there, so I would imagine that they're probably our beer ads or something in the in the Apple TV games, but I don't know that.

1:31:03 - Leo Laporte
This goes along, by the way, with the addition of the athletic to Apple news as well, right.

1:31:10 - Jason Snell
Yeah, they he mentioned that right that they have added athletic content to news plus and so that's another part of their kind of like sports agglomeration. I would I would not be surprised. Like I said, I do agree with Andy. The simplicity of it is sort of like the weather app. Is is great. I would imagine at some point you're gonna be able to see Headlines of your favorite you know teams in that app and the athletic content will be extra good for that right, because they've got beat writers for most of the major teams.

1:31:40 - Leo Laporte
What's their attitude on on sure-locking though a third-party Ecosystem? I mean Apple could easily do apps in a lot of areas. That would be fantastic.

1:31:51 - Jason Snell
I mean, first off, we talked. We talked here and they didn't talk about this, but we talked here about why it makes sense strategically for them. But I think, from Andy's perspective, his pitch was Most scores apps are really bad because they're either trying to get you to bet or they're trying to put gross ads in front of you or they're trying to, you know, sell you on some other thing that they're doing like they don't have. They have an ulterior motive that because it's expensive to do, to get the, the data sources and to push it all out there. And Apple Because they're. It's.

It's the traditional thing with Apple, right, it is they're playing a different game than their competitors so they can come out with something that is simpler and cleaner, because all they want to do is show you the scores and put a link to Apple TV in there, right, like I mean that's. I think that's the motivation here is. So I don't think they're worried about it. I don't think that they feel like I mean, they didn't really justify buying Dark sky and putting them out of business to make the weather out better. So I think they're certainly not gonna justify it now. But if I you know, when I talk to him about it.

I mean, eddie Q basically said a lot of people still like Google the name of their team in order to see the score. Because they're and I do that because a lot of those score apps are, you know, they're okay but they're actually full of junk because They've got to make money somehow. And right, apple is playing you. Right, apple can make their platform a little nicer and then drive you toward their TV app and that's a benefit for them.

1:33:15 - Alex Lindsay
But, you know, try being a third party to do that and I have to admit I don't gamble at all and I but I love looking at what the odds are. Yeah, so I don't, I don't really look at that that way. And then the same thing I would love to have something. I at first I was like I don't know when I'm gonna ever use the sports app, but I was like, well, it's not stealer season, so I don't even caught football season, it's just not stealer season. So so if it's stealer season, then I check it all the time. If I'm not watching the, the thing, I'm checking it like every five minutes and refreshing Google To do that, to figure out where where things are.

So it'd be great to have an app that was doing that relatively fast and not Junkified with everything else that I don't, I'm not interested in and I don't think that, like, if you look at, apple made a weather app, but I but I use carrot, so I, you know, I think that carrots very different than weather, you know, and so, especially if you turn up the attitude and so the, so you know, I enjoy carrot and so I don't think that Apple, I think that if you're making something that's Utilitarian and it isn't, and it's got a lot of junk in it or it's got a lot of other things. You're gonna have a hard time competing, but if you're making something that's really original, that's it can be doing the same thing that Apple's doing, and you're, you'll still be, you'll still be able to succeed.

1:34:24 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah you're reminding me of one feature that I've. That's kind of surprised that that the sports app Doesn't have which is like I am a local sports but I'm not into like a lot of people in New England, I'm not into sports. I'm into the Red Sox and the Celtics, I'm into the Bruins, I'm into the Patriots, I'm into the Beanpot tournament tournament, those kind of things. I'm surprised you can't just simply like allow access to location and simply say give me sports from 02134 and so basically auto populates, like like the New England New England College hockey leagues, minor league sports, things I might not necessarily know about or might not be immediately on my radar, but I would be interested in just any baseball that's happening at any sort of professional level. Give me the Cape Cod league. I'm sure it's gonna be a long time before the summer Cape Cod baseball league is gonna be part of Apple sports on their radar. But I'm kind of surprised you can't simply say just auto-filled Boston and let's go from there.

1:35:23 - Leo Laporte
By the way, excellent article on six colors calm, thank you Jason. Simple complexity. He writes Apples trio sports apps. So if you want to make sense of all of this, this article, right, because there is a way.

1:35:36 - Jason Snell
If you're like, wait a second, it doesn't do live activities, the answer is it doesn't because that's in the TV app. I know, I know, when it doesn't have news stories, it's because it's in the news app and they all sync. Your favorite teams sync across all of those Apps. You just have to go to different apps. I know, I mean I'm just, I'm not making the news, I'm just reporting it.

1:35:57 - Leo Laporte
And making sense of it, which is good, trying trying to make sense. Thank you, jason, for doing that. Let's see. We're gonna get to the picks and just a sec, so I want to make sure we get everything in here. Apple care support advisors are testing a new chat, gpt like tool. They call ask. Ask, it's internal, though, right, you don't get to, you don't get to see ask. That makes sense, though. If you can put all of the manuals, all of the information in that notebook that they have to page through In a simple query interface, that's a good way to do it.

1:36:32 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, and it's a good way to quietly in-house test AI models that you're hoping to put into the operating system at some later date or put into extra services. It sounds like it's not just doing like a chat GPT sort of ask a question, give an answer is saying here is that, here Is all the data that is in this radar, who that's that's in this support request, and here is a sample response that the human can then basically okay or edit or disregard. So yeah, it could. It sounds like it's more ambitious than certainly just here's a way to streamline our customer service, although if all it does is makes it easier for people to get access to really good, really good quality information Vetted by an actual human being at Apple, that would be a big win for everybody.

1:37:14 - Leo Laporte
I like the wired I Com writer Lauren good, who said she wanted to test crying in the vision pro. We should have put this in our vision pro segment. She watched a steady diet of sad movies but just to see what it was like to cry in the vision pro. Have either of you guys cried in your vision pro yet?

1:37:36 - Jason Snell
I'm a big yeah, oh man, what was it? There was some movie that.

1:37:39 - Leo Laporte
I watched.

1:37:40 - Jason Snell
I was like well up and and Stephen Hackett and David Sparks on their Mac power users podcast, they did an episode that I think was called tears fell on my vision pro or something. Tears on my light seal, something like that, and it was the same thing it was. You know, it's a little cushion, it'll dry out, it's okay, you can cry, it's all right to cry, it's okay, it's the sad out of. You get the set up. Rosie Greer taught me that I'm not children of this, the non-gen Xers in the group. You can look it up. Marla Thomas free to be you and me. Great, tough football player. Rosie Greer saying it's all right to cry. Anyway, yeah, I mean it's. The good news is you're not gonna short it out because it goes into the light seal and Corina Reuters.

1:38:23 - Leo Laporte
Apple's gonna get a a new messaging and communications team member. Former deputy press secretary For President Biden. Apple's hiring Olivia a layer Dalton, she's deputy assistant to the president, went out. Principal deputy press Secretary will take on a senior communications role at Apple. She's been with Biden for 20 years, hmm, interesting.

1:38:50 - Andy Ihnatko
It's interesting, so I wonder why she's leaving now, particularly in an election year.

1:38:54 - Leo Laporte
Well, that's exactly what you want to get out, I think that's exactly, you just nailed it, andy.

1:39:02 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, well, I guess. I mean, if the offer was on the table, it might not be in a year If she, if she suddenly needs a job shareholders Meeting is tomorrow.

1:39:11 - Leo Laporte
There are some proposals Apple has absolutely no interest in, so you can pretty much be sure that they will not go anywhere. Also, let's see what else in the Sure. What's news they want? Yeah, they want Apple to reveal their use of AI. This is from the Financial Times.

1:39:35 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, they want to disclose their use of AI and do they have any ethical guidelines in place similar to, like Google's AI print Published AI principles?

1:39:44 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, this is coming from the Norway Wealth Fund, the Norges Bank Investment Management and Legal and General, apple's eighth and tenth largest shareholders respectively. That's pretty big, pretty big guns there. They asked the company to disclose any ethical guidelines the company has Adopted regarding its use of AI technology. So not the source or what they're doing with AI, but what ethical guidelines. That that's a fair question.

1:40:11 - Andy Ihnatko
That's a fair yeah and Apple's already basically told the SEC hey, we don't want to have to do this because it'll disclose like secret information. The SEC. Sec said, yeah, try again. So they're just Apple's just saying yeah, please, shareholders, don't vote for this. Shareholders will get to love you. Look at, look how much money we're making for you. We're all happy.

1:40:31 - Leo Laporte
Proposal was submitted by the AFL and of CIO. Afl, cio, f of L CIO. I was like to put the oven. It makes me sound old. Apple has launched a new open source programming language. This happened earlier this month. We didn't talk about pickle. I'm pretty sure you pronounce that pickle.

1:40:52 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, it's, it's a Python, Kotlin and Lisp I thought I put this thing so I thought it was interesting. So it is a length, a programming language for configuration, like configuration and settings files. So essentially, if you're deploying, if you're, if you're basically it's it's code that you can create, that Well, you can then include in your actual project library and have again, have it, have, have it generate Python code that generates these configuration files or profiles or settings files, or generates it as Lisp. Almost last time you heard Lisp mentioned something that's sorted or Kotlin, it's open source.

It was created by Apple. If you go to the website, it looks like a beautiful Apple design website, although you have to really scroll down to see that, yes, this is an Apple project. The the logo, if they were. If they have hats I want one of the hats. It is a green gear with a pickle slice as the circle inside it. I I would pay 30 or $40 for such a hat were available at one intent loop. But yeah, I thought it was interesting. It must have been a solution to a problem that they were working on a lot internally and the idea that hey, let's open source this and try to turn this into a thing, particularly something as polished as this seems really interesting. I have, but obviously I admit that all I've been reading are like medium posts from developers who've been trying to use it. It's kind of funny.

1:42:15 - Leo Laporte
I like it. He lists and Jason and all these file for XML or all four months were kind of designed so you could write them Like they were, but they got so complicated now you have to have code to write the code. Jason, nell, andy and I, co Alex Lindsey, it's all right to cry. Get that sad right out of your head. Our show today brought to you by CacheFly man.

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cachefly.com/twit. You've heard me say it for years Bandwidth for MacBreak Weekly is brought to you by CacheFly at C-A-C-H-E-F-L-Y.com/twit. Thank you, cash for life. Thank you from the bottom of our hearts. You've made TWiT possible over all these years. Time for our picks of the week. Jason, still want you kick it off.

1:44:47 - Jason Snell
All right, this is a simple app. There have been, over the history of the iPhone, a whole lot of different scanning apps, but the fact is a lot of them are kind of long in the tooth or they've gotten Full of like Baroque features that are for people who are scanning documents all the time, and a lot of us stand a handful of documents every month or every year. Greg Pierce, the guy who wrote the great app, drafts of agile adgeal tour yes yes, has a new app just came out.

It's called simple scan. It is free. You can try it for, I think, five scans and then you can either spend five dollars a year or just pay twenty bucks and get it forever. And it is simple, like it. You do a scan and it says do you want the scan to be a message? Do you want it to be a share, do you want to save it to a file, like? And then it does all of the edge detection.

I love that Apple has documents scanning built into the OS now, but it's built into notes and then getting those scans out of notes is a real pain. So what I really want is something that just very quickly will scan documents, put them in a PDF. It optionally I think it's turned on by default will index, will OCR, basically index the documents so it's searchable, and save it where, in my case, save it to files, to a shared folder so that other people can look at my receipts and stuff like that. And you know, I think you need something like this in your life. Something this simple might be a better solution than some of the more complicated things that are out there, but I find myself once you have hell of a document scanner.

Yeah, app on your phone and in a pinch you can absolutely use notes. But like it's so useful because then you're in that moment where you're like, do I need to do? I need to take this somewhere and get a photocopy? And like, no, no, no, I won't. Or maybe you take a picture of it.

And the good thing about the scanning software is it detects that it's a document, it knows that it's probably black and white, it detects the edges of the paper, it de distorts it and you end up with a PDF that actually looks pretty good like an actual Scanner scanned it, instead of your dumb hands holding an iPhone at a weird angle. So check it out. If this sounds like you're, either you have never really thought about doing something like this or you're using an older, let's say, scanning app that maybe is not working reliably anymore. That was the case with mine that I was using before, and so I'm excited that Greg put this together pretty quickly, because getting it, getting things into notes you know it's nice that notes is on every iPhone, but boy I struggle. Apple really just wants you to scan things into notes and leave them there, and I almost never want to scan them into notes and leave them there.

1:47:16 - Leo Laporte
So so you get five scans for a free it looks like for free and then to get the professional version is five bucks a year. That's nothing or 20.

1:47:26 - Jason Snell
Give them all the money, and then they'll never ask again and go pro. Yeah, I think that's a real like well-known developer with a Very well respected long-time app draft.

1:47:35 - Leo Laporte
I'm subscribing a draft.

1:47:36 - Alex Lindsay
since it came out, I use it every all the time, yeah and and I'm in the process of getting it there are a lot of different ones, so pay attention to what you're buying.

1:47:45 - Jason Snell
Yeah, you want the ones from there. There are a bunch that are called simple scan with a bunch of things, but it's simple, Can quick scanner and agile.

1:47:53 - Leo Laporte
Tortoise is the developer right, right, right.

1:47:56 - Jason Snell
And actually, if you watch this or listen to this episode in the next week or so, max stories net just did a story about it and you can get the link direct from there, for example. There you know, but yeah, don't buy, don't get the wrong one.

1:48:08 - Leo Laporte
So I'm gonna scan, let me just try something. Does it do OCR to? So I'm scanning a ridiculous angle. I just scan it. A result ridiculous angle. And let's see here oh, and now I can email it off to everybody. I know, yeah, great, and it fixed the angle and everything. Well, that's great, yeah, and it's actually scan it right email. That's nice.

1:48:28 - Jason Snell
Yeah, a lot of these apps just got started to get weird, where they wanted to add bells and whistles in order to keep you In the app. And I think Greg's reaction was can someone just make an app that keeps it simple? And he said, well, I guess that's me.

1:48:40 - Leo Laporte
So Good job, nice job, make, keep it simple, mr Andy Naco. Pick of the week.

1:48:50 - Andy Ihnatko
I'm going to reiterate and hopefully amplify Alex's pick of the week from like a couple months ago. The great American solar eclipse is happening on April 8th and this is the reason why I picked this today was that I think the window is closing on your being able to buy like proper solar eclipse viewing glasses and getting them like in time for for the big show. I when Alex recommended these like about a month or two.

I I literally like ordered them like before the show was over, because I knew that I was the sort of person who would forget until Like late March, and then I kind of be host.

1:49:31 - Leo Laporte
Can you see anything, andy? At all anything.

1:49:33 - Andy Ihnatko
I can. I can see pretty much Reflections into my own black. That's about it.

1:49:41 - Jason Snell
But that's what you want. You can see anything.

1:49:44 - Andy Ihnatko
Makes me confident that, like that these are, these are proper glasses, but and so but? Another reason for recommended is are mentioning this today is that, like, as we get closer to the event, the only ones that are going to be left are ones by, like scammers that you are selling you basically last dark.

Exactly so. They're not safe at all. So go to I'm recommending there. If you go to the Planetary Society's website, planetaryorg, they've got a whole piece on here's how to check. Here's what kind of glasses to get. Here are sources that have legit glasses. Here is things you absolutely should not use, like saying, don't use ordinary sunglasses or multiple pairs of sunglasses. Stacked neutral density, polarizing filters, smoke glass, photographic or X for X-ray film, emergency blankets, potato chip bags, dvds. What you're looking for is something that is I.

Know one, two, three, one, two, dash, two, compliant, although again, they're saying that the scammers will just take that logo and just slap it on right on the box. No problem, you can also get. Now. This is. This is why, like, if there's I only reason, I'm glad that I have the glasses. They're really again they're, they're really cool, but they're more like 1980s, like comedy like. But that with the nerd buys to at the 1980s comedies because he thinks it'll make him look cool.

What I was hoping for another 80s sort of thing, that sort of like mad scientist, crackpot and ventured glasses that Thomas Doldy might have worn and she blinded me with science, the music video, those are. So you can get welding glasses with number 14, ir filters, and on Amazon you can get them for anywhere from 30 to 40 dollars or 50 dollars. I might actually buy another pair of those before because it seems like something I would like to have like on the shelf for when I Just want the rest of the neighborhood to think I'm very odd and leave me alone for the rest of the day.

1:51:35 - Leo Laporte
I definitely want these. These are amazing, yeah, and you can get them with the right filter for watching.

1:51:44 - Andy Ihnatko
Exactly, yeah and you can. You know you could. They're useful to beyond the eclipse because you there replaceable filters so you can buy like the number 14's for the eclipse, but then also like buy lighter ones for for the beach, clear, transparent ones for weddings. You'll get a lot of use of the ultimate steampunk glasses.

1:52:05 - Leo Laporte
You've seen them fake ones, but now you could have the real deal.

1:52:10 - Andy Ihnatko
Just just don't wear them as the band on a top hat, because I really think that's played out. They're good. They're good. They're a bold enough fashion statement on their own. They can exist on their own, but but again, make it. Whatever you do like, get your. You can get the cheap paper ones that are like less than ten bucks, but you should probably place your order this week. You should probably make sure you place your order from a very legitimate, reputable place, because if you forget about it now by the time you remember it, yes, you're again. This, this planetary society article Explain gives you some tests you can do on glasses that have been sold to you to make sure that they're actually gonna keep your eyes safe. But I think that windows starting to close really rapidly.

1:52:51 - Leo Laporte
Are you in the line of totality?

1:52:55 - Andy Ihnatko
No, but apparently we're gonna get 90% around here, so that's good.

1:53:00 - Leo Laporte
That's reason enough for me to stare at the same thing. To visit a mom In April, that might be the week to go.

1:53:06 - Jason Snell
You know the the Cleveland Indians opening day is during the eclipse and they're in the path of totality, so they're gonna take an eclipse break. It's gonna be all oh, you know what?

1:53:15 - Leo Laporte
that would even be better oh.

1:53:18 - Jason Snell
They're the guardians now. Anyway, cleveland is in the path of totality, as our Dallas. A bunch of big cities are Totality, so it's gonna be.

1:53:25 - Alex Lindsay
You're going to Texas, yeah, I'm going to Texas a bunch of us in office hours are descending on Texas and we're still figuring out exactly where we want to go, because we're trying to get internet so that we can stream it.

1:53:35 - Jason Snell
But I yes but we're.

1:53:37 - Alex Lindsay
But yeah, it's four minutes, four and a half minutes or something like that. What if you're in the totality and tech? And the reason we're going to Texas specifically is because has the highest percentage chance of not having clouds?

1:53:47 - Jason Snell
I'm not having bad weather. Yeah, because that's a really, really messed up kind of everything's mixed up that time of year, but Texas has a lot of parts of. I'll be in Texas too, so oh.

1:53:59 - Alex Lindsay
We're at, yeah, but we have also. We have a gram-jones and and buckle from time and date. They cover these eclipses, every, every eclipse somewhere in the world, and they're gonna be on office hours on Thursday. I didn't know that. I didn't know that I was gonna talk about that.

1:54:13 - Jason Snell
But so the guardians move their game to just after the eclipse. Yeah, go to the stadium watch the eclipse. So are you going early?

1:54:19 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, because the game won't begin till 510, but the eclipse totality ends at 427 but the gates open at 2 pm so you can come early watch the eclipse.

1:54:33 - Jason Snell
I wonder if they're gonna get you know they should.

1:54:35 - Alex Lindsay
They can't. They can't give you head. I was gonna say they should give you Sunglasses on the way in, like that's the thing you get.

1:54:40 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, everything else you can go to build a good bill, nice paper sunglasses, let's do somebody. Yeah, that's true, yeah.

1:54:50 - Andy Ihnatko
Alex, are you worried about being being in a really really like religious State like Texas at a time when God takes the sun away?

1:55:05 - Jason Snell
I saw the last total eclipse in Idaho and I survived it, so I think it's okay. I think he's going.

1:55:11 - Leo Laporte
He's going for the rapture. You want to be there, don't you?

1:55:14 - Alex Lindsay
I want to be the right that we're ground zero. I went, I saw it in Bend Oregon. We were covering it for National Geographic and fun and it is, if you have it something near this. Yeah, it is, there's a hole in the sky, it is a hole, and it's night and it and it's night.

1:55:30 - Jason Snell
So the other thing I'll say so I took my, drag my kids side of home, I and they're like whatever, dad, it's one of my dad's things like baseball and space things and whatever. And then the total eclipse happens. My daughter turns to me and she is crying and she says I didn't know what would be like this, Because if you've been dragged outside by a friend, like look at the shadows of the leaves of the trees, oh, that's cool. A little crescent moon, that's all cool. Totality is it's like a different thing.

You shouldn't even call it the same thing Because literally it's suddenly nighttime, the birds stop chirping the animals, okay, and the solar corona comes out and it's this thing that's invisible otherwise, and it's this giant fuzz all around the sun and the stars come out. It is amazing, so see it if you can.

1:56:19 - Andy Ihnatko
I can tell you that the one time that I was lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time for totality was I could probably find out what the date was, but it was in the 70s. I was a little kid, definitely in the single digits in age, and I still remit that's one of the few things from like my kindergarten, pre-k, whatever days I remember with absolute clarity. I can describe everything from where I was and because that was like something something bigger than few.

1:56:50 - Alex Lindsay
Oh man, like I, covid is the only reason I didn't go to South America for the. I don't travel very much anymore, but South America I had planned to go down. We're going to this one, I'm already planning Greenland. Greenland is the next one, it's a couple of years from now and and it doesn't come back to the United States until 2044, I think so it's. You know, it's not gonna. You know so it's quite a while before we see it again. So if you're anywhere near it and plan ahead because it will, it will be busy, like you need to be, like don't think you're just gonna go show up somewhere an hour before to see it, if you're in the line of totality. You know, we were talking to a little town in Texas because we're trying to figure out where to put our gear and they're like yeah, we expect we're a town of 1800. We expect 50,000 people to be in the area.

1:57:35 - Jason Snell
Yeah, yeah, I think traffic is the biggest problem, because what I found being out in the middle and yeah all those things, but what I found is like space, like there's a lot of space on the ground and the path of totality in terms of, like square footage is enormous, so you'll find some place to stand. The problem is where do you park and then, when it's over, how do you get out and like, can you find a place to stay in a hotel that's nearby? Those are all the problems.

1:58:00 - Alex Lindsay
And for me? For me it's like camper get there the day before barbecue afterwards.

1:58:08 - Jason Snell
We were in a lot of traffic in Idaho after the eclipse. It was quite a quite a thing.

1:58:13 - Alex Lindsay
It's been the whole afternoon just cooking barbecue or something.

1:58:15 - Jason Snell
Yeah, that's a good idea. I like that idea.

1:58:16 - Alex Lindsay
I'm not even bothered to think about trying to leave. Yeah.

1:58:19 - Andy Ihnatko
I'm really disappointed with you. Alex, if you don't like, take it while you're waiting, take a look around. Find somebody who might be clutching a religious object or beads and say, wow, that's a nice like 20, 23, Ford F 800 or whatever. I'll give you $500 cash for it right now. Oh, you're cold, that's me. And they'll say well, I'm going to be raptured in eight minutes anyway.

1:58:41 - Jason Snell
The fool doesn't know that the devil's coming to claim him in 10 minutes and then drive off.

1:58:47 - Andy Ihnatko
You'll have to, you'll have to miss the eclipse, but you'll get like an $80,000 truck for yeah, and a good story to tell people that when two people who are very upset Are you going, john?

1:58:57 - Leo Laporte
Let me know You're going to know. Oh, you went last time, last two, last two. Yeah, we were on a geek cruise for the eclipse in 2000,. What is 12 or 13,? Whatever that was.

1:59:10 - Jason Snell
Australia. Yeah, we went to Australia. Yeah, I missed that one. I should have done that one.

1:59:15 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it was a geek cruise. It was fun. Yeah, cans. Well, it wasn't that much fun. I've told the story before, but famed astronomer Lawrence Krauss was on board with us and he was a little miffed because just as the totality began, the captain got afraid, not of spooks and spirits, but that the clouds would cover it. So he fired up the engines and sailed away and didn't really get anywhere near the eclipse ever again.

1:59:43 - Jason Snell
So April 9th episode of Mac break, weekly. By the way. Who will be here?

1:59:49 - Alex Lindsay
Alex and I, I think, will not, oh, oh, I'm going to start playing.

1:59:52 - Jason Snell
Coming in remote I'm working out a place to be on a plane.

1:59:57 - Andy Ihnatko
So, jason, can I ask you because, okay, I'm glad to hear you say, because you'll be on a plane, you might, but there's still like a little chance you might be raptured. That's what you're saying.

2:00:05 - Jason Snell
Yeah, right, I may be fine, I'm fine at it.

2:00:09 - Andy Ihnatko
There might be an empty T shirt, like draped on the chair when we cut to you and do but I will probably be on a plane that day flying home flying home.

2:00:18 - Leo Laporte
Are you going down in Dallas? Great yeah, how exciting are you? So wow, but you're not meeting up.

2:00:26 - Jason Snell
My sister-in-law's family is in town, is in Texas, so we're going to. Actually all my my wife's family and I are going to. We're all going to meet there and hang out, and then also there will be an eclipse, so it was a good excuse to get the family together at a place. It's like find family in the path of totality and visit them.

2:00:46 - Andy Ihnatko
You know we should get together every time God swallows the giant day ball.

2:00:52 - Jason Snell
Andy, as you know, this, this just in. I'm getting a report now, as we, as we know, since he first saw the sun, man is dreamed of destroying it, and so now the moon will do the next best thing.

2:01:04 - Leo Laporte
The good time to go to Mazatlan. You're going to get get a nice four minutes and 15 seconds of a of darkness.

2:01:12 - Jason Snell
It is tempting. Yeah, it's very tempting.

2:01:16 - Leo Laporte
Mr and Mr Alex Lindsey is next with, I think, your very first handmade artisanal organic pick of the week.

2:01:24 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, so it's such a great marketing thing that you know, so I didn't know anything about this. This is I, I, I, I, my whole family's gotten hooked on these. These are called jam bars and they're out of Marin, they're out of this County, and how we got hooked into them was so funny. So I went to the Toad to Wets Brockett concert in the fall. So this is, and they handed these out.

2:01:44 - Jason Snell
Did they give these for there? Alex and I were both fair. I've got that poster to you.

2:01:48 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, so they give you this poster as you leave, which I thought was awesome, but they also gave you. Did they give you jambars away as you left?

2:01:56 - Jason Snell
Yeah, we got some jambars.

2:01:57 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, and I was like this is a really good bar. You didn't like it.

2:02:01 - Jason Snell
I thought it was pretty good, but I didn't buy any more of them. I don't know where to buy them.

2:02:05 - Alex Lindsay
I don't know where to buy them other than Amazon, so I bought a box of them. I was like, oh, this is really good and I really like energy bars because I keep them when I do work. I always have three or four energy bars in case you know meals to get broken up or whatever. So I'm always like it's cliff bars or power bars or this bar or that bar, and so I'm always researching them for the team and for myself. So I got them. I was like you're really good, he's a really good jam bar.

2:02:27 - Leo Laporte
What flavors do you recommend? I was thinking, maybe I should.

2:02:30 - Alex Lindsay
Of course. So there's a lot of drama about that in my family. So the, the we have a lot of discussions. I usually you're only going to see this jasbury one because my daughter will take all of them as soon as she knows that there's a box here. So the jasbury and the and the mangoes the women like, and then there is malt, malt and chocolate, chocolate cha-cha and malt nut. Medley, melody Medley. The boys like the, the boys like the mall melody Cause it's music, baby.

So so what they do is they give half of their net profits to music programs in Marin.

2:03:09 - Jason Snell
So you actually, they actually, you're supporting your.

2:03:11 - Alex Lindsay
It's a jam bar Supporting like local music, it's like music in high schools and stuff like that, and so so it's kind of cool that they're they're giving money away and you can't get them on Amazon, cause, again, I I've never seen them in a store in Marin. I'm sure they're around somewhere, but I haven't seen them. But but you can order them on Amazon by the box. I just I would recommend buy the if you, if you decide to buy this, just buy the, the one that is like 12.

2:03:35 - Leo Laporte
I'm buying the 48 bar mixed case with one 12 count box for each flavor, so that we can have them for the entire team.

2:03:45 - Alex Lindsay
And then you guys can let us know in a week or two.

2:03:47 - Jason Snell
I look forward to seeing those in the snack bowl.

2:03:49 - Leo Laporte
The next time I visit, next time you visit. Now, you really want to come visit, don't you?

2:03:53 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, but they're a, they're good. They're a good. I like. I like companies that are giving back something to, I mean, you know, some amount back to the, the community and and they're good, and I wouldn't recommend them if they weren't, if they didn't actually taste good, and this is so I buy them by the box.

2:04:06 - Leo Laporte
The family absorbs them when they go on little trips and and then I buy another box, so Well, next time you're in the studio you'll have your choice, unless, unless John snarls up all the chocolate cha-cha, they're all good.

2:04:24 - Alex Lindsay
Some are better than others.

2:04:26 - Leo Laporte
Well, maltnut melody sounds really, really good. I like, I like that's which one's your favorite, my favorite is somewhere between chocolate and maltnut, but I like them.

2:04:37 - Alex Lindsay
I don't the. The jaz berry, which is the one I actually got that I thought was good enough to go buy them, is probably my least favorite. I like them all. The mango one is really good as well.

2:04:46 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, they look good. Well, we're going to have all four here at the studio as soon as the mailman can deliver it. There you go, thank you. So here's Lindsay office hoursglobal, the place to go to see what's going on in the world. It's every morning. The secret life of splines this morning. I know you want to know more about that.

2:05:09 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, there's a, there's a picture for you. Yep, yeah, the. Yeah, we were talking about how you know it's a. Splines are a very basic skill that most people don't know anymore. It's kind of like it's a lost. It's a lost Among most of us that do it, but it's really important and still makes a difference, and so we decided to spend talk. Talk about splines Tomorrow. We're talking about field recording, so like taking sound devices and stuff in, as I said we had, we're talking about Eclipse's on Thursday, and on Friday, Nathan Slagle, who designs stages and all for big events and concerts and everything else, is going to come on and talk about how he does that. So you know good stuff Normal week.

2:05:46 - Leo Laporte
Join it for free officehours.global Andy is going to be Thursday's going to be on WGBH. Are you going to the library for that Andy?

2:05:55 - Andy Ihnatko
Nope, I'm from the home studio on Thursdays. Hopefully next time we'll be in the library. They actually they actually did a redecorate. Now They've got like. I'd love to show it to Alex, Alex. Then all the of these LCD screen, more display screens as part of the set, whereas before it used to be like a little temporary. So yeah, Sounds good, Sounds cool. Mr. Snell, sixcolors.com, thank you so much.

2:06:23 - Leo Laporte
All his podcasts at the sixcolors.com/podcast only five this week he's taking it only five of light week. Take it easy. Take it easy. We do MacBreak Weekly every Tuesday, 11 AM Pacific, 2 PM Eastern time, 1900 UTC. Everybody can watch it. We stream it live on YouTube now at youtube.com/twit during the broadcast, so you can watch live there. Of course, if you're in our club, you can watch it before and after the show. The streams are much more. They go on and on and on. And of course, by being in the club, not only do you get that, you get access to the club twit discord, which is where the streams live all the great conversation. You get ad free versions of all the shows, tracker free versions as well.

I was talking in the twit forums at twit.com/community about that. We just turned down a big ad agency that said you have to add another tracker. They call them pixels, but really it's a redirect in the feed so that we can see who's downloading it. We said no, which means we lost a number of advertisers because and this is our policies we don't want to overload you with trackers. There's a little ad tracking in our ad supported feeds. We have to give them some, but then you give an inch and they take a mile and agencies want more and more.

This is really what's happening in the world of podcasting. We're trying to hold the line. We, for several reasons, not merely because we don't want to do it, because we know you don't want us to do it. We feel like this would be kind of a betrayal of our audience. So that means we rely on you more than ever before for the support that keeps the shows on the air. We made it inexpensive and I think we made it. You know some extra benefits that make it worthwhile, but really do it because you like twit and you listen to twit and you want to support our content.

All the shows are ad free. You get bonus content. You get video of shows that we only produce in audio, like iOS today. You also get, of course, the Discord and our endless thank you. We appreciate our club members more than you know If you're not yet a member twit.tv/clubtwit, did I mention it's only seven bucks a month. It's not much and we're going to keep that price low $84 a year. There's family plans and corporate plans. Twittv slash club twit Thank you in advance Studies show. Twit club members are happier than others. Says doctor do, and he's a doctor, so you should listen to him. After the fact, though, we do make ad free and ad supported versions of the show available, the former for the club members, the latter for everyone else.

At twittv slash MBW for MacBreak Weekly. There's also a YouTube channel dedicated to MacBreak Weekly. You can get the video there and, of course, the best way to get it subscribe. That way, you'll get it the minute it's available. Just choose your favorite podcast player and search for MacBreak Weekly. Thank you, gentlemen Alex Lindsey, Andy Ihnatko Jason Snell. Thank you, club members. Thank you to all you who watch, and merely watch and listen. We will see you next time, but now I have to tell you, sad to say, it's time to get back to work because break time is over. Bye, bye.