MacBreak Weekly 916 Transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.

0:00:00 - Leo Laporte
It's time for MacBreak Weekly. Jason Snell has the day off. He was down watching the eclipse in Texas but joining us from the Texas Standard, Shelly Brisbin Love having her on. Alex Lindsay's here. Andy Ihnatko, we will talk about the layoffs coming to Apple. What's happening to the car team? It looks like robots are on the horizon and a very cool 3D printed classic Mac. It's all coming up. Next on MacBreak Weekly.

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This is MacBreak Weekly episode 916, recorded Tuesday, April 9th 2024. Cars Into Robots. It's time for MacBreak Weekly, the show where we talk about the latest news from Apple. Jason Snell is off pitching for the San Francisco Giants so he's not here. No, actually that was yesterday. He was at the Eclipse, so he's on his way back from the Eclipse. We'll hear from him about that next week. But that gives us a great opportunity to get Shelly Brisbin in. Hello Shelly.

0:01:13 - Shelly Brisbin
Hi Leo, thanks for having me. I was at the Eclipse as well, but I got home quicker.

0:01:18 - Leo Laporte
Did you? Oh, you're in Texas, of course, that's right, right.

0:01:20 - Shelly Brisbin
We have a lot of totality happening around here.

0:01:22 - Leo Laporte
What was it like? Was it spooky?

0:01:25 - Shelly Brisbin
It was not spooky. We were with a lot of people, we were at an eclipse festival, we were covering it for the Texas Standard, and so it was actually the band that was playing before. Totality was very sort of crispy and funky and psychedelic and very appropriate to the occasion. And then they stopped and we watched the eclipse and had a great, watched the kids lying on the ground looking straight up at it. It was fun.

0:01:48 - Leo Laporte
So, so fun. I watched it on CNN. That's pretty much the same. Actually, it was fun because they were going from place to place as the totality was moving up north, so they started in Texas and they moved up to poor Niagara. Falls was all cloudy, but it was really fun. And then actually, uh, one point, there were people getting married. Another point uh, somebody read it, totality made, proposed, got down on his knees. It was very, it was very cute, it was really neat, it was a fun thing and I'd I've been to a total eclipse before. So I kind of you know, I, I got the, I got the feeling, andy, and I go to you print it. You had a pretty good view of it, I think. Yeah.

0:02:26 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, that's. The thing is, though, like 90 percent, 90 percent totality is still like, oh, it's kind of overcast, isn't it? Yeah Right.

0:02:34 - Leo Laporte
But it's a weird overcast.

0:02:36 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, but yeah it's. It's a weird overcast in which, like, birds and critters are freaking out for reasons that they don't understand and in a way that you are not prepared to console, but you can console them. I tried, uh, but yeah, I had, I had my. I mean it is cool to like put on the glasses and look up and say, wow, that should be roundy, and actually it's got two pointy things on it. That's, that's new that was cool.

0:02:57 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, the uh, they had a couple of flares. Uh, it's just just tell the birdies, it's just a shadow, it's just the moon shadow leaping and hopping on a moon.

0:03:05 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, I mean I, I, I made sure that I, I, I left the garbage cans untied because the raccoons are probably going to say, well, you know, if we're up anyway, we may as well ransack some garbage cans. It's dark Again. They're very, very confused and it wasn't my position to correct them on help them through this.

0:03:21 - Leo Laporte
We only had I don't know in California like 20 or 30% totality. So I had a. I just put a little pinhole in a shoe box and put it on my head. It was fun. You know it's. It's fun, We've seen it. We've seen it before. The New York times crossword puzzle had a bunch of appropriate songs. It was really cute. Like total eclipse of the heart was one of the clues and I'm staring at the sun and moon shadow. It was really fun. It was a good. It was a good eclipse. Uh uh. If you haven't done it yet, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to spoil it. Uh, monday's a time's cross or puzzle also here from office hours dot global. Mr Alex Lindsay. Hello Alex.

0:03:56 - Alex Lindsay
Hi, yeah, we, I watched it from the uh from my, the comfort of my own home. We had, I think, five or six teams that were in different places. Oh, you did your own broadcast. Yes, we were kind of jumping from one to the other. We also traded. We ended up trading signals with time and date and NASA spaceflight. It all turned into this like hey, we've got six signals. And then we're like hey, we got 28 signals. And you know, it was good, it was a lot of cloud cover. I almost went down and fortunately, I mean I, I, uh would have been great to go down and see friends down there and and see it, but it turned out to be pretty overcast where I was aiming for us.

0:04:32 - Leo Laporte
So, uh, so I ended up trading signals with.

0:04:36 - Alex Lindsay
I don't understand the link so what we did is we we realized all of us are have different teams all the way up and down that rib, and so we use this. There's a product called Virtual Video Control Room, VVCR, and a company called LiveX does it, and Corey who runs that company is a friend of mine. I said, hey, can we use VVCR for this? And he's like, sure. And then, once that opened up the gate, basically we send all of our signals there and it's like a giant online router in AWS, and so he just starts sending. You know, like I could, we could all send our signals oh, that's kind of cool and then send them all back to each other so that we all had each other's feeds, you know. And so it was all using SRT and, and so it was, you know. And of course we had a. We had someone from the Perth Observatory, because he couldn't make it. Obviously it's a long flight.

Well, he gets one in a couple of years. So it's okay, Exactly so. We talked about that a little bit and then so he added the technical expertise, and then we were cutting it in Texas, and then we had people. You know, we were getting feeds from all the way up and down the river, and then we had people, you know we were getting feeds from all the way up and down the river.

It was fun. Can we watch that? Is it on YouTube? It's on YouTube, yeah, it's on our channel, nice, and the hard part is you only get to do it once, so you do it, and there's things that work, there's things that don't work.

0:06:05 - Leo Laporte
You're kind of there, you go Absolutely. There's a feed.

0:06:08 - Alex Lindsay
Wow, that was in Ohio.

0:06:10 - Leo Laporte
I should have been watching that much better than CNN Although the CNN anchors did dress up as the earth and the moon, which was weird.

Oh, there you go. A couple of them did All. All right, there's your eclipse coverage. Watch that office hours dot global on youtube. That's really neat. That's really neat. I can relive it. Uh, okay, we're kind of waiting a holding pattern, waiting for, uh, the release of we expect new ipad pro a couple of weeks, I think. Mark german is now saying May 6th, early May, something like that. Yeah, so still no event, but yeah, probably probably won't be an event. Right, they're making the video right now, alex, right, something like that, yeah, he has something like that.

0:06:59 - Alex Lindsay
I mean, yeah, I don't think that we'll see any. I don't think Apple, I think Apple's kind of past the keynote thing, I know, I mean they might. I don't think Apple, I think Apple's kind of past, the keynote thing.

0:07:06 - Leo Laporte
I mean they might, I don't know anything about it.

0:07:08 - Shelly Brisbin
Well, they've got June, they've got the WWDC. Wwdc is coming right up.

0:07:10 - Alex Lindsay
So these are videos. Now I mean, what I'm saying is I don't think we're going to see anything on a stage anymore, so it's just a matter of do they? I doubt it. I doubt it. The problem is, is that a video product of your, of of there is so much? I don't think the executives would want to go back to the old keynote thing and people, people keep on asking like, why do the other keynotes feel so slow? It's because they're on my stage. They felt the same speed before. It's just that you can only work at a certain speed on stage versus doing videos and being able to jump all over the state and and show things. And the thing is is, once you get used to that, it's really hard to go back. I'd be really surprised the Apple go back to it's like it's like basically going from fifth to first really quickly, you know. So I don't. I don't think. I don't think Apple. I think Apple's passed it.

0:07:53 - Andy Ihnatko
I think most companies need to think about moving past it, because more yeah, also, to say nothing, the fact of having, like your senior executives, all tied up for the same, like three or four hour period on the same day, as opposed to, okay, this person, this executive, is going to be available for three hours here. That's when we'll film their segment.

0:08:12 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, well, and and and. There's one thing about getting a take right once. It's another thing to practice it so that you can get it right in front of you know, 10 million people at at you know the right right at the right time. So there's so much rehearsal. It is a fraction, it probably I don't know what the number is but I would guess it's at least 10 times harder to do what they do on stage than it is to do it for a record. They practice it a couple of times. They do it. Once they get it right, they go okay, that's in the can, we'll move on, instead of having to practice it. So they can do it every time, every single time, while clicking slides and doing the thing and you know all that stuff. It's way easier for the, for the, and it's way more effective. It's easier to watch.

0:08:48 - Andy Ihnatko
And it's the same discussion about the difference between a live stage performance and something that's been recorded beforehand. Everything that you're saying is true and I agree with all of it. It's more effective, it's more easy on everybody. But I would love to see somebody maybe even you like recut Steve Jobs iPhone introduction as though it were like a video event, so there's no crowd reaction, it's just him. He cuts away to other like other pre-filmed things of statements and demos and then cuts back again. It's like again, it was a time and a place that no longer exists. So that's perfectly fine, I think, but I, I, I have it's. It's. It's fun to imagine what the next really big, exciting apple thing would be and how exciting would be to have 2 000 people in an audience that are all like kind of fought to get in there, including 500 engineers who worked on it or were hearing about this for the first time from Apple. It's kind of an energy that, like you hope, gets preserved at least it gets preserved like on YouTube.

0:09:54 - Alex Lindsay
I think, fundamentally, one of the problems is there's just not that many people that can do it. So I think that Steve Jobs created, really made the keynote what it is, because of who he is and how he is able to present something. And I think Mark Benioff does a pretty good job at Salesforce. He's, you know, he does a lot of work on that to make that happen. And I think you know there's Jensen is pretty good at NVIDIA, like he's pretty good on stage. Yeah, so NVIDIA is the one exception where I've seen, oh, that stage event was pretty good.

But the reality is it's not just that the stage itself structurally doesn't make sense, it's that most of the executives aren't very good at this. This is not their business, like this is. They're not actors and we're asking them to do something that's way outside of their area of strength. And if they're not willing to dedicate, the people who are really good at it spend two or three hours a week year round working on their skill set and then working on the presentation and everything else. And if you really want to tie up an executive to do that, you just have to really think about it. But that's what it takes for an executive to be good at it.

And Steve was naturally good, but I don't think anybody else is that competitive.

0:11:00 - Shelly Brisbin
I think all that makes sense. I think all that makes sense, but I think the community of people who follow this whether it's the press or whether it's the enthusiasts they don't really know how to deal with the video-only world. Yet I find them cold after a while, like the first ones when the pandemic was happening, that we understood why that was happening and it was like what's this going to be like? Afterward it was clear that video was going to be more a part of what they did afterward and was clear that video was going to be more a part of what they did. But now that it's exclusively how those events are handled, I feel like the community of people who follows Apple is going to have a different relationship with those kinds of events.

Even the fact that we're talking about is there going to be an event. Why do we want there to be a video? I mean, maybe there will be a video, but maybe it's not done as a presentation, maybe it's done as some sort of pretty product demo at some point. So I just don't. I feel like it's not set in stone that this is the way it should be from the point of view of the people who are interested enough in this stuff to wait for an event for the introduction of products that are essentially follow ons to existing products.

0:12:03 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, I mean, I think the hard part is is that I mean, for the most part and maybe just cause I've seen too many of them, cause this was my job for a long time um is, I'm just really jaded and I'm just waiting like for an Apple. When Apple announces the phone, the only thing I'm waiting for is to know what the camera specs are Like. I just like. I think that the real issue for a lot of companies is most of these are like watching the grass grow uncomfortably. You know, they're kind of awkward. You have people who are not good at doing this, doing it.

I think that in this environment, I don't think the current executives are. This is their area of strength. I think that they do fine, they've gotten better, but I don't think this is. I think putting them on stage did not put them in the best, especially as you went deeper into the bench. It did not necessarily make for a great, great video, great, great watching, and so I think that that I think that's the that's the real problem, and I think that what I think a lot of companies need to think about, and Apple included, is how do you follow up on it? Because there's still an event. They bring press in, you get to see the equipment, you get to do all those other things that are there. But the question is, is what do you do afterwards?

What we have found really successful is you show a video and then you do live Q&A. So you do Q&A and you talk to people and you have conversations and that gets the ideas out. And we're seeing a lot of that right now, with N be coming up next week, is that everyone's doing their releases. I think Frameio did one today and does it on tomorrow, and Blackmagic does it on Friday, and these are all announcements. These used to be speeches and now what they're doing is putting the videos out and then they're going to go to the booth and wait for people to show up. So I think that that's it's just. I think that the video first and then. But to your point, I think that discussion is still necessary and I think that that'd be really powerful.

0:13:44 - Shelly Brisbin
So that helps, because if I'm interested in whatever NVIDIA whoever is coming out with, if they're releasing their product this week, I get to learn about it and read the specs, and then my questions are better when I come next week to the booth.

0:13:56 - Leo Laporte
Exactly. It's interesting. I mean, I think part of Andy and my bias both is towards live performance in general. We like going to the theater, we like going to opera, we like sitting in an audience, but there are very few people as you point out, alex that can pull it off. In fact, it's funny because you'll see some companies like Samsung pulling celebrities, movie stars, actors who theoretically would be good at this, and they often really falls very flat. It's a hard thing to do.

0:14:29 - Shelly Brisbin
Apple is trying to increase the number and diversity level of the people that they have, and so, whether or not one or two top executives, whether Tim or Craig or somebody, is really good at it, you're having to train up these additional folks who are in charge of various aspects, and the guy or gal who runs AirPods or watch isn't necessarily the most charismatic human they may be. But then you have to decide well, do I find a charismatic human who works on that team and can say senior engineer for Apple Watch, something or other, or do you get the person who is the main person to try and do a live performance that they may not be equipped to do? And I agree with you, though I have a bias toward live performance, but it should be good.

0:15:05 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, there's nothing worse than bad live performance.

0:15:08 - Shelly Brisbin
Yes, I agree. Yeah, then you really?

0:15:10 - Leo Laporte
got the worst of all possible worlds. There is something, though, about an event, and I think there's an opportunity for companies to make an event exciting. You know you make an excellent point, Andy. Announcing the iPhone as a canned event would just not have had the same power. Of course you had Steve Jobs as a percenter, I wonder if companies look at when they're looking at product managers.

But you know, of course you're looking for the best driver, but they very much consider their, their appeal, their ability to talk to the press. There they're how for F1, it's very important that the driver become a celebrity, and they do. There's only 20 of them.

0:15:55 - Alex Lindsay
It's conceivable you could say, well, I'm a product manager, but part of it's the ability to present, yeah, and I think I think a lot of times you look at a quarterback in the NFL you know, you don't have to be. You don't have to be six, three or taller, but it's really hard if you're not.

0:16:11 - Leo Laporte
Yes, you know, like it's, you know, and I think even with quarterbacks they're looking for somebody who has a good on screen, who could do a press conference?

0:16:22 - Alex Lindsay
Well, I was part of it to some degree, to some degree% of the population, really fast.

0:16:25 - Leo Laporte
So it's the real question is what are these keynotes for? What's the purpose of a keynote and and what serves it best?

0:16:35 - Alex Lindsay
You know, I think it's a matter of letting us. I mean, I think for a lot of us, what we're looking for is they're going to give us the data that we want in a hopefully an entertaining way, data that we want, um in a hopefully in an entertaining way, um, and I again I don't feel like. I feel like you're if you're exceptional, like again, I think jensen at nvidia can pull this off. I think that almost nobody else can right now, like you know, and and I think I think that salesforce and mark benioff right now can, can pull it off, but I think, outside of that it's funny there's almost nobody out there.

0:17:01 - Leo Laporte
The music world went through this. Right there's live performance which continually content to even today, is very important to record sales and to uh and to success.

0:17:11 - Alex Lindsay
Well, it's very important, it's not actually. The record sales don't mean anything anymore because they don't make any money.

No, it's the live performances, right the live performance is what generates revenue, and so artists that can't perform live and they're, you know the big problem they're having now is that there's just not that many that can go on a big tour right, and there's not many people can fill a stadium, you know, other than the old bands who did this all the time, and so it's. It's a real, they're having a real challenge, but artists are, they have to tour.

0:17:34 - Leo Laporte
I talked to quite a few that they're like you have to tour because there's no money in actually releasing so you have to be able to perform, and you can't write music that you can't perform, or perform it the same way.

0:17:47 - Alex Lindsay
Or simplify it. You know, I think sometimes it's really cool to see a band take something and do something different with it. I agree.

0:17:56 - Andy Ihnatko
But the purpose of these events remains exactly the same as it ever was. It's just that because of the Internet, because of live streaming, because now the most influential people who can repeat your message or publish a reaction to a news event, now they don't have to be associated with the Boston Globe or the New York Times or the Chicago Sun-Times or NBC or CNN. They basically come with their own 10 million plus audience. So all you need to do is kind of rope in those dozen or two dozen people. You want to make sure the information gets out to people who are blogging. You want to make sure that CNBC gets the version of the story that you want to make sure that they have.

It's always been the same point to all these events never to have a celebration of hey, it's the birthday of the iPhone, but we have the following list of impressions and data points we want to get out we want the story to be told the way that we want it to be told. We are going to engineer an event that actually will achieve that it used to be. Let's bring everybody to the same place. Let's give lots and lots and lots of one-on-one and hands-on interviews. Now it's. We can just basically let this video do most of that job for us and the ones where the the people who have the highest stakes or the outlets that have the highest stakes we can still bring them in for one-on-ones. We can still fly into a hotel suite in New York to take to talk to people on the East coast.

It's all, it's the same thing. It's just that the technology has changed, the medium has changed. That's why I said you can't be nostalgic about oh boy, it was nice to be able to ride the red car from LA to Sacramento for just a nickel. Yeah, that was nice. But there's reasons why that doesn't exist anymore and they don't use that model.

0:19:40 - Alex Lindsay
There's something very romantic. I grew up raising horses and there's something very romantic about wandering around on a horse through the woods. You know like it was great, but I still use a car.

0:19:51 - Shelly Brisbin
In terms of that number of influences, whoever, whoever they may be, whether they're YouTube folks or podcasters or bloggers or whoever the person of the moment, you can still, if you're Apple, do a lot by bringing those folks into Apple Park. So it's not even about the one-on-one. Maybe they get to talk to Tim or somebody else, but they're going to get to see Apple Park, they're going to get. Apple is in a really good position, for probably not very much money, to feed people, to drive them around the park in the golf carts, to show them the glass, the pretty buildings, and then they get to go away and say, wow, I had this really great experience. Let me tell you about the new iPhone.

It really softens up the press. Oh yeah, give them some food. I mean, I doubt salesforce has that option right, because that's they can put them up in the building.

0:20:33 - Leo Laporte
No, actually I think that part of what's really tall.

0:20:35 - Shelly Brisbin
Would you like to see the top of it part?

0:20:36 - Leo Laporte
of what's changing this is true for apple at least is that it's an ad now and uh and and. For apple, I think it's not just the press, it's not just the influencers, it's a ad now, and for Apple, I think it's not just the press, it's not just the influencers. It's a direct way to talk to your customer, and so the customer really doesn't have time or patience or interest in sitting and watching a live presentation, but they are very much interested in a jazzy spiffy pre-produced thing and the thing that that's an ad.

0:21:07 - Alex Lindsay
It's a big ad, but it also gives us a bunch of information and it helps you illustrate what the new features are A 3D animation of how the speakers work and how the flow works. That's going to make a difference. It is explaining what those things are.

0:21:20 - Leo Laporte
It can also do too much. For instance, in our Discord chat, anthony Nielsen's saying maybe if the Vision Pro presentation hadn't been so slick, had been a little more realistic, expectations might have been tempered a little bit. You can over if you produce something too good. People can have higher expectations than your product can deliver. Vision Pro might be a good example of that right.

0:21:46 - Shelly Brisbin
I don't know if I saw anything that it that I feel like it's not delivering on them.

0:21:49 - Alex Lindsay
Well, I know you're a fan, no, but as someone who's used it, I would say that I don't feel like there's a lot there that they showed that I couldn't.

0:21:59 - Leo Laporte
No, no, I don't think they showed stuff you couldn't do, but they maybe raised expectations beyond.

0:22:04 - Shelly Brisbin
I mean, I think I think there was a long lead time, don't forget so. They presented it in June, that's true. Came out in February. I think for a lot of people that, in and of itself, not only are they anticipating it, but they're forgetting some of the things they were shown in June.

0:22:17 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, they never showed direct pass through. You know, they showed it as a produced video and not a live thing. There, they showed it as a produced video and not a live thing. There are risks also inherent with that. I think those iPhone ads I'm sorry, keynotes present the iPhone maybe perhaps in a little bit more spectacular way than they deserve.

0:22:38 - Shelly Brisbin
Do you think Also I will say that going to video and focusing more on the customer and perhaps the advertising side probably means that we're going to have less slides with how many they sold and little digs at?

0:22:51 - Alex Lindsay
Intel or whoever they're looking at.

0:22:53 - Shelly Brisbin
Which I kind of think is good. That's interesting for the press, for those of us who write about this stuff and try to put it in context, it's inside baseball.

Although I never take Apple numbers as face value, anyway, I'm going to research it, not because I think they're lying, but because those numbers are going to be whatever number makes them look the best, right. But so you're going to get more to the content, hopefully make the presentations a little bit shorter, and I still think we're in this transitional period where the people who consume this stuff, people like us and people who are enthusiasts are trying to figure out what they want and what they expect, because there's still anticipation for quote, unquote events which are just videos, and wondering and saying well, I didn't get this thing in the video that I used to get in the live event, or I didn't get this thing in the video that I personally wanted, even though it's not something that Apple is trying to convey. I want to know. I want to see a chart with all the MacBook models and their prices and specs laid out in a table.

0:23:45 - Leo Laporte
That's not what Apple wants to send to you, said no one ever. Right, I do think there is. The one thing is and you pointed this out, shelley is the excitement, is the kind of the thrill, and I wouldn't I hesitate to agree with you, alex, that they're never going to do it again. They may save this for the next big thing, which apparently is robots. We'll take a break and when we come back we'll talk about that, shelly. It's great to have you, shelly Brisbin, from the Texas Standard, which is, you know, alive. Thank God, we're trying, yeah.

0:24:20 - Shelly Brisbin
There's so many downsizings in journalism and we feel real fortunate that we've been able to continue doing what we're doing.

0:24:28 - Leo Laporte
It was, wasn't it? Am I wrong in my memory that it was about to shut down?

0:24:33 - Shelly Brisbin
No, no, texas Standard has always been in really good shape. We're a collaboration between the four major NPR stations in Texas, so there's plenty of money We've always gotten.

Well. I don't know about plenty. I mean, our travel budgets are down a little bit, although we're doing things like we did yesterday with a remote broadcast from the eclipse. So there is some interest in making sure that we're able to get out across the state of Texas. So we're not just in Austin, you know, talking about what they're doing at the Capitol, but they're going out and finding out what Texans out there are talking about and hearing from them and asking them, questions them and asking them questions. And there is money for that. And all four of those big stations have really stepped up and put their money, including our home station at KUT in Austin.

0:25:11 - Leo Laporte
So glad. Yeah, I guess I'm confusing it with the Texas Observer.

0:25:14 - Shelly Brisbin
I think the Texas Observer almost literally shut down and then a group you know saved them. I mean, they had shut down, they had basically fired the whole staff and then over a weekend they came back and that publication has been around for more than 50 years and has quite a lot of storied history, and I'm glad to see it's back. I think they're focusing less on print, as you can imagine, than they might have been. They're probably going to do that anyway, but they have a very active online presence and they sort of know that they have to focus on the future and that involves different mediums.

0:25:44 - Leo Laporte
Who isn't focusing less? When I get some reason, somehow I get the Atlantic magazine sent to me. I just wanted the digital subscription and every time I get it I get a little annoyed. It's like why don't do?

0:25:56 - Shelly Brisbin
that Don't waste all that paper, don't waste all the trees, and I've read all these articles a month ago Exactly. What are you sending to the? I love, I love the atlantic, and they're great long article I love, I love a long read. I really do. Oh, absolutely to see it on paper right.

0:26:10 - Leo Laporte
In fact it's frankly better now that we're used to it. I I find it hard to read a magazine you used to buy. Alex used to buy a stack of magazines to take on the plane every flight do you still do that? No?

0:26:23 - Alex Lindsay
no, here's. The worst part is is that I I stopped doing that because, oh, the magazines are all on my iPad, but then I don't open up my iPad, and so I just ended up stopping. I just stopped reading magazines.

0:26:33 - Leo Laporte
Now you just watch movies on your Vision Pro.

0:26:35 - Alex Lindsay
Have you taken?

0:26:36 - Leo Laporte
on the plane yet I did.

0:26:37 - Alex Lindsay
I did, I had ironically, even though I didn't go to Dallas for the thing, I was in Dallas last week for a walkthrough, for a show coming up and and I I wore the vision pro, uh, on the way down and back for you know a bit of time, um, and I don't know if I could go back Like it was so good, like it was it is. You do have to do something kind of annoying, which is turn the light on over you so that the tracking works doesn't affect you but it doesn't affect everyone.

0:27:02 - Leo Laporte
So, so, but. But I've heard people talk about um glare. I'm not sure what they mean. Have you seen?

0:27:10 - Alex Lindsay
this you, you, you would see glare. There's, there's always. I mean, there I'm, I wear glasses, so I'm kind of used to glare, so it probably doesn't bother me as much. Okay, there's some glare, be glare. So when you have a dark background, a dark background and a, and your screen, your movie screen, you're going to see a little bit of glare in there. If you're not, if you're not a glasses wearer, that probably is annoying. Um, I definitely notice it, or I know that it's there, but as someone who wears glasses, I see glare all the time. That's so I'm, you know, and so, yeah, so it's not a bit, and then it you will. You might see a little bit of nose bleed, uh, bleed through the nose if your window is open, but of course, you just close the window and then it's fine.

0:27:48 - Leo Laporte
Do they give you a Oculus? Does a cover to shut out ambient light?

0:27:57 - Alex Lindsay
It does have a cover and I don't use it. I don't even know if it will track properly if it doesn't have the cover on it Right, because you'd be covering the cameras, yeah, yeah, and it's really like I mean, it's almost nothing.

There's a little thing that goes over your nose, a little felt thing that kind of hits it, and I really didn't have an issue with it. I will say that watching a screen that big and I had my you know AirPod Pros on and watching a screen that big is pretty addicting. And then you turn the background, the you know, you turn the background off down when you know that they're going to be bringing the cart through with the water so you can kind of see them off in the corner. Oh, that's cool, yeah, so you can see it like, if you'll, the screen can be sitting over top of the seats or whatever, or you turn it up and you've got for me Joshua tree or whatever, and then you're just in your own little world and I will say that it's. I didn't do a lot with it. I will say that if you turn the light off, it doesn't track well, so it kind of complains about that a fair bit, but outside of that, it's a. It's a it it.

0:28:53 - Leo Laporte
Somebody needs to make a special.

0:28:54 - Alex Lindsay
It's a full-size movie theater in a in a plane.

0:29:04 - Leo Laporte
A Vision Pro headgear that you would wear that would cast just enough light for ambient and then you wouldn't have to turn on the overhead light in the airplane. I'm just saying.

0:29:08 - Alex Lindsay
Could be a great product. Yeah, you probably just have something that clipped onto it that just kind of lit up.

0:29:14 - Leo Laporte
It wouldn't make you look like a cyborg at all. It's fine, it's okay. Yeah, exactly, I'd be worried that I'd kind of lose myself or forget that I'm on an airplane, but them on an airplane, but I guess that's the point.

0:29:24 - Alex Lindsay
I definitely. You definitely go into some other you you get out of the space that you're flying. Yeah, I mean, you know, like you're, you're kind of in your own space and you're watching a movie and it definitely doesn't feel cramped or anything else. It suddenly feels like there's a lot of space.

0:29:36 - Leo Laporte
That's the way to do a flight yeah, especially a long one, really good.

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We are talking Apple with Shelly Brisbin. So great to have you from the Texas Standard, a regular on the Incomparable and all of Jason's stuff I know. So nice to have you with us.

0:32:02 - Shelly Brisbin
Yeah, jason Snell keeps me busy.

0:32:03 - Leo Laporte
Yes, yes, he keeps us busy too, for other reasons. Andy Ihnatko is also here from WGBH in Boston and from officehoursglobal. Mr Alex, I can use both eyes to look at the eclipse. Lindsay, I don't know what that means. There was there. Somebody showed that there were multiple uh searches for eye pain. Shortly after there was a big spike on the google.

0:32:32 - Alex Lindsay
There was a big recall like there was a big oh no, that's bad eclipse glasses and I was like, oh, that's not, that's really bad. Yeah, yeah, yeah so people who thought that they're. You have to be really careful about what you buy there and in general you just don't want to look at anything before it's you're in totality. You know like you can look at it directly if it's, if it's in totality, yeah.

0:32:52 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, so robots. This is German, I you know. So they gave up the car effort, some engineers, in fact I think apple's done its first big layoffs. Uh, you know the one tech company that didn't lay off a bunch of people, 600 people, mostly car people right, I think mostly car and display people.

0:33:13 - Andy Ihnatko
Oh yeah, the display, the micro led. Why?

0:33:16 - Leo Laporte
what happened?

0:33:16 - Andy Ihnatko
they did, they not want to use it one well, but they've got a whole bunch of different projects. One of them was that they kind of wanted to develop their own displays and then they realized that this is just not feasible, particularly considering the advantages of just having Samsung or somebody else build it for them, and it was just not the right investment for them. And also there's a it's one simple story that was reported by a lot of different people from a lot of different angles. Different angles CNBC and a lot of the other financial outlets were basically saying that Apple needs to do things that will convince investors and analysts that, hey look, we realize that 2024 is not going to be one of our greatest years and we are aware of that and we're not going to barrel ahead.

I think Tim Cook actually said in 20, just a few months ago I wish I'd looked that up, but he actually said that he doesn't have any like layoffs planned like in the immediate future. So this is a little bit of a reversal of that, but the fact that it's being specific about where we are not simply reassigning a lot of these people from canceled projects to new teams. We are deciding that we don't need these engineers to begin with, and for a company like Apple that is traditionally very conservative in hiring. This is why Google is laying off 12,000 people and it's big news that Apple is laying off just 600. But it's still. For Apple to do layoffs in the triple digits is interesting State of California.

0:34:39 - Shelly Brisbin
Of course they had to. Yeah, we're just going to say California required them to make that disclosure. I forget what the minimum number is and so I assume whatever layoffs have I mean, people have been laid off at Apple before, but in much smaller chunks where they don't have to alert the state.

0:34:53 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, california has a thing called WARN where, if you're a company of sufficient size, you have to announce layoffs ahead of time to warn people, I guess. So, yeah, you lay off small numbers. I guess it's not as big a deal, although Apple's a big enough company, I think they're. I can't remember the rules. I remember when we got under 20 employees we were no longer subject to warn, but I think we did have to file when we did the layoffs because it was a certain percentage of our team. Anyway, yep, so it's. You know, always, layoffs are always sad. Apple has managed to dodge that bullet up to now but they almost never do it.

0:35:34 - Alex Lindsay
It's a very, very unusual thing for them.

0:35:36 - Leo Laporte
It's hard to hire good engineers Also they traditionally they.

0:35:43 - Andy Ihnatko
We keep hearing stories about how why was this feature delayed? Well, because the the team on an update of iOS got got in the weeds and they needed pull engineers off of other projects unrelated to iOS to help get that out the door, which is remarkable when you think how, how big on the cultural radar Apple is, how prominent every one of their product products are that they don't simply have. Oh well, obviously we have. We should have enough engineers that we can put it all hands on deck without compromising uh updating of, uh, wi-fi 6e drivers or whatever it is yeah, but I think these people are rare, like against one they're also.

0:36:21 - Alex Lindsay
I mean, it's also takes time. I mean you have the hr has to do a you know know, to flex for something that's going to take three months. It'll take three months to hire them and then it'll take another six months to have them acclimate to how you do things. So if you need to flex something for two or three months, it's better to just pull someone off a team than to try to build up a team, because then you get to the other side of that sprint and do you still need?

0:36:41 - Leo Laporte
them. That's actually one of the biggest differences, I think, between Apple and other tech companies. Apple's very aware of its culture and it's one of the reasons I think Apple doesn't do a lot of acquisitions because they want to preserve they're so anxious to preserve that corporate culture that it's even more difficult for them than other companies to bring in new people. They bought a company called Luxview Technology in 2014. That was the micro LED display company. They're laying off 58 employees from that office in Santa Clara. I don't know if that's the entire Luxview team, but it makes sense. Apple wants to make everything, but you can't make everything.

0:37:22 - Shelly Brisbin
Yeah.

0:37:23 - Leo Laporte
And screens are very highly specialized. This was, we think, or Bloomberg thinks, because of the watches that they were going to do. Micro LED displays for the Apple Watch start small. Yeah, and they gave up because they were too difficult to produce in sufficient quantities. Yeah, there's a Siri data operations office in San Diego 120 layoffs there. This was the office response, according to nine to five. Mac, the office responsible for evaluating series responses to users. Yeah, I'd fire them too, and no, I'm being mean, that's mean. Maybe, though, that is a that is an indicator of apple's move towards a different kind of ai and that wasn't the team that got moved, or was?

Oh, it was actually, I think that's what Shelly's about to say, our Texas reporter coming in from Texas.

0:38:13 - Shelly Brisbin
Yes, that's right, because I keep being surprised when I am remembering that the second largest concentration of Apple employees is actually right here in Texas. I know we have a really big office and a lot of Apple stuff has come to Texas. Back in the day it was accounting and tech support, but now they're actually moving engineering teams and you know Siri is part of that. I don't think all of it's here.

0:38:35 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's nine to five maxes. At the time, apple offered to relocate all those affected employees from the San Diego I remember this story now a Siri office to Austin. Not all went. It's a big change. You know if you're living in San Diego, it's a big change it is. And then, of course, the Apple car. Although we had heard that a lot of those engineers were going to be reassigned. The latest from Mark Gurman is they've been reassigned to the robotics division, which is which is hysterical Apple has teams.

0:39:10 - Andy Ihnatko
You gotta, you gotta imagine, like like languishing in the Apple car project, saying, oh my God, I can't believe. You know, I I thought that, like at age 28, 29, 30, I would be like changing the world. I'm stuck on this pie in the sky project that Apple won't even acknowledge and will probably never, ever ship. Oh, thank god, I'm you moved on to, okay, but I, boy, I'm ready to change the. I'm working on a robot project apple had a lot of fun your robots are always fun but not great products.

0:39:37 - Leo Laporte
we've seen so many companies even amazon has a robot that that is sounds a lot like what apple's working on that wanders. Or was it astro that wanders around and has a robot that sounds a lot like what Apple's working on that wanders? Was it Astro that wanders around and has a little telescoping thing?

0:39:50 - Alex Lindsay
I don't know if all engineers necessarily want to release a product. I remember talking to someone at Microsoft and they were really, I mean, one of the most amazing teams on Microsoft. I'll leave it at that and they did incredible work and I was like, so when are you going to release a product? They're like, oh, hopefully never. And I was like, you know, like he goes because a product means we have to support customers and we have to, like, do updates and we have to do bug fixes. And he goes right now we're just playing. And they were doing incredible work. Yeah, much more fun. I was so interested.

0:40:25 - Leo Laporte
I was like I really want that as a product. And they're like yeah, I don't, don't, this is the amazon astro. Sixteen hundred dollars, uh.

0:40:28 - Shelly Brisbin
But they do say you have to get an invitation to buy it, which is hysterical, and I don't know really if there's a huge market for a robot that follows you around the house before they released that was some time ago, actually, so I don't even know if it was I'm pretty sure wasn't available at the time they were trying to make a big pitch that this was going to help with accessibility, that that you could help a person who had mobility issues or was blind out around the house and the accessibility community. We just laughed at it because it was like this robot is not going to help us with things we need help with. Now, obviously, if somebody doesn't have use of their hands or they're in a wheelchair and they drop something or need something brought to them, potentially that could be useful. But following a blind person around and showing them where the kitchen table is is not something we need our robot to do.

0:41:08 - Leo Laporte
Thank you very much. I don't think Astro has hands, so I don't know. You know, everything that they show in the Astro video is actually more creepy than anything else. It's a screen on wheels, but I suspect that what I mean, that screen looks a lot like an ipad. I'm sure it's an amazon fire tablet, but I suspect that what that's kind of along the lines of what I don't know. What could apple do?

0:41:30 - Andy Ihnatko
that's different well, according to the report there, there are two ideas that mark urban is mentioning. One is a robot that's kind of like that, a wheeled device that has kind of like a phone or an ipad sort of thing on it. Um, but he's also talking about is. He doesn't have a lot of specifics, but he's uh, he's uh talking about something that is more like a fixed stationary robot I'll quote a pivot.

0:41:55 - Leo Laporte
The iphone maker has developed an advanced tabletop home device that uses robotics to move his display around. So it's a fancy Echo Show no I think it's a fancy arm like a monitor arm.

0:42:16 - Shelly Brisbin
I mean as somebody who is very persnickety about how my monitor is positioned and has a double arm monitor set up over here. I like that idea, but I don't think I need a bunch of engineers to create a robot for me for just that purpose.

0:42:25 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, I mean it is kind of weird. There's the. The obvious position for it is conferencing, where you can have a camera that move that will follow you as you move around the room. But like is that something you really want a 500, 600, 700, $800 robot for, versus just give me something with a good 4k or an 8K camera on it that can digitally do those cameras for?

me or just something that's on a simple gimbal that can do tracking for it. Remember, there was a time when, for some reason, the purple cloud of insanity descended upon a certain community and every other Kickstarter program was some sort of a personal robot, and they had the exact same problems with the exact same questions. Maybe they actually look really, really cool, but what is it actually going to do that's actually useful, and there's just no answer to that question.

It's it's the robots. Domestic robots are useful for vacuuming floors not in my office because there's too many damn cables and boxes around but for a normal person it's actually useful. That's the only thing that we found.

0:43:31 - Shelly Brisbin
They need a lot of help, those robots need to be picked up and they need to be cleaned periodically. They're like little kids. Basically, it's like asking kids to do chores around your house. You have to clean up after them.

0:43:40 - Leo Laporte
Now, I really don't want one.

0:43:47 - Alex Lindsay
Maybe that up after them. Now I really don't want one. Maybe that's just mine. Her name is rosie.

I think that there is again what apple's good at as ecosystems, and there could be a potential for a lot of different ecosystems where things fit all together.

Um, to make that actually work, I I will say that you know where it has worked well as like, and this is not going to be apple's vertical, but it's not that robots have been completely unuseful. We were at, uh, golden One Center. I did a bunch of work at Golden One Center and they have these robots that wander around for security and they got a bunch of cameras and they wander around the outside and it definitely cuts down on, you know, you don't have as many police having to do that, but the police can respond really quickly if they see something going on and so it takes. It definitely slows things down. So if you look at you know, I don't think that Apple really would focus on home security of it wandering around, but it being able to go, go look at this or go get that or do this, and I think we should not think about it being a $400 or $500. If Apple's doing a robot, I bet you it's $5,000 to $15,000.

0:44:38 - Andy Ihnatko
Oh, I would guess, and it's not going to be a couple hundred bucks.

This is not going to be like a little thing running around on the ground. I don't think the vision grow with legs and there's a lot of movement in industrial robots right now. There are at least 11 very serious companies that are doing humanoid robots. That we're talking about the NVIDIA keynote and they just did. One of the big announcements during their big developer keynote a few weeks ago was hey, we've got an entire AI model specifically for like, controlling robots, so that you can direct a humanoid robot to pick up the red cup and pour a cup of decaf coffee with it and then hand it to the person who's wearing the cowboy hat, and it would basically be able to parse that sentence and turn it into motion and actuators and vision automatically. So, yeah, it's the question, kind of like the same thing with the with the car is that, what could? What's the secret sauce that Apple could add to this the?

When I, when I first read this story, I'm trying to be helpful. I'm trying not to be skeptical. I could be skeptical. I'm trying not to be cynical. I'm trying not to be skeptical. I'm trying not to be cynical. It could be that a lot really when you think about it.

A lot of the work they put into the car could also be put into a robotics project, because it is all about a machine that has sensory awareness of the world around it and is able of interacting with and reacting to things in its immediate environment. However, of course, a car is a really, really cool design, like luxury, aspirational object, whereas a robot really isn't. And it's an interesting place for Apple to go, but right now there's nothing. I can't imagine something that they could add to a factory a company that owns a bunch of distribution nodes, a bunch of factories that needs to be able to replace a bunch of persnickety unionized workers with some faceless automatons who just simply shut up and work, or a leasable workforce that could be trained in just a month and a half or two months, instead of taking a year, year and a half that a typical industrial robot takes to require. That's all. You could see a business plan for that, but I'm having trouble figuring out what Apple could do to make that really happen.

0:46:51 - Leo Laporte
Do you really have a robot named Rosie?

0:46:54 - Shelly Brisbin
Well, it's a Roomba and we just call her. Rosie, because we aren't very imaginative. We know of one robot.

0:47:01 - Leo Laporte
The robot, of course, from the Jetsons. But she had a feather duster Roombas don't.

0:47:09 - Andy Ihnatko
Right on it.

0:47:10 - Alex Lindsay
Mrs B, you know, I think the hard part is figuring out what to do with consumers. You know like there's lots of robots that do a lot of different things that are interesting.

0:47:17 - Leo Laporte
Well, robots are the best example right of robots that are in many, many homes.

0:47:21 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, yeah, yeah, and they do stupid things you know like, and and off things and I got rid of ours.

0:47:27 - Leo Laporte
I actually tried to put it, I tried to kill it. I um, yeah, it would. I told the story before I woke up in the middle of the night and would get stuck under a piece of furniture same one every night, boom, boom, boom, and I would keep picking it up, putting it back in the charger. I'm sure, shelly, you have some experience with this Indeed Bad robot. Sit here and go, don't do that anymore. And then, finally, the last time, I just picked it up and put it under the tires of Lisa's car, but she unfortunately saw it before she pulled out the next morning and saved little. We didn't name it. So you never name your robots because it's harder to kill them.

0:48:01 - Shelly Brisbin
I think that's the problem. I tend to anthropomorphize anything, things. Anyway, I've named my phone, which isn't a good thing.

0:48:09 - Alex Lindsay
And then I mean you know, I will say that if I had a robot that was a sous chef, I'd probably cook even more than I do now. Yeah, like yeah, but do you really?

0:48:15 - Shelly Brisbin
want to give robots knives there have been cocktail robots, which is interesting to me, uh, and, and some of them are on cruise ships and basically for a novelty experience.

0:48:24 - Leo Laporte
I've had a cocktail made by a cruise ship cocktail robot and it's painfully slow and annoying.

0:48:32 - Shelly Brisbin
Right.

0:48:32 - Leo Laporte
As are most robots.

0:48:33 - Shelly Brisbin
Theoretically, a robot barback would be great. Get me a robot barback and I'll talk again to you.

0:48:39 - Andy Ihnatko
And you can't think about how maybe there is a parallel between development of robots to development of computers. It used to be that, like in the 40s, 50s and 60s, if you had a computer yes, it was a large company that made it, but they were they would design a computer exactly for the needs that you have, as opposed to a generalized sort of system. And maybe right now, or at least we're at the cusp of, if you need a robot, there is at least a more active industry that could build you a robot solution for the exact thing that you want. It's, I will say, to be to be fair, if one, if there is a company that could make something like a smart speaker, but it is really, really cool and it's something like Lord.

Lord knows that that Shmerdekov is not a voice assistant is not really really impressive. Their home speaker is not really really impressive. But if they had like a really updated AI version of Siri on a smart speaker with a display in a way that, yes, of course it's going to pivot to make sure that it turns to see whoever is in the room watching the Apple TV and taking part in this conversation, make sure that they're on camera and up close and personal. They could make it look cool enough that even if you didn't really have a need for it, maybe you would spend like eight or nine hundred dollars for it. I'm thinking about. One of my eBay searches is still was the Aibo? I know the.

Sony Aibobo, yeah, one oh no, I'm sorry, not the ibo. It was that robot that was kind of like a golf ball on a cone and it could, like, twist and pivot.

0:50:12 - Leo Laporte
Oh, I have one right over here yeah, and it looks super cool.

0:50:17 - Andy Ihnatko
Um nothing now, because they turned the server off.

0:50:19 - Leo Laporte
yeah, this is it right. I think this is the one you're talking about. Is this it? Yes, yes, yes. Yeah, jibo, that's it this was such a good idea and it would come. You come in the room and it would look at you and blink at you with its eyes, and then the company that made it turned the server off.

0:50:33 - Andy Ihnatko
So now Jibo is just no-transcript, Like if I had the sort of money where it doesn't matter that I would spend $300 or $400 more for something that really doesn't do anything more than the really good $350 smart speaker except it looks awesome and it's made by apple I would be into that I used to have that kind of money.

0:51:08 - Alex Lindsay
That's why I have a jeep I still, I still think about it people's conceptions of robots is it's a robotic human.

0:51:16 - Shelly Brisbin
We want it to be a humanoid thing. I have no interest in that. Make a robot do something functional for me, whether it's vacuum my house or whether it's pick things up off the floor. Whatever it is. But the more you spend time and money on making it, giving it human characteristics, the more I feel like you're playing to an audience who does have more disposable income than sense. And that's fine if that's your market. But just, I think the conception people.

Andy, you were talking about computers in the 40s and 50s and having very specialized tasks. I think if you ask somebody in the 50s what a robot was, they would be able to tell you something Well, it's an approximation of a human, but it's a machine. If you said to them what's a computer, I'm not sure that they would have that specific an answer, because robots are baked into how we understand technology and culture and everybody has the conception of a robot, from some ones that they've seen in movies or you know, robot is going to either going to save humanity by doing drudgery that we don't want to do, or they're going to kill us in our sleep, and I think that affects how we think about and how the companies feel like they have to market a robot. If apple and robotics are used in the same sentence, we're going to talk about whether it's going to be a humanoid robot, and I'm not sure that's the best thing.

0:52:25 - Alex Lindsay
Well, and I do think that when you look at what especially when you look back at NVIDIA's by the way if you haven't seen NVIDIA's keynote it's both amazing and terrifying all at the same time.

Like it's an incredible, like this is what's coming, and I do think that if you look at it being able to figure a lot of those things out using AI and machine learning and Apple's able to go down that path you could end up with something that really is an assistant, like we're thinking about it and what robots can do right now, not what robots do with AI. Where they're, they can learn how to do all the things they need to do, and you can show them how to do something, and then they just do it. You know, like, like this is how I want my, my French omelet to be made use, these things, here's how to do it and they just figure it out, and then you ask them for that next time. You know that kind of thing, and so I think that it's. It is a now there's all kinds of you know, obviously scary things that could happen there. Uh, if they're free, free forming robots, knives.

0:53:15 - Leo Laporte
I'm telling you, spatula maybe.

0:53:17 - Alex Lindsay
I mean, you know, like we're, we're finally getting to stuff. I mean we have to remember that, like a lot of times people think of these things. You know, we we had discussions about how drones would be used in the early 90s for the military. That are now happening. You know, like there's going to be a swarm of drones and as you shoot them down they just get better. Like you know, as a as a as a no-transcript.

Well, OK, the stock market reaction, according to Bloomberg, was cool. I don't think Apple will even acknowledge. I don't think Apple will acknowledge this exists for five years.

0:54:02 - Shelly Brisbin
Absolutely not.

0:54:04 - Alex Lindsay
Like we're talking about the car. I not, they never said the car existed right, they never did.

0:54:08 - Leo Laporte
I think there is a risk. The rumor was the story was that the car was born out of a bunch of engineers going to Tim Cook saying, look, we're going to leave for Tesla. That's where some interesting stuff's happening. Unless you get in, get on the ball and do a car. They talked him into doing it and the robots have the same exact smell. You know like this is something engineers love to work on, something very hard to productize, and so I could see why the stock market was somewhat cool to the whole notion let's take a little break we're gonna. We got... we can move on. Uh, because there's other news, including an acquisition, but not by Apple.

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When I started using Rocket Money, I was blown away by the number of subscriptions I was paying for and I didn't need to every month services, fitness apps, delivery services. I had a. I had made a campaign contribution in 20 I think it was 2020 and I didn't notice the checkbox that says do this every month. For years until Rocket Money discovered it for me. I was paying for a campaign that was over. Thanks to Rocket Money, I no longer waste money on the subscriptions.

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Rocket Money has more than 5 million users. I'm not surprised. They've saved a total of $500 million. If my math's correct, that's half a billion dollars. It cancels subscriptions on average. They save members up to 740 a year when using all the apps features. They've saved me a lot more than that. I could tell you right now it happens like with regularity I'll open Rocket Money. I say wait a minute, stop that that one. Please Stop wasting money on things you don't use. Cancel your unwanted subscriptions. Just go to rocketmoney.com/macbreak. rocketmoney.com/macbreak. I actually have been using this for years and I'm a big fan. When they said, hey, would you do ads for us? I said would I do ads for you? Hell yeah, rocketmoney.com/macbreak. I'm a. I'm a Rocket Money believer. I am.

0:57:13 - Andy Ihnatko
Can I make a confession?

0:57:13 - Leo Laporte
Yes.

0:57:14 - Andy Ihnatko
I only recently discovered that I have been double subscribed to the New York times digital edition for like a long time. I did not know that I was like I was logged in under my email address that I started with. I did not know that I was like I was logged in under my email address I started with. I did not know that at some point I had also created an account under my google account and that I was being charged 25 bucks times two. Oh, oh, yeah, so that. So things like these are everybody has important to do a really cautious audit.

Yeah, well, and the nice thing about Rocket Money is, uh and this is not even the ad anymore, so things like these are, everybody has them. It's important to do a really cautious audit.

0:57:44 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, well, and the nice thing about Rocket Money is and this is not even the ad anymore, this is just me saying it yeah, you say I don't want that anymore, and they actually go out and cancel it, so you're just kind of done. It's like, oh good, it's over, the pain is over. It's John Giandrea, by the way, is working on that robotics thing. He's the guy they brought over from Google for the AI wizard, so maybe this is just part of their overall AI stuff. I don't know.

I am not anxious to get a home robot wandering around the house for me, to be honest, beeper has found a home. Oh, little Beeper. That was, of course, you all remember the app that was supposed to give green bubbles, blue bubbles, or was it blue bubbles, green bubbles? It was an Android messaging app that would allow you to kind of, in a shady way, turn your Android phone into a phone capable of receiving messages from Apple's iMessages, in fact, to appear to Apple to be an iPhone, which is, I think, what really got him in trouble with Apple we talked about.

0:58:46 - Alex Lindsay
I don't understand, like we don't understand Apple's robot. I really don't understand buying Beeper by Word, yeah so it was bought by Automatic the WordPress folks. Okay, for $125 million.

0:58:58 - Leo Laporte
Well, that's the guess.

0:59:00 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, it wasn't. We took over your assets, which is what it seems like was was what was coming next you know he bought tumblr too, although that I don't think he paid that much for tumblr frankly right. Uh, I just don't know what the value is. Maybe there's something to be, perhaps they want to get into messaging that's the value they have.

0:59:17 - Leo Laporte
actually, he's been talking a long time about doing messaging of some kind, so if you get you in messaging infrastructure, I don't think he wants to get into the beeper battle with Apple by any means, right, right.

0:59:30 - Andy Ihnatko
And it helps to remember that before they decided to do this really really stupid and silly and self-defeating thing of trying to muscle their way into iMessage, they really did have. They really had a nice product with a lot of really good ambition about it, which is to make sure that make it the most inclusive messaging app in the world, which is still a very, really great idea, or would be a lot more important, if not for the fact that WhatsApp pretty much owns the entire planet except for the United States of America. But yeah, it's I like, but it is. It is a common thing for for automatic to buy there they are and they've been buying a lot of interesting companies, things that are kind of like on the margins. They just needed a good sponsor to make it, to elevate it from the graveyard into something that's useful as part of a package.

Interesting to think about what a messaging unit could do to WordPress, given that WordPress has evolved from a tool for creating a blog to a real like web app, not just a CMS, but really an app development tool. You could imagine how well that would fit in, as if you, if you, wanted to create not again not a blog, not even a storefront, but something that is designed to keep a whole bunch of outposts of a company or a community in touch with each other, instead of just simply posting message, posting content to a central server. The ability to also have a private, like message chain within each other. That would be interesting too, if they could suddenly do it by clicking a checkbox and suddenly you have your own private version, personal, bespoke version of WhatsApp with its own interface, with its own identity, with its own controls over who gets to message and what the rules are. That could be very interesting.

1:01:09 - Leo Laporte
Automatic already owns something In fact I tried it called Texts, which is like Pigeon or one of those all-in-one messaging apps. So you put all of your apps, your WhatsApp and everything including, I believe, apple's messages into a single interface Discord, signal, insta, all of them and you can show it on the screen. There it is Into a single inbox. It's kind of ugly, it's kind of eh. So I stopped using it. But I have a feeling that maybe the beeper team, maybe the, the Matt and automatic want the B actually Matt's on sabbatical, so I don't even know if Matt had anything to do with this but the beeper team might have something to do with making texts more appealing.

Beeper is based on matrix, which is actually really interesting. Matrix is an open source messaging platform and I think that there's. I tried to get us to move from Slack to Matrix because it's open source. There, matrix is the protocol. There are a number of clients for Matrix. If there's any hope at all for unified messaging, this is it because it's open source. So maybe Beeper plus texts plus matrix? I don't know. Shelly, do you use a messaging platform other than Apple's messages?

1:02:39 - Shelly Brisbin
I use so many because the nature of my work we're always contacting new people to be on the show and part of my job is to book them or hunt down folks who could be interesting sources. And everybody's on different platforms and I've said this for years. Like many people have their favorite one. Somebody's always on messages, somebody's always on Slack, somebody's back in the I mean Twitter. Back in the day was how we got ahold of a lot of people, especially in professional life, who you know, some reporter that you want to talk to or whatever he's on X or Twitter and just sort of keeping track of that.

I might have five different ways to contact somebody, but which is the one they're actually going to read. It's just kind of a big productivity hit for me to sort of figure out and I mean I was doing that this weekend. I was having a WhatsApp conversation. I to sort of figure out. I mean I was doing that this weekend. I was having a WhatsApp conversation. I was texting somebody else. We had to talk to you for Eclipse stuff and unified messaging. I feel like I would pay ridiculous amounts of money if it actually worked.

1:03:34 - Leo Laporte
And, by the way, I have found the video of the drink making robot that we used. This is back in 2015 on the Anthem of the Seas. You order it on the tablet there and then the robot. Let me see if I can find the robot. I guess maybe that's another video. The robot actually mixes it from alcohol bottles hanging from above it. Oh, I can't find the one of the robot. Maybe it was one of those three, six. Oh, there it is. Here's the robot. Maybe it was one of those three, six, oh, there it is. Here's the robot, the little robotic arm that actually makes the drink for you. It really is way more work than just going up to a bar and saying can you please make me a drink?

1:04:18 - Shelly Brisbin
And I don't imagine that it actually saves the bar any real time, because the big deal with a bar is you've got a lot of patrons who want a lot of drinks and the more drinks you make the more drinks.

The quicker you make the drinks, the quicker you sell them. But I don't get the sense of what that robot is about. You're probably paying a premium and part of what you want to do is stand there at the bar and watch it, which means that somebody else can't be ordering a drink because you're standing there gaping you're standing there gaping at the robot.

1:04:44 - Leo Laporte
They have actually on the display a wait time so that you know how long it's going to be before this robot delivers your drink. You can see this is actually painfully slow. In a minute it's going to shake it, I think.

1:04:56 - Shelly Brisbin
And you can still have that good banter with the bartender time.

1:04:58 - Leo Laporte
It doesn't save you any money either because those must cost $50,000, maybe 100 or more.

1:05:06 - Shelly Brisbin
There it goes, it's shaking, shake, shake, sugary uh I mean you're gonna sell more drinks because somebody is going to want to see the robot in action. So in a in a limited sense, a certain population on the cruise ship is going to go. Hey, I want the robot to make a drink. But overall are you limiting the ability of the bar to actually move more?

1:05:25 - Leo Laporte
this is the same cruise ship. Had bumper cars, water slides. Uh, it was ridiculous. Oh, there goes the drink, there goes.

1:05:34 - Shelly Brisbin
Oh, yum, yum yum so how was it leo uh?

1:05:38 - Leo Laporte
no, it was terrible actually, because they're very limited on the kind of uh things they can. They can put in, of course, yeah, and it, by the way, came in a plastic cup, which is not my favorite way to drink.

1:05:50 - Shelly Brisbin
So you can't say I'd like a mad man, a rye manhattan oh, no, no right, make it straight up with a twist dirty martini, none of that.

1:05:58 - Leo Laporte
No, basically it's all punches. Uh, it makes me want to punch the robot Anyway, so messaging I think that there is a.

1:06:17 - Andy Ihnatko
I believe there's a market for a unified messaging platform that would include Apple's messages, but I don't know. Yeah, but it gets into the conversations that we've been having for months. It's like it'd be so difficult for Apple to integrate a non like a non open standard that they a standard that they would then have to maintain, a standard that they would have to handle all the traffic for it's and it's for of again, because WhatsApp pretty much has the rest of the world on lock. We're just talking about a solution for people in the United States. It would be nice it would, but it would be if Apple's to, if Apple's going to give us a, a, a solid as big as that. There are about eight other things that have on the list. At the top of the list, I want to be able to do a spotlight search for Zoom and have it, not choose Zoom Zoom video in preferences. I wanted to launch the app that I always oh, yeah.

1:07:02 - Leo Laporte
You know what you need. You need ferret. Ferret AI. This is Apple's new AI model, that's that's designed to make sense out of app screens.

1:07:12 - Andy Ihnatko
Ferret.

1:07:13 - Leo Laporte
UI yeah, ferret.

1:07:18 - Andy Ihnatko
UI. What the what? I don't this is. This is a tech paper, the research paper that got published yesterday by by Apple, and it's interesting. It is an AI system that is designed specifically on interpreting what's on the screen of a device, what is the user interface. And so it starts off with things as simple as what is the text that's in this part of the screen, or show me where there is a button on this. But it goes as far as like showing the paper has a lot of screenshots of what it does.

Where you're thinking about, if you want an AI or even just a script to control an app, you're thinking about something like shortcuts or Apple script or workflows, where there is an infrastructure built in, where the app can publish to an API. Here are functions that this app can support. Here's how you can call it from an outside app. This AI can simply understand what the interface, what interface is going on on a screen right now and what the purpose of it is. I'm kind of interested, given the conversation we were having earlier. I'm just kind of interested to hear, like, what Shelley would have to say about this. Like there's what there's.

1:08:25 - Leo Laporte
Oh, actually that's a good point.

1:08:28 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, One of the demonstrations they have is like what's asking the AI? What's the function of this screen? And it's showing a screen that's just simply like a. It's a podcast app and Ferret UI can explain the screens for a podcast application where users can browse and play new and notable podcasts, with options to play, download and search for specific podcasts. Another screen is here is the product page for AirPods Pro and you ask the in the paper the AI has asked how do I purchase AirPods Pro? And it comes immediately back. You can do that by tapping on the buy button on the screen and I'll be darned.

There is a. There is a button called, called by so for Navi, for breaking everything down onto what the button. What is on the screen? What is there? Is there a camera button on the screen? And doesn't have to know necessarily. There's a button that's labeled camera inside an API. It says it knows what a camera button looks like. It also has lots of goodies where it can, knowing that a screen might be scrollable and it might have cut off like the bottom part of a piece of text, it can kind of figure out what that text is.

It makes the point that there's a lot of UI elements that are just so, so tiny that you can't, via conventional, like image search, find out what this button is.

You have to essentially use AI tools to basically add more pixels to it for you can break it out.

It's a very it's it's not a very, very long read at all and the implications of what it can do, particularly in the case of being able to hold up, hold up your, hold up a phone and say to say to a male client or, excuse me, say to a virtual assistant I want to send an email to eight different people and I want each one to get a different photo and for this AI to be able to figure out. Here is what the control for this, here's what the interface of this mail system is like. Here is the button that needs to be virtually pushed in order to add an attachment. Here is the content that this person is asking for on this email that wants to be cut, pasted and modified. And the last thing is that this is not just Apple stuff. It also is using examples from, like Android screenshots. It's been fed with tens of thousands of iOS and Android screenshots and shows places where it worked, places where it didn't work, but it's a very, very interesting development.

1:10:41 - Leo Laporte
Well, and ideally, siri would have this built in, so you could, in effect, talk to the screen and say Siri, press the buy button. Shelley, is this something you would want it?

1:10:52 - Shelly Brisbin
sounds like it's a great extension. There's a feature in VoiceOver for iOS called screen recognition, which is supposed to account for an app where buttons are not labeled and it recognizes that looks like a back button because it's a left-facing arrow, that looks like a home button because it's a little picture of a house. It's hit and miss, but it is kind of useful. There are applications where there are apps where there might be some buttons labeled and others not labeled and you can use screen recognition to get around them. But in a lot of cases, if there's no labeling at all, and especially if text content is not labeled, you can't get there. So this is probably a smarter version of that and the fact that you could customize queries. So instead of just saying you know, I want to go back to the previous page, show me where the back button is. For example, some of the AIs that already exist for accessibility purposes will allow you to scan a bunch of text. Like, say, you scan a food label and instead of just bringing back the text on the food label, you say how do I make this thing? Or does this ingredient, does this package contain more than 500 milligrams of sodium? Or whatever specific information you want. That's obviously from the content, not from screenshots, but this is the kind of extension of things that already exist that actually make.

And the cool thing about it, I think too, is that once people who use it for accessibility purposes sort of get smart about what kinds of questions they can ask, it can be really, really useful. And you're going to use it in ways that I don't even think the inventors would necessarily have thought of, because how do you actually find that buy, find that buy button if you can't see it? Well, you have to have you know. Are you going to bring the cursor over to it? Are you going to have voiceover? Uh, engage for the moment that you need it and read it, and then have you know. Have you be able to move to it? What are you going to do? There are all sorts of opportunities, so it seems really cool I think you go even a step beyond that.

1:12:40 - Leo Laporte
I mean, that's accessibility, where you have an actual screen and you can query and act upon it. But really, I think the future of AR may not have a screen at all like your AirPods, and what would be great is if an AI understood the information being presented by on a user interface and could say it could act on it without you having to even query it about the user interface. So I'd like to buy AirPods.

The user interface is an impediment for the accessibility term sometimes Exactly, not just for accessibility, but for anybody without a screen, including people who might be using an audio-based augmented reality system. So to be able to say I want to buy AirPods. Okay, I'm on the Apple store. Tell me a little bit about the airpods tech specs. Okay, what's the price? Okay, I'd like to buy it. Okay, you know that that's the next level up beyond just a concrete description of what's on the screen and having you be able to push those buttons. I think that would be fantastic and I think that's where they're headed.

1:13:41 - Andy Ihnatko
To be honest, especially the ability to to interact with anything that's on your screen, whether it's designed to, whether it's wired up to support automated control or not, because think about all the disappointment pies that you've eaten because it's like oh okay, you know, I really, really want to automate this because I do this every single day. Then there's this one crucial step, and that is not scriptable. It has none of the plugins, it has nothing, and also even the user interface, the hacks you can do to. Basically, they're like monkey scripts that can simply say look for this button and send a mouse event to that thing, like that's not the sort of even if it does work, that's not the sort of thing that the average person can do. But for an AI that gets sophisticated enough in five years from now that you can simply give it a command that it's not prepared to do, but it can still parse this out, figure out where the buy button is for this and, of course, maybe ask for a verification, but explain exactly what it's about to do, because I understand all that. It's.

The problem with a lot of automation is simply that it works, but the amount of work you have to do to make the automation work often exceeds the amount of work you'd have to do to just do it manually to begin with, even if the thing has been designed so that it's easy to do from a regular point of view. So it's interesting. Again, this is a research paper. It's not a process of a feature that Apple is specifically working on. It does talk specifically about your other different AIs that do this kind of sort of thing. We think that we've got a system here that works a lot better than these other three, and here's how it works.

1:15:35 - Alex Lindsay
It actually uses ChatGPT for a lot of the text savviness and text awareness that it has to do, so it's a good everything is going to be something that we expect and I think Apple has to stay ahead of, in the sense that you know, like, I use chat GPT all the time and I was trying to figure something out, so I you know, on on chat GPT, I said I need you to make me a list of a hundred cities that that are this criteria, like I need it to be. You know, I want them to be the largest markets, but I want the first 20 to be the largest college markets. I want the rest of them to be. You know, and I just stacked up what the requirements are, just gave me a hundred.

1:16:17 - Leo Laporte
And you know, including Smallville, gotham city. It's really.

1:16:20 - Alex Lindsay
You know you can always trust an AI to give you the no, and I I interrogated it a little bit, but as I looked through them I was like, oh, no-transcript direct access to the internet.

Today that's the key and a lot of the new ones, including google's own now as access to google yeah, and that kind of information isn't fast moving, you know, for that one and so, but but I think that the I think that being able to naturally ask it things and then say, well, what about this, or take this away, or add this, or you know, and make a file that's a tab delimited file for me, you know, those kinds of things are all things that you can just kind of ask it to do and you get used to that and and I think that that I think Apple has to get to do and you get used to that, and and I think that that I think Apple has to get to that point.

That is the one part of AI being able to interact with all of your software. Where you're not really you know, you don't have to go figure out how you're going to search it. You know, we joke in my family that you know, it's not what you know, it's how well you Google. You know and you know and, and I think that at some point you get to a point where you start asking questions, and I think that that's where being able to see all the interfaces and that type of thing means that you can interrogate the apps that already exist.

1:17:38 - Leo Laporte
Yes, that's the point exactly. The end game is everything's an agent talking to another agent. But in the interim we have all of this stuff that has a screen and a UI and you need some sort of interim technology that will make it accessible to uh, to an AI. But eventually like not too far in the future, 10, 15 years everything will have an AI interface and then it's just a conversation between your agent and theirs.

1:18:03 - Andy Ihnatko
Exactly the same way that we've been. We've been discussing that. It's not terribly useful, for, yes, a robot can pour. You can pour you a cup of coffee and serve it to you, so long as you have a special machine that the robot can control, so long as it's always the same cup of coffee and so long as you're sitting in the exact same spot as always, and it could just deposit it on a specific spot the ability for AI to simply parse out, get me a cup of coffee and understand that, okay, this is the kind of coffee he likes. I'm going to go into the kitchen. I'm going to look for something that I recognize as a coffee maker, then I'm going to look on the shelves of something that I recognize as coffee and then I'm going to find, andy and find and basically make sure that I'm placing on some place, some place where that's the last thing that we're going to get right, because of course it's.

1:18:49 - Leo Laporte
It's, you know, just to talk to the physical world, which isn't going to change. Your coffee machine is never going to be an AI that can respond to my AI. It might have a dedicated AI that understands the machine, but the machine is not going to change because it has to make physical world coffee. So I think that you know the digital world, the Internet, you know searches, all of that, the phone screens and all that. Eventually there'll be this transitional period where you have an AI that could talk to it. Eventually it will be an AI and then I think the last step in this will be robotics, will be the interaction between the physical world and the digital world. That's the hardest step. I think that's why self-driving vehicles are so difficult. The real world has rocks and other obstacles Right.

1:19:36 - Shelly Brisbin
So AI could help with solving that messaging problem we were talking about before too, because why couldn't I say I want to send a message to Andy, leo, alex and I want to use their favorite messaging platform, send a message that says hi, I'll be right there?

1:19:49 - Leo Laporte
Precisely, and that's why, by the way, self-driving vehicles the biggest step is going to be vehicles intervehicle communication, because that helps a lot, at least in terms of navigating vehicles. But the real world is a tough nut and AI is probably going to be challenged by that for a long time.

1:20:06 - Alex Lindsay
I think they're thinking about incremental changes too, like, for instance, self-driving cars. What would really solve most of my problems is working on the highway, like I don't need you to figure out how to get to my house, I just need you to get. I can. I can do all of those things Once I get on the highway. I don't want to have to think about it again because that's boring and and I think that we have to find ways. We're good at that.

Actually, we've already solved that pretty much right For the most part, but you can make it a lot better. If you said we're not going to worry about the last mile, we're only going to worry about highways, and we invested in all the sensors and everything else that you would need in the highway to make the cars even smarter, it would all work perfectly. Oh yeah, you know and, and, and, but we've spent, you know, billions, possibly trillions of dollars on trying to get the last mile solved, which is the hardest part investing in the highways.

1:20:52 - Leo Laporte
You know, just agree A hundred percent.

1:20:54 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, we're solving the wrong like. Sometimes we're solving the wrong problem. They're like no one will use it if they can't use it on the highway. Everybody would use it if they could get on the highway and go do something else you know like it would you know.

1:21:05 - Leo Laporte
Let's take a little break. Shelly Brisbin, so nice to have you from the Texas Standard and many of Jason Snell's podcasts on the Incomparable.

1:21:14 - Shelly Brisbin
And some others and others.

1:21:15 - Leo Laporte
Tell us about the others. What else do you do?

1:21:17 - Shelly Brisbin
I don't just podcast with Jason. Oh, okay, all right.

1:21:20 - Leo Laporte
Well, I don't either. I have Parallel on RelayFM.

1:21:21 - Shelly Brisbin
Parallel is a tech podcast with Accessibility Sprinkles. So we talk about technology in general, but there's a big heaping helping of accessibility mixed in there. We mixed in there. We talk a lot about Apple stuff, but we also talk about Android, we talk about inclusive design, we talk about AI, ar. Whatever interesting guest I can get who has some accessibility perspective, even if they're spending most of their time in the mainstream tech world, we'll talk to them.

1:21:44 - Leo Laporte
I like it. You talked about Vision Pro on the most recent episode.

1:21:48 - Shelly Brisbin
We did yes how interesting?

1:21:50 - Leo Laporte
I mean, is Vision Pro accessible?

1:21:57 - Shelly Brisbin
Well, that's what we learned about in the latest because I had the Vision Pro Interesting. I mean, is Vision Pro accessible? Well, that's what we learned about in the latest because I had the Vision Pro demo. I do not own one and so I took an accessible look at the Vision Pro. But then I found a guy on the Internet who, because you can find people on the Internet I don't know if you know that- oh, wow.

But I found somebody on the Internet who is a developer and who also has low vision and he bought a Vision Pro on day one and he talks about all of the different input methods there are for the vision pro which I saw and which I know about, but which ones he uses.

And the thing with low vision always is everybody's experience is different, their eyes behave differently, and so his experience is his experience and it might not be mine, but it reminds you that the vision pro has more uh, has more input methods than eye gaze. You can use your head gestures or finger gestures or point. There's just all the different ways you can interact with Vision Pro. And what I figured out with Vision Pro particularly is that accessibility is always going to be a particular set of features that work for you as an individual, as opposed to oh, we'll just turn voiceover on and it'll be fine. It's more a matter of picking. Especially if you have low vision or if you have a physical disability, it's going to be a matter of picking the specific things that you have to alter to use the device the way you want to use it, and so I was really excited to talk to Zach about that, because he's actually lived with one where I just had one on my head for 45 minutes.

1:23:14 - Leo Laporte
Awesome Parallel on RelayFfm, a tech podcast with accessibility sprinkles Our show today brought to you by Wix Studio. They're giving me 60 seconds to tell you about Wix Studio. Can I do it? The web platform for agencies and enterprises. Here are a few things you can do from start to finish, in a minute or less on Wix Studio. Adapt your designs for every device with responsive AI.

Expand Wix Studio's pre-made solutions with back-end and front-end APIs. Generate code and troubleshoot bugs with a built-in AI code assistant. Switch the styling of hundreds of web pages I mean, I'm talking fonts, layouts, colors all with a single click. Add no-code animations and gradient backgrounds right in the editor. Start a design library. Package your code and UI in reusable full-stack apps. Oh, and one more big one Deliver everything your client needs in one smooth handover. Deliver everything your client needs in one smooth handover. All right, my time's up, but the list keeps on going. It is beautiful and they do such a good job. Step into Wix Studio, see for yourself Wix. Go to Wix: wix.com/studio or just go to our show notes. Click the link there to find out more wix.com. Time's up. Did I make it? Thank you, Wix for supporting mac break weekly.

Uh, app store guidelines have changed. What's interesting is, yes, they've changed. In the EU you can. Apps in the eu, now particularly particularly music apps, can send you somewhere to buy that is not on the Apple device. With special entitlements, music streaming apps can also invite users to provide their email address something Apple has strictly forbade for years and still does in the US to receive a link to buy digital music or services via the website. This is something the EU mandated. But then there's another change which the EU did not mandate, and it's kind of interesting. For years forever the App Store has banned game emulators, but now they're allowing them in. What's going on there?

1:25:34 - Andy Ihnatko
That's pretty exciting, cause it's a whole category and a whole real vibrant category of software emulators that will emulate pretty much any game platform that you might've heard of, uh, from like the seventies, eighties, nineties, two thousands, some of them fair use, because, credibly you know, the ROM cartridges for an Atari 2600 are probably not commercially viable right now, atari still sells a VCS, so I don't know.

1:26:03 - Leo Laporte
I don't know.

1:26:06 - Andy Ihnatko
You could justify to yourself that okay, well, if I could buy this game cartridge, I would, but I can't. So I'll get this and it's easy to emulate and they work really, really great. I've got two emulators on my Android phone. I've got an emulator on my Playdate and it's really, really fun when you don't want just any version of Tetris, you want the version of Tetris with the music and the same sound of blocks that you're used to Always been forbidden by Apple. Now they've opened it up, but we don't know exactly how far they've opened it up. So, yes, you can have a game emulator, but it's not quite clear if you can do a game emulator the way that I'm used to having it, meaning you just install this app and whatever game ROM files you copy into it will actually work. All this app and whatever game ROM files you copy into it will actually work and, for all intents and purposes, it's a Nintendo Game Boy or it's an Intellivision or whatever.

1:26:59 - Leo Laporte
Very appealing right, apple does say you're a responsible developer for making sure you don't violate the law.

1:27:08 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, and someone I forget who it was but one writer actually brought up the possibility that maybe they won't allow you to do an emulator like that. But if you are Atari and you want to recreate your own Atari 2600 emulator and sell your own game ROMs through it. I think they did say that any additional games that are accessible through the emulator are also subject to App Store limitations. But it's better than nothing. I mean, if I could, if I could pay for, uh, something like the evercade, which is a licensed platform, that they actually get the licenses for all these classic, uh, vintage games and they, they'll, they'll. Then you can play it through a hundred dollar like a tv console or like 120 or even cheaper game console apparently.

1:27:51 - Leo Laporte
I would definitely do that. Yep, you can have a a store in your emulator so that if you have legit roms, you can download them. I think that's that's a big shift for apple why?

1:28:02 - Andy Ihnatko
how about look, will they? Will they ever allow them to have like a mac emulator? Because I still want to. I still want to run like hypercard on like an iPad mini. Maybe, it's too bad that all this cultural content from like the late 80s like, has disappeared, or at least you have to go to archiveorg and watch it and play it through a web browser. I want an Apple product where I can actually make HyperCard stacks again.

1:28:27 - Alex Lindsay
I miss HyperCard. I think that Apple's looking at the list of the DOJ and they're like, hey, how do we just knock the list down, Like do we really care? Like it's you know, I think that in a perfect world, I think that they, I think that they were concerned about being legally accountable, for you know, now that they've made it, if someone gets sued, Apple might get included in that lawsuit. I think that's probably what they were probably avoiding and so, especially now, because they don't let everything in, but they do let some things in by turning this on, it does potentially create an issue for them, but I think that they were just like okay, let's look at the little things that don't really affect us and take the laundry list and just knock a bunch of them off and just say, yeah, we've handled a lot of this stuff already. Yeah.

1:29:10 - Leo Laporte
Proactively say you know, hey, we't, you know, we're doing this stuff, it doesn't matter.

1:29:14 - Alex Lindsay
Apple is pretty good at going here hey, there are some, there are some lines in the sand we're not going to cross. We're not going to let the government have. We'll let them have access to your iCloud account, but we won't let them have access to your phone. You know like. And so Apple will have has fallback positions that they'll go to and going to say well, there's certain things that we're that we think are sacrosanct, and there are other things that we'll just give you because it just doesn't.

1:29:40 - Leo Laporte
It isn't worth fighting over, right? Um, I did just get my atari 400 mini. It's like what atari 400 hit by a shrink ray. Yeah, it's so cute.

1:29:46 - Alex Lindsay
I love it. I did actually.

I got an atari 2600 like the you know from atari, you know, like one of the simulators or whatever yeah and, uh, the only thing I I noticed was that um number one is I had no idea that my uh, my wife was so good at space invaders. She smoked like, smoked me like I came out of nowhere, like never said anything about space invaders, and we sat down and she just smoked me. And then the other thing is I realized I don't really like playing these games anymore, like pitfall and and they're fun the first time.

Yeah, you're like. Everybody sits around and plays them for 10 hours, you know, like for the first two over the weekend and then, and then it's, and then you're done.

1:30:18 - Leo Laporte
That's like I played it and then it sits there like it's.

1:30:20 - Alex Lindsay
It's connected to the tv. I just don't. When I sit down, I don't think of playing it again.

1:30:24 - Leo Laporte
Same thing, so my same experience with the 400 I. I played a few of the classics, including star readers too, which is on there.

1:30:31 - Alex Lindsay
But yeah, and my kids played it for a little while and then they went back to what they were doing.

1:30:36 - Andy Ihnatko
I do like the culture.

It's going to sound like I'm being sarcastic, but I do like the idea of the preservation of this kind of cultural heritage.

I agree, because games are an art and the idea that imagine, like all the movies that would disappear completely, because, oh well, there's no such thing as a 16 millimeter film projector or 35 millimeter film projector anymore, or this film stock, there's no support for this film stock anymore. So therefore, these 20 000 movies and movies and things don't exist anymore because they just simply there was no way to play them. So, yeah, I'm I'm definitely not. For me, emulation is more like there are a couple of specific games I kind of like, and I kind of like digging into like old games that I never got a chance to play because my family, my family, didn't have like game consoles and even when, like I was a young adult, I did not have discretionary income to actually buy like the, that 16-bit platform, and then the next platform and the next platform. So I finally get to find out what this Mario Kart thing is all about and I'm pretty pretty happy about it.

1:31:41 - Leo Laporte
I think you'll enjoy it. Somebody I was. I saw this on Reddit somebody 3D printed I don't know what. This is kind of a.

1:31:51 - Andy Ihnatko
Oh, that's really cool. Like the Macintosh studio. Yeah, it's a. It's it's basically it's a. It's a thing that sits on top of a Mac studio that is the shape like a classic Mac, but also has like a slot for, I think, a 10-inch iPad. So, using continuity, you can just essentially use it as a classic Macintosh exactly yeah, with a little keyboard and everything.

1:32:12 - Leo Laporte
This is Scott Ujan on his YouTube channel. He even put a serial number on that.

1:32:18 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, I love the ingenuity of these people. I wish that I was thinking about this because I would have linked to it. But remember, like last year, the year before, some really, really clever guy who was really into 3D printing sent us a frog design like Mac 2CI based influenced enclosure for a Raspberry Pi and like a Bluetooth like free interpretation of like the original Mac M001 mouse. He created a new project, which is he built an entire Mac classic from the ground up using nothing but modern components so he 3D. He created a 3D model of the case. We 3D printed the entire like one-to-one scale case. He's using emulation inside but he also has like a modern power supply connecting to it. He has modern SD card driving from it. He actually also not only that, but connected to a major like USB hub inside hidden inside the case.

He actually like retrofitted a three and a half inch floppy drive so it actually does accept like Mac format of three and a half inch floppies. It's like he made sure that, like the power switch had the right action, it makes the right bong sound, because he had to put in a separate like microcontroller just to make sure that the second that the fire hits the wire, you get the Macintosh bong it can. He created another adapter so you can use it with Apple desktop bus. Yes, there are also USB ports on the back of it.

But it's like I am like I'm no stranger to like Mac emulation on Raspberry Pis and other things like that, to like Mac emulation on Raspberry Pis and other things like that, but I have never seen this kind of dedication to making sure that, if there is an experience that you would have had on a Mac Plus, this is supposed to replicate that precise, even be able to stick an unbent paperclip into the floppy, into a tiny hole in the side of the floppy drive, to manually eject the disc if necessary. And I'm like, I'm sorry, I just put a scratch on my tv screen because I just threw my wallet at it, because I just want you to have some money. I don't want to buy one, I just want you to have some money, because, whatever it is that causes you to be the person that you are and do the things that you do, I want to make sure that you don't have to worry about feeding yourself for at least a couple of days while you go and do that thing.

1:34:38 - Leo Laporte
Here is a Go ahead.

1:34:41 - Andy Ihnatko
I'm sorry. No, I was about to say I'm going to go see if I can find it while you talk.

1:34:44 - Leo Laporte
Oh, you have it Okay. I don't have it, but it's definitely in my history.

1:34:50 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it will be my pick of the week.

1:34:55 - Leo Laporte
If I can find it to the video, this is, uh, the update on massimo. You've been wondering perhaps you have been wondering what happened with that thing where they couldn't sell the apple watch in the united states because they got sued by massimo and the itc said you can't import those anymore. And apple is now, uh, in front of a us court of appeals. They started the arguments four days ago. Um, they have returned to the case between apple and massimo. The company told the court that massimo's victory with the itc was based on two flawed claims.

This is from apple insider the validity of massimo's effective patents. Uh, I don't know if actually that's going to be a good avenue. Those patents are pretty good and that Masimo claimed it was making competing products. This is, of course, over the blood oxygen oximetry that is in the Apple Watch. Masimo had a similar technology before Apple had it and then, to Apple's dismay, made a watch with it. The ITC decision, apple says, was flawed because it was based on a substantially defective patent judgment, some of which have been invalidated. Masimo updated its original pulse oximetry patent six days after the watch launch. Apple says that was that. That's evidence that they were intending to Manifestly written to ensnare Apple's new watch.

1:36:26 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, the basis of the basis of their appeal is that Masimo, they're saying, never had a functioning watch Because part of the rules that they would have had. Again, from what I've read, obviously I'm not an attorney in terms of what the ITC is looking for, but the claim is that in order for this claim to be valid and for this ITC ruling to be okay, they would have had to have been able to show you hey, look, we actually built this, we were actually bringing this to market. They're making the point that the ITC is not there to police intellectual property, they're to police actual trade. So if there's no product, then there is no trade to protect and therefore this would have been invalid Many times. One of what they believe to be a smoking gun sort of thing because they repeat this phrase over and over again was that Masimo kept promising that, oh, we have our working prototype or our working product ready to show you upon request, and they have admitted that this thing never existed.

The appeal claims that they were referring to three or four different kinds of pieces of hardware that they might have been able to show if they had been forced to prove that. Hey, yes, we're actually building a watch. Here it actually is and on that basis, because it never existed. They're saying that the ITC made a ruling based on a CAD design that Masimo produced, as opposed to an actual competitive watch. A lot of this is subject to scrutiny and questioning, but they are essentially saying that ITC acted completely incorrectly. Also, the patents are invalid to begin with, but they're trying to get it thrown out on a more fundamental basis, that there are rules for which ITC would have been able to create this injunction against Apple. None of them were met by Masimo's creation, so therefore there's not a correct ruling and therefore should just be tossed.

1:38:12 - Leo Laporte
It is a long saga. You may remember that at the end of last year Apple was hoping that the White House would overturn the ITC ban. They did not, so Apple had to initially halt sales of the two latest models, including the Apple Watch Ultra, and then they decided to continue sales, but with the blood oximetry feature disabled, and that's where we stand now. The pulse oximetry, I guess, doesn't work on the latest Apple Watch models. I did not know that. So the Masimo patent, if it is valid, expires August 2028. And so maybe that's the end of the the game.

1:38:53 - Andy Ihnatko
But they're hoping the court will overturn that thing, and yeah, they're still not the or at least it's a 900, it's a 900 page appeal. Fortunately, most of it is just like quoting what happened before, so it's really only the first 60 or 70. So I've read the first 60 or 70 pages. They don't even seem to be necessarily challenging the idea that they violated what might be a valid patent, although, again, one of the things they're saying is that, hey look, if you, if you had this, if you had this intellectual property, you kind of sat on it until after we actually shipped our thing and that proves that you knew that you never had anything to begin with. So but they haven't really made excuse me, as far as I as far as I was, I have been able to read into this they haven't necessarily said that whatever finding was made in terms of violating Masimo's patents, they're not relying on that as a way to clear out this injunction.

1:39:41 - Leo Laporte
Finally, right before WWDC in June, microsoft is having an event May 20th, right before Microsoft Build their developers conference, in which they will unveil new PCs based on these new Qualcomm Elite chips that they say the Snapdragon X Elite. It beats the M3 powered MacBook Air both in CPU performance and AI tasks, so this will be very interesting to see. According to the Verge, microsoft is so confident that it's planning a number of demos that May 20th event that will show how much faster they are than an M3 MacBook Air for CPU tests. No Air, not Macs or MacBook Pro or any of that, but still.

1:40:28 - Alex Lindsay
I think that the two most interesting things here is number one is can they get the whole operating system to work on it? I mean, that's they've done this before and it did not go well. And then second is how does Intel feel about it? I mean, this probably puts Intel in a Intel's already in their back feet.

1:40:46 - Leo Laporte
Honestly, yeah, there's still lots of people who will buy Intel-based PCs because, as you point out, everything works on them, including Windows. I've been using Windows on ARM on my MacBook, using Parallels, and it actually runs quite well. There's a limited number of apps that run not in emulation natively, similar to the kind of Rosetta thing that Apple had when the M chips first came out.

1:41:11 - Shelly Brisbin
I think it could be You're talking about nostalgia before I kind of miss a good old-fashioned chip battle though. I love the idea that Apple has been able to say the M3 is faster than anything and they have benchmarks to prove it, but there hasn't been any real. Oh yeah, let me show you mine. And then we have to get into benchmarks that are competitive and that compare how the chips function on different apps or different tasks, and I don't know, I enjoy that as an observer of this sort of thing.

1:41:37 - Leo Laporte
I think it'd also be great if Windows had a. I mean, this has really been a huge Apple advantage with the MacBooks. It'd be very nice if you could get a Windows on ARM device that had similar battery life and similar performance. I don't personally like Windows that much, but there are a lot of people who use it far more than use Macs and they deserve a good experience too, I think. So this will be interesting. Qualcomm really pushed this Elite chip last year at their event. We covered the event and now the other shoe will fall, as they promised Mid-2024, we're going to start to see these PCs. They already are showing them running games. You know AAA games beautifully, so this will be very interesting, I think. Yeah, good on you, shelly, not being the rabid Apple fan saying I don't want nothing.

I'll never be as good as my Mac.

1:42:32 - Shelly Brisbin
That's right.

1:42:33 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, nothing will ever be as good as my mac. That's right. Yeah, microsoft is saying, according to internal documents seen by the verge, that the new windows ai pcs that's what they're calling them they even have a co-pilot ai button on the keyboard. We'll have faster app emulation than rosetta 2. Um, and that's going to be important because, as as you pointed out, alex, there's not a lot of ARM native stuff on Windows, but we were in the same boat back in the day. Microsoft, at least it seems to be catching up a little bit. According to the 47th annual semiannual Piper Sandler survey as you've been saying this, alex, forever teens still overwhelmingly want an iPhone and Apple Watch more than any other brand.

1:43:17 - Alex Lindsay
Well, and it's. I think that the two stats that you see there are what they have now, which is about 85 percent or 90. I mean, if you look at the stat there, it's over the last bunch of quarters too. It's not like it's right it was back to 2014.

It goes back to 2014. Yeah, and they're. They're basically, and the hard part is is that there is definitely some erosion, you know, at some point, but not many iPhone. You know the. You know, once someone gets into using either one of the operating systems, the chances of going to the other one is low and the chances of going from an iPhone to Android is even lower.

Tip, I mean statistically. Um, so, so it's it. I think that's again. That's the number that I think the doj and the european and not unless the european union of the doj, this is. This is a, because we're seeing the percentage. Apples percentage is very is, you know, not dominating in the general population of 50 or 50. You know 55 or something like that. But when you look at the next generation, what you're seeing is this has gone from 25% to 55% and really it's just a function of people aging out, you know like they're aging out of their iPhones and the next generation is at a Microsoft level usage, and I think that's probably part of what pushed the DOJ to start going down the path. It's going because people really have dominating control.

1:44:38 - Leo Laporte
Don't X-ray on the dominant part of this. The Piper Sandler's Taking Stock of Teens survey talks to 6,020 teens in 47 states, average age of 16.1 years. Not everything is sunny. Apple TV Plus, apple's streaming offering, ranks lowest when it comes to daily video consumption 1% according to the survey, compared to 27% for YouTube and Netflix. Apple Pay is doing all right, though. 57% of those teens surveyed responded they had apple pay installed in their smartphone and 44 said they used it in the last month. That's actually amazing I don't what's.

1:45:20 - Alex Lindsay
What's interesting is I don't know how, uh, like apple, doesn't the the content and apple tv plus does not seem to be. It's not even teams. Yeah, like it's just not. It's not skewed that direction. Um, and and I think that, um, the music, you can tell Apple has not been that successful, but the music has.

If you look at their live activations and what they promote, it's all teens. That's what they're focused on. You can see that because it's a whole bunch of people that I don't even know who they are, so they're definitely leaning into they are and and the, so they're definitely leaning into that. There, obviously, a lot of the features around message you know messages has been very teen focused. A lot of the added benefits and so on and so forth have been very much aimed at teens. So I think that they're. I think you can see where Apple's marketing in most of these things, about where they're trying to go. And you know, I think that I talked to after we've talked about music and Spotify, I started polling some of my younger nieces and nephews and my kids and it seems that they're all. They all agree that the Apple music sounds better, but their discovery is better in Spotify. So they're kind of split between between those two things.

1:46:28 - Leo Laporte
By the way, my blood oxygen is 96% according to my Apple watch ultra things. By the way, my blood oxygen is 96% according to my Apple Watch Ultra. Congratulations.

1:46:34 - Shelly Brisbin
Glad to hear it.

1:46:36 - Leo Laporte
They didn't disable it in existing devices. No, no, they didn't. No.

1:46:41 - Andy Ihnatko
Because of the ITC, it's about importing into the country, so they can't import watches from China, which is why, after the ban, there were third-party sellers.

1:46:49 - Leo Laporte
Amazon and Best Buy could still sell through what they had, I got it Okay, so if you already have one, don't worry about it. This was important. During COVID, I actually bought a blood oximetry finger device because-.

1:47:04 - Shelly Brisbin
There are folks who have chronic illnesses or diabetics who pay attention to it, in fact the people I saw a lot of dismissive commentary about this oh, this is just an entertainment feature and I guess you can't rely on it as medical advice. But for people who have compromised systems or some sort of chronic illness, I think they were relying on it to at least sort of keep tabs on whether they were needed to get some help.

1:47:29 - Leo Laporte
A blood oximetry device for your finger, though, is cheap, and you probably should have one. Oh, that's very true. If it is a health issue, you might want to get some help.

1:47:38 - Andy Ihnatko
A blood oximetry device for your finger though is cheap and you probably should have one. Oh, that's very true. If it is a health issue, you might want to get the more accurate solution. Yeah, and that's actually an excellent point. There's been a lot of discussion about whether, like most health watches including Apple, but of course Apple Watch is big in the conversation Like, they're great, but they're intended, they're being designed for, and marketed for, healthy people who want to maintain their health. There's not been a whole lot done to address the needs of people who have a chronic illness, who need to manage that disease or to manage a declining situation with exceptions, of course. But this is where the next wave, the next generation of really, really important health devices, are going to be the ones who really do help. You keep on top of a thing that if you fall behind on your measurements, if you let certain signs slip your attention, your health can go very, very much worse very, very quickly, and we need watches that help that.

1:48:32 - Leo Laporte
This is pretty exciting if you're a developer. Apple has a developer YouTube channel and they have a little hello world video that they've put up, the Apple developer channel. Remember, microsoft did this with channel mine. I think they still have something like this, but if you're an Apple developer, these videos are really, I think, especially for this younger generation, an important way to learn.

1:48:57 - Alex Lindsay
And so a lot of this has been. I think. I think that this is actually a chain reaction to what happened during COVID, and so Apple went from WWDC being a lot of presentations, which were a lot of uncomfortable engineers talking awkwardly on a stage with some great looking slides to to they started making these movies because they that's what they had to do, and I think they just got really good at them and they're like, you know, this is much better than what we were doing on stage, and so they, you know, so they're still releasing those during WWDC. But I think what's happened is is Apple's built an engine around generating videos, you know like, and so there was a. There's an engine that didn't exist before that now exists, and I think that what you're seeing is that kind of this is now outputting like we're going to still do WWDC, but here's a whole what's on here right now is all from last year's WWDC, but I bet you this, uh, this is going to become a very interesting channel very quickly.

Um they just had a lot of work and the videos just look so nice and they're so much quicker and cleaner, and so I think that I think Apple is. I think we'll see a lot more from Apple in this area.

1:50:23 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, and they also launched just at the end of March a new Develop and Swift like tutorial portal on the developer site, developerapplecom slash tutorials, slash develop hyphen in hyphen Swift and it's a very, very nice multistage. I don't I'm not sure if it's for beginning programmers, so much as it is for people who have experience with something like Python or some sort of object oriented programming, who want to learn pick up Swift, but it does start you basically at the ground level in developing apps in Swift in a very, very colorful way.

1:50:54 - Leo Laporte
All right, I think a good time to take a break so we can get your picks of the week lined up here. Shelly, if you want to participate with a pick, we'll talk about that in a moment. First, I want to implore our audience to join our club. Club TWiT is the way we are monetizing these days, as advertising dwindles, and not only the number of advertisers but the amount they're willing to pay. And I want to tell you we hold the line. We do not give advertisers all of the information they want, all of the tracking pixels that they want. We've said no to agencies and lost a number of advertisers because we won't do it. We want to protect your privacy, but for that reason we would very much like to invite you to help us out a little bit Now. It's only $7 a month, but we do give you some benefits Ad-free versions of all of our shows, video of shows that are audio only to the public, like Hands on Macintosh, the iOS Today Untitled Linux Show, the Home Theater Geek Show, and you also get access to the Discord, which is a great place to hang. I have to say I love our Club TWiT Discord. But even if you don't want any of those benefits. The benefit of sending the $7 a month to us is the knowledge that you're helping us stay alive.

Now I have to say we have discontinued the annual subscription and I know there was some concern about that. People don't like that monthly ding. They'd like to pay all at once. We don't give you a discount for the annual, but people like that idea. The only reason we stopped is because that's a commitment that we'll be here in a year, and I was unwilling to make that commitment. To be honest Now, we continued to take those up to last week. So I guarantee you we'll be here till a year from last week.

But I don't know if we're going to survive into next year, and that's one of the reasons we have to implore you, as public broadcasting does, to support what we do. If you like what we do, if you listen to you know here's the deal If you listen to more than one podcast a week, $7 a month it's a great deal. Go to twit.tv/clubtwit. We'd like to be here we really would a year from now, but at this point I'm uncomfortable. Guaranteeing it Time for our picks of the week. Guaranteeing it Time for our picks of the week.

1:53:19 - Shelly Brisbin
Let's kick it off with our esteemed guests Shelley Brisbin of the Texas Standard. This is possibly something you've talked about. I don't know, but Zoom has come out with a new line of audio recorders, not to be confused with the conferencing app.

of course, the Zoom Essentials series. There's the Zoom HE1, essentials 1, then the H4 Essential and the H6 Essential. I have the H6 Essential and what I love about it. I had the H6 before, so I know this product pretty well. This version, the H6 Essential, is a little bit lighter to carry than the H6. It comes with four XLR inputs. You also, when the capsules are available they're not available yet we'll be able to put a capsule on top that gives you two more xlr inputs.

So if you're recording a podcast with a bunch of friends, as I often find myself doing if you're in person with them, you can get up to six people on one recording. The interface is great. I think zoom has really done a good job of making the decisions about what should be in the menus and what should be physical buttons. All the inputs are armed with physical buttons, but there's a nice interface that gives you access to all of the settings and the like. You can use it as an audio interface. I'm actually using it right now, or I would show you my device because it's over here, being the audio interface and if I pick it up I'm afraid something bad might happen. It supports 32-bit floating 32-bit floating audio, which means that if you're recording out in the field and you haven't set your levels properly, you're not going to clip, which is great for me, because a lot of times when I'm out and this happened over the weekend we were recording coverage.

I would see an opportunity to talk to somebody and all I did was jam the XLR microphone cable into the Zoom, turn it on, make sure the input was set to the right place and run over and go.

Hey, hey, can I talk to you? I didn't have to worry about levels. You can set levels and actually that's the only sort of weird thing about it is that the level setting is all in software now, which means you can't accidentally knock a button, which I've done before Like you think you have your level set and then you've hit a button it's like oh, it's lower or higher than I expected, but now it's all in software and it doesn't really matter in the end. But you can set, especially, like for cases like this, you want your output level set so that your input level set, so that the output for the people you're talking to is not too loud. I love this thing and also the icing on the cake and why I sort of got interested in it. I have an H6 that is long on the tooth for various reasons, but it also has a fully accessible interface. It has a talking menuing system.

1:55:48 - Leo Laporte
Oh, good for them.

1:55:48 - Shelly Brisbin
But if you don't want to hear it talk, it also has full features. Like a lot of times when talking menuing systems exist, they do a very limited number of the functions, but everything here is accessible via voice. In addition, the display is so much better, high contrast. It's not that sort of shiny, shimmery background with a thin font on the menu that's hard for somebody like me to read, but it's actually a high contrast, dark background, light text interface and I just love it. So I don't actually feel I'm probably going to turn the voice off pretty soon. I've been using it as it's new because it's just quicker for me. But I think I'm going to turn the voice off pretty soon because I haven't had any difficulty reading this interface.

I know the H4 is basically this device with too few reports, the capacity for too few reports, and so that's great for field recording. That's normally the kind of device that somebody like me, a radio reporter, would carry around. The H1 is this tiny little handheld thing. You don't have any XLR inputs, but the microphones on top are really good. So I've I've heard some audio that people have recorded at trade shows and it actually said and that's a notoriously noisy environment. Obviously it's not pristine audio, but for the purposes of doing a little podcast where you're saying, hey, tell us about this new thing. You're having your booth today. It's, it's really quite good. So I, I, I can't recommend them highly enough.

1:57:10 - Leo Laporte
I, I, I completely agree. I have the field recorder, the F3. In fact, that's what I'm going to use next week on the show when I'm at my mom's house. I use it just like you do for the interface. But it's also that 32-bit float is mind-boggling. It's really fantastic. Yeah, now I'm tempted to get an H1 Essential just to have a little pocket recorder for quick little hits and stuff like that.

1:57:32 - Shelly Brisbin
It's only 99 bucks. This, this, the H6, is $299. I mean, I'm going to have to buy a capsule if I want all six inputs.

1:57:39 - Leo Laporte
But those are it's really good pricing. I remember carrying around a bunch of you know big heavy field recorders in my days as a radio reporter. It really has come. We've come a long way. I agree with you and I'm glad to see they have this zoom essential series now and all 32-bit flow. Thank you, shelly. It's, uh, it's a zoom. What is it? What is there? Uh, it's zoomcorpcom.

1:58:04 - Shelly Brisbin
To distinguish them from the other zoom right, because I keep typing, zoom us and that's not right I know, I know me too.

1:58:12 - Andy Ihnatko
Or if you just google zoom, you can get the wrong zoom right, you're gonna get the wrong one, almost always zoom, corpcom andy and ako pick of the week uh, my pick of the week is that video that I talked about earlier. Uh, his name is kevin nokie uh, and if you go to his youtube channel, kevin nokie k-e-v-i-n-n-O-K-I, you'll be able to see this video 3D printed full-size Macintosh. He calls it the Brewintosh and you gotta be in there for the entire ride. It is, of course, it's a 47-minute, 25-second video. But the idea that he didn't even want to switch it on and it's being run off of like an HP thin client that he picked up for 12 bucks. So that's what's inside the guts. But inside I was thinking that, well gosh, the box of a Mac Plus is like really, really big, like it must be nothing but air. But then, when it gets to the end of it, like again because he was not satisfied with simply having like oh, look, there's an emulator that attaches to like a little HDMI display that's glued to the front, it's like, no, he wanted to make sure that from all angles it looks like an exact Macintosh. It powers up like a Macintosh and makes sounds like a Macintosh. You can use ADB like a real Macintosh. So a lot of it is just this tangle of little controllers and little boards connected to all kinds of USB hubs to make sure that this HP thin client can talk to everything that needs to do, and also just things like he wanted to make sure that you turn it on and you don't see like a Windows startup sequence or anything like that. He wants to make sure that you see the welcome to Macintosh, you hear the Bing and you see the startup sequence go. So it's not for sale.

I think he said he's going to at some point, once he gets the 3d model for the for the 3d print printed case like absolutely unlocks this so that everyone, everyone else, could successfully print it, he will probably release it. But this is not a commercial product. Just just admire it from start to finish. This is this is like whatever job he might be applying for at any point in the future. If he just like forget the forget the CV, just plops this on the desk of the person who's interviewing him. It's like I built this from. Not only did I build this from start to finish, but also I've had this. I had this idea that I was not going to compromise on. It had to be perfect. It's just brilliant.

2:00:27 - Leo Laporte
Well, of course we know Kevin, because you and I both have his world-famous Raspberry Pi case that he also 3D printed. It looks like a 2FX with a Raspberry Pi inside. And he also sent me that mouse, which I love. It is an Apple one-button mouse, but inside it's actually a real mouse. But that's so cool. Kevin is a master. He's in Germany. I do hope that at some point he releases this, because I would buy this in a heartbeat. I think it's so cool. Yeah, Kevin.

I'm on his insta but he also has, of course, a YouTube account.

2:01:04 - Andy Ihnatko
I do love what he says instigated this idea that he had like an actual Mac classic or a Mac plus. But he didn't want to like gut it out, to like modernize it. He wanted to preserve it as is. So we decided, of course, do the next best thing, which is to spend God knows how many weeks and months and engineering getting this thing to work again.

The floppy disk works exactly the way you would be, it would be so easy to simply say, okay, well, look, there's an SD card reader inside it that has like an art, has an HD image on it.

2:01:35 - Leo Laporte
But no, he had to make sure that you could boot off of a floppy. That's a. That's god bless him absolutely obsessive, uh, and it's called a Bruintosh and the logo is a little uh, beer stein in rainbow color, six rainbow colors. I think it's really clever he is. He is an amazing fellow, uh, and I don't know if you still watch Kevin. But, uh, you don't, don't send us this. Yeah, we will buy it. Ok, right, andy, I always feel guilty when I get these in the mail. It's like no, no, I want to buy this really cool stuff, kevin Nookie.

2:02:04 - Andy Ihnatko
I still I still have as a Raspberry Pi case, like on, like a table on the table behind myself in my living room.

2:02:17 - Leo Laporte
That's what runs, like my Raspberry Pi, like my living room computer, because it's such a beautiful object. Yeah, the light even lights up on it, which is so clever, he's so good. Real attention to detail.

2:02:21 - Alex Lindsay
Uh, alex lindsey pick of the week so, uh, I'll get something to show to uh the um, uh, the neb is next week. This is the biggest conference for me every year and if, uh, if you are um, uh, if you're, if you're interested in going, you don't usually have to pay to be in the expo and the expo is the thing to do. So if you can get to Vegas. I'm just letting you know that next week, uh, it's a MP zero seven. That's um mama papa zero seven. If you put that in when you type it in for the expo, it's free oh good, there's the code.

That's the free code for the expo, but if you can go, it's it's free. You get to walk around it is. It is like if you do production or even interested in production, we're thinking about production. It's like a little candy store, like you just get to see all the cool things. Uh, we'll, we're actually having a booth at in the central hall, so we're at 50, 59, 47 I think, and and uh, we're going to doing. I'm going to be coming in to Mac break from there next week.

So from that booth and but we'll be covering the show there and I thought I'd show you the rig. Hold on, this is the. This is the zoom rig that we're building because you know, this is your enterotron, the Lindsay enterotron. Yeah, We've moved things around a little bit so we've got a speaker down here so you can hear Zoom. You can see it here. We can walk anywhere in the central hall with this. So this is, you know, I can still see what I'm doing here, but this will do a two-way connection to our booth so we can wander around, ask people. We've got a Sony FX6 with a BizLink which is like what they use for the Super Bowl. It's good that you found a use for those old FX6s.

2:03:54 - Leo Laporte
I think that's good.

2:03:55 - Alex Lindsay
The old FX6s are pretty new. I think we're going to have the best looking stream. We've got a bunch of FR7s in the booth and then FX6s. Sony lent us some cameras for the booth and so anyway, so yeah, so it should be a lot of fun. You'll see this in action next week and so yeah, so it should be a lot of fun. You'll see this in action next week and we're really excited about it. We've been kind of planning it for months now and, as you know, leo, when you do NAB, it's a lot of lift. So the, but anyway, that's the camera that I'm building up. We've got a couple not that's the biggest one, there's about. There's two other ones floating around, and so it. I would highly recommend it. Otherwise, you know you'll see us streaming it um, next week, uh, at just at the office hours. Youtube page Um, and you can ask questions while we're doing it. We're doing it live, so it should be. Should be a lot of fun. Also, um, a quick note that Coachella will be a little different this this year.

2:04:50 - Leo Laporte
I just got the literally Lisa wants to go to.

2:04:52 - Alex Lindsay
Coachella. Should we go? Well, you should definitely go if you can. It's sold out. So it's hard to go to Coachella and buy a ticket now, unless you want to spend a lot of money, because it's usually sold out like within minutes of when it opens. But if you can't go to Coachella, you saved me, thank you. But YouTube is now. They have this awesome YouTube TV. They have this awesome multi view. You know, it's like you see four of them at a time and you can choose what you want. They're doing that with stages. It's the first time it's been available publicly, like if you're not subscribing to YouTube TV, so you'll see four. You'll see a four up with different stages. You can look at the different stages and cut to them and everything else. I think a lot of people don't know that they stream enormous amount of Coachella on YouTube. It's a deal that YouTube has with Coachella, so, and I literally found out that that was happening while we were in the show, so, so, so it's a so, so all the stages will have their own stream.

I don't know if it's all the stages, most of them, it looks like. I don't know how many there are, but yeah, but you'll be able to look at a multi-view and see four of them at a time and jump, listen to the one you want to listen to or jump to the one that looks the most interesting. So, um, it's some. It's one of the features that's really cool inside of uh, uh, youtube tv. Um and uh, it's now moving to youtube, so so it should be.

2:06:10 - Leo Laporte
Should be nice so anybody you're very excited about seeing at Coachella this year, you know I'm going to be on.

2:06:16 - Alex Lindsay
I'm going to be an NAB.

2:06:17 - Leo Laporte
Oh, that's right.

2:06:19 - Alex Lindsay
While Coachella is going on, I'll be. I'll be busily setting up and getting ready, because our first day is on Sunday, um, or we start streaming at noon on Sunday, so we're building.

2:06:29 - Leo Laporte
YouTubecom, slash Coachella or, if you're really more interested in office, in nab office hours, dot global right, that's, that's the place. Do you have the multi-view screen? Yet I don't have the multi-view screen for that. You could. You could do that. You could.

2:06:44 - Alex Lindsay
No reason you couldn't do that too. I I'm somewhere in the future like we like. We went from being like we streamed the last NAB. We streamed for like two hours total. Now we're doing it three hours a day, wow. And then the goal will be to get to the whole time, and then the goal will be to have more than one thing happening at a time Amazing.

2:07:06 - Leo Laporte
Shelly, brisbane, thank you so much for being here. Catch Shelly's Act, of course, at the Texas Standard. Is that TexasStandardcom Dot org? Oh, of course it's a nonprofitorg. Or on the Mastodon, she's at Zeppelin Flights at Shelly. She's also, of course, on Relay FM with her show, and many other places as well. So great to have you, shelly. Thank you for.

2:07:32 - Shelly Brisbin
Thanks for having me. It was a lot of fun, always a pleasure.

2:07:35 - Leo Laporte
Always a pleasure. Andy Anako GBH next.

2:07:40 - Andy Ihnatko
Week after next 1230, excuse me 1250 pm Eastern Time on Thursday. Go to wgbhnewsorg to listen to it live or later.

2:07:50 - Leo Laporte
I shall be visiting you next week in beautiful Rhode Island. I'm going out to see my mom and I will be broadcasting from her house, as I have now a few times, using my Zoom F3. I don't know if I did. I bring a Heil. No, I have a different microphone and I think I'm going to use the iPhone for my camera. I have yet to find a better camera than the iPhone.

2:08:16 - Andy Ihnatko
So I will see you and we'll go to a nice diner at some point next week.

2:08:18 - Leo Laporte
That'll be super lovely. Alex Lindsay is at officehoursglobal Always a great place to go to keep up on what's happening in the world of technology, particularly in production Photogrammetry, the subject from today's show.

2:08:31 - Alex Lindsay
What a day. I mean, greg Downing is like the world expert in photogrammetry. Uh, I, I met Greg maybe 20, almost 25 years ago and uh, doing, and he was doing it back then and now he's, he does some of the highest end photogrammetry in the world and so he uh, um so anyway, so he's, he came on the show, I pinged him and he jumped on and really, really deep conversation about you know what, what's possible, and structured light versus unstructured light, and how you approach it, and you know all the bits and pieces. It's really good.

2:08:59 - Leo Laporte
And if you want to follow yesterday's eclipse, your yes, your eclipse coverage eclipsed everybody else's. Just the, just the. I don't know if that's the case, but just the best we had a good time, just the best.

2:09:15 - Alex Lindsay
All of that at officehoursglobal. What's coming up on gray matter? Gray matter we're taking the week this week off, but we had a great discussion really about the Middle East, so it went, it went. So this was a deep you know it's really. It was Ambassador Ross and it is a you know it's. It's interesting to listen to someone who's been in the in the mix for a very long time talking about the matter of fact. If you're interested in what's really happening in Israel, having someone like that talk about it. It's someone who's really been in the trenches for 40 years, you know, and you know seeing this happen over the last 40 years. He just knows where, knows what happened and why we do what we're doing and what's going on there and everything else, and I think it was a really interesting conversation. Very cool, gray matter dot show.

2:09:58 - Leo Laporte
I will listen to that. This is such a thicket that I would love to hear somebody with some authority talk about it. Thank you, alex Lindsay. Thank you, andy Anako. Thank you, shelly Brisbin. Thanks to all of you. A special thanks to our Club TWiT members that made this show possible. Join the club at twittv slash Club TWiT.

We'll be back next week with another fabulous show every Tuesday, 11 am Pacific, 2 pm Eastern time, 1800 UTC. Watch us live on YouTube, youtubecom slash twit. Or, after the fact, you can download a copy of the show, audio or video, from our website, twittv slash mbw. Or watch the YouTube channel dedicated to MacBreak Weekly video. Or, probably the best thing to do, find a good podcast client and subscribe. That way, you'll get it automatically the minute it is available. Thanks to Jammer B, back from his jaunt to the craters or whatever it was, uh, we're so glad to have you back in studio. Thanks to John Ashley, our producer and technical director, uh, and thanks to all of you for being here. We'll see you next time, but now it is my sad and yet humbling duty to tell you get back to work. Break time is over. Bye.