MacBreak Weekly 918 Transcript

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

0:00:00 - Leo Laporte
It's time for MacBreak Weekly. Andy's here, alex is here, Shelly Brisbin's back filling in for Jason Snell, and Apple has announced an event. I'm not getting up at seven in the morning to watch it, but you can. We'll talk about what they might announce at this new event. Apple's environmental push Is it real or is it all window dressing? And a bit of a shock. Vision Pro sales seem to be dwindling. Maybe you're not so surprised. All that coming up with a lot more in just a bit of a shock. Vision Pro sales seem to be dwindling. Maybe you're not so surprised. All that coming up with a lot more in just a bit. On MacBreak Weekly.

Podcasts you love. From people you trust. This. Is TWiT.

This is MacBreak Weekly episode 918, recorded Tuesday, April 23rd 2024: You're Rubbing It Wrong. It's time for MacBreak Weekly, the show where we cover the latest Apple news. Jason Snell has once again boarded an airplane to nowhere. So hey, good news. Shelly Brisbin's back, it's great to see you, Shelly from the texas standard. See, I'll get it right this time.

0:01:08 - Shelly Brisbin
You did uh good to be here, and I don't know where Jason is either, other than he's up in the air. I I don't keep track of him, apparently he could be on a zeppelin flight. It's not unheard of well, that would be on brand.

0:01:20 - Leo Laporte
We like that man, I wish I were on a zeelin flight. I have always wanted to go on a Zeppelin. I think they should bring airships back. I really do. Andy Anotko is also here from ihnatko.com and GBH in Boston, and Andy and I had a secret dinner last week.

0:01:38 - Andy Ihnatko
It was so much fun. Yeah, we talked about all kinds of things and no one else was invited, so you can imagine the things we talked about all kinds of things, and no one else was invited, so you can imagine the things we talked about.

If that makes makes anybody think that they were left out, well, that's kind of too bad, because you were. No it's. I'm just kind of thrilled to be at the at the dinner, but oh wow, it was so much fun that was no, no, you were. You were in town. I'm glad that you had time to to get together. Yeah, it was great.

0:01:59 - Leo Laporte
I was visiting my mom, but I'm back now. A Alex Lindsay is also here. Office hours dot global. Hello, hello, hello, hello, hello, hello. We have a day, we have a date, but we don't have an event. Apple announces May 7th event, putting that in scare quotes Because the invitation is why don't you watch this video on May 7th? That's 7 am Pacific time. Why don't you watch this video on may 7th at 7 am pacific time? Why don't you watch that video?

0:02:29 - Andy Ihnatko
this is, this is like the, this is like Taylor Swift. They're saying you know, we don't, we don't have an album for you, but if you wait for this date, you will be able to watch something that we actually recorded quite a while earlier. We'll be nowhere near the place that you think will be, but you're welcome to see what we did at the time when we were at that place doing the thing.

0:02:45 - Shelly Brisbin
This is the condolences to those of you on the west coast, because it's prime time for most of us. Just think of it as getting up to order an apple product. Oh no, you're not.

0:02:54 - Leo Laporte
You're just going to watch a video we really, uh, enjoyed the fact that apple was on the california time for so many years. I guess it's only fair that you Easterners.

0:03:04 - Alex Lindsay
They've done it before. They've done a couple of them where, they've done them out of New York or something like that, but there's no reason to do them this early.

0:03:10 - Shelly Brisbin
And then there was the 7 pm one. That was the weirdest one. I saw 7. And then I looked again. I said, are we doing 7 pm again? And I checked and it was the morning.

0:03:18 - Alex Lindsay
So I was like okay, I was not invited to watch the video, you were. Oh, you're not even going to watch the video Now. At this point, it's just throwing shade.

0:03:30 - Leo Laporte
It's just throwing shade. It's like, yeah, we're not going to invite you to watch our video, but those who received the invitation saw this a splash of color which is clearly a rainbow apple that's been smooshed Really deep, intense colors, as though a new display technology hidden to unknown to the realm of iPad.

0:03:53 - Andy Ihnatko
And what's that? It's a hand holding an Apple Pencil. It's very dimensional. We can only conjecture, of course, at this point this will have something, if anything, to do with the iPad, but we feel somewhat confident in making this sort of prediction.

0:04:06 - Leo Laporte
Is it an AR?

0:04:06 - Andy Ihnatko
I'm going right on my limb, my neck's, all the way out.

0:04:09 - Shelly Brisbin
This is the commentary that MacBray listeners, come MacBray Weekly listeners, come for.

0:04:15 - Leo Laporte
Come for the commentary, stay for the cheese. There will be no cheese on this episode. So is this? Should I go to Applecom and see a? Uh, usd.

0:04:28 - Alex Lindsay
I think you'll see something on the morning of the event. They'll swap it over. You'll get to all watch a movie together. It'll go sploosh sploosh, splish, splash.

0:04:35 - Leo Laporte
I'm a dick in the bath, so 7 am, I'm not. I don't. What do you think? Uh, john ashley producer, should we stream that live?

0:04:46 - Alex Lindsay
I mean, that's on you, yeah, how early.

0:04:51 - Leo Laporte
Do you really want to get a video? Let me just see.

0:04:54 - Shelly Brisbin
What day of the week is May 7th. Oh, it's a Tuesday, quite convenient.

0:04:57 - Leo Laporte
Maybe, what we should do is just come in at our normal time, 11 am Pacific, having all watched except for me, because I was not invited this fine video and discuss it. How about that?

0:05:12 - Andy Ihnatko
that's not so. You got me scared there for a moment there because I thought that hey, we should do move mac, break up and do it live, because I'm not waking up at 11, at 10 am come on.

0:05:25 - Leo Laporte
Uh, it's gonna be ip iPads, obviously probably the new iPad pro with OLED display. You were referring to the rich colors, Andy.

0:05:34 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, and that's that's going to be pretty cool, because I have I have devices with OLED. I have devices that don't have OLED. Oled it's we, I think we've. We've talked about OLED displays before and the complaint is usually that, yeah, the contrast is way higher and the colors are a lot punchier. But hey, that's like having a McDonald's cheeseburger with all the salt and all the fat and all the carbohydrates. And the answer to that is yes, we know, we like salt, we like fat, we like carbohydrates. That's why they put them in the burgers. And so OLED displays that have this for ordinary work, it's absolutely fantastic.

What's going to make it really cool for Apple is that oftentimes, the disadvantage is that, yeah, all that punchiness comes at the cost of color accuracy. Like, if you're using this as a creative to create art, edit photos, edit video, whatever you kind of want to see, what you think that most people are going to see, you don't necessarily get that on like a Windows laptop with an OLED display. You have a lot of faith, however, that when Apple puts that on an iPad, they're going to make sure it's color accuracy. It's still going to be like probably the best. The goal will be to make it the best display you can get on an Apple device, and for a while. Ipads are often in that category.

0:06:46 - Alex Lindsay
And, given the pencils in the actual graphic, you know, it'd be really interesting to see how far they push. That, I mean there's a lot of us have felt that there was a lot more you can do with the pencil Proximity control, you know, being able to, you know, do more things that feel more like airbrush, do more things with the tip, more things that are pressure sensitive. You know there's a lot of things that could be done with the pen for artists. That, you know, I think a lot of us thought would happen five years ago. That maybe, given how much, how proud they are of the pencil, given that it's in the actual graphic, you know we might see some innovation there.

0:07:19 - Shelly Brisbin
I'm glad to see it happening. For those who are excited about OLED I personally and I said this on a podcast a while ago when they were asking about predictions for iPads and I said, well, it's not a prediction, but it's a wish list. Could somebody give me a 12.9 inch iPad Air? And I didn't think that was realistic at the time and and subsequently it's become more of a live rumor, and part of the reason for that is that Apple has all these extra screens lying around barely enough to make iPad Airs without OLED displays and as somebody who is very mid-market, that's an insult, I suppose, but I live in the mid-market. What can I tell you? And I don't really need the poppy OLED display for my personal use and I would like to save a little money, but I love a really big iPad, so I hope that there is also a 12.9-inch iPad Air for me.

0:08:06 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, a really big iPad. So I hope that there is also a 12.9 inch iPad Air for me. Yeah, I agree with you. I've got a 12.9 inch M1 iPad Pro in front of me right now, and if I could have gotten everything that I get out of this without having to spend MacBook Air type money for it, that would be awesome.

It does make me wonder if Apple's going to start us down the same road that we wound up with the differences between the MacBook Pro and the MacBook Air, where it's like, okay, they're technically the same computer, they technically will benchmark pretty much the same. Most of the features that you would want in a MacBook Pro are also in a MacBook Air, so why do they have two different models? So if this rumor does prove to be true, I'm really keen to see how they differentiate a 12.9-inch iPad Pro from a 12.9-inch iPad Air, given that if they both have the same sort of displays, that has to be a way that they're going to save money and save the price point on the iPad Pro. But if they also have the same kind of features with the pencil, if they have a lot of the same things you can do with continuity, that's going to be a much more difficult question. I would love to see a 12.9 inch.

0:09:10 - Leo Laporte
Much less expensive, though I would have definitely gone for that, had that opportunity so yeah, this is german, says uh, it'll give the pro version a snazzy new oled display. Uh, we know that. Uh. One thing he pointed out though this was a couple of weeks ago and you kind of see the tea leaves that the iPad availability dwindles ahead of May revamp, but not for the iPad Pro, which is still well-stocked, which is going to put Apple in a little conundrum, because they're I mean, if that's true, maybe they'll have both a M1 iPad pro like you and I have Andy and this new, I guess it'll be an M3 iPad.

0:09:54 - Shelly Brisbin
I mean, they've done it before. They've had a complex product line with two things that are named the same but have different ships. I don't like it when they do that, because it's very hard to talk about. But maybe somebody can get a deal and they think that they need an iPad Pro. But yeah, as you say, I don't know what the differentiation between a new iPad Air and an old iPad Pro ends up being.

0:10:15 - Leo Laporte
Maybe it would tickle your middle market fancy to have a lower cost iPad Pro. Would you consider it if it were down to the close to the iPad Air?

0:10:25 - Shelly Brisbin
Well, sure, the name doesn't matter. I mean, what I want to do is save money. I want to not pay, as Andy said, macbook Air prices for a nice big iPad, and I will take screen real estate over the best screen technology for my use.

0:10:38 - Alex Lindsay
That's not yeah.

0:10:41 - Shelly Brisbin
Right, that's not everybody, and in fact it was funny because after the 12.9 came out, people were very excited about it. There was sort of a honeymoon phase and then it seemed like for a long time people were saying people in the sort of pundit sphere where we all reside were saying 12.9, that's just way too big. I sure love my 11-inch iPad Pro, but I all along continued to love my 12.9. I think the size is great, especially as the MacBook Pros are getting bigger. I think there's a reason to differentiate. I think 12.9 has a reason to exist and I just love a screen that I can basically hang in midair and look at and use it in the way that I want to, without having to be tethered to a MacBook. And a big, big, big iPad makes me happy.

0:11:24 - Leo Laporte
It is kind of like a little TV if you put it on a stand.

0:11:28 - Andy Ihnatko
It's kind of yeah, 100% If you try like the standard size. What we accept is the standard size 11-inch iPad. It works great for productivity. It's going to work best if you've got an app in full screen you can do slide over and that will kind of work too. But for a stage manager and if you're really really really trying to get a lot, of work done in the course of an afternoon.

you really want 12.9 inches Absolutely Also. No joke, I mean, I'm in the middle of kind of reorganizing how I've got my hardware set up on my work desks and one of the things I'm buying is an articulated arm for my 12.9 inch iPad Pro, because one of the things I use it the most for is simply as a third display for my M1 MacBook Pro, which can only technically do two displays, and there's no lag, there's no suffering whatsoever. It is a 12.9 inch display that is kind of perfect as the window that I'm actually riding on, as I've got other windows, other displays for research and so the ability to. It's a way that you're spending more for the larger model. However, you're getting value back in the form of here are all the things you can do with it that make it a lot more useful and a lot more powerful, simply because it has more of a conventional sort of a laptop size screen. This is why I haven't seen any rumors to the effect that there'll be other kind of productivity features that are above and beyond.

Oh, has a different display, oh, it's a larger display, but things like well, here's our things. You can do with it as an external display for another device. Here are things you can do it. Here are things that you can do with it. That, basically, as an accessory for a Mac or anything else you have in the Apple ecosystem.

That's the sort of thing I'm super, super excited about, particularly in the pro line, and that could be a way that they decide to differentiate. They say that, yep, this is the. The 12.9 inch iPad air is simply the iPad air with a, with a bigger screen, whereas the 12.9 inch uh, 12.9 inch iPad pro is always going to be the one. That is the, the workhorse, the workstation, the thing that, yeah, it's the most expensive one, but you'll be getting at least twice the value back, and what you can do with it. That you can't do on a smaller display or or lesser hardware. But like, if I, if I, if it's just the way it works with external displays, like having displays plugged into the iPad pro, that would be super interesting to me as well.

0:13:44 - Alex Lindsay
I think the big challenge is figuring out what happens with the Pro and why do you get a Pro? Because the biggest challenge for the iPad is that it's so overpowered for what most people use their iPads for that finding things. Now I think that you know Apple's put Logic and Final Cut and Resolve, and there's LumaTouch and there's other things that are now pushing the iPad a little bit, you know, in that area, but for the most, for most users, if you're not doing video or or some of those things, it's really proving the need for a pro versus, you know, something a little bit lighter.

0:14:17 - Leo Laporte
So here's another question given that there's been a lot of talk about AI at WWDC and the new AI M4 chip and so forth all this speculation mostly from Mark Gurman Do you think there'll be an AI story on May 7th with these iPads?

0:14:35 - Andy Ihnatko
No, I bet that they're saving that story for WWDC, where they can tell a story with a beginning, middle and an end, like we talked about last week. I do think that this is Apple needs to get the storytelling on AI absolutely perfectly, because, even though they're not really obligated to pivot to being an AI-based phone, an AI-based desktop, ai-based everything, they do have to make sure that they're telling their customers, analysts, everybody that yeah, we've been an AI company for a number of years. We just haven't put that above the, above the headline. But here is sort of our strategy going forward. They can't really just simply mention offhand that, oh and, by the way, we have this new AI feature we're putting in there. I think that they might put that as a bullet point, like it's. It's prepared that these new M3 based iPad pros are prepared for the AI future. That is that Apple and our users are going to be looking forward to, but I don't think that they're going to be using that place to show off new features we haven't seen before that are AI based.

0:15:34 - Shelly Brisbin
I tend to agree, and I also wonder if maybe it's just a teaser at the end, something equivalent to coming soon that doesn't even have to do specifically with the iPads, you know, and hey, in a month we're going to be back, because it is a little odd that they chose to do an event this late, because typically when you have a spring event, it would have been like an early April, we'd have already had it. And now we have an event that's very soon before WWDC, which says two things to me. It says they really want to get those iPads out, and the WWDC is pretty packed with other things and they wouldn't have had time to do the iPads the justice they think they need.

0:16:07 - Leo Laporte
That's a good point. It's only a month before WWDC, that makes sense. Yeah, clear the decks.

0:16:13 - Alex Lindsay
Alex, yeah, no, absolutely yeah. I think that a lot of times you see a bunch of little releases. I wouldn't even be surprised if they release other things that they've done in May, where they've just put out a press release Like this got faster, or this, whatever. Because they're trying to clear a lot of those things, because after WWDC everything slows down until September. So you know the whole, you know all the development stuff you know kind of simmers down.

They're not going to do any releases or anything else between you know June 15th and or June 10th really, and early September, and so they have to get everything out that they're going to get out before then, and all of it's going to tie back into whatever they're talking about, wwdc. So so I think that it makes a lot of sense for them to you know, at least tell you what the hardware is. I don't think they have to tell you what the ai is. They'll just be like again, as Shelly said, it'll be like a surprise. But I doubt it'll be a surprise that in May it'll just be a surprise. And hey, by the way, the thing that we sold you has more power than we told you.

0:17:09 - Leo Laporte
Tim Cook, who is, I'm sad to say, back on xcom. Uh, actually, put he. His emoji foo is strong with this one. He really, really likes putting emojis in his stuff. It's kind of like nice job, grandpa, you got emojis. So he which is? I mean, I'm older than him so I can say that, right, uh, he's got pencil us in. Oh, pet get, we'll get it.

0:17:34 - Alex Lindsay
And then, just in case you didn't get it, he actually has a pencil emoji next to it and then he has the animated and that's, and that's why I think that there could be theoretically a lot of work being done on on what that pencil actually does, you know that would be cooler than what we would.

Yeah, yeah, I mean, that's the thing that, like, if that's. I mean, I have a pencil on each one of my iPads and, and you know, I think a lot of us thought that there'd be more we could do with it. For instance, airbrushing is something that is something we can do on a Wacom tablet. You know where you get the cursor close to it, you know, but not on it, and you can start pushing buttons and spray on onto things and stuff like that, and those are the kind of things that I think that we feel it always felt like to be competitive with a Wacom tablet. If you're talking to an artist, so there's a bunch of tools that the Wacom tablet has that the iPad doesn't. The iPad has, you know, it's very portable, it's in a lot of ways, in some cases, a higher quality, a higher frame rate, a lot of other things, but it doesn't have what they need to really switch over from a Wacom tablet to an iPad, and so it'll be interesting to see what they you know what they do there.

0:18:39 - Andy Ihnatko
That was the first time I actually saw that animation, did I? Am I overthinking things? Or to look, does it look like the? The animation is of the, the hand holding the pencil and sort of spinning it a little bit in his hand and in his or her hand. Does it look like they're tapping the end the, the eraser end of it? If we, if, if we are, if we are programmed as mac commentate, as apple commentators, to absolutely dissect every single one of these invites, I am required to wonder if this doesn't mean that there is a new like, there's a new version, maybe there's a, there's a tap, there's a gesture button on the, on the, on the eraser end of it.

0:19:16 - Leo Laporte
You don't even need to put a button in, do you?

I mean because it has a tap on just the surface, so yeah, so I bet you could have it where it distinguishes between the side and the top. Anyway, who knows? Yeah, I think the folks at Pro Creator probably jumping up and down with excitement. When I was at my mom's house you know we're going through the old stuff and I found an old Wacom tablet and the pencil because she used to like to draw with that on her Mac. She stopped using it as soon as she got an ipad. I mean, it was like that solved it, right, yeah um, it's a different, you know.

0:19:51 - Alex Lindsay
I think for the most part, I think for most people, it does, or the ipad solves that problem. I have a wacom tablet right here next to the ipad and it's because it's still tied into my, my application, that's your telestrator. I want to use it in, well, my, my telestrator, but also Photoshop and other tools that I might want to use, the Wacom tablet.

0:20:06 - Leo Laporte
Do you find, though I mean? One of the advantages of the iPad, and the Cintiq for that matter, is you're drawing right on the image as opposed to the disconnect. It's night and day.

0:20:15 - Alex Lindsay
You're used to it. It really is. I haven't used a non-screen based Wacom tablet for 20 years.

0:20:23 - Leo Laporte
Like it's, you know, like it's always been a Cintiq, so the Wacom you have there is a Cintiq or something.

0:20:27 - Alex Lindsay
It's a Wacom 1, which is the much less expensive than the Cintiq lines, but it has a screen. But it has a screen. Yeah, that's why, when I draw on this, I can see what I'm drawing. Yeah, you know in that area, and I don't.

There's no other way to do it. I mean to me. I mean it's like anybody who's doing a lot of work, you know, and I started using some version of a tablet 30 years ago and so when we moved to as soon as you move to a screen it's hard to go.

0:20:54 - Leo Laporte
I have to go back, I want to hire you to build a home studio for me. Is that? How proprietary is that combination? I build home studios for people, oh, ok, that's what I can Proprietary? Is that combination? No, I build home studios for people. Oh okay, can you build in a Wacom with a with a illustrator kind of a thing for me. I sure can.

0:21:11 - Andy Ihnatko
Oh that'd be so fun, Can I? Can I ask a question?

0:21:14 - Leo Laporte
that. Go ahead. It's such a nice flex. Go ahead, andy.

0:21:21 - Andy Ihnatko
No, I, I just occurred to me that maybe we should.

0:21:22 - Alex Lindsay
Maybe we should pull the panel. Is it Wacom or Wacom? I can tell you with certainty that I asked so at Seagraph last year. I walked up and I said is it Wacom, wacom? And he says it's Wacom, like water. So it's Wacom. And he was like that's the way you say it I don't care.

0:21:37 - Leo Laporte
I'm going to say Wacom from now on, just like I'm going to say G, I don't care, you're a rebel, you're a rebel. I think they released a video or something on the pronunciation, didn't they? It was funny.

0:21:48 - Alex Lindsay
I don't know, Because I think they really wanted people. I had to walk over to Seagraph. I was like there's a booth and I'm going to walk over and I'm going to get this figured out.

0:22:03 - Shelly Brisbin
Wow, because I have to confess, is that the way they pronounce it, and now we know.

0:22:08 - Leo Laporte
Well, they say Wacom, wacom, Wacom. That sounds fancy, wacom, I like.

0:22:14 - Alex Lindsay
Wacom. Yeah, so the and the Wacom one is is. I think what happened was there was a lot of people coming out at two or three hundred dollars that were not Wacom. That that, um, we're putting out these things that were a little less expensive and I think they they. Their starting entry point was at 650, 700 for the cintiqs, and so they they dumbed it down a little bit and for me that's perfect, for, like my telestrator, um, it's a perfect how much is, I don't need all the other tools it's like three or four, three hundred and thirty dollars or 350 or something like that.

0:22:42 - Leo Laporte
Yeah good, good, that could fit into my home studio budget. Yeah. I want to do a bunch of things, though, with the Steam Deck instead of the.

0:22:50 - Alex Lindsay
XM-Many. What I do is that for mine, I have the Excel Stream Deck next to the it's. Actually, I put a piece of metal behind the Wacom tablet so that it's attached to it, yeah, and so what I can do is I go like this but I just hit a button and I got green and I can make it.

0:23:07 - Leo Laporte
Oh, look at that.

0:23:08 - Alex Lindsay
So you use the stream deck with the Wacom? Yeah, so the two of them are next to each other, by the way it's pronounced Strom deck.

0:23:14 - Leo Laporte
I just want you to know it's Strom deck, strom.

0:23:26 - Alex Lindsay
I always wanted to do a um uh, a a cooking thing where you just do all the wrong you know we are going to now make an office.

0:23:30 - Leo Laporte
A bakadu, a bakadu salad, everybody. How do you like? Whack-a-mole?

0:23:35 - Shelly Brisbin
there's the big one that's got a lot of buttons.

0:23:38 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, there's a bigger one than that. Oh, there's one with knobs right the only.

The next step up from that is to get the app for your, uh, for your, uh, your ipad, and then you just have a dedicated ipad. Dedicated, but, but I have, yeah, that biggest. The only. The next step up from that is to get the app for your, for your, your iPad, and then you have a dedicated iPad, but I have, yeah, that biggest. That big one is what I use for for that. And then I have a little one, this tiny little one. This is what I run my presentations with, it's six buttons.

0:23:56 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, they give me this, so I won't screw up with too many buttons. Leo, we're going to give you six buttons, but we're only going to turn on four, so be careful. We didn't want to give you too much power.

0:24:09 - Shelly Brisbin
I love my very tiny stream deck because I don't have to remember what 37 buttons do. Yeah, exactly, it's cute. Actually, I'll put it in my bag Sometimes when I'm working at home, I'm so used to having it. I use a lot of stream deck buttons for Adobe Audition stuff, and then when I go to the office to work I don't have my stream deck and my hand is just flopping around in the air. I don't know what to do with it. So I just pack it in my bag now so that I look less ridiculous when I'm at the office.

0:24:32 - Leo Laporte
Beware the dangers of stream deck hand Some people. By the way, this is a product from El Gato, because we're talking about like, oh, everybody knows this, but it is a really great product from Elgato, which is now owned by Crucial the memory folks. But they have done a good job, I think, with Elgato keeping them.

0:24:50 - Andy Ihnatko
And it's such a simple thing, just a screen that's external, that's just used for buttons, and that kind of reminds me of the one feature of iPads that I've always really, really wanted, and I thought that I thought it was such a natural that if Apple were to create, like some sort of set of APIs for if I have a, if I have a, an iPad or I barely had an iPad mini connected to my desktop I want to be able to use it as a controller, as a, as a button input, so that and allow, like Adobe, to sense the presence of it and say oh well, I see you've got an iPad docked to your desk. Would you like me to use that as a control deck so that you can have scrubbers, you can have color pickers on it, you can basically mix colors with your fingers. Or if I'm using streaming apps here is now my anytime. I want that incredibly funny fart noise. Just here's the button for the fart noise. Here's the button to switch cameras.

0:25:42 - Shelly Brisbin
You could a morning dj with that in the early in my early days of podcasting, there were some soundbite apps out there. In fact you could have several boards of apps, so I guess you could have your silly morning zoo fart noises and then you could have your your npr sounds on the other board and all you have to swipe from one to the other and then you switch. And that was. I will use that on an old ipad and it was a lot of fun actually.

0:26:04 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, farago on the Mac will do that, farago.

0:26:09 - Shelly Brisbin
Yeah, Farago, Farago, Farago right from Rugamiva.

0:26:11 - Leo Laporte
It's pronounced Farago.

0:26:13 - Shelly Brisbin
Sorry, I couldn't help it yeah no absolutely.

0:26:16 - Andy Ihnatko
But Apple dabbled with a touch bar which was kind of slapping at this kind of question no-transcript.

0:26:46 - Leo Laporte
But my go-to day in, day out is the Mini. That's the one I use many, many times a day, compared to the iPad Pro, which I rarely use, you know, once in a while. So I'd be much, boy, you know, if they make an OLED iPad Mini. Now they're talking.

0:26:59 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, I still haven't really gotten into using the heavy ones. I mean, I have two pros right here that I use as controllers for other things and everything else and I um, but I I feel like I could. The size is nice, how powerful they are is not important to what I do. You know, like I'm using them to control mimo live and and or mimo live and and to and to control. You know my ATEMs and stuff like that. But I'm not, you know, I have a day-to-day basis, but I do grab them and use them for other things, like I, when I go into the field, I kind of grab the two of them, throw my backpack with my, yeah, I, I have an iPad mini.

0:27:31 - Andy Ihnatko
That's, it's uh, I think it's like a third generation. It is old as hell. I'm not even sure it takes the the latest operating system, but it is my go-to for I when I'm going to be out of the office for the entire afternoon. But I need to have something nearby in case there's a breaking story or there's someone an editor or a producer calls and says, hey, can you have something for me in the next two hours? I need to get some work done. And or I just want, like, a really great rich reading experience or rich video experience or gaming experience.

There's a, there's even a new I don't, I can't, I think it's razer has a new uh game controller, one of those kinds that's like two halves of really, really good rumble controller that are separated by a slider that you can put a phone in between, and this one is compatible with the ipad mini, all these sort of things where I'd even though I usually have reason to take my 12.9 ish with me the ability to simply have, uh, have a, an iPad mini in my bag, plus like a, a compact Bluetooth keyboard, and not know it's in there, even when I'm when I'm walking around New York for the entire day.

It's this thing where I can have the meeting, file my story or file my notes or do my live stream or whatever, and then for the rest of the day I'm not. I'm not like checking a bag with uh at the Met with this big, big hunkly sort of a piece of thing about it. It's just a perfect thing for what I want. And I mean, you know that I'm a I'm a skinflint when it comes to like spending my own money again hello, a freelance journalist in a rapidly collapsing market. But I would have money for, like an updated iPad mini, because it really does fill one of those little nooks and crannies that nothing else can fill.

0:29:07 - Leo Laporte
We're due to the sixth generation. The latest iPad mini came out September 2021, three years ago.

0:29:13 - Shelly Brisbin
I was going to say it's really a shame that they don't update them more often, because I have had iPad minis in the past and they've just gotten old. I use them for reading and also I think nowadays I'd probably use it more as a teleprompter. I've been using the big iPad as a teleprompter, but there are certain times when you're in a tight space and you just need something to hold up with your script on it, and I think I could do that with an iPad mini. But I'm kind of tired of buying them and then they get old and I either can't use them anymore or don't want to, for whatever reason. So I don't know if I, if, if Apple would do what they will never do for me, which is, you know, say, every couple of years we'll have a new one, then I'd feel a little better.

0:29:46 - Alex Lindsay
I think the hard part is again it's what do you I mean assuming they stay in good condition, I guess other than the battery slowly winding out I have iPads that I can they stay in cycle and other than I have to keep some of them plugged in all the time because the battery is worthless. The rest of them are. I mean, they just kind of are still being used and so that's true I mean I don't update like I update my phone every.

I update my phone almost every cycle because of the camera, like you know, and so that I all I'm doing is following the camera and then the iPads. I go well, I get around to it Usually every other year. Every third year I get a new iPad because it just isn't, I just don't know what I would do with it. That really that I really need that for.

0:30:44 - Shelly Brisbin
I mean, I think that's true and I I say my in many got old. I think I must have had a second generation or something. So it was really old, it wasn't, it wasn't viable. But but I think because I have other ipads, it wasn't urgent to me. I kind of miss it, like, oh, miss my little friend, the ipad mini. But since I have a, what do I have an eighth generation ipad over here, or ninth, I think it's ninth, and and then I have an old iPad pro that I hope to replace with an iPad air. So at that point you're like well, can I justify spending a few hundred dollars on a mini, even if it would be really great to tote around, cause I can fit a mini in my purse and that would be really nice to have that one device. Well, that device and my phone 100%.

0:31:19 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, like, like I said, I, I I carry a laptop bag, sort of thing.

And the thing is, even with an iPad mini excuse me, even with a full-size iPad in it, I'm always very aware that it's there, if only for the fact that if I try to put, like, my camera in there and a couple other things, it makes it kind of difficult to wiggle out the 12.9-inch iPad.

But again, the ability to simply say I'm going to take it, not because I have any intention of using this, but because I might have a use for it later on, even if it's just I want to dump all the pictures I took on my camera and take a look at them and triage them during my one hour long commuter rail ride on the way home. The ability to take it with you and not know it's there, but it's there whenever you have it, because I don't think I can't think of another computer, probably even the 12.9 inch iPad Pro included. That fits that bill so well where I don't know if I'm going to need a computer, but I would like to have one in case I need one. I want to be something more useful than $100, like Kindle Fire or my phone, but this is the perfect solution for me.

0:32:19 - Shelly Brisbin
And the mini. I can even type on the virtual keyboard. I would never try to do that on a bigger iPad and I could certainly get a keyboard case with a mini, but I probably wouldn't in order to keep the weight down even further. But because it's so small, it's easy enough. If I have to type, I might, might or might not be filing stories probably not but I could certainly write emails and texts and that sort of thing.

0:32:38 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, like you and I, you and I are like in the same sort of position where, like, a lot of our job is to be ford prefect as much as possible. Like we. Just we just have a satchel, it has our towel, it's a net signaling device and it has our, our book in it, and so long as we have that with us, we're we can work, we can get by.

0:32:56 - Leo Laporte
Yeah as did somebody say something or no? Okay, uh, let's take a little break. I want to talk about what somebody has called fine woven gate. I think that was you, andy, that was me. I like a good rhubarb. I like a good rhubarb, all that. But first I want to talk a little bit about something I really love and use all the time and I think people have forgotten about maybe I don't know. Our show today, brought to you by Yahoo Finance.

You know, one of the things we do a lot on the show is talk about stock prices or what's going on in the financial market, not because we care that much about that stuff, but because it's useful to figure out what's going on with Apple, for instance. When you're talking about Apple and I have to say for years now it must be 15 years when I need to look at that kind of thing, I go to Yahoo Finance. This is my favorite place to go to find out what's going on with any company. By the way, I'm on Yahoo Finance right now. A little tip for you we're on just kind of the front page and you can see all the things open and closed, day range, week, year-long range and all that stuff. Click the advanced chart, though. This is where I really get a lot of value at. When I go to the max range on the advanced chart, I can see how Apple's stock has done for the entire history of the Apple stock, and I can even zoom in and zoom out. No-transcript, apple is just an example. I have to say, one of the books I've been reading lately is a book about automated trading, and again and again it comes up.

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0:37:31 - Andy Ihnatko
Honestly, I the only thing I had no interest in like maintaining like my investments, my retirement stuff, until like the last five or eight years, where now there are tools where, ooh, if I slide this, it goes this way, oh my goodness Graphs going up and hey look, now there are emojis next to that. Isn't that cool? Yeah, there was little graphs going up and hey look, now there are emojis next to them. Yeah, isn't that cool. Yeah, I have a 10-year-old child.

0:37:49 - Leo Laporte
I'm sorry, it's silly, but you know, whenever we talk about stock prices and stuff I don't know if people have noticed that I'm always pulling up Yahoo Finance. It's the one I like to. I think it shows it the best. It's very useful. All right, let's talk about. It's a, a Apple wallet that I purchased, uh, at the same time as I purchased my latest iPhone 15. So it's been in use what? Six months? Something like that September, october, november, december, january, february, march, april, so eight months. Um, it is in terrible shape. In fact, I replaced long ago the fine woven case with a nice leather case sorry cows, and uh and uh. And I'm still using the fine woven wallet used buying magsafe because I haven't found anything quite as good as the apple. But this does not wear well. And now, according to mac rumors, apple has kind of confirmed that by supposedly stopping production. Actually, this comes from apple leaker kotsutami, who says they have stopped production of the fine woven. I'm not surprised.

0:38:55 - Andy Ihnatko
This thing's crappy yeah, and people and that got noticed like almost like the first week it got released, when their social media was full of pictures of hey, here's, here's, here are the fine woven cases on display at the Apple store. Here's what they look like after one or two days of customer handling.

0:39:13 - Leo Laporte
And that wasn't really optimistic. The MagSafe well, this is a $60 thing that I put on a $60 case which I have long thrown out because, yeah, they just don't wear. Well, I respect Apple's decision because they wanted to get rid of leather. Right, it was to phase out leather.

0:39:29 - Andy Ihnatko
It was a good statement to make and also I think that they're very, very aware that there's a huge, huge, wonderful market of iPad cases. They don't have to. It's not like when they make a. It's not like Apple was making, like it sounds as though this was the only case that was going to be available this year for all iPhones. So they can afford to make a change and take a risk like this because they know that everyone's. If they don't like it, people have like 100 different options for them and it was a good experiment. Maybe the knowledge of what happened with this is going to affect how well the direction of new cases, new alternate materials and they have such a good track record with alternate materials and experimenting with the physicality of device. This is, it's not an embarrassing thing. Again, I did, I did call it. I did call it woven gate, because how could you not call it woven gate? And also and also and also, apple still has to pay karmically for antenna gate.

0:40:24 - Leo Laporte
I don't think you're going to receive the karmic debt for that yet. Well, and if Steve Jobs were here, he would say you're rubbing it wrong, and that's really the problem, exactly.

0:40:30 - Shelly Brisbin
Well, and I think it's astonishing that I don't know I've never bought Apple cases, never. I've only had Apple cases when I've had review units or if there's some other reason that a case arrives with a phone. And so to me the idea that you would pay $60 for a case period If it's not a leather case I have bought a $60 case. That was a very nice leather case. Yes, sorry, cows as well, but I don't buy Apple cases and I certainly wouldn't pay $60. I mean, this is a company that also will charge you $50 plus for watch bands. So I am not a fan of accessorizing from Apple. I get that if you're in an Apple store and you're buying a product especially if you're not an enthusiast and you get your Apple phone or you get your watch or whatever that it's logical to say, ok, well, I would like a case, do you have one? And that Apple would certainly like to sell you something with their branding on it. I would rather that they just sort of do silicon cases or something that's simple and straightforward and say if you'd like something nicer? Here are our lovely third party options, and there are many more even than are available in the store. You can have leather. You can have fancy silicon or whatever plastic you might like. You can have a wallet case I mean, I carry a ridiculous wallet case that's third-party, because Apple doesn't make a case that looks the way I want it to.

And my fine woven case, like I actually wrote a piece for Six Colors and I think my headline was it's fine and it was mostly for the joke, but also at the time, like I had had it for about a month and it was not in as terrible a shape as many people were reporting.

But I saw the other pictures too. It seemed like this was inevitable, that it was going to happen. And you know Apple, I guess, in terms of deciding when they were going to let this out, whether they let it out officially or whether the leak just became too big to cover. I guess the question for me always was well, when are they going to change direction and how are they going to do it? Are they going to say fine-woven 2, fine-woven pro, or are they going to go back to leather? I can't imagine that they're going to be able to go back to leather, because they made such a big deal about moving away from leather and it would be more embarrassing for them to say, you know what we're going to do leather cases again than it would for them to either exit, which I don't think they'll do, or just come up with something else that is more more tenable yeah, is it.

0:42:37 - Leo Laporte
Is it insensitive to me to say you're the cow's already dead because you're eating it, so might as well use the skin for something, or is that just really insensitive?

0:42:47 - Andy Ihnatko
I'm sure some people are gonna find it sensitive, but the I mean there there's, there's some. There are a lot of cases where, except my, my opinion, there are a lot of cases where you can say, oh goodness we're, why are we wasting? Why are we wasting animal wise doing this? That's because, like a fur coat is like. There's so many alternatives to.

You're not eating the ferret, you know yeah yeah, but the thing is like leather if you try to make a belt out of something that's not leather, if you try to make a wallet out of something that's not leather, leather is not a disposable thing. A leather wallet is something you hold on to for 10, 15 years.

0:43:19 - Leo Laporte
Well, that's the problem is you don't hold on to the phone, for that long.

0:43:21 - Shelly Brisbin
You know, watches used to be like that.

0:43:25 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah, that's. The problem is you are getting probably a new case every few years at least.

0:43:30 - Shelly Brisbin
And he does have a good point in the sense that leather, when it gets old, becomes worn and comfortable, and I think a lot of people with jackets the damage is the damage is a positive.

0:43:41 - Andy Ihnatko
Yes, it's absorbing oils, but that makes it. That makes it richer. And yes, it gets creased and scratched, but again, that's something that people appreciate.

0:43:48 - Shelly Brisbin
Right, and if you switch cases, it's because your new phone doesn't fit the old case.

0:43:52 - Andy Ihnatko
Right, yeah, there is an update. Kositami put another post on TWiTter I will not say X saying that they're still going to make an Apple. They think that Apple will still have a new season of quote-unquote of fine-woven cases, just like a new color range, will still have a new season of quote unquote of fine woven cases, just like a new color range, but after that that's it. But you know, I mean having having having brought up, uh like, alternatives to fur. That happened, and that happened in great ways because designers embraced fake fur and they stopped. They stopped thinking of it as something less than as a cheap version of something you as something of a luxury item. They started think of it as something that they could do things with it that you can't do with natural fur and avoid all the problems of natural fur.

It would be great if Apple I'm sure that Apple will stick with it. I'm sure Shelly is 100% right they can't go back to leather now and so this they will as hard as they work to figure out how best to get every time they introduce new material into an iPhone. It came after a lot of lessons about metallurgy and manufacturing. I'm sure they're going to come up with a new version of an animal-currency-free case that has leather-like attributes the things that we like about leather to it, but not using leather. It'll be something that no other manufacturer has, because Apple decided to put all the investment into it.

0:45:10 - Leo Laporte
All right, so much. I thought we'd get more time out of that, but okay, so much for fine woven gate.

0:45:18 - Alex Lindsay
I can't. I can't remember the last time I bought an Apple accessory. It's foolish. I think it's really foolish. It's convenient, but I always feel like it's there. I'm not saying that they're not nice, I just feel like they're a little overpriced for something that I would need. And you know, I use Peak Design System. I use the Peak Design System because I've got it all, like I've got all the pieces and they're everywhere, so I just and the nice thing about that is you only buy the base for the phone and everything else continues to work with it.

So I on my car and I've got it. You know, like I've got all these, you know mounts and everything else, and so you just, you just change the phone every time, but that's, that's it, and I I have a hard time getting my head around, like I think that it's convenient for people who don't know better when you're buying them online. They're like oh, look at that, I might as well get that I guess we're a little. We'll say I always get a case we're a little.

0:46:01 - Shelly Brisbin
I really think it's people in the apple store. I think it's somebody who goes in and buys a phone especially if they've switched to iPhone for some reason and they go in and they say okay, what do I need? Well, now you need a charger, you need a cable, you need a phone and you need a case.

0:46:15 - Alex Lindsay
The one thing I will recommend is that Apple does the install for the screen on top of your screen. You know the little screen protector and they'll do it for you if you buy it there and it is so much nicer than you figured it out. They just they have a machine. T-mobile does that too.

0:46:31 - Leo Laporte
We bought a phone for Lisa's father, a new iPhone for Lisa's father and, of course and by the way, I was just going to say that most people buy the case when they buy the phone. So if you're buying it at a T-Mobile store, you're going to buy something from the rack there. If you buy it at the Apple store, you're going to buy something from the rack there. But yes, I agree with you and T-Mobile, I was really surprised they also put the screen protector on with that special. You know they have the machine that Apple has.

0:46:58 - Alex Lindsay
I mean because I know they have like a whole form fitting thing that Apple designed for this thing and it just puts it on and and and I like walking out with it, because I think the one time I didn't do that I scratched it like while I was. I felt like I was like while I was walking out of it.

0:47:12 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, her dad, you know, broke the screen protector the next day can I, can I tell you that every everybody, everybody is at, is a lifelong customer of screen protectors. Because everybody is going to be like me where never, just never. I I spent my entire career as a phone user like never getting around with to never getting around to it, never seeing like scratches on my screen. And then the but. Then the first time, like you take a phone out of your pocket and you see like a divot that wasn't there before, yeah, and you're like, uh, how did I do that? Like guess what, now I'm good. Now, guess what, guess what, andy? This means that every time we buy a new phone, we're buying a screen protector for it, because we need one of those.

0:47:53 - Shelly Brisbin
Yeah, I should maybe do that I don't, I don't.

0:47:58 - Leo Laporte
I hate screen protectors. I load them and I have yet to have a problem. But maybe I just, you know, I cut my fingernails.

0:48:04 - Andy Ihnatko
So there's the question Do you loathe them because they're hard to put on or because when you put them on they look kind of weird? Yeah.

0:48:11 - Leo Laporte
I don't like anything. I like to bareback it. I don't like anything between me and my screen. You're a maverick.

0:48:18 - Andy Ihnatko
Untamed. Is that maverick?

0:48:20 - Leo Laporte
It seems like that would be the norm, but I guess maybe it's judging by this panel judging by this panel, again I'll, it's, I, I've, that's that.

0:48:32 - Andy Ihnatko
That that incident of again I did, I did not even I did not do anything differently than I've done for the past five years with my phones. I have not. I did not have an accident or anything like that. I just picked on my pocket once I noticed that there was this big scratch I think, modern screens are better than they were.

Oh yeah, no, absolutely, and that was that was my thinking too, because this is the Pixel 6 Pro. It's only actually it's three years old, so maybe there's better screen technology. But the reasons why that got me to realize that, the reasons why I was I did not put a screen protector on, was because the times that I tried them out I'd gotten something for, like reviewer or loaner. It was so fiddly to put on and I don't think I put it on really extremely well, so there seemed to be something between the surface of the interface and the surface of the actual interface itself.

If I had, if I could go into an Apple store and say, no, I have, we have, we have behind the scenes a really expensive and impressive device that does this all automatically so that you will not even know that there's anything on there. But nonetheless, if you get a scratch in this thing, you do not get a scratch in your new thousand dollar device. I would do that. There's a, there's a. There's a new Google store that just opened in Boston by. As a matter of fact, if they, if they have that kind of a machine, like at a Google store where I can buy my new pixel and get it there. There's no way I'm not leaving the store without the phone and the screen protector.

0:49:49 - Leo Laporte
You know I do use a case. I think everybody needs a case Absolutely.

0:49:54 - Shelly Brisbin
I've never used screen protectors. I don't feel comfortable without a case. It's not even just like the heft of it or whatever, just the phone doesn't feel right in my hand without a case. I'm very persnickety about my cases. I like what I like, but I the idea there are people who somehow it seems like they feel like they're accomplishing something and they're showing off because they don't have a case, so they want to. You just see the color of their phone or whatever it is Like. That's a risk that I'm not willing to take. It's nice.

0:50:21 - Alex Lindsay
I will say that when you don't have a case and it's just in your pocket my older one, I oftentimes will I still use it for other things and as a pocket, as something in your pocket, it is nice to not have a case. I mean, it's from a convenience perspective, but I'm too scared to take it anywhere because it's like I'm going to feel bad pretty quickly here, you know, and every time I drop it I just go oh, I'm really glad I have. Oh, it has. I dropped it, like literally last night, off my night table. It hit the ground, it was a little bang, and then you're like, oh, it's fine.

0:50:50 - Shelly Brisbin
Mine always drops in the bathroom, which I don't recommend. Tile floors and phones are not friendly to each other.

0:50:56 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, exactly, all right, well, we have. I think we have covered this in great detail and we've got the maximum juice we could at a fine Wolfgang Gate.

0:51:05 - Alex Lindsay
You were uncertain and then we came up. We came up with another 10 minutes and I appreciate that we are and now I really want a better case.

0:51:16 - Shelly Brisbin
This is a.

0:51:16 - Leo Laporte
Nomad leather case and it ages. I've had these for years and these age nicely. But the nice thing about this I don't know if the other mag wallets will do this, but Apple knows it's attached right, so it actually tells me it got attached or tells me it's lost right, and it has the kind of find my sort of Do the other guys do that? I guess they probably would. It's just a magnet. I don't know. Yeah, I don't know. Let's take a little break. We come back with more. It's great to have Shelly brisbane here with the texas standard, which is the public radio. Uh, is it weekly newspaper?

0:51:53 - Shelly Brisbin
it is daily daily state daily statewide public radio show. We're on 30 public radio stations. In texas our typical time zone is 10 am central. Some stations shift us a little bit, but that's where we're at when we're on texastandardorg the national daily news show of texas because we're from texas and that's how we have to say stuff I didn't write that you actually have the word texas in the title twice really so plus a picture of the state yeah in case in case, there's ever any doubt. Right, because that's how texas rolls it's funny.

0:52:25 - Leo Laporte
I know I can't imagine california standard, the national daily news show of california. I know it's nobody too many syllables yeah nobody would want that. But there's something about texas, just don't mess with it, that's all right. There's something about it. Have you lived there your whole life?

0:52:41 - Shelly Brisbin
most of it. I spent five years in california having to explain that I was from tex. Oh my God, that was quite something.

0:52:49 - Leo Laporte
I also like the slogan at the bottom no matter where you are, you're on Texas Standard.

0:52:55 - Shelly Brisbin
You are on Texas Standard time. That's how we start the show every day.

0:53:01 - Leo Laporte
Okay, now Shall, we Can I.

0:53:03 - Shelly Brisbin
If I may, yes, andy, the stars at night jumping and bright, oh God, Deep in the heart. You got to go this. There you go. I'm sorry, it's all right, it's all right.

0:53:17 - Andy Ihnatko
I just had to verify that this is what we have. I'm telling you.

0:53:19 - Shelly Brisbin
I'm channeling my time in California right now.

0:53:22 - Leo Laporte
Stacey Higginbotham, who used to be our host on this week in Google, by the way, who was on twit on Sunday? It was, was it? No, it was twig last week. Last Wednesday was great is, of course, uh born in Houston, live for a long time in Austin. She's now in uh in Washington state, but she went to uh I think it's UT, um, where the song for the UT.

0:53:53 - Shelly Brisbin
The Eyes of Texas are Upon you. Sounds a little bit like I've been working on the railroad. Sounds exactly like that, not a little bit?

0:53:56 - Leo Laporte
Exactly. She tells a story of playing, because I guess her husband's also a UT grad. At their wedding playing, the Eyes of Texas are Upon you and people like me puzzled saying why are playing? I've been working on the railroad. At your wedding, that's a, that's not that romantic.

0:54:12 - Shelly Brisbin
There's another song that has the tune of the eyes of Texas. I have no idea. I don't know which one came first, I'm just saying and then, and of course we have our interest state rivalries, because my nieces, my niece and soon my nephew will be going to Texas A&M, so we have to have competition. They're Aggies, indeed. One of them is an electrical engineering major.

0:54:34 - Leo Laporte
Good place to go for an Aggie.

0:54:36 - Shelly Brisbin
He'll be graduating with a degree and hopefully get into circuit design after that, hooray.

0:54:42 - Leo Laporte
You must be very proud.

0:54:43 - Shelly Brisbin
That's awesome. I'm extremely proud. I put her in a radio story the other day and I got to say I was proud of her on the air, which was fun.

0:54:50 - Leo Laporte
Aunties are the best I have to say. We try.

0:54:53 - Shelly Brisbin
I threatened my sister that I was going to be the aunt that was going to get her kids in trouble, and I don't know that I've lived up to it. I've tried.

0:55:00 - Leo Laporte
My daughter had a one-woman show in New York City on Saturday and the only person that was invited not her mother, not her father, not her brother, just her aunt. Her aunt could come.

0:55:12 - Shelly Brisbin
The rest of us had to stay home I've taught my niece how to make cocktails already, so that's kind of trouble.

0:55:18 - Leo Laporte
There's something about aunties yeah, yeah, yep.

0:55:21 - Andy Ihnatko
It's part of the responsibility of of an uncle or, but especially, an aunt, to be the person that a kid's parents don't want you to, don't want them to talk to you, because aunt will lead them to do two decisions that will make them very, very happy in life, but which the parent does not approve of.

0:55:36 - Shelly Brisbin
I try, I try, yeah, yeah.

0:55:39 - Leo Laporte
Let's take a little tiny break and when we come back, the eyes of Texas and all the world will be upon us as MacBreak Weekly continues our show today brought to you by ZocDoc. I swear we all know that there are things in life you have to compromise on. Maybe you're you know, you got an apartment, it's in your budget, but the upstairs neighbor is a drummer when it comes to health. No, no, no, don't, please don't compromise. And I think lately maybe we all are a little bit. That's why you got to check out ZocDoc Z-O-C-D-O-C, where you can find and book doctors who will make you feel comfortable, listen to you and prioritize your health. Man, if there's any area in this country where we ought to have free market, really, and competition ruling, it's here, because there are great doctors out there, but you know they don't advertise. How do you find them? ZocDoc, that's how. It's a free app and it's a website you can use either, where you can search and compare highly rated in-network doctors near you and instantly book appointments with them online. Now there's the search bar. If you're watching the video, you can search by location, so you can say I want it within five miles of me, 20, 50, whatever Availability like. Can I book them tomorrow? Are they taking new patients? The insurance they use? You really can narrow it down even to the discipline. It's not just doctors, it's dentists, chiropractors, and you can get you know orthopedists or gerontologists. I actually used it to find gerontologists for my mom. You can search and really narrow it down. But then there's one more thing that makes ZocDoc sing. That really is great. Every single doc has verified reviews from actual, real patients. That makes all the difference in the world, because every doctor has a different style. Every person, every patient maybe, wants a style that fits your needs, whether you like to get every detail explained to you or you just want to just give me the facts, jack, just tell me what to do. You can choose that based on these great real reviews. And, by the way, the typical wait time to see a doctor book on ZocDoc is between 24 and 72 hours. So if you're not feeling well right now, right now, go to ZocDoccom. Slash Mac, break. If you've been putting up with something. Oh, my hip hurts, my back hurts something. Oh, my hip hurts, my back hurts. Why are my eyes changing color? Go to ZocDoc. I don't know, I made that one up ZocDoccom slash MacBreak and download the ZocDoc app for free. Then you can find and book a top rated doctor. Today I've used it and it's great. Z-o-c-d-o-c.com/macbreak. zocdoc.com/macbreak. zocdoc.com/macbreak. We thank them so much for supporting MacBreak Weekly.

All right, let's see here 18 gigawatts of clean energy. You know, actually work. I am very kind of proud of the state of California. It wasn't widely reported, but a couple of weeks ago we spent two entire weeks on renewable power not generated power solar, wind and water. Apple's doing a lot to help that. They can now generate 18 gigawatts of clean energy and they want to be replenishing fresh water it uses 100% by 2030. This is all. In their Earth Day PR release they made a pledge to be carbon neutral by 2030, so that's only six years away. And that's covering not just manufacture but supply chain, office power, the power even used to recharge your phone and laptop. The update was published Wednesday ahead of Earth Day, and they now say that Apple and suppliers now use more than 18 gigawatts of clean energy. That's up from the year before, which was 13.7, and triple the clean energy use of 2020. So I know it's a little bit of a puff piece, but I think it's still important to share it.

0:59:59 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, also in context of all the other stuff that God, particularly if you're a journalist and you just get nothing but bombarded with these press releases of these just garbage oh, it's Earth Day and so we're creating a whole new line of packaging for our new fruit bars and it's like, oh God, let's all give the planet Earth a great big hug by encouraging our customers to buy more stuff they don't need at a 10% discount. But Apple does a lot of self-promotion here, but they've got a lot of stuff to promote. They do a lot of really great work. They're way ahead of the game in terms of companies its size trying to go from end to end. It's one thing to say that we're going to work our data centers on renewable energy. We're going to basically reduce our carbon footprint there, but also go as far as we're going to work our data centers on renewable energy. We're going to basically reduce our carbon footprint there, but also go as far as we're going to manufacture as many of our products from recycled materials as possible.

They also, around the same time, released their annual environmental progress report that covers fiscal 2023. The highlights include, like the MacBook Air, which they're saying, the first Apple product made with 50% recycled content, reduced overall emissions by more than 55%. And then you scroll in and they will actually give you numbers so that if you want to see exactly how all these things were achieved and how well they're going, they're also willing to say we did make promises to get things done by 2030. Here's the progress we're making. Nope, we haven't made that yet. Nope, we haven't made that yet. Nope, we haven't done that yet, but we're working on it. At least they're again, not just simply issuing a press release saying yes, we're way on track, let's give Mother Earth a good, great big hug. They are saying you can try to follow us and try to see exactly how well we're going.

1:01:46 - Leo Laporte
You can even look product by product, which I think is really great. That is an amazing number. Fifty-five percent, or 50 percent, of the MacBook Air 15-inch is recycled. It's mind-boggling really.

1:02:01 - Andy Ihnatko
And think about how early in the design process that has to be a factor, all the different factors that go in, all the different voices that come in the designer of a new product. For at the very, very start of the conversation there is somebody who's keeping an eye on the environmental impact, or where are the opportunities and the design of this that we can take advantage of to get that number higher and higher and higher? That, to me, is very, very impressive. I'm very cynical about this sort of stuff and I'm very impressed with this.

1:02:27 - Shelly Brisbin
I'm cynical too and frankly I appreciate the more numbers we get and the more breaking out by products and by initiative, because I know initially it was just we're doing great things and we had stuff like the mother nature video at the WWDC years ago that everybody made fun of.

Right, and I think Apple still can be seen to do that, but I also think the more specific numbers we get I mean, I'm not able to audit independently, and others aren't able to audit independently, so we, to some extent, we do have to take Apple's word for it, but the more numbers we get, the better off we are. I will remind you, though, that when Fine Woven came out, that was one of the contributors to making the apples particular apple watch models, uh, more sustainable. I can't remember if they were so supposed to be completely carbon neutral.

1:03:12 - Leo Laporte
There was a, there was some fine print in there, I can't remember the exact wording yeah, they says right here in the report a luxurious textile that's lighter on the planet, luxurious not so much right so.

1:03:23 - Shelly Brisbin
So I guess if they're going to replace fine woman or woven or move on from it, they're going to have to figure out whether they're going to be able to continue to make that promise or whether they're going to have to adjust it a little bit while they figure out what that new material is. So that's something to watch for.

1:03:37 - Leo Laporte
It says our fine woven textiles. Actually, now I have to take back everything I said Our fine woven textiles made from 68% post-consumer recycled content. So it's probably old water bottles. It has a suede-like feel. Yeah, it gets more suede-like as it goes, with a far smaller carbon footprint than leather. Okay, okay.

1:03:59 - Shelly Brisbin
But they were calculating the overall carbon neutrality of Apple watches, including fine woven bands, in a really narrow way, and so it's going to be interesting to see, like I say, whether they have to pull back on a promise or whether they're able to pivot quickly and say we have this other material that has a similar carbon footprint, and that seems like that'll be hard.

1:04:21 - Alex Lindsay
And I think one thing to underline is that this is a lot of work. It costs billions of dollars. Like they're not. This isn't like oh, like oh we. It's not really a press release or we really feel bad for the environment.

I mean, to put out this kind of infrastructure is not a trivial process and I don't think that it necessarily has any real impact on sales. It probably has. I mean, maybe some, a couple people, but most people are buying it for the product. They're not buying it because apple's doing this, and so what it really shows is a commitment to this that isn't connected necessarily to the bottom line. You know that they are. You know this is something that they care about, they think they should be doing as a company and they're kind of moving it down the path and again, I don't think that there's a bottom line driver. You know for this, and it is one of the arguments when it comes to the environment of large companies existing is because they can make these big changes in a way that smaller companies could never, could never take yeah, but as derecho says in our discord chat, uh, the one of the best ways to be carbon neutral is to allow the repairability of your devices.

1:05:22 - Leo Laporte
Yes, yeah that's true.

1:05:25 - Shelly Brisbin
I mean we have to have some part in it as well. How often do we replace our devices? If our AirPods lose a little battery, do we go ahead and get new ones? How many people replace? How easy does Apple make it to replace your phone every year? So that's a choice you can make and I'm not saying somebody absolutely shouldn't make that choice. But if we're going to have sort of judgy feels about the way Apple behaves in terms of the environment, we've got to think about how we interact with these tech products ourselves.

1:05:52 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, and part of that really is that everybody knows the phrase reduce, reuse, recycle. But what a lot of people don't know is that that advisory is not do. Here are the three things we can do. It's like no. First, most important thing is reduce, reduce, reduce, reuse, make it repair, reuse and after so, the idea that, if you can, if you don't, if you don't have to buy a new phone after every year, after two years, that's in itself makes a big impact across all the things that you buy, and so, yeah, that's kind of anathema to Apple's business strategy. There's also a good like. Bloomberg had a really great report last week, I think also timed for Earth Week. They call it what really happens when you trade in an iPhone at the Apple store.

Yeah, yeah, and it's all about like a kind of a scandal they had with one of their contractors in Canada, a company called Geep Canada. That their company, that they sent all of their like Apple turned. When you turn in a device to Apple for recycling, obviously they don't recycle it themselves, they send it to one of these contractors. And there was a big, big scandal because a lot for two reasons. Number one, that a lot of these devices were just walking. Employees were like, despite Apple being really, really stringent about here are the security measures that you have to take, here are all the investigations we will do as part of your contract A lot of these stuff, these parts were just walking out of there and being resold, but also the knowledge that you have perfectly functional iPhones that were just being shredded just because not and not in contrary to Apple's contract, but because it was just simpler to simply shred them and then recover the materials that can be recycled as opposed to no.

This is a working iPhone nine. Let's see if we can actually refurbish this so it can be resold as a as a used iPhone or taken apart so that the screen, the camera, all these components can be reused and it has lots of really great details, including we've all seen this, but this was more PR stuff they're demonstrating hey look, we've got these robots that could disassemble an iPhone six into its components at a rate of X per X per hour and that's kind of fallen behind because they just can't. They just can't produce these robots, can't tear down a significant number of iPhones. For the numbers, for the numbers that are coming in, it's a big, big challenge and the it points out that I'm sorry.

I'm sorry I got Apple accused. All I'm saying is all I'm saying is that there is a it was, it was good, because it also kind of points out that Apple decided not to pursue the lawsuit against. They canceled the contract, of course, but they did not pursue the lawsuit. They filed the suit, but it didn't go anywhere. Possibly Bloomberg is conjecturing because they didn't want a lawsuit to reveal. Here is exactly what we're doing for recycling, which might point out, here is what we could be doing for recycling but we are not doing in 2020.

1:08:48 - Leo Laporte
Apple sued geek in ontario, canada, for 31 million canadian dollars for breach of contract. They accused them of failing to recycle nearly a hundred thousand items, uh, but, as bloomberg points out, nothing happened for four years. Today, today, the case remains a mystery. No new motions have been filed and, without further actions, geep and Apple's lawsuits could be automatically dismissed as soon as August and January. Geep countersued respectively. Why would Apple expose some of the inner workings of its recycling program in a suit, only to let the matter end there? Maybe they didn't want too much to be revealed, for instance, uh, the fact that they're shredding perfectly good stuff, including, incidentally, in this story, a box of boxes of t-shirts with the apple logo that were completely usable but had to be shredded.

Um, that seems a little aggressive to me well, that, well.

1:09:46 - Andy Ihnatko
That detail actually just points out exactly how scared these, uh, these companies are of apple and how closely they monitor things. They said, well, they got a box of apple t-shirts. They didn't want to. It was easier to shred the t-shirts rather than wonder if apple was going. Well, that fell under the the purview of things that there's.

1:10:04 - Leo Laporte
They're not supposed to like, tamper with, take home, sell, sell, do anything else with, except at the same time they had a separate area where there were hundreds of Apple watches off camera in a corner of the warehouse floor. Auditors found two bins of intact watches in an off-camera section of the facility. So maybe different managers have different points a few. One manager shredded the t-shirts. The other said you know those watches, let's just put them in that box over there. Maybe we could do something with them later.

1:10:33 - Andy Ihnatko
Um yeah, but I'm sure they learned from this also. There's. There's a great quote from uh one. They quoting it, the the piece quotes, and industry executives saying that here's. They were trying to make an example of keep uh citing China's proverb. One industry exec puts it this way Kill the chicken to scare the monkey.

1:10:53 - Shelly Brisbin
Well, I mean remember that several years ago what is a wonderful proverb?

1:10:57 - Leo Laporte
I don't know what it means, but I'm going to use it from now on? I think so.

1:11:01 - Shelly Brisbin
And several years ago there were scandals to do with whether companies were auditing how their contractors were dealing with everything from child labor to working conditions and obviously that's, you know, more human based and more serious than these recycling issues. But I'm sure that part of what Apple is doing is wanting to be seen to be auditing. If they're going to go to contractors and they're going to make promises about how we're recycling this stuff, they need to be actually doing the audits, and whether that comes just in the form of a literal audit that results in a change in what the company is doing, or a lawsuit that ends the contract and has them go on to something else. You know that's part of the calculation that Apple makes in terms of keeping their own PR. I mean it's not only PR, I mean it's actual practicality, because they are recycling these things Well.

1:11:46 - Leo Laporte
But wait, because that's, I think, why Apple has dropped this and doesn't want to talk about it because the way they're recycling it is not the optimal way. It would be far better to reuse than to chop them up Sure, of course, I think both things can be true.

Bloomberg writes, it may sound eco-friendly to smelt a device's metal so they can reenter the supply chain, but recycling is far from the greenest option. The recovery value of an iPhone is low and with 80% of its carbon footprint emitted during production, the most environmentally sound path is to keep the gadget alive as long as possible, and I think they didn't want people who were, you know, being good citizens bringing their iPhones back to Apple when they got a new one to get recycled. They maybe didn't want them to know what that means is. We're just going to chop it up and recover the metals. Go ahead, I'm sorry, Shelley.

1:12:38 - Shelly Brisbin
No, I'll just say something something different, actually, because what's unfortunate about it is that people who are skeptical of recycling or who don't do it a lot of those sort of and some of it's true and some of it's folk wisdom that people say, well, what I recycle doesn't get recycled anyway. I can throw away my newspapers or my cans or my bottles, and there've been plenty of articles about how that stuff is shipped to China and not recycled or something happens to it that shouldn't happen to it or that they didn't expect. And unfortunately because people believe that they're less likely to go to the trouble. And sometimes there is more trouble involved in recycling your own iPhone, unless you're going directly to the Apple store because you know you're going to get some kind of a rebate, and so I think it's just unfortunate for the idea that whatever happens to my iPhone, I'd like to be able to turn it in, and whether it's reused or whether it's recycled, I'd like to know that it has a life after I'm done with it.

1:13:28 - Leo Laporte
What we generally do of course we can afford to do this is we hand it down. So there's a long chain of relatives, so that the one at the end of the chain is using a four or five-year-old iPhone, and that, to me, is the best way to recycle it. Sure, we do that.

1:13:45 - Andy Ihnatko
You're suddenly making me think that one of the most positive things Apple could do for recycling iPhones would be to make that a service, that you can make an appointment at the Genius Bar and say that, hey, I want to sell this iPhone or I want to give it away to a friend or a co-worker. Put it in the magic box that resets it to absolutely factory zero and leaves me with no concern that at any point, the next person who owns this will be able to access my photos. At no point, if they take photos, will that wind up on my iCloud? Give me like a certification that this has been absolutely zeroed out. So, and also so that when I do sell it for for a few hundred bucks, the person who buys it knows that. Okay, here is a certification code that you can. You can put through Apple's website. Say, yes, this machine, this phone, has been zeroed out so that when it does arrive, you will be able to basically set it up as your brand new iPhone on your device.

1:14:37 - Shelly Brisbin
Well, it's also a convenience service, potentially because I had to get my mom a new phone recently. She had an original SE, oh my goodness, and it was just not cutting it anymore, and so we had a new phone a new old phone for her. But I had to go and set it up. I had to find all of her Apple credentials. I had to wait while all the Apple ID information downloaded. I would have, given what we were doing last weekend, given how much family stuff was going on, I would have paid Apple or somebody to switch those phones for me.

1:15:05 - Leo Laporte
The. This, by the way, a Businessweek piece by Austin Carr, which he deserves a lot of credit for this Also kind of. I hate to say it, but this was always the Liam robot, the Daisy robots these are always suspicious to me. These seem to me more like PR than anything else. Liam's precision automation proved a dead end. Carr writes it could handle just one iPhone model, and not that well. If a device had corroded screws or sticky insides, the robot would glitch. A person familiar with the project estimated Liam could run for about 10 minutes without human intervention. Another person says Apple at times fed the robot still functioning iPhones and for media demos, cherry picked cleaner units so it didn't crash, suggesting Liam was geared more for promotion than scalability.

Then, a few years later, you might remember, Apple introduced Daisy. It took a promising destructive approach. Instead of delicately removing parts, Daisy's robot arms and four stations of machinery ripped off the screens, punched out screws, froze batteries for easier extraction and knocked modules onto conveyor belts. The discrete output led to better recovery rates for elements like cobalt and tungsten. By 2019, when Apple opened the Material Recovery Lab in Texas where Daisy currently resides, the robot could process and disassemble 15 different iPhone models at a rate of up to 200 units an hour. They have recently added a second, Daisy. That's kind of amazing.

1:16:34 - Alex Lindsay
Boom, boom, crunch.

1:16:36 - Andy Ihnatko
I don't show up in this neighborhood ever again. Yeah, the last step is it throws the phone out of a moving car. It's like 20 seconds.

1:16:44 - Alex Lindsay
I mean it's like that's a Still car goes on.

1:16:46 - Leo Laporte
While Apple recycling, veterans and industry experts generally laud the innovation, some are surprised that apple continues to have a machine that's now six years old and capable of processing only 1.2 million iphones a year, which is about what the company sells every 48 hours. Apple envisions third-party recyclers licensing this technology, but they haven't so far. They're doing more like deep, they're just putting it in giant shredders. Um, anyway, I recycling is hard. I think the bottom line is really yeah, it would be great if apple would pay more attention to repairability, make it easier to fix these and not push a new model every year, because that's a problem.

You know, a couple of months ago I read a very sad line in some sort of environmental piece saying you know, every toothbrush, every plastic toothbrush ever made is still around. They don't decompose, they just go in the landfill. And so I actually went and I bought a. I replaced my electric toothbrush with a toothbrush that uses cornstarch heads so they can be recycled and is repairable. It's aluminum and has screws in it, so it can be repaired. And while, you know, I'm not convinced I'm doing anything, good, it's it does seem better to me after having purchased new electric toothbrushes, you know, twice in the last five years that maybe this one will be repairable and last you can send it back to them and they give you a bag to send the heads back to them, where they recycle them.

1:18:22 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, and we could argue pro and con, like what steps like this, specifically are going to do to help anything, but I think that the biggest win is that, so long as you, as individuals, keep thinking that everything that you buy has a cost related to it, there you go. And again, no one should have to defend. Oh God, you think you're going to save the plant with this toothbrush? No, but I can do what I can do. Plant with this toothbrush? No, but I can do what I can do. And if again, every single time I consider a purchase, I'm considering do I really need this? And or is this going? Is this, am I going to get a good long life out of this? And what is going to be done with this stuff after, after it's no longer useful, if that that sort of thing spread out amongst hundreds of millions of people does have an impact.

1:19:04 - Leo Laporte
And, incidentallyally, for anybody who says a cornstarch based electric toothbrush head with bristles derived from castor oil will not work, as long as they work fine places, they're exactly the same all the single-use plastic that we use.

1:19:20 - Alex Lindsay
I mean, that's really like I'm trying to get rid of plastic.

1:19:22 - Leo Laporte
I don't want any class we replaced all of the uh, all the plastic containers with glass. We're trying to get rid of it. It's hard to get rid of the Ziploc bags there aren't a lot, but I bought silicone bags. It's hard to find good replacements for Ziploc bags or garbage bags. There are things, but we always carry them. Now I'm sure you do too, alex. Carry our canvas bags to the grocery store and use those and things like that.

1:19:50 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, but those are the big swings and you know back to work isn't very good for the environment either, Like you, know when we think about Good we're shutting the studio down in the next six months. No, no I'm saying, but like Apple having this big press to go back to work. I'm not talking about yeah, I'm talking about for big corporations. Yeah, I know, you know their back to work is the thing.

1:20:12 - Leo Laporte
Still, every little bit counts. The R15 employees won't be, driving all the way to Petaluma anymore. They will be staying home.

1:20:20 - Shelly Brisbin
Apple also has giant facilities with very bad transit access. I know about both the Austin and the Cupertino facilities and it's never been a priority. They make a big deal about the wonderful architectural design and all the features in those facilities, but nobody that I've from Apple that I've ever heard has talked about or made transit a priority.

1:20:39 - Alex Lindsay
So you know driving, driving that direction with traffic to an area near the the. The dish is a nightmare, yeah, Un.

1:20:46 - Leo Laporte
An area near the dish is a nightmare. Yeah, unhappy Cupertino, no fun. All right, let's take a little break. When we come back, we're going to get back to the things you really care about An AI-powered calculator for your Macintosh Woo. But first a word from Kolide K-O-L-I-D-E. You've heard us talk about Kolide, sure, but first a word from Kolide. K-O-L-I-D-E. You've heard us talk about Kolide. I sure they've been with us for some time now, but maybe you. You just heard that Kolide was acquired by one password. Interesting, now, that's big news.

Both companies, of course, lead the industry in creating security solutions that put users first. Kolide is a device trust solution. It helps companies that use Okta to authenticate users right to ensure that those users' devices are known and secure before they're allowed to access the data, and that's exactly what they're going to continue to do as part of 1Password. I just wanted to reassure you. If you've got Okta and you've been meaning to check out Kolide, now is a great time. It's even better with the help of 1Password. Kolide comes with a library of pre-built device posture checks, so it makes it easy to get started. Then you can write your own custom checks for just about any device you can think of, so you can really make sure that your network is secure. Plus, you can use Kolide on devices without MDM See all those guys with the Linux flags.

Your Linux fleet no problem. Contractor devices no problem. And here is probably most important Every BYOD phone and laptop in your company. Now that Kolide is part of 1Password, it's only going to get better. Check it out. This is a great solution. At K-O-L-I-D-E kolide.com/macbreak, you can watch that great demo we showed you a little bit of on the video to learn more and find out more about what Kolide can do for you, for companies that use Okta, Kolide's awesome K-O-l-i-d-e.com/macbreak. Thank you, Kolide, for supporting us at MacBreak Weekly. It's funny how excited people got about this story that apple is going to finally release a calculator app for the ipad. Now I don't know if james thompson is as excited. He's been offering his p-calc for the ipad for many, many years.

Uh, I don't know if this is going to sherlock him. Ipad os 18 will include a built-in calculator app for all ipad models. Um, this will be unveiled probably at wwc j June 10th, and Mac OS 15 is going to get a revamped calculator app which will integrate with notes, which I think is interesting.

1:23:35 - Alex Lindsay
You know, the real challenge here is is that if you have a, if you have something you that you didn't deliver, the longer you don't deliver it, the bigger the expectations are about what is what took so long to get here, and so my expectations are almost infinite at this point for this calculator.

1:23:54 - Leo Laporte
Well, also the more chance you give for people like James Thompson to come up with a good calculator.

1:24:00 - Shelly Brisbin
And get name checked whenever it comes up.

1:24:02 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's James. We love James, we do.

1:24:07 - Andy Ihnatko
And let's just acknowledge that PCalc isn't just. Oh well gosh. There's no calculator for this device, so someone made up. No, pcalc is part of the culture of Macs and iPads and iPhones because he has this devious.

He is exactly the poster person, the poster developer for Apple development, where you'll take something as simple as a calculator, but this brilliantly weird person is going to come up and do this simple thing at a supreme level of creativity and execution that you did not think was possible for something so basic and functional for something so basic and functional. So I hope that if Apple does move forward with this and there's screenshots to kind of demonstrate the rumor behind it, I hope it's like. By the way, james, for no reason we're going to be running you a huge, huge check of thanks because we feel as though nobody would even be interested in calculators on any of our products had you not been the torchbearer for addition, multiplication, subtraction and long division.

1:25:12 - Shelly Brisbin
And if they don't do that, everybody go and buy Dice by PU Calculus James also makes.

1:25:17 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, I mean, I think that anytime you're building something around an Apple product, you know that. You know it's a little bit of a good job. Wesley, I might kill you tomorrow. You know like it's. You know like there's, because, like when we had DV Matt DV Matt was the one of the products that we developed and it was for Final Cut and it took advantage of the fact that Final Cut's keyer was horrible.

So so and this is before the new Final Cut 10 and you know, and you know it was one of those things that it's not a, it's not a huge product, it's not the kind of product you retire on, but it did, it did generate about. You know, I guess I can say this is generally about $30,000 a month, which is just like just people downloading it and doing it. Just for years, like you know, for eight years it was just $30,000 a month came into the account. We didn't do anything, we didn't have any support, we didn't, you know.

But when Final Cut 10 came out, I looked at it and finally I opened it up and I opened up the keyer and the keyer was great and I was like, well, that's the end of that. Like you know, like, we need to find another product, and that was we just had to pivot, so it's. You know, I've definitely been on the receiving side of that, you know, and it's, and you, just when we developed it, we thought Apple would get to it much faster than they did, you know like, and so it was just every year we were like well, this is more gravy, you know, rolling in, you know, so it worked out well no-transcript insider has this scoop, as apparently it'd be really interesting to see how many minutes of time they've devoted wwdc to this particular app, because I'm gonna mock them.

1:27:08 - Leo Laporte
I'll be honest, it's a calculator app, right? And if you don't have, if you needed one for ipad or mac os and you didn't have one, well you, you certainly bought one. If not p calc, something else. Uh, this was the day it was released. Yeah, of course. Um, this is project gray parrot uh, which, according to apple insider marco uh zivkovich says, is an unmistakable reference to the african gray parrot, which is a species of parrot widely known for its intelligence and cognitive abilities. We have to ask uh rich uh siegel about this does he?

not have an african gray? I think he does he has? He has two African grays. Wow, I've learned something today. There you go, another classic app developer, right, absolutely Again. Another mad monk, another mad monk. We need the mad monks.

1:28:00 - Shelly Brisbin
Still making great software.

1:28:02 - Leo Laporte
Oh yeah, in fact I opened BBEdit this morning because they have a really great regular expression tool playground and I needed to generate a regular expression.

1:28:12 - Shelly Brisbin
It's a great. I just write random stuff in it. I mean I, I use it. I use it as I use it for everything. It's just always open.

1:28:17 - Leo Laporte
I love it, I love it and I think that it's a shell. You know, mpw style shell. Uh thing is great. I just think that's fantastic. Sell sheets or whatever they call anyway, I've had, I've had.

1:28:28 - Andy Ihnatko
I've had to dive back into JavaScript in a major way over the past week for reasons and like, oh God, why am I having? I used to be kind of better at this than I realized that, oh, you're using the crappy built-in code editor for this web tool. You should actually be doing this in BBEdit, like, oh, that's right, I don't have to type as much or remember what I declared things to be. Yeah, thank you rich yeah, really good.

1:28:49 - Leo Laporte
Editor makes a huge difference in productivity. By the way, scooter x is saying if you don't want to use p calc which you should, there's also calc bot which is 45 dollars and 34. Oh no, that's just the tape. I'm sorry, I thought that's not the price. Uh, you can email your tapes. You could have currency conversion. Uh, ipad support, whoo um, but, but max apple's gonna do this too. Great parrot. Uh apparently has a lot of features. Uh, math notes. Uh, updated calculator. Apple receive a new history tape. You know, people really uh care a lot about their calculator apps, don't they?

1:29:26 - Andy Ihnatko
yeah, I don don't know, I have no inside information, but this feels like the sort of thing where people who work at Apple often build things for their own uses that Apple is not building for them, and sometimes there are these projects that suddenly become so popular amongst the campus that, yeah, guess what, you're no longer a copy editor on the developer site.

1:29:52 - Leo Laporte
You are now the head of the new calculator project that's going to be in iPadOS. I feel like that's something an intern should be writing.

1:29:58 - Andy Ihnatko
Well, a calculator. This is what makes Macs Macs and what makes iPhones iPhones and iPads iPads. It's not just a calculator. There's an infrastructure there so that you can be making calculations and figuring out the money and the math side of something to a project that you could then integrate into something that you're working on in Keynote, something that you're working on in the Notes app.

1:30:22 - Shelly Brisbin
Apply to shortcuts.

1:30:23 - Andy Ihnatko
I mean calculate stuff.

1:30:24 - Shelly Brisbin
Make shortcuts.

1:30:25 - Andy Ihnatko
Right, and the things that things that like it's. It's relevant to me too. I was doing this on my desktop, but now I need to push this onto my phone because I want to have that, that paper tape, I want to have that calculation history there. There's a lot they can do, and so it's it's again. If they all, if all they wanted to do was replicate what you can get for $5 in a drugstore, yeah, that's. That's not even intern stuff. That's like that. That's like your interview is that I we're a half hour late for the interview.

You have a half hour to write a calculator app for I for the iphone, and show me what you can do. That's how basic it is, but they can do. It can be better than that uh, let's see.

1:31:00 - Leo Laporte
Let's talk about apple pulling whatsapp threads, signal and telegram from the app store. They say they were ordered to pull it Beijing's orders and Apple said, hey, we got to obey the law of the land and that's. You know the way it is. They didn't say exactly why, but according to the New York Times and a person briefed on the situation, the government had found content on whatsapp and threads about china's president, who is notoriously sensitive, xi jinping. You'd think if you were the fearless leader of a great republic like china, that you wouldn't worry so much. But they didn't like it. They said it was inflammatory. Don't get that crap happening.

1:31:43 - Andy Ihnatko
The united states yeah, thank god right right, right.

1:31:46 - Shelly Brisbin
No thin-skinned leaders here.

1:31:48 - Leo Laporte
These specifics better than they are the specifics of what was in the content was unclear. The person said I'm gonna guess it had something to do with when you poo, but anyway, uh. An apple spokesman denied that the chinese government had ordered the apps removed because of the content um, they said.

1:32:03 - Andy Ihnatko
They said that, uh, national security issues, but that's pretty much the same thing.

1:32:08 - Leo Laporte
So that's just what they were told we should also point out these apps all have encryption, which, and then encryption yeah, these and these are.

1:32:15 - Shelly Brisbin
These are all like non-chinese companies that run these things, so they could also be part and the tiktok ban is potentially going to happen in the us, so there's a little going on yeah, ironically, china does.

1:32:26 - Leo Laporte
China does ban TikTok in China. I don't think the fact that they ban meta products in China, or Signal or Telegram or whatever, is a reason to ban TikTok in the US. I don't think, tit for tat. No, I don't either.

1:32:41 - Shelly Brisbin
I feel like there's as many things are being banned under this rubric right now. It doesn't seem like it's about a specific thing. I mean, I'm sure they did find some things that made the Chinese leader a little thin skinned, but it seems like this brought a ban was always kind of inevitable If they were going to. If they have an excuse to ban one, they're going to ban all of them.

1:32:59 - Alex Lindsay
Well, and to Shelley's point, this did happen after the TikTok ban was run by the House.

1:33:04 - Shelly Brisbin
So maybe and the Senate's going to act on it this week and so maybe and the Senate's going to act on it this week and Biden said he'd sign it and it's probably going to show through because it's now part of a military appropriation bill, right, so it's a lot harder to get it extracted out.

1:33:14 - Leo Laporte
There's no line item, vita.

1:33:15 - Andy Ihnatko
And the Chinese government is already very much on record as saying that they see this as an attack on a company, on an economic, an economic factor inside the inside China there's. A Chinese company is very, very, very successful. You're trying to undermine the success of a chinese company. Therefore, we have to protect our industry.

1:33:33 - Leo Laporte
So and then there's also, uh, the 15 of bite dance that's owned by an american who is a big trump supporter, who went to the former president and said, hey, donald, let's not ban tiktok. And and, amazingly, president trump said no, let's not ban TikTok. And, amazingly, president Trump said no, let's not ban TikTok. Biden has no such scruples. I don't. You know my I it's. It really makes me mad. My son, got, is basically based his career on TikTok. Got his start in TikTok is, you know, doing really well. Now he's smart enough to have moved to Instagram and YouTube as well. But TikTok is a great platform for people, creatives to get their exposure in the U? S, and so many great artists and talents have come from TikTok and it's a shame. And all that's happening is American companies are saying, oh great, let's make our TikTok clone, even LinkedIn, now let's make our TikTok clone and a bye-bye TikTok, we'll take it from here.

1:34:30 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, I'm, I'm steamed about this because I there there is.

There is an obvious argument to be made that, yes, conceivably, the Chinese government has the power to compel a Chinese company to turn over any information that they are that they asked to do. Yes, that's possible, but I have not seen as much as you've seen all the saber rattling for the proponents of this bill saying that, oh no, this is a national security thing, this is a, this is a. This is this is an entry point for China to do surveillance and to do cyber attacks upon us. Great, but if you're going to pull one of the most important and most most profitable for individuals and the most widely used social media platforms from the United States, you are going to have to come up with more than we think that conceivably, this is possible. You have to really have a moment where you say here's evidence that we have had eyes on that says that this is part of a larger plan that's going to be horrible for United States security, united States safety, united States citizens. Otherwise, you're not going to win this.

1:35:30 - Shelly Brisbin
Well, those who support the ban also like to talk about the harm that TikTok as a platform and that other social media short form social media does, but they're not doing anything to address meta or any of the any companies. So it seems incredibly cynical. And you know, we're not. We're not going to touch meta at all. Ok, I see. So we can move everything to Instagram. We're not going to touch Google at all. We can move everything to YouTube and whatever harms those companies have visited on social media, which have been the subject of a whole lot of Senate hearings and a whole lot of politicians bloviating. Nothing has happened on that front.

1:36:05 - Alex Lindsay
Well, and it's fundamentally a different platform than all these other ones that are out there, so like, for instance, you know Shorts is great, you know YouTube, shorts has got its own place in the market and everything else. But the nature of TikTok, of the collaborative effort of TikTok, where you're copying, you're not copying it and someone's coming after you. In YouTube, you know, you accidentally include some audio that doesn't belong to you and you're going to get a cease and desist or you're going to get some kind of impact. In TikTok, they do it hoping that you're going to do that. They're hoping that you're going to reuse their audio or reuse their video or react to you, and so it's just an entirely different form of entertainment and I think that that's the hard part is that it's not replaceable by these other formats because they're all caught up in an old fashioned way of thinking about copyright. You know, and that's the and and and there, and that's the.

1:36:55 - Leo Laporte
I mean, I remember when you were all excited with Tik TOK and your kids, and a couple of years ago I still use it.

1:37:04 - Alex Lindsay
I don't know what I'm going to do. Find biking horribly stationary, biking horribly boring, so I need something, and I watch TikTok every morning. You see, it is a drug children, don't get hooked it works. It works, though it's like I need my TikTok in the morning.

1:37:19 - Leo Laporte
This is actually from the Financial Times a very interesting piece TikTok fortune of billionaire Republican donor Jeff Yass threatened by Washington. Fortune of billionaire Republican donor Jeff Yass threatened to buy Washington His stake in TikTok. His company Susquehanna International's group stake is $40 billion. That's 15% of ByteDance. It is a significant chunk of Yass's net worth, according to people familiar with the matter in Financial Times. So there is at least one person lobbying really hard right now to keep tiktok from being, uh, shut out of it may west.

1:37:54 - Alex Lindsay
I think it shakes a lot of rat sabers, but I do think that the uh, the legal standing of that, of this law, is pretty shaky yeah, I think, first, amendment protections, yeah and so forth.

1:38:06 - Leo Laporte
I think it's going to be really it's going to be hard. I mean, imagine if the government, the Congress, said oh yeah, you've met, you've got to sell Instagram. Actually, well, they might Right they might.

1:38:15 - Andy Ihnatko
Right, they could no-transcript, that app is gone. And I'm not saying this is the end-all, be-all argument about having multiple app stores. But if there were multiple platforms, if there were multiple app stores, that would become a much, much harder problem for any one government to try to solve, so big that they might not try to jump to this. Well, we'll just push the button and get rid of it sort of solution. So it's a big problem.

1:39:15 - Leo Laporte
Yass is the largest single donor in this election cycle, with $46 million for Republican candidates in this cycle, and he has been very active in lobbying against this ban. I'll be very curious. Rand Paul is one of his. Big, his big. What donies? That's a terrible word. Recipients, recipients how about that? Paul is, of course, against the TikTok ban, as is Trump. Now. I'd be very curious to watch this play out in Congress, because he's putting a lot of money into this election cycle.

All right, one more thing before we cut to the picks of the week Prepare them, though. You have been warned. I've been seeing more and more news about Apple's Vision Pro, and this from Ming-Chi Kuo three hours ago. Apple cuts its 2024 and 2025 Vision Pro shipment forecasts down from 800,000 to 400,000. I'm also seeing people report in the Apple stores that demos have dropped way off and they might sell one or two vision pros a week. Um, look, I'm not going to take a victory lap here, because that would be unseemly, but it, it. I wonder what this means for the vision pro. How committed is Apple to something that is now, all of a sudden, not selling particularly well?

1:40:46 - Andy Ihnatko
I think. I think Apple sets set expectations correctly by not predicting that, hey, you're going to be seeing this on the heads of everybody walking down the street from now on. I, they, they all but said that this is an experimental, like pre-release sort of thing for people of deep pockets and a lot of uh, sense of incentive venture. Um, the report which just came out, like a few hours ago. It was a Medium post saying that Apple's going to be taking a very, very conservative view, that they had changed their rollout for non-US markets. He's also saying that there may be no new Vision Pro model in 2025. A previous expectation of his being that there would be a new model in the second half of 2025 or the fourth quarter of 2025. Be a new model in the second half of 2025 or the fourth quarter 2025. And they also saying that apple expects vision pro shipments to decline year over year, in 2025 as well.

1:41:36 - Leo Laporte
So I I would check to see if I can get a vision pro tomorrow, but I have to go through that whole stupid do the thing with your face and all that just just to find out what the ship date is. It's my guess that while we thought the vision pro would be very hard to get by now, it is not and that you can probably go to an Apple store and get one today.

1:41:55 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, I think it was Mac Rumors. I didn't make a note of it, but I think Mac Rumors had some sort of anecdotal report of having pulled like Apple stores and getting the sense that they're selling maybe one or two a week.

1:42:06 - Leo Laporte
Yeah.

1:42:12 - Andy Ihnatko
Which doesn't sound like a lot, but yeah, yep, but again, that was just the only way you can get that information, just by simply calling up people and trying to get a get a get a sense of it. But even so, yeah, it's pretty clear that that apple's maybe looking forward to the second version of this, the smaller, more compact version, a version that learned a lot of lessons from what people were complaining about, and I'm also a version that learns from what developers are actually writing for this platform so that they can make sure that they're enhancing the work of developers that are interested in making certain kinds of apps and the people who are actually buying those kinds of apps.

1:42:41 - Alex Lindsay
But I bet Alex Lindsay is pretty darn happy about the new dinosaurs in vision pro you know, I think that I am so uh, the, the, uh, you know, I think we should probably give it some time. You know, like, I think that that uh, uh stories of its demise might be a little early. Uh, I think we should wait for a couple months after uh, wwc to see how things roll out. I? Um, I don't think, I think a lot of.

I think Apple still has a very limited release here. Um, I don't know if they're waiting for I mean, I'm sure that they can't wait to put out version two. Um, they probably already know what it is, but I think that there's uh, there's probably still to learn unless you put it out there. You know, and I think that that's the fundamental. They have to get it out there, they have to get a certain number of people using it, they have to figure out how people interact with it and so, yeah, so, anyway, so I think I think that that's going to be. It's going to be really interesting to see what happens at WWC, I think that there's.

1:44:01 - Leo Laporte
You know we, you know there are. Yeah, there's rumors of some great content that's floating around, that that a lot of us are hoping to see somewhere in June, but there's a.

1:44:07 - Alex Lindsay
What is that? That's what's the Apple TV show you love about dinosaurs TV show you love about dinosaurs. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So what they're doing is they're taking a lot of the CG elements from dinosaurs from their prehistoric documentary, because they put out this prehistoric documentary a couple of years ago and then what they're doing is now they have all those CG assets have already been created, so going back and creating 3D experiences of those, and they dropped another one recently.

1:44:27 - Leo Laporte
The second episode of prehistoric planet immersive, but it's only five minutes.

1:44:33 - Alex Lindsay
It's not the whole thing it's no, no, they're, they're all. All of these are just little bits and pieces of getting to see it, and I think that's what's really interesting is the experience of what we found with vr over the last uh, eight years of shooting vr and doing 360. Was it's not really something you want to put the whole show into? What you want to do is create experiences that augment shows, so you can watch a 16 by nine show and then we're going to give you some experiences that make it a little richer, make it a little deeper, and we've done that with 360. We've done that with AR and VR, and so those are.

It's a little harder to tell that whole narrative story in the same way if you are trying to do all of it in 360 or all of it in AR, because there's just things you can't do with the camera. You know, if I start flying you around like there's very soft line in these dinosaur ones and the soft movement, if I start moving you the way that was in the original show, you'll get sick, you know. So so those are all things that we have to kind of take into account as we go through it. But I think that it's a um, it's, it's pretty impressive, you know, like what, what they're doing right now. So I, I, I think that there's um again.

1:45:34 - Leo Laporte
I think that there's a lot that's probably going to happen over this year it just shows how hard it is to do that, because it's taken them since the original vision pro release with the pterosaur beach has taken them. What is that? You know? Four months, five months, to put out this five minute triceratops forest, uh, but it is well. I mean you get on the apple plus.

1:45:53 - Alex Lindsay
The question is, what did it take them that long? Or they just? Are they putting it out at a rate that they want to put it out at? You know, I don't know if they're necessarily. I mean, a lot of the stuff, content that we've seen so far has been shot or produced.

1:46:04 - Leo Laporte
Many, many you know, last year we meant to spread it out by five months. Yeah, that was a plan.

1:46:09 - Alex Lindsay
Well, there's no reason to put it. You can put it all out at one time.

1:46:13 - Leo Laporte
Oh, you can put it out more often than every five months.

1:46:20 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, no, I think that it's yeah. Four months, it's a lot. I will say that it is a lot of work and it lets you see little glimpses of these things. I mean like, for instance, I felt like the MLS sampler that they put out was a little bit of a misfire, right, because they were cutting so fast.

1:46:35 - Leo Laporte
It's hard to do I think is the point.

1:46:37 - Alex Lindsay
Well, you really want to hang on things and let people be there, you know, and that's so I think that. I think that those are, those are learning moments too.

1:46:46 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, and just one note no David Attenborough narration on this. I don't know if Sir David doesn't like Vision Pro or just wasn't available, I don't know. All right, let us. Let us get ready for our picks of the week. Shelley, brisbane, great to have you once again. From Texas, to have you once again, uh, from texas, the, the texas, brisbane.

1:47:13 - Shelly Brisbin
The others are in pennsylvania, apparently, but all the ones I know are from texas uh, andy inaco.

1:47:20 - Leo Laporte
He's from new england and from the left coast. Mr alex lindsey, host. Mr Alex Lindsay, we'll be back with your picks in just a moment. I do want to make one little plug for our club. We had such a great event. We celebrated our 19th anniversary on Sunday with an open studio. About 20, 25 people came by. That was our maximum. We couldn't hold more than that Many. About half of them went on to Lagunitas to join us to celebrate a little bit at the brew pub and that was fun. That was so much fun. I met so many of you. Thank you all Club TWiT members.

I'm very grateful to our Club TWiT members, but one of the things I realized is to a person. They were fascinating, interesting people working for the most part in technology. I guess that's not a surprise. One of them designs or incorporates, used to work at Fitbit, now works at Google putting the Fitbit guts into the Pixel watch. Another works at Meta doing the Meta AI glasses. There were people in security. There were people in finance.

It was a really interesting group and it reminds me that there is a good reason to join Club TWiT beyond, over and above supporting the network and getting access to the shows and the video and ad-free versions of the content. All of those are nice benefits, but really you're joining a club with some pretty fantastic people, people who can answer your questions, people you'll love to talk, to Get in the Discord and join the conversation, and all of this is just seven bucks a month. I invite you to join Club TWiT. We would love to have you in the club. twit.tv/clubtwit. If you have technology questions, it's not just me and Micah and Andy and Alex and Shelly and all of that, it's the members of the club who can help you. And there's a lot of that going on in the Discord as well. twit.tv/clubtwit. Seven bucks a month. And, most importantly, of course, you're making a big difference in our bottom line, letting us continue to do what we want to do.

Lisa had said that that probably will be the last open studio we have. I think that's one of the reasons so many people wanted to come, because one of the big expenses right now is just running this studio and I think in the next six months or so we're probably going to, as I mentioned, send everybody home and work remotely. So we're looking at that. We're going to do Thursday. We're going to do Stacy's Book Club using StreamYard, which is one of the technologies we're looking at for doing stuff from home. So I'll be at home doing Stacy's Book Club on Thursday for you. Club TWiT members. Let us get to the picks of the week. I'm going to because you're our very special guest. Start with Shelly Brisbin.

1:50:06 - Shelly Brisbin
Oh, I was afraid of that.

1:50:08 - Leo Laporte
Well, you can demur if you wish. No.

1:50:10 - Shelly Brisbin
I'll go. I'll go. I have the courage to make this pick because of one Andy Anotko. Because a few weeks ago Andy picked something that I loved and adored. In fact, I slapped him and I told him I was like, oh my God, I can't believe he picked it. And so I, inspired by it, have a different pick. Andy picked the Torchy Blaine movies from the 1930s and I was just shocked and you knew them. You knew them. Of course I did. Do you know me, leo?

1:50:38 - Leo Laporte
I'm so impressed. I mean, I do an old movie podcast. I'm so impressed that you knew Torchy Blaine.

1:50:49 - Shelly Brisbin
However, I am not going to pick old movie related things. I'm going to pick old television related things. Lately my comfort watching has been 1970s detective series, not colombo particularly, but I've been watching quinn martin shows. I've been watching rockford files I've been watching. I love manix, but he's not quinn martin, uh.

Barnaby jones, untouchables, oh yeah, uh uh. Streets of san francisco, the fugitive those are all quinn martin shows and there's something just very stoic and laconic about the way quinn martin introduces shows and he'll go special barnaby jones with special guest stars, and one of the fun things about watching shows from the 60s and 70s is that you get to see the special guest stars when they were just babies and they became whatever great actor. They became later in life or ran their, had their own series or something like that. But they're very structurally simple shows. In the case of barnaby jones you actually know who the killer is beforehand. And then barnaby who's buddy ebson from the barely hillbillies has to go and solve the murder, uh. And Mannix is about car chases and running really fast in a suit, which I enjoy a great deal. So I would just say generally 70s TV shows, but also specifically Quinn Martin productions that include Barnaby Jones and Cannon and the Fugitive and the Streets of San Francisco.

1:52:05 - Leo Laporte
And where would we find these?

1:52:08 - Shelly Brisbin
Well, Barnaby is on Pluto. A lot of them are just spread across the streaming services. You can never predict what where something is. I would actually look at the free services if you can tolerate the ads or if you have a paid subscription to one of the ad supported services. But I found them on Pluto. I found them on TV to be. I've found a lot on Amazon. 12.

1:52:29 - Leo Laporte
O'Clock. High was an early Quinn Martin production.

1:52:33 - Shelly Brisbin
Oh, I am not familiar with that one. Oh, that was a fun.

1:52:35 - Leo Laporte
I used to watch that when I was a kid. Yeah, yeah, yeah, wow, but it's super random where you can find them.

1:52:43 - Shelly Brisbin
I think Hulu probably has some.

1:52:52 - Leo Laporte
I think probably the best thing to do is to go to just watchcom, which is kind of my source for that kind of information, and then look for the show that you're interested in and see where it might be streaming the fbi most.

1:52:58 - Andy Ihnatko
I just say that as a dan august, dan august, right and august as a kid as a kid like who, who is uh, who grew up in a time before cable tv and you just watch whatever was on tv and syndication when you got home from from school, whether it was age appropriate or not. There's something about like some sort of a series on film where the credits include a quinn martin production that's right yeah, where I have no idea who this. I'm a little kid.

1:53:27 - Shelly Brisbin
I have no idea who quinn martin is, but it's like bank michigan or hank sims but his style of introduction is so simple like you can tell by looking at the intros that it's quinn martin even before at the end, because he definitely promotes himself. But the sort of style of this is the deep voice that has the name of the show. And then here are the four special guest stars who will probably go on to be more famous for other things later.

1:53:52 - Andy Ihnatko
Yes, also, if you want to see stars driving, cars that get about six miles to the gallon on leaded gas also a great resource.

1:54:00 - Shelly Brisbin
Yes.

1:54:03 - Leo Laporte
So the legendary Hank Sims, who passed in 2013, was the guy who narrated all of those the FBI, barnaby Jones, canon streets of San Francisco. Uh, that was his style and, by the way, he was so distinctive that when they made the movie police squad, they had to hire Hank Sims to do the the announce for police squad. Good pick, nice. Now you've got. I want to get some popcorn and watch them. Barnaby Jones.

1:54:30 - Shelly Brisbin
Come over. We're going to watch Barnaby Jones tonight on the Apple TV.

1:54:34 - Leo Laporte
I love it. Thank you, Shelly. So, oh, wonderful to have you. I appreciate it. You're coming back.

1:54:39 - Shelly Brisbin
Jason is.

1:54:40 - Leo Laporte
we don't know where he went. He just disappeared on a plane, so he'll be back, I think, next week. I hope. I hope, andy and Ico, your pick of the week.

1:54:49 - Andy Ihnatko
Tonight's episode hey, diddle, diddle the cat and the murder, perfect, perfect.

1:54:57 - Shelly Brisbin
That's exactly what kind of title is that?

1:55:00 - Andy Ihnatko
My pick is a media downloader for YouTube that I found last month and I use a lot. There are a lot of old albums. Old music albums get posted on YouTube. You know that my policy is that you don't want to be Johnny no, want to Pay. You don't download copyrighted content because you don't want to pay for it. However, there's a lot of music, a lot of albums, that are just completely out of print and they're never coming back into print. But someone actually took an LP and actually recorded it and put it onto YouTube and maybe even separate into tracks, and oftentimes I will get like an old comedy album that way. So I've been using a really great tool.

There's a company called Media Human that makes a whole bunch of like free like media conversion tools. One of them is called YouTube to MP3 Converter and it does everything in one stop. You basically just paste in a playlist that represents an album. It will download all of the quote video and quote files, convert them to mp3s and then I then you do have to do a little bit more manipulation to turn it into a really like functional album on itunes or whatever, your plex or whatever, but it take it gets so many steps out of the way and the the, the iron and the ironic thing is that I've discovered YouTube to MP3 converter.

When I had it just a few weeks ago, I had a problem just like this where I downloaded an album. That got downloaded as I guess they uploaded as a mix of like MP3s, ogvorbis and a couple other formats, a couple other formats, and so I just needed okay, I know, I know I've got like I must have three or four different music editing apps that will ingest a music file and let me export as something else. Really, I just want to drag things into a window and say please convert this all to an MP3 and make that happen. And so they do have media. They do have media human audio converter, which does that kind of batch conversion. So if you need batch conversion like if you've got, if you've been ripping all of your stuff as Apple lossless and you want to convert them all to to more industry standard kinds, it will do that. But YouTube to MP3 converter is also free and it will just simply take. It'll just give you the pile of MP3s that you want. So if you go to mediahumancom and look at the collection of stuff, everything's free.

They're actually multi-platform. So the good news is that that made it possible for them to take a Windows what they probably wrote as a Windows app, and release it for Linux and release it for Macintosh. The bad news is that it's not the most like Macintosh style app you've ever seen in the world, but it's a lot better than a lot of open source projects you've seen that are multi-platform app you've ever seen in the world, but it's a lot better than a lot of open source projects you've seen that are multi-platform. So a high recommendation for that sort of stuff Again, particularly because I think it's a damn shame when an album that came and went but even if it came and went without much success, someone worked really really hard on it and somebody 30, 40, 50 years later thinks enough of it that they wanted to. They took the time to put on the LP, put it to a digital file and upload it to YouTube. Those things need to survive and tools like this will help it survive, because now you can actually put it on your phone.

1:57:57 - Leo Laporte
Or download all the episodes of Barnaby Jones and listen to the music and the announcement. Do you have my audio? I don't know. Oh yeah, Act two.

1:58:10 - Shelly Brisbin
That's the open.

1:58:12 - Leo Laporte
You know it.

1:58:15 - Shelly Brisbin
I've heard it a lot lately.

1:58:17 - Andy Ihnatko
So many movie and TV stars from the 40s, 50s and 60s were able to maintain their lifestyle based on being stars. On Booking of Barnaby Jones or when Will?

1:58:26 - Leo Laporte
You See who's the Guest Star that's why you watch Murder.

1:58:28 - Shelly Brisbin
She Wrote that's full of that kind of stuff. Yeah, Lee Merriweather.

1:58:32 - Alex Lindsay
Janice Rule, darlene Carr, victoria Shaw. Special guest star William Shatner. Oh wow, look at that.

1:58:46 - Leo Laporte
To Catch a Dead man. To Catch a Dead man. To catch a dead man, 1973.

1:58:52 - Shelly Brisbin
I bet William Shatner's the killer.

1:58:54 - Leo Laporte
By the way, I didn't realize this, but Hank, yeah, I bet he is. What do you think?

1:58:57 - Andy Ihnatko
He looked a little sweaty Shatner was the killer twice, on Columbo, by the way.

1:59:02 - Leo Laporte
I think I knew that he's shifty, he's shifty and he's, and he's nervous, like he just gives that impression of having something to hide hank azaria, who is the great voice guy, uh, who does a lot of simpson voices, says he actually uh patterned his tv announcer on hank sims. Uh, that's, that's the voice he used.

1:59:20 - Alex Lindsay
Alex lindsey your pick of. By the way, there's a. There's a great interview with azaria, the hank's area, that is, of how he does all of his patterns and how he does the um. I kind of went down this rabbit hole because there was a in the actor's studio there was all of the cast from the simpsons, or not all, but a big chunk of them, were all in one place and so they had, you know every, you know all of them doing their, doing their stuff. But then then I went, I kept on going down that path and he has just this incredible interview, which funny is.

I always thought, like I thought of him as an actor, because I'm a big fan of gross point blank and he's in gross point blank for like a minute, but I, you know, I think of him as like, oh, the guy from gross point blank, the CIA guy, and so when they, when they list all the movies he's in, they, when they list all the movies he's in, they never list that one anyway. So the um, uh, uh, so anyway, but the uh, he just goes through how he patterns every he copies somebody like it's a roommate, right, it's a person, it's these people that he, that he used for that and it's, it's. It's really amazing how many voices he does inside of the simpsons. It's really fun anyway, uh. So, um, I, I realized I looked, I did a search Mac break picks. By the way, mbw picks is very useful because I always go have I said this, you know, like like I'm always in, so if you're always wondering, yeah, MBW picks.

I think Leo recommended this five years ago or something like that. This is reality.

2:00:44 - Leo Laporte
I only recommend it because you told me about it and we played with it because of you, so you get the recommendation really.

2:00:50 - Alex Lindsay
So Reality Composer is Apple's own reality system and when it first was released it was mostly just so that you could see your projects. But what's happened now is that they've really built these great tools and it's just such an Apple approach to photogrammetry of. I'm going to, you know, guide you towards you, turn it on. There's almost nothing, you know, it lets you just kind of throw it together and it builds great models. So what this does is it guides you through capturing, and I was just using it over the weekend to capture something and I was just thinking, oh, this is really great. I don't know if I've talked about this before and I and I use it.

I switch back and forth between when I'm doing an object, I use this program for Reality Composer, and when I'm doing larger objects or I'm just kind of whacking through things, I use Polycam. So those are the two that I kind of go back and forth with on my phone. But the Composer is just a very detailed way to do it and what's interesting is it doesn't upload it anywhere. So when you do those models, it does it all on your phone. That's very it's very Apple-y way to do things. Polycam will upload it and bring it back or you know there's a lot of processing there. But this is a it's all done on your phone and it will walk you through it. You have to get kind of, you have to learn how to dance with it a little bit of getting all the pictures, but it's taking those pictures and it's giving you this little visual guide of how to take pictures of your object and it produces really high quality models.

So, anyway, so that's my, that's it's, and again, and it's free, of course, because it's Apple. Yeah, and remember that you know USDZ, now what it produces, you can text it. So, like, I've done a couple of things. A good example is my daughter was making a she's proposing a bench for her school that they might build. It was like part of their projects and she made it out of cardboard and she made it at one twelfth scale but she cut it in little strips of cardboard and everything else. So I just took, I just took this and I took Apple, I took Composer and I took all these pictures of her, of her little piece of cardboard, and then we brought it into SketchUp and then built a full USD model of the bench.

You know, and and that's the kind of the workflow that you can get into is like, and take something and, you know, grab something from the real world and add things onto it, and then sometimes you're like what? The number one reason I use this app and polycam is actually to print things that will go, that will connect to my. What I was doing, uh, earlier this week, was I have a black magic atem mini extreme. That's the switcher that I use in front of me and I just needed to build something to rise, raise it up, and there's not a good 3d model on the internet, so I just digitized it. You know, like with this, with this app, and then, um, nowadays, my, my son does them, my son does all the modeling, so I, I've, I've, I've, um, so I will hand him the model of here's the, here's the extreme, and he'll, and he'll build a 3d model of of my little stand for me, and and then I'll, I will pay him anyway, so it's a nice way to make money.

Well, it was like he could. He could work at Chick-fil-A down the street, or he could work for me, yeah, building 3D models. It'll make the same amount of money, yeah, so, anyway, so, and and so he's. But the point is, is being able to grab things in the real world and be able to use them either. Again, I we send examples to each other all the time, so we'll take pictures of something and send it and just text it. You know, because the, the iphone will just, you know, open it up, and it'll open it up at scale which is kind of crazy, like if you send someone a usdz file, it'll just open it up in front of them at the size that it was, and they can kind of walk around it and give you feedback and so on, so forth. So, um, it's not just for the vision pro, it's, um, the ar stuff is pretty useful reality composer, build augmented reality.

2:04:30 - Leo Laporte
You're doing photogrammetry and you didn't even know it. Thank you, alex lindsey. What's coming up on the gray matter?

2:04:39 - Alex Lindsay
uh gray matter. Uh, we have uh mark sand, uh sandowall, um, he's a, he's, he is uh, um, we're gonna be, I be, I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's. We're stuck in politics right now because there's so much politics going on, so he'll be, you know, so we'll be talking about that, um in the uh, um in on Friday, um and uh, we're still most of us are still recovering from NAB, so we're just, you know, nab was so the the big thing how did that go by?

the way. Yeah, we hadn't really talked about that yeah, you know, we uh, we found a new format, a new, a new way to do cover events and and I think that I think we were kind of in this mode of trying to search for it, but what we did there is I think we talked about it a little bit during the show we saw your special rig and all that yeah well, we.

so what we did is we were able to have the actual panelists just talking. So imagine you being able to sit here in the office and send somebody out, but you're talking to the folks that are on the ground, and we figured out how to do that really effectively and I thought that it was really powerful. Like I have now I don't know how much I can watch someone with a microphone going back and forth. After that, it was kind it kind of it was kind of a shift in how we looked at how that worked. So for us it was great. There was, you know, obviously, everyone talking about AI. So a lot of folks are talking about AI. A lot of folks are talking. I mean, I think that we just came out of CinemaCon, which is the week before.

Not a lot of positive things about the film industry trajectory at the moment, so, so, so there was a lot of that was kind of hanging over um, a lot of NAB, uh, people just trying to figure out. You know, I think that in the media industry everything's contracting very, very fast, you know, and so it's, and so they're, they're all. I mean. It went from being uh, kind of like oh, we're getting smaller too. Wow, we got really small really fast, and so everyone is, so that's been.

2:06:30 - Leo Laporte
Does that mean we're all going to be watching old Mannix and Barnaby Jones episodes for the permanent?

2:06:34 - Andy Ihnatko
future.

2:06:35 - Leo Laporte
We can only hope. Yeah, I think that could be worse.

2:06:38 - Shelly Brisbin
And so I can make money curating them. For you, I'll have a website and a podcast.

2:06:41 - Andy Ihnatko
So many plaid sport coats. So many plaid sports coats.

2:06:45 - Shelly Brisbin
Yeah, so many old cars.

2:06:47 - Alex Lindsay
The discussion is really that there'll probably be better. There'll probably be better content coming out, just not as much of it. That everyone was overproducing content and you know, with the change in the financial structure over last year, they are going to be much more touchy about, like they're going to be much more picky about what they make and that has, you know, dramatically changed the flow of things. And that little break that they took of not making anything over the last six months of last year, it, it gave them time to think and and I think everyone was in a, they were in this like we got to keep up with the Joneses and suddenly all the Joneses stopped and now no one's turning everything back. Like. Everyone thought everything was going to get turned back on in the spring, but one of the discussions at NAB was people aren't turning things back on, you know, and so they're. You know and they uh and so that, and they don't intend to like when you talk to them, they're not. No one's planning to go back to the level Ironically, netflix had its best year ever was what they noticed was hey, we made a lot of money without making all those productions, you know, because all you and what's really become a conversation is what is the minimum viable product to hang on to subscribers, not like how do we produce everything they ever wanted, but really like you know so there's a lot of.

Isn't that the way of the?

2:08:06 - Leo Laporte
world. What's the least thing we can give our customers and still keep them.

2:08:11 - Alex Lindsay
I think that they're. But the problem is, is the business model for streaming other than for Netflix, apple and Amazon? For everybody else it's got. It's been way too expensive and not generated enough revenue. And so they're, you know, what they're trying to back into is like, how do we actually make a profit with this? Because they just had, they weren't able to get enough subscribers, you know. So, you know, and they I think everyone rushed for the door. Some of them are in big trouble. You know, paramount and NBC and others were just too late, and not there's not a lot of good excuses for being late. They were talking about doing their own apps in 2015. Like this is they just were. You know, they took too long to figure this out and and and so the so there's a lot of it's not so much that they're trying to I mean, they are trying to get more profitable, but they're trying to get to be profitable, like it's not sustainable to keep losing money. So so they, you know. So that's been the big problem.

And again, you have Netflix, which is massive, I mean just so much further ahead of everybody else. And then you have Apple and Amazon that don't really need. You know, they, their business model. They have a kind of a Kaiser associate model, which is that they don't need to make money on what they're selling, right? And then the um, uh, and then they, then you have everybody else that's trying to figure out how to turn this into a business, and that's that's the hard part, and so that was that was definitely a discussion that was floating around at NAB was how people are, how people are going to work that out.

2:09:30 - Leo Laporte
All the NAB coverage at office hours, dot global. You can participate every morning or watch on YouTube. Andy and Akko GBH calling your name. Where's Andy?

2:09:42 - Andy Ihnatko
Yes, Thursday at one 10 in the afternoon, Eastern time. Go to WGBH newsorg to stream it live or watch it later. Listen to it later, not watch it.

2:09:52 - Leo Laporte
And Andy's home on the Narragansett Bay is just a beautiful place. You can see the yacht harbor right below him and it's just gorgeous.

2:10:01 - Andy Ihnatko
And I didn't even let you see the submarine pens because you had to leave and it was kind of raining. Next time we will go out and under.

2:10:09 - Leo Laporte
I will be back stuff. Thank you, andy, it was a lot of fun. Thank you Shelly brisbane, texas standard standard. I almost said observer, texas standard. Thank you, Shelly. Always a pleasure having you on. Thank you for filling in for Jason.

2:10:25 - Shelly Brisbin
We'll have you back thanks for thanks for having me. It was a lot of fun and, uh, now that, now that you know the name of the show, you know we're good do you do, you must do some podcasts too.

Yes, I do a few. Yes, uh, I do in fact a podcast about old movies called lions, towers and shields. So if you want to hear me yell on and on about movies made in the ancient times, lions uh, dead from the incomparable network. So, yeah, Jason and I are always. I am part of that little bunch. And then for Relay, I do a podcast called Parallel, which is about accessibility and technology.

2:10:57 - Leo Laporte
Nice I was not aware of. You know there's so many shows on Incomparable I can't keep up. I did not know about Lions Towers and Shields we are at episode 96.

2:11:09 - Shelly Brisbin
Amazing, we just finished our spring season. We'll do a summer season of international classic films, so episode 100 will not be one of those, but we're going to be doing that pretty soon and it's been a lot of fun to do that show. And someday I'm going to get Andy to come on because I've invited you.

2:11:22 - Leo Laporte
Please have you. That sounds so cool.

2:11:26 - Andy Ihnatko
And I was foolish not to reply.

2:11:28 - Leo Laporte
Andy put on your morning culottes and get on in there. That is one of the best names of a show I've ever heard of, and it's morning with a U, by the way. That's what makes it.

2:11:38 - Shelly Brisbin
That's because there is a person in there who is in morning who is wearing culottes At least I hope they're black Come up with by one of my wonderful panelists, mickey maynard, who has uh always came to funny. Uh, talk about old movies with me love it.

2:11:54 - Leo Laporte
Thank you Shelly, thank you andy, thank you alex, thanks all of you who joined us, and a special thanks once again to our wonderful, brilliant, fascinating club twit members. We, you know that is. That is really the blessing of this whole uh enterprise is that the community that has sprung up around it, and I am so grateful to you all. And if you're not in the club, get in the club. TWiTtv slash club twit. We do MacBreak Weekly Tuesdays, 11 am Pacific, 2 pm Eastern time, 1800 UTC.

The live stream is on YouTube. Whenever we go live with a show, we turn on the stream on YouTube, so you might want to smash the bell, as the kids say, so you get a notification at youtubecom slash twit, and if you're watching live, you can talk live in our discord, and it's kind of fun to have that going on in the background too. I love our our chatters. After the fact, on demand versions of the show are at the website twittv slash MBW. You can also watch a YouTube channel dedicated to the video from MacBreak Weekly. The best thing to do, though, I would say subscribe. You could choose audio or video and and get it automatically the minute it's available. Just pick your favorite podcast client and subscribe to MacBreak Weekly. We'll be very glad you did. Thanks for joining us Now it is my solemn duty to tell you to get back to work because break time is over. Bye-bye.