MacBreak Weekly 920 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
Hey everybody, it's time for MacBreak Weekly. Well, just a few hours ago, Apple announced new iPads, a new Apple Pencil. We've got the panel to talk about it, explain it and delve deep into what the M4 is all about. Is this Apple's way of saying forget the Mac, you need an iPad? I don't know. Doc Rock is here from Ecamm. We've got Andy Ihnatko and Mikah Sargent stuck around after the event, so we've got some talking to do. Coming up next, the brand new iPads are here on MacBreak Weekly.

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This is MacBreak Weekly, episode 920. Recorded Tuesday, may 7th 2024. Breath of lavender. It's time for MacBreak Weekly, the show where we cover the latest news from Apple, and, of course, this morning there was big news, so much so that half the panel has disappeared. Andy, thank you for not leaving me. Andy Ihnatko is here, but he's in the library with a sailing ship model. Andy Ihnatko from GBH in Boston.

0:01:13 - Andy Ihnatko
Hi, andrew yes, thank you. I thought I'd show off the where where your educational tax dollars are going into our library infrastructure, which is part of a healthy community and an informed community.

0:01:24 - Leo Laporte
Actually, my pick of the week has to do with the library, so stay tuned. Excellent. Also with us, Mikah Sargent. He got up early with me early Pacific time anyway, 7 am to watch the Apple event and then host iOS today, so we're really putting him to work today, a three-show day for Mr. Sargent.

0:01:43 - Mikah Sargent
You can go take a nap later. I was up at four this morning and for some reason I could not get back to sleep yeah, I had the same problem I've been up since four I had the same problem.

0:01:52 - Leo Laporte
Maybe we're just so excited, and my eight sleep said well, your heart rate was seven percent higher. What's going on? I was excited because it's, you know know, a holiday geek day for Apple lovers. Doc Rock's here filling in for Alex Lindsay. Hello doctor.

0:02:08 - Doc Rock
Hello, I was going to say Michael, what is this 7-4, man? You know, for us Hawaii people, we got to get up at 4. And I'm the same, though I have that disease. It's called Apple announcement insomnia Every time. I never get to sleep properly the night before.

0:02:24 - Leo Laporte
I don't know why did you get up for the? Uh, I mean, it wasn't. This is the weird thing. It wasn't an event, it was more of a viewing party, right? Yeah, and I got up.

0:02:34 - Doc Rock
I got up and I really thought like maybe it was going to be like two hours for some reason. I was like man, they're going pretty fast and it was about 48 minutes or whatever. So it could have been a TV show, but first time I watched it on Apple TV instead of YouTube, just out of curiosity and it's glorious. And when you open the Apple TV app it was like the giant hero. It looked really good.

0:03:00 - Mikah Sargent
Don't tell the antitrust people.

0:03:04 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, I think it was the first one that really felt like an infomercial. I was almost expecting like a Chiron with an 800 number on it, like it was just like okay, well, if there's. If you're only going to do is post like a highly produced video with sales points, marketing points, okay I'll. I'll definitely like bookmark that for watching later, but it's like it takes the eventness out of it.

0:03:24 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, like bookmark that for watching later, but it's like it takes the eventness out of it. Yeah, I commented on the same thing to Mikah early on. Is that it really felt like an advert, not a uh, an event, and I guess that's what happens. If alex were here, we'd say no, no, this is the way, because in 48 minutes they got everything that was supposed to be 25 minutes. I guess german got that wrong.

0:03:42 - Mikah Sargent
Well it's supposed to be? No, it was rumored to be not necessarily.

0:03:46 - Andy Ihnatko
Well, I know, I I actually, of course, I used our one of our favorite apps, downy, to download, like the, the actual video, and so it's 41 minutes 40 seconds, minus probably the three minutes it took to to launch for the countdown. So, yeah, this was pretty short.

0:04:02 - Doc Rock
This is pretty brisk yeah, and the countdown was very smooth transition. But the one thing that I thought was funny I don't know if you noticed is when tim was doing the talk. Tim had this bounce and he would like every syllable he was doing like a kataoke ball bounce every couple syllables. He would like pop, pop and I was waiting for him to just tim is always a little pressured in his speech.

0:04:28 - Leo Laporte
A little good morning, but he seemed more so. Uh, I don't know why, but he did seem more so there was something going on he was, I noticed.

0:04:36 - Andy Ihnatko
I noticed that too. He was a little bit of. He was a little bit italian in his gestures. Yeah, yeah that's. Maybe that's one of the other reasons why I got the infomercial sort of vibe off of this.

Tim didn't stay very long, he uh he just stayed long enough to say the good news is the vision pro selling exactly as we intended yeah, and all the superlatives that we thought we would miss out on, like all the irrelevant superlatives that we thought we miss out on by not having a live event. So the third, the new the new macbooks are the best-selling notebooks in the entire world. That's nice. We didn't get a walkthrough of like a new architectural maven Apple store flagship store, but it'll do. It'll do.

0:05:17 - Leo Laporte
No mention of the big product that Apple sells half of their revenue, which is the iPhone. But this was really iPad and pencil day. I'm on the Apple store, which was closed. This time they got up right after the event. They wanted to give you a chance to buy and everything we're going to talk about you can order right now for delivery. Well, it was next week. I don't know if they're getting sold out. So there's an iPad Pro in 11 and 13 inches they're not saying 12.9 anymore. There's a new iPad Air in 13 and 11 inches, which looks interestingly a lot like the old iPad Pro. It even has an M2 chip in it. They dropped the price of the 10th generation iPad that's now the base model at $349, which is a great price really, I mean, for an iPad that will do everything these other guys will do, and they're off to the right. It says new, new, new. And the iPad mini, where there was absolutely nothing yeah, that's a bummer.

0:06:15 - Andy Ihnatko
that was the thing I was really looking forward to, and also it's they really seem to have cluttered like the top end. Now I was amazed. I'm sure we'll talk about this later, but it just seemed weird that. Okay, so now you have the iPad Air, which has most of the functionality that would attract someone to the iPad Pro, assuming that they're not made of money. They don't want to necessarily spend top dollar on the top device, but it's no longer the thinnest. The iPad Air is not the thinnest one, it's like the easiest one to hold is still going to be the iPad Pro, and so it bums me out that they missed an opportunity to really differentiate the iPad by bumping up the iPad Mini, which, again, it's such a great device.

0:07:02 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I'm curious what you all thought. My takeaway from this and I guess I'm coming at it from a mac user, a macintosh user is that apple is now doubling down on this notion of what's a pc. This is the post pc computer and it really is looking more and more and priced more and more like a full-fledged laptop. I really feel like people like me who are worried oh, what's going to happen to Mac and Mac OS? I think the alarm bells are going off again. I was lulled to sleep for a while, but I think they're going off again.

0:07:44 - Andy Ihnatko
My take was still that, gee, it's impressive. These are great leaps in performance. They made great hay about what Final Cut could do on an iPad with AI features and selecting things and selecting foreground objects from background objects with just a touch of a button, blah, blah, blah. All I could think of, however, was wow, that's really really impressive. Think of, however, was wow, that's really really impressive. Imagine how impressive an achievement they could have made if, five or 10 years ago, they had not decided that touch screens do not belong on Macs.

This could be a Macintosh. This could be a next evolution of a hybrid desktop tablet, sort of OS, sort of interface. And now I mean, as I so ably demonstrated last week, you can't really sub an iPad for a laptop's work. It's, to this day, the same thing. That is true today as it was the first day. An iPad is great so long as you can really predict exactly what you're going to need it to do and everything works fine. It's the moment when you have to call an audible in the middle on the day and on the, in the moment that it really starts to let you down. So again, kudos to making a really wonderful, really wonderful tablet. I've got an iPad Pro. I love it, but what I would love this iPad Pro to be is just no iPad at all and just a Mac that is that flexible yeah.

0:09:03 - Doc Rock
I think it's coming, I think the emergence is getting closer and strangely, the the Rosetta stone of this, if you will, is the Apple vision pro, because that is the first computer that's not a computer, but it is a computer, and it's it shows that you can put computer as appliance. So I think we're three to four years out, but I believe your wish comes true sooner than you think I'm not wishing for this.

0:09:32 - Leo Laporte
believe me, the Vision Pro is an iPad internally, right? I mean, it's basically the iPad. Yeah, I wonder. You know, I don't think Apple stopped making the Mac, no, but it really feels like they want. This is the computer they want people, even pros, to buy. Um, here's the, just so people know what we're talking about. The comparison on the left is the new 13 inch M4. That's very important. Based iPad pro. This is a M2 based iPad Pro, the last generation, and the new iPad Air also M2.

Price wise, I don't know why they don't have the. Maybe they did they stop selling the iPad Pro sixth generation. They don't have a price for it. Screen now 13 inches instead of 12.9. You can that ultra retina xdr on the new iPad pro, liquid retina xdr on the old iPad pro and liquid retina no dr on the air. You don't get promotion either, but all three are p3, all three are true tone, all three have any reflective coating and they introduced a nano texture display on the one and two terabyte models of the new iPad Pro. Now that's the same nanotexture. I think that's on the monitor, right on the XDR monitor, which is, I think, pretty sensitive.

0:10:58 - Mikah Sargent
Mikah, you stopped me from ordering the nanotexture display Please don't get it Because you said it's dimmer. Nano texture display please don't get it because it's you said it's dimmer. That was the thing that. Uh, I didn't hear people complaining about any sort of um sensitivity or that it would you know chip or something. It was just that by having that on there, you're reducing they.

0:11:17 - Leo Laporte
They felt that the brightness was reduced and, but remember when the xdr is through display came out with a nano texture. They said don't touch it. And they and sold a $19 cup polishing cloth with it. Maybe they've got a more durable.

0:11:31 - Mikah Sargent
Hopefully this is. Yeah, this is a different kind.

0:11:33 - Leo Laporte
I mean don't touch, it, doesn't work for an iPad Exactly, you've got to touch it. It's kind of a problem. Only with the Apple Pencil. The M4 chip is now out. I'm not sure we're going to have to really dive deep into that and we will in a bit. 10-core CPU up to. They didn't talk about the 10-cores, they talked about the 6 and 4. 10-core GPU. 16-core neural engine that's the same 16-core neural engine it looks like in the M2 versions of the iPad. In fact, it's very similar to the M2. So we'll be interested to see Camera wise. They're still going with that 12 megapixel, even though they promoted the idea that you might want to shoot video with your iPad please don't.

0:12:17 - Mikah Sargent
Yes, but you'll notice that they lost a lens. We only have one camera lens on the new iPad Pros, whereas the previous model has both the wide and ultra wide. It was an interesting choice to get rid of a lens, but I think one that suggests, hey, maybe the iPad's not the best place to be taking the photos of the videos.

0:12:35 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, even though they showed it, but they did also release.

0:12:39 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, but they showed it specifically for files. They were really scanning kind of as a Scanning was a thing. Yeah, yes, document scanning or if you need to, but yeah.

0:12:46 - Leo Laporte
They also um, they also released a final cut camera app which is designed for multi-camera shoots using final cut on the iPad. So I think they want you to use your iPhone. It's confusing. They did. Thank God they moved the camera. Always been a problem for me on the iPad Pro, which was the camera was on the left-hand side if you held it in landscape mode. In fact, they even show it here in portrait mode as if oh, of course, that's how you're supposed to hold an iPad. But the new one, they put it on top, like they did with the Air. So that's good. It does have the true depth camera system. It'll move you, move around with you on center stage. Connectors yep, thunderbolt, usb4, just like the previous version. Face id here's one you're going to be interested in, though apple pencil pro is not supported on your old iPad pro yeah, it requires an m2 or an m4,.

0:13:42 - Andy Ihnatko
excuse me, a new Air or a new Pro?

0:13:45 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, because this is 12th generation. I mean 12.9 inch sixth generation iPad is on M2. So it's not the M2. They just declined to support the Pencil Pro on the older iPad Pro. Maybe a little nudge to get you in there.

0:14:03 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, so that means that now they have three pencils they have to keep like. I checked to make sure even the first generation pencil is still on the books, which is, I suppose, is fair, because they want to make sure it's compatible all the way down. But wow, that's. I'm sure that's a non-optimal roadmap that they were trying to avoid.

0:14:21 - Leo Laporte
They have bumped the minimum memory storage, which is a good thing. Frankly, that was a little low at 128, but it's now 256 gigs. Let's do a little, uh little shopping, shall we? So? Uh, Mikah, you're gonna get you, like the uh 11 inch a and black or silver uh, space black gotta love that right up to two terabytes, right Up to two terabytes. Notice though, two terabytes is $1,000 more than the 256 gigabytes. Yeah, wow.

0:14:55 - Mikah Sargent
It's not just storage.

0:14:56 - Leo Laporte
I'm thinking you get a better processor? I don't know. You get something more? I don't know.

0:15:03 - Mikah Sargent
People have not yet uh pulled that apart, but I think that is, you know, in the works of trying to figure out exactly because we have seen in the past that the uh terabyte models have more ram or have other features that the non-terabyte models have.

0:15:20 - Doc Rock
I think that's what it is, my current one is two terabytes and I mainly got it because I just was going to be using it to dump a lot of photo and footage when I'm traveling. I use it to edit and at this point in time, like I would say, one would have been fine. But I always overdo it.

0:15:37 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah.

0:15:38 - Leo Laporte
Because you can't add it right.

0:15:40 - Doc Rock
Yeah, you can't really add it later, but it is super handy being able to take pictures with my cameras or take footage with my camera or the Osmo Pocket 3 now, which is my favorite camera, dump it straight to the iPad, get the chopping and then I'll put stuff on the fly. So it's helpful, but I don't really notice anything other than the space.

0:16:00 - Andy Ihnatko
If you go up. It might sound a little bit weird, given how cheap you can buy a terabyte of storage as a Thunderbolt device, but it's possible. It's likely that it's not just the amount, it's the kind of RAM that they want to put in there. I thought it was. It's still kind of weird that on the iPad Air you can still get the minimum of 128 gigs, which is like really Seriously, 128 gigs which is like really Seriously. But I think that might be equally a reflection of here's how much Apple spends on RAM and here's how much it would affect the really really comfortable buy-in price of the iPad Air if they made the minimum just 256 gigs.

0:16:39 - Mikah Sargent
That reminds me too. You were talking about the nanotexture glass. Speaking of storage size impacting nanotexture glass. Speaking of storage size impacting nanotexture glass is only available on the one terabyte and two terabyte models, that's right. So they? You can't even get that nano on the smaller.

0:16:53 - Doc Rock
And that's probably because they're doing something with the image in order to make it work properly with the new nanotexture, especially with the new sandwich displays, so it might need that extra space in order to do something.

0:17:06 - Leo Laporte
Who knows which displays, so it might need that extra space in order to do something who knows, you're very generous, doc rock.

0:17:09 - Doc Rock
It could also be because they just want you to have to get more, spend more money and I never take that approach because that is the easiest way to ruin a business and this business has not ruined itself for all this time. But everyone always goes through. Oh, they're just doing this to make money. I'll tell you how I run my business. I do things to make money yeah, they're pushing you they're giving you reasons to buy more.

0:17:33 - Leo Laporte
There is also thanks to a james b, who's looking at the tech specs. The one and two terabyte models have, uh, one more performance core. They have twice the RAM 16 gigs. The lower storage units 256 and 512, have three cores and performance cores and eight gigs of RAM. So that's what the bump is you're getting, but it sounds like you really want to at least get a terabyte. If you want the nanotexture or more RAM, I think 16 gigs of RAM seems like a good idea personally.

0:18:06 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, especially with the investment in AI, now that they're really going both shoulders ahead with that. At least on other platforms, we've seen that these models, if you're trying to run them on device and that seems to be what Apple wants to do you really do need as much RAM as possible to get them to work efficiently. And that was after people were already complaining that 8 gigs seemed a little bit chintzy, at least not for an advice that might not have the option of getting more RAM than that or a really, really big price jump for getting more RAM than that. So I mean they did. I think a lot of us were kind of paying close attention to what do they say about artificial intelligence, because they're going to part of the messaging.

Going forward for Apple is going to be yes, but we acknowledge that we live in an AI driven tech world. Believe me, all of our hardware and software and our operating systems are going to reflect that. So we're going to spend, even on a 41 minute or 40 minute presentation. We're going to spend at least three, four or five minutes explaining exactly how powerful the M4 is for, for how, how powerful the neural engine is. I think they actually even said that with a lot, with a lot of fudge factor in it, the, the, the, the iPad pro is the most powerful, has the most powerful onboard AI of any desktop desktop computer, or they're basically saying that, all saying that all the Intel stuff has not come out yet. It is faster than all the stuff that is currently existing. It probably won't be as fast as what's going to happen in six months from now, but at least for now we can say that we have the most powerful AI hardware support in the CPU on any mobile or desktop computer.

0:19:45 - Leo Laporte
If numbers are your thing, you can remember the number 38, 38 tops, which is what they're claiming for their AI engine. You can compare that when Qualcomm stuff comes out, which is any minute now. Yeah, I don't know if Intel is going to even be in the game, but Qualcomm is claiming, of course, to be outperforming the M2s. Nanotexture glass costs you $100 more. Wi-fi, I mean plus cellular rather Cellular costs you $200 more. That's kind of a bump. It used to be $129. It's now $200 more.

0:20:19 - Mikah Sargent
And some people were caught off guard, I guess, by the fact that the cellular models no longer have a physical SIM drawer, it's only eSIM. So if that's a thing that bugs, you be aware of that.

0:20:33 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, and I imagine that will be more of an issue outside the US, but here in the US I think every carrier does eSIM. Now let's see what else. Apple Pencil Pro is $129. Bucks. Apple regular pencil non-pro is 79 dollars. They are not offering the uh, less expensive pencil apple pencil dilettante edition like two weeks ago, because I left one in the airplane.

0:21:03 - Doc Rock
I just bought a new pencil two weeks ago and it's funny now a pencil can be found with find my and I was like oh, oh, we're getting to the pencil tear apart my whole house looking for the thing they packed a lot of, a lot of stuff into that pencil I.

0:21:17 - Leo Laporte
I don't know if they have uwb in there or what, but uh, it's pretty impressive. So let's see here uh magic to add the magic keyboard. Let's see something I would never buy again. By the way, really, you like the uh third party?

0:21:31 - Doc Rock
ones. I know I love my magic keyboard, but here with a traveling, it has happened so many times. When you're set up on the the tray table right and I have, I have a 12.9 inch pro it's bent back like that. Everything is glorious. I'm in my movie and the person in front decides to throw the chair back oh, that's bad slowly, and then it bites the top of that little clippy thing and the iPad either hits the tank or yeah, and I'm like you know what. I'm not even going to bother anymore. I'm just going to get a regular folio and a some portable keyboard and just be happy because, yeah, it's, it's nice to type on. It does make it way heavier too, and so now that my most of my life is in an airplane or an airport, I'm like, yeah, I'm not buying one of those ever again and I actually like it yeah, well, that's gonna be true of any laptop, of course I I do.

0:22:22 - Andy Ihnatko
I do love my magic keyboard. I generally keep it. That's generally where the iPad lives. I find, though, that I think, for the like, for reasons that you were mentioning, I also tend to keep the like, the standard, just like keyboard excuse me, the standard cover like in the bag as well, because if I'm going to be out for like a day, even overnight, it's kind of nice to have that option of being able to actually fold it as flat as I want it to go. The only thing I don't like about the magic keyboard is that it bends only to a certain extent and no further, and oftentimes, that extra like 15, 20 degrees is the difference between perfect comfort, perfect viewing angle, and okay, I guess that'll do, yes exactly, and I, you, I, you know here's a.

0:23:08 - Doc Rock
So this is so crazy, andy, I often forget to take it out, like because it lives there so much that in my brain it's just part of the deal. So oftentimes I'm sitting, I'm holding it uncomfortably, I'm holding the magic keyboard uncomfortably and my brain never says, hey, dummy, just pull it apart. Oh look, you can just carry this, you know. And so, yeah, I agree with you magic keyboard is 300 dollars.

0:23:32 - Leo Laporte
It's cheaper, it was 350. Oh, all right, that's a. That's a blessing. It does have a function row.

0:23:38 - Andy Ihnatko
It's a win key, a win 300 bucks, but that's but that it does. It does make it a challenging proposition, because now again, I love the iPad Pro. You're almost in the arena of a performance-grade Windows notebook with a touchscreen and with a pen that was probably not as good as the pencil but as good as most people are going to want. So it's an interesting proposition to suddenly say once you look, I mean I cheaped out about it, I did get the iPad Pro I wanted. I did not get the keyboard case until like eight to ten months later when the previous generation model was on sale and I found out that you can actually use them in the new models too. So I was able to cheap out. Good, 48-hour breather to figure out what can I buy for $1,600 that might do as good a job as this iPad Pro combination, and can I do even better than that for the same amount or as good for $400 or $500 less?

0:25:00 - Leo Laporte
If you are a Mini fan. By the way, Gurman is saying that there will be a seventh generation mini at some point relatively soon, so we'll see.

0:25:13 - Andy Ihnatko
And a new pencil to go with it, maybe.

0:25:15 - Mikah Sargent
Maybe I like the mini. I've had mini pencils.

0:25:19 - Leo Laporte
I use the mini far more than I use any other iPad. But okay, let's see, have we covered all of the? Oh, I forgot to tell you your price Mikah with a terabyte 1899, it's, it is, it's a laptop, it's a. It's. It's an expensive windows laptop. Uh, and that's the uh, that's the 11 inch model. You put in the 13 inch model, it kind of goes up a little bit more as well $21.99. $21.99. Yeah.

0:25:50 - Doc Rock
I just put it in the chat. I paid $25.99 for my last one.

0:25:54 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, you know I should probably keep track of prices and stuff. This is, I think, the same price. Yes, as the old one was Pretty close, it feels like it's the same roughly the same price, um so, Mikah, I have a question.

0:26:10 - Doc Rock
Sorry, leo, I know you're in boss, but I had to ask a question because you mentioned earlier you guys said that not to get the nano. You think that the regular screen and paper like or something of that nature is better?

0:26:22 - Mikah Sargent
so I the reason why I was suggesting leo not get the nano texture display he knows me because that's why he knows yeah I know, leo, that's what it is and b. The complaint, yeah, the complaints that I've heard, is that you do see a drop in brightness by doing that, and so for some people that's annoying, even if it means that there's less reflect. You know, reflection, um, but I can't speak to the textural differences. Uh, that would be something.

0:26:54 - Doc Rock
See, the thing that got me this morning and again, my eyes were still halfway focusing when they talked about the, the stacked OLEDs. Yeah, this time we're getting OLED. That's a difference. It should be brighter. It's a thousand nits. Stop that Stupid reactions. And then it also has. So you have the double paddle. So that just has me intrigued, and normally I would just be triggering now. But now I think I have to go in and see for myself how bright it is. Because you're right, what's the word we say now, leo, vintage? Uh, brightness is important. Brightness is the difference between being able to see clearly or not, right?

0:27:36 - Leo Laporte
light yeah and I also. Uh, yeah, I had the liquid paper on mine because alex told me to and it gives it a nice texture. With the pencil I took it off because I want the glass. I like the smooth glass. Now, we'll see with the new pencil We'll see. So you like a little texture on your screen, doc.

0:27:58 - Doc Rock
Well, only because you know they show. One of the first things is like people taking actual notes. When it comes to writing, it's glorious. For everything else else, it's irritating and I wish I could just clip it on, like you know, the old grandpa shades. I wish I could just clip on the texture right and then take it back off well, that is the advantage of the screen right now.

0:28:18 - Leo Laporte
The screen cover is you. You can at least remove it if you decide you don't like it when you buy the nano screen.

0:28:22 - Mikah Sargent
You got it, it's yours, yeah I can't remember who it is, but, uh, somebody has figured out how they. The outside is a magnet and so, or something like that, I'll have to send you. I'll find it and I'll tell you the whole way around, the whole perimeter yeah, they basically make the outside the sticky part, but it's not sticky so you can.

0:28:44 - Leo Laporte
So you out and have that, so you could have a magnetic screen and then, yeah, pull it off afterwards, because you remember the old school CRT 3Ms.

0:28:51 - Doc Rock
They were just clip-on right when you wanted the privacy screen or the anti-glare. It was just a little frame.

0:28:58 - Andy Ihnatko
We need more Velcro and a $2,000 tablet. That's it.

0:29:08 - Mikah Sargent
Thank you to. That's it. Thank you, uh to Mikah in the chat. Um, it's from astropad and it's called rock paper pencil. Oh and yeah, it just goes on. The outside is where it connects and then you can just take it off.

0:29:14 - Leo Laporte
It's nano cling, it's not magnets, um well, nano cling is even better than I want to get from that new from saran wrap nano cling. Uh, so it is just a Kling. I don't. That seems like that's I have one you do.

0:29:31 - Mikah Sargent
I haven't installed it, though, so I can't talk about that. It's just been sitting in a box for like a month now, because I bought it. I was like, oh, this is so cool. But yeah, I'll have to try it and let you know.

0:29:42 - Doc Rock
Nano Kling sounds like something that is sponsored by the male trimming products. That's on all the podcasts.

0:29:49 - Mikah Sargent
I was thinking it was sponsored by Charmin.

0:29:52 - Leo Laporte
Oh God, you guys, you mean okay, so it uses static. Basically it's stronger than magnets, according to Astropad. Huh, huh, recording, I'll let you ask. Oh, astropad, huh, huh. And they also have their own rock paper pencil tip, which?

0:30:10 - Mikah Sargent
looks like a ballpoint pen kit. Yeah, yeah, you can get that with the kit if you'd like, but, um, the problem is I have to. This is so stupid, but I have to clean the iPad screen first and I just am lazy so I haven't done it.

0:30:23 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, you want. You want it perfect don't you.

0:30:25 - Doc Rock
Why do we recommend you a bottle of swoosh?

0:30:28 - Mikah Sargent
I have swoosh. I've got all the stuff I need, except for the desire to make it happen. That's the one thing I like.

0:30:33 - Leo Laporte
Isn't it funny how geeks converge on a product. It's just odd, like the Neil I Patel said, the printer. Everybody has, that nobody talks about. Which is what is that?

0:30:45 - Mikah Sargent
it's that, brother brother hl2, something, something, yeah and then go ahead.

0:30:48 - Leo Laporte
You can bring me the swoosh and then apparently we have without. It's like we all, uh, we all our menstrual cycles have, uh, have synchronized it. We all have this same cleaners. Oh wait, but this is not a swoosh, this is whoo. You know he meant meant was. I meant whoosh, oh good what a relief, come on, what a relief.

0:31:09 - Mikah Sargent
I wouldn't want to be. Uh, we were gonna find a new product called swoosh.

0:31:12 - Leo Laporte
Right, I never heard of whoosh, but apparently our team does oh man, it tastes really good with a single malt.

0:31:19 - Doc Rock
I'm joking do not drink your whoosh all

0:31:23 - Leo Laporte
right, let's take a little break where we have lots more to talk about. We'll go to the 11-inch. We'll talk about the new Pro Pencil While you take the break.

0:31:31 - Mikah Sargent
I'll clean my iPad screen and put this nano-cling on it.

0:31:35 - Leo Laporte
Put your whoosh.

0:31:36 - Andy Ihnatko
By all means, that's something you should do spontaneously and in a rush. Yeah, absolutely.

0:31:41 - Leo Laporte
Absolutely, andy Ihnatkos. Here. Jason Snell is somewhere. I think he's getting a briefing. Don't know about alex, though. I think alex just got a job. Uh, we don't know was he at. Uh, was he the office hours earlier?

0:31:54 - Mikah Sargent
I don't know all those toilets, I can't make it.

0:31:57 - Andy Ihnatko
And uh, I was, I didn't want to push it on no, don't push no, no, oh, never push, because that gives us a chance to have Mikah and Doc on.

0:32:05 - Leo Laporte
I'm happy about it. Doc Rock is here, we're very happy to have him. And of course, Mikah Sargent, who joined me this morning early this morning it wasn't early for anybody but us and Doc Rock. It was really early for Doc Rock. Uh, here is. Uh, I justine has already posted her first look at the m4 iPad pro with the nano texture display. She's talking to a zippo lighter. I'm not sure why that is, but anyway let's check them out. Here's the new iPad see if you see snell in there the matte display.

0:32:42 - Mikah Sargent
I'm so excited about this, as you can see there's so that I'm so excited about this, as you can see there's so much so that's interesting.

0:32:52 - Leo Laporte
So, even though it was a viewing party, they did invite some tame journalists to an event somewhere. This might have been before. I wonder if this was yesterday.

0:32:58 - Doc Rock
No, no, it was today. It was today Because they posted pictures.

0:33:06 - Leo Laporte
They were all together. Okay, so good. There's a little event this might be. I think they were doing an event in New York. I bet you this is New York, not Cupertino, but I don't know. I can't wait to see that tandem OLED display. That's going to be interesting. So Mikah and I did both order. You getting yours Wednesday, Mikah, Is that right?

0:33:28 - Mikah Sargent
Yes, it is coming on the 15th as well.

0:33:31 - Leo Laporte
Mikah will have the 11 inch, I will have the 13 inch. We both got the pencil. I got the keyboard. Did you get the keyboard or no?

0:33:39 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, it'll be a full, full deal, the whole package, yeah, the whole kit and caboodle, awesome, awesome.

0:33:49 - Leo Laporte
Uh, we will. So we'll have that a review for you. Uh, probably on the ask the tech guys be the first time we'll be able to do it, but you'll do a full review, of course. I'll do a full-on. Yeah, video as well. Yeah, our show today, brought to you by my email provider. Uh, maybe I should get a discount, shouldn't I? I love Fastmail. I've been actually plugging Fastmail forever. As long as I've used it, which is, I think, now close to 10 years, they are well.

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Man Mark Gurman says we've reached Mac-like differentiation between SKUs Double the RAM, more performance scores when you go to one to two terabytes. That really is a big difference and I think when you add that all up you're getting more. Let's talk about the M4. This was Gurman's big scoop a couple of weeks ago. Nobody believed it. Everybody thought what? The first product with the M4 is going to be an iPad Pro. Well, it happened. We don't know much about the M4 at this point. Apple kind of alluded to the fact that it's on the new tsmc three nanometer node. Uh, which the three? I think that's the 3ne node and in theory would be um an improvement in performance but yeah, they're, they're saying a 2x performance over the, over the previous generation.

0:38:45 - Andy Ihnatko
Uh, a lot of that's kind of with the iPads it's. It's weird, though, because they've always been like overpowered for what they do.

0:38:52 - Leo Laporte
So by the way, it wasn't in fact over the previous generation, it was over two generations ago, which I thought was kind of cheesy of apple yeah, the comparison, you see how that's stuck in your head, though it's twice as fast. It's not twice as fast as the yeah previous I did two previous I did know.

0:39:10 - Andy Ihnatko
I did know that they they wanted us to know was 10 times faster than the original iPad pro. Yeah, like these are meaningless the one, the one with the home button and the thick and the thick bezels. Okay, yeah well.

0:39:22 - Leo Laporte
But the other thing, honestly, to be fair, be fair. I don't. Does anybody I have an M1 iPad Pro. Does anybody feel like that was too slow or didn't perform well enough?

0:39:35 - Andy Ihnatko
I don't think so it's weird because the iPad Pro there are, really there's a thick wall between two kinds of users. There are a handful of users that use it for really intensive productivity stuff, Like I'm talking about video editing and I'm talking about really intense kind of like art creation. And there's the rest of us that are buying this because, again, they wish they had a MacBook that had a tablet-style MacBook or something with a touchscreen or something they could use a pencil for when they're just taking notes and stuff. And, yeah, it's seriously overpowered, for it's always been seriously overpowered for what most people use it for. So, again, it's nice.

We have to remind ourselves and everybody that just because it's an M4, it's not the oh well, that means it's too bad in the M2, isn't it?

It's like no, it's just like the next generation of processors. You can have a slow M4, you can have a super fast M4. The fact that you're going to see an M4 and a desktop later on this year doesn't necessarily mean that they're going to have the same performance, the same capabilities. But it's interesting that they decided to use this not just as a rollout for the M4, but also to start promoting it as like the next generation of Apple Silicon, given that it's really hard to come up with stuff to really show it off, for they did mention things like being in Final Cut and being able to isolate like a dancing figure and put on a new background just by touching one button, and there are other parts in a demo like that. But that's not. A whole lot of people are saying, gee, I really, really wish I could do that kind of pro level editing on an iPad. There are a lot of people that are saying, well, I'm going to spend that much money and get a Windows notebook. They'll do a lot of the same things for it.

0:41:15 - Leo Laporte
They did show, though, at the rock climbing wall, people shooting and then editing video with Final Cut. They have updated Final Cut Pro 2 for this, so they clearly think that that's a market.

0:41:29 - Andy Ihnatko
Well and to be fair, they know who's buying these things and they know that that's why they keep the iPad Airs so vibrant. There are people who want that extra level of performance, that extra push over the cliff, and there are the other people who are just using it to take notes in class, watch videos, play games. There's also a call-out for the gaming capabilities of this thing, with what the M4 and the other capabilities would let you do. So I think that, but they kept that to the iPad Air section of the talk and they kept the iPad Pro for Final Cut.

0:41:58 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, as Geezer Nerd says, I can't wait to see how much faster I can write in Scrivener on my new iPad Pro.

0:42:05 - Doc Rock
Geezer nerd says I can't wait to see how much faster I can write in scrivener on my new iPad. It's. It's funny when, uh, you know, a lot of the conversation around the pro or the not pro is always about productivity and people don't talk about what type of productivity you're doing, right, if you're doing everything in notion or evernote or something of that nature, uh then yeah, maybe it doesn't matter, right? But if your productivity is based around SketchUp or they showed not Blender, they showed ZBrush, some other things like that, those all count, those all count and they do actually tax pretty hard.

If you're a Logic person and you're running pretty heavy Logic action which a lot as an ex-DJ, I would tell you a lot of music people use iPads. What happens? The general tech person in our circle and the general YouTuber also my circle they always talk about it like the way it matches them. People forget about Bechtel, who's doing civil engineering, and their iPads are running really high level tests. Who's doing civil engineering and their iPads are running really high level tests. People forget about all the restaurants, which is why you want 128 gigabyte model, because all they do is use them for retail and they run one app and one app only.

People forget about education, healthcare, occupational therapies all of the things that you use an iPad for other than you just use it to watch Netflix, and I get that and knock yourself out player. But, like, don't be like. Apple doesn't have the knowledge of who they're selling to when they make these devices. And it cracked me up every time because people always have these weird hot takes, and one of the ones was why put the M4 in this first? Wow, what a great test bed where you're less likely to have full-scale meltdown. It's in iPads and collect all the data and then make adjustments and then get ready for it to end up in what would probably be the Air Next or the MacBook Pros that we'll probably see in the middle of June.

0:44:00 - Leo Laporte
Well, that's going to be a challenge for them, because they have Mac, they have M3s to put out. Still. I mean, are you going to? They skipped M3 with this. You think they're just going to skip M3 entirely? For the rest of the line, there won't be an M3 iMac, there won't be an M3 Mini, there won't be an M3 Mac Pro. They'll just go right to four everywhere.

0:44:20 - Doc Rock
Yeah, this studio right here needs a bump, and so I'm assuming you know, it just hit its second birthday. Happy birthday. It'd be hard to sell an M3 Mac studio, wouldn't it? Yeah, so you have to go to M4. Yeah, like now that I know this exists, when they told me, hey, here's a brand new M3 Mac studio, I'll be like what you talking about, willis.

Yeah yeah, you know you're right, and so it could just be pure nomenclature. Maybe it doesn't have to do anything, but like now it has to be an M4 or M5 Mac studio. I definitely don't want M-Tray, sorry.

0:44:54 - Leo Laporte
Well, the other thing is it's going to be very hard to run the traditional industry benchmarks on an iPad, so you know we may not. This may be a chance for Apple to release the M4 without getting a whole bunch of information. I mean, I I hope a non-tech can somehow do something with this m4 to find out what's really going on. Is it just there it is? Is it just a uh and the new three nanometer node and m3? It doesn't. It seems like it's got the same basic features.

0:45:25 - Andy Ihnatko
Yes, Well, the neural engine is again. They spent a lot of time trying to convince us that this was something brand new and something really revolutionary.

0:45:34 - Leo Laporte
I think 38 tops was the same. Wasn't that the same number for the M3? I don't know.

0:45:40 - Doc Rock
I don't know. The one that struck me is the 120 gigabytes per second. Unified memory Like this is quick yeah.

0:45:50 - Leo Laporte
Yeah. Let me look here, this is the M3 Max, so that's 12 core. Yeah, I mean, I guess it's not, I guess it's the next one, I don't know. I don't know, I don't know. We have to really get our hands on these before we can know what's going on.

0:46:12 - Andy Ihnatko
I mean it's hard, I mean everything is a hot take, like two hours after the announcement. But it's like I actually did take down the quote because it was a very stick out your neck sort of thing. They're saying that about the M4's neural engine, more powerful than any neural processing unit in any PC today, which sounds like it has some serve for those waffles, but nonetheless, that is at least if they're trying to say something about the state of the art in May of 2024, it's an ambitious statement. We'll see if it holds up when people start tearing this thing down.

0:46:44 - Leo Laporte
I mean, I'll be honest, I'm just buying it for the tandem OLED displays.

0:46:50 - Doc Rock
And Scooter mentioned something that I also mentioned in my person. I was yelling at somebody with the hot takes they're like. Well, I was like you know that we were running this stuff on iOS and iPad devices before it made it to the max, like in october 2020, right, and you know, of course, dead silence after that. But yeah, we got to where we are in the computers because of iPads all right.

0:47:12 - Leo Laporte
So here's some numbers from a non-tech. The a17 is 35 tops, 35 trillion operations per second. The M3 is actually considerably slower 18 trillion operations per second. So when Apple says 38 trillion operations per second, that is a big jump from M2 and M3. And so maybe this really is Apple's AI chip. That's, you know, on the neural engine.

0:47:44 - Andy Ihnatko
Also it's going to have to be, especially where.

0:47:47 - Leo Laporte
AI is concerned.

0:47:49 - Andy Ihnatko
We're not talking about features that are going to see the light of day even this year. I mean, ok, we don't know what Apple is going to be announcing in June, so we don't know what we're going to be seeing in the new iPad OS. But yeah, if people are going to be starting, it's going to be expected to get three, five, six years out of this device. They're going to have to be able to run those AI models that Apple is planning for three years from now. So this could see headroom. That is quickly going to be consumed, because ambition requires headroom.

0:48:15 - Doc Rock
Can I do pedantic pushback, pedantic pushback, please? Apple has been running AI on phones for quite a long time. All of that stuff that's happening to your pictures and all of that that's still considered AI. People mean Gen AI or LLMs, and we're going to specify. We should specify Because, honestly, they've been doing AI-oriented stuff on these chips for quite a long time.

0:48:37 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, but LLMs and the stuff that Apple's pursuing and Google's pursuing and Microsoft's pursuing. It has a lot more RAM overhead it really doing and Microsoft pursuing it has a lot more like RAM overhead and again it looks like Apple is going to be pushing their advantage that, hey, we're going to be a privacy-oriented approach to AI. We're going to do as much on device as possible. There was a new rumor today or yesterday that they're designing chips for uh, uh, for uh compute plants, but there looks like they're trying to keep this as personal, as private as possible. If so, machine language models are not. Machine learning models are going to be okay for photos. They're not going to be okay for here's a. There's a thousand emails.

0:49:18 - Leo Laporte
Tell me, give me a record of all the appointments I've got related to this project the next three weeks intel out of sync is telling us in the um, in the discord, that the intel ultra chips are 11 trillion operations per second, so this is a big jump sorry is that when you take a photo and it fixes the photo.

0:49:38 - Doc Rock
You take a photo in the dark and it fixes the photo. That is, that's ai. I mean it's, it's a little bit of neural engine and machine learning. But because somebody in the chat goes what assistance do they have? Ai doesn't mean assistant. Ai is that's what I'm saying. We should specify if we mean agents or llms or you know what everybody considers chat gpt. And I just want to remind everybody that your iPhone's been fixing those photos since I think like 10, oh yeah, maybe 11 yeah, apple's been doing ai, but but um, you can down do more.

0:50:09 - Leo Laporte
Look what they did you see what they showed with the final cut with a in in a moving movie? They were able to drop the background out in real time. So beautiful. Yeah, I hope that's real it's you're.

0:50:22 - Andy Ihnatko
You're right, it is over the fact that apple hasn't done anything flashy in the last two years with a technology that was kind of premature and that Google really put the saddle on and rode it hard only after they saw a competition for an open AI. This is really premature technology. It shouldn't really be used as a consumer level product just yet, really be used as a consumer level product just yet. But realize that the AI or the machine learning that's being used in photo processing is tuned for photo processing and they can't really. They can't. Just the CPU that they made, the Apple Silicon they made to handle those kind of tasks are not necessarily going to be okay for the stuff that people might be expecting as the table stakes features in any desktop or mobile operating system going forward.

0:51:07 - Leo Laporte
Early on in the presentation today, tim Cook did say we have been doing machine learning in our chips for a long time. He wanted to make sure that everyone understood, and it's really true I've said it many times that Apple's put neural processing units in its chips for several years. Right, I can't remember which the first iPhone chip was to have it, but it's been around for a long time. So in that respect they have a lead in AI. They've been doing AI hardware for a long time. Intel is just putting what they call NPUs into their processors. Qualcomm's new Snapdragon Elites are going to have NPUs and Microsoft's all excited about this NPU. But Apple's been doing it for a long time. They're kind of well settled in on this. I think that there are the others. Go ahead, Mikah.

0:51:57 - Mikah Sargent
I was just going to say. Well, it is true, yes, absolutely, and Apple likes to make it very clear that they've been doing AI, that they lovingly have called machine learning, for so long, and that's why they've got Core ML baked into the various operating systems. But I hear that refrain a lot from people who are champions of Apple, and, while it is true they've been doing machine learning for a long time, I don't think it matters in the scheme of things, in the sense that what people are talking about when it comes to what they are expecting Apple to do, which is a heavy focus on generative AI, and the other companies are much further ahead in, at the very least, having products and features available to market that are generative AI features. So we can say that Apple has been doing this forever, but in the grand scheme of things, that just doesn't matter, because until we see this generative AI, we haven't seen them do generative AI Like that's got to happen.

0:53:05 - Doc Rock
But's one point people should specify. But the general people don't know to specify and so it sounds disingenuous. But yes, well, you understand.

0:53:12 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, that's why we should talk about features and not core technologies Like just the simple even if we limit things to photo editing just the simple ability to recognize an object in a flat field of pixels, that is an immense power lever. That is the ability to simply say I just want these changes to affect this person holding the baseball bat in the foreground and not any of the other people who are in baseball uniforms in the background, and then I can adjust the sliders wherever I want, and then I can adjust the sliders wherever I want. That is huge, and I often judge the impact of a feature by people who ask me hey, how is your phone doing that? And sometimes it will happen on an iPhone, sometimes it will happen on my Pixel phone.

Evolutionary features to succeed, there was just the ability on the on the first generation of pixels. I could say, oh, by the way, I really wish that that dog weren't taking a leak against that tree in the background, that photo of my kid at the park. Oh well, that's okay, just circle it and just simply click, erase and suddenly that that dog ain't there no more and it will just, and not just simply blurring it out and identifying the outline of the shape, but also recognizing that, okay, there's grass behind them, there's a tree in front of them. That's how you fill that sort of thing out. So, yeah, people aren't interested in knowing what kind of neural engine it has, what the performance is, what models it's running. They do care when all of a sudden, like in the WhatsApp chat for the family, all of your pictures look awesome Like 10 minutes after the cookout and everybody else's pictures are like bleh.

0:54:57 - Leo Laporte
You know, we should also mention.

that's the revenge of the green bubble right there, the other shoe is still to drop, because we haven't heard anything about iPad OS 18. And all of that's going to be next month, a month from now, at WWDC iOS 18 and iPadOS 18. And all the rumors are that these are going to be heavily AI focused. What I would say is you know, you're absolutely right, andy. People look at the features, people look at what you can do.

I still think, though, that we are right on the cusp of these little chat AI bots, these LLM things, which are pretty much toys at this point. We are on the cusp of truly intelligent assistants, and I think Apple knows that. They've certainly got the research team working on it, but they haven't said anything about it. I think they want to be there when that happens. I don't know if they want to be there with Siri or something else. Google's Gemini just replaced for me and I bet for you too, andy on your Pixel the Google Assistant. It's now using Gemini. If you want, you don't have to, and that's a big step up, and I think we're I really think we're just I don't know months, maybe a year away from true ai assistance, and I think that's when I, every time I buy an iPad, I'm buying it for the future. I'm so far completely disappointed, but I I always buy into the idea the future is very disappointing.

0:56:29 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, it is, isn't it?

0:56:30 - Leo Laporte
here we are, uh, but I always buy into the apple's proposal that we are making state-of-the-art hardware for shooting the puck where it's going. You know we're trying to get ahead of the game. Yeah, they've yet to come. I mean, maybe this new final cut and logic will will start to make that a reality. It's not entirely their fault, because developers have to follow suit procreate. I noticed they really pushed procreate through this whole thing, starting with the invitation. I imagine they're doing something interesting with a new pencil, but developers have to come up with this. Maybe they have to make some changes to ip OS that make it more like a desktop operating system. A file system would be nice, accessible file system.

0:57:15 - Andy Ihnatko
Well, yeah, I mean this is the best cycle for any new technology, the hype cycle, right, because we can basically be hopeful, because it's going to take a while for actual results to come in.

But this could be as big a revolution as the graphical user interface that before everything you did was typed on a command line.

You had no commands, you couldn't just see what you wanted to do and click on it, and that totally changed everything.

And I hope that part of the upcoming revolution is kind of like the diminishing of the dominance of apps just as a construct, the ability to having the ability of an assistant that's so intelligent that you can do things like, like every time that I usually spend the morning before each show going through all the bookmarks of news items that I've bookmarked and things I've taken notes on and things that I've jotted down here and there, and I have to.

I look through all this sort of stuff and I figure out what do I want to like, contribute to the show, doc, what it's going to be, what turned out to be kind of nothing, and that takes me the amount of time, but the event across three or four different apps. Imagine the ability to simply wake up, check to make sure I did not sleep until like one 30 in the afternoon, a half hour before the show, make sure there's no construction noise that's driving me to a public library instead of my office, and then simply say summarize all of my notes and all of my Mac and Apple related news and put it inside a Google doc so I can take a look at it in the next 20 minutes and again, not necessarily doing it all on its own, but knowing what apps are going to manage that, knowing what databases all that stuff is in on stuff in there, so that I never actually have to float through all those apps.

I used to create that content and it can do that for me?

0:58:52 - Leo Laporte
And, andy, what device do you think it's most likely to do that on?

0:58:57 - Andy Ihnatko
Probably a mobile device, probably a phone device. I mean the AI assistant hardware, pins and little, cute, little rabbit devices. They're abject failures. Right now I don't think they're necessary because I think that's something that could be handled by a phone, but the idea of having a very, very personal item that is not just like this floating thing that I have to have my laptop in front of me or connect to the cloud, that this is something that is on my person at all times, it's the first thing I pick up and take a look at, it's the thing that wakes me up in the morning. It seems like it's the most, that's the most appropriate device to run a model like that on, even if it's connecting to the cloud.

Because as much as I don't like the idea of personifying a technology, this I I think that when you have a, an industrial robot that you know that everyone's trying to make right now, the, the uh boston diamond boston robotics uh got kind of in dutch because they had the new version of their atlas robot and the face quote, quote is just like a circle and I'm saying, yes, do not put a human face on this. Do not. Let us do not. Let us form an emotional attachment to these things, but the ability to simply say this is something that is part of my daily carry. It's something that's familiar with me. I've customized it with my own case, have my own wallpaper on it, and I can infuse a certain amount of trust in it that when I ask it to do something for me, it knows what I want, it knows my habits, it knows what the intent of this command is, not just the function. It seems like a very, very appropriate place for that to happen and maybe it'll set it to the iPad for reading.

1:00:26 - Leo Laporte
You know, maybe it won't, I don't know.

1:00:28 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, maybe that's you're right, it should be mobile continuity is one of the best technologies apple has ever come up with. It was, and back when we thought that, oh wow, oh wow, isn't that nice I can be. I can continue reading a safari or a safari page on my, on my desktop, but no, the ability that this is one. You have one big sticky ball of rice that consists of all of your Apple stuff Right now I've got. I mean, the idea of having a two-screen setup for this podcast, like five years ago, would have been just such overkill and so ridiculous. But as I again realized that, I found out that I wasn't going to be able to use my home office 45 minutes before the show, and so I just grabbed what I needed put in my bag. But the fact that I grabbed my iPad Pro means that I can simply use that as a second screen. That is extra value.

So, yeah, that is something that Apple could contribute by distributing the AI load across multiple different devices, load across multiple different devices, and it's one of the reasons why I'm very, very pleased with my, as much as I can rail against Apple's lock-in on so many of these topics that we talk about. That's one of the big paybacks. You're making a good transaction there. I'm giving up control over my hardware. However, it's doing stuff that only one unified manufacturer and operating system creator can actually create. So, yeah, maybe Apple is in a position where they could do things with AI through continuity that Google really can't match, that Microsoft really can't match.

1:01:55 - Leo Laporte
Gurman obviously knew something because in his Sunday Power On newsletter his headline was Apple's new iPad Pro should turn device into true laptop replacement and I think he kind of nailed the message of this morning's announcement. We're going to take a little break. When we come back let's talk about Apple's Pro Pencil and the new features. They're on. You're watching MacBreak Weekly with three great people. Jason Snell is missing in action, probably in Cupertino, I'm thinking. Alex Lindsay we don't know where he is. But good news, doc Rock, sitting in Great to have you in the Jason Snell seat and in the Alex Lindsay seat. Mikah Sargent, who was up early with me covering this event. Pencil next.

But first a word from our sponsor. Actually, Mikah knows a little bit about this sponsor the Eufy Video Smart Lock E330. He installed such a device himself. I didn't. I had no idea you were so handy, Mikah into our engineering room.

All it took was a Phillips screwdriver. The thing about this I love it is a smart lock for your door, but it also is a camera for your door, so you kind of get the best of both worlds. Install it with a Phillips screwdriver. He's doing it right there, no drilling required. It has fingerprint recognition, so that's probably the primary way you'll use it. You walk up, put your finger on the sensor and in 0.3 seconds it'll unlock the door. It takes about a second to turn that knob. The embedded ai self-learning chip, they say, becomes more accurate with every use. That's pretty cool. You saw that's the replaceable 10 000 milliamp hour rechargeable battery. That should give you about four months because it's removable. You could easily swap it in. You'll get a load battery notification before it runs out too, so you don't have to worry about that. Watch, there's a fingerprint. That's so cool and it turns the knob and unlocks the door. It's a deadbolt and it's great. But look at this. I love it.

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1:05:28 - Andy Ihnatko
Actually, before we go into the pencil. We didn't talk about the thinness of the iPad pro.

1:05:31 - Leo Laporte
Oh yeah, the thinnest iPad in fact, the apples are the thinnest device we've ever made.

1:05:35 - Andy Ihnatko
Period so it's so. It's thinner and lighter than the air that I that's confusing. Yes, that's, that's confusing, but okay, that's, that's something you may have a chortle about, but then move on about. It's like I'm looking forward to holding it and seeing if it feels thinner and it feels lighter.

1:05:55 - Leo Laporte
I think it's like a quarter pound lighter 1.28 pounds for the 13-inch, 5 millimeters thick, which is pretty thin.

1:06:06 - Andy Ihnatko
That's suspiciously thin. That's like I mean, uh, I would love, I would love it if it, if they did say during the, during the, the event, that, hey, it's just as durable as the previous generation, yeah, but that but that, yeah, but that's. That's the thing. It's like. I'm just I've had the, I've had my pro for what? Two or three years now.

I'm just now sort of okay with the idea of having it in an overstuffed laptop bag and not being concerned that it's going to bend because I've got a whole bunch of books and a bunch of other stuff in it. You make that even thinner and I have to admit that I'd be waiting three or four months to find out. Are these things going wibbly wobbly after like a month in people's bags? Because it doesn't matter if it only bent a little bit and it doesn't affect performance. The first time you put that on a table and it goes diggity-gig, diggity-gig, diggity-gig. The first time you put it down, you see a tiny little curve and it's like when you buy a record it's either flat or it's not flat, and if it's not flat, you're unhappy yeah, you call it thin gate, doc rock yeah I was like I'm just waiting for somebody to come out.

1:07:16 - Doc Rock
They are people always gating something, so now we're gonna be on the same gate oh, it's fun a youtuber will bend it.

1:07:23 - Leo Laporte
We know that. Don't do this.

1:07:25 - Doc Rock
That's silly so that's how you know. All I did was sit on it.

1:07:29 - Andy Ihnatko
I can't believe a 1500 dollar tablet. You can't sit on. What's apple playing at?

1:07:33 - Doc Rock
well, here's the thing. That's crazy, andy the 13 inch is thinner than the 11 inch and I'm like mama say what?

1:07:44 - Leo Laporte
that's crazy. Well, it's got more space you could spread the components out. Honestly, this is Apple capitalizing on the fact that the M4, like all the Apple Silicon, is a system on a chip. Everything's in there and so it can be. I'm sure the die isn't very thick. You've got the memory in there. You've got everything in there.

1:08:04 - Andy Ihnatko
Everything except for headphone jack. Yeah, this is still. I will. I will simply note it and move on. But now, now, with the discontinuation of the previous iPad, nothing. This it's not only. Not only did apple get rid of all lightning jacks, not only did they get rid of all like home buttons, but now there are no more iPads that have headphone jacks. I think that's that's disappointing, because it's still a super, super useful thing to have. But at least now they can say that well, look, it's now. It's not there. There is. It's not thin, it's not thick enough to support a headphone jack. So maybe I'll give them a mulligan on that. But yeah, it's, it's I again, I can't wait to get my hands on it.

If it does, the thing is like um I? The obvious take would be, especially on a 13 inch tablet, that you're probably not going to be spending a whole lot of time lifting it, holding it in two hands as opposed to resting it on something. But some people do. And even if you're standing up and taking notes with it, or even if you've got the bottom of it leaned against the table and you're taking notes on it, there's something about the hand feel of a device that is such a big contributor to the pleasure that you take in using it.

And I've never noticed that the my iPad Pro is particularly chonky. But if it's thin enough to make me notice that, wow, this is a more pleasant experience, or to sort of telegraph that, wow, this really is a premium product they could have they, they, the cheaper version of this or God forbid an Android tablet from Samsung is much thicker and much. It's easy to manipulate, but it doesn't feel like a premium object. That's part of the entire sum total. That makes something into a pro the idea that, from top to bottom, soup to nuts, this is a premium product.

1:09:39 - Leo Laporte
It does make you wonder what the air, what air means if it's heavier and thicker? Exactly yeah.

1:09:51 - Doc Rock
It's thicker and heavier. What are they talking about? Yeah, it just means fresh air, fresh air breathing and, of course, everybody's uh losing it over the colors of the air.

1:10:00 - Leo Laporte
And again, like you know, they're trying to, not in a good way. By the way, they don't like the colors. Nobody likes the colors, but trust.

1:10:08 - Doc Rock
I want to just make these decisions. There was some thought into it and, at the end of the day, I know that my pro has been in the skin since the day I got it and you know it's just, it's 40.

1:10:20 - Leo Laporte
What don't people like about the colors? They're too washed out, is that it? Yeah, nicole, call that color. Purple is just kind of well.

1:10:31 - Andy Ihnatko
It's purple on the screen, but the actual color is more his, his royal badness, would not approve of that use of that word.

1:10:36 - Doc Rock
Yeah, yeah, me neither, because I was very disappointed with my purple iPhone because it was, it was cool for like a second and then it was don't these look?

1:10:44 - Leo Laporte
exactly like the previous models of the ipod, iPad pro, I mean, I think they, they basically use the lavender breath of breath of lavender that's that sounds.

1:11:00 - Andy Ihnatko
That sounds like when I'm packing for like a 10-day destination wedding on my mood board like okay, tuesday, our theme is Breath of Lavender.

1:11:08 - Leo Laporte
It's pretty, though People want more saturated. You don't want saturated. I think that would be too much.

1:11:17 - Mikah Sargent
It's the air. Have you seen the IMAX? They're rich in color.

1:11:21 - Doc Rock
They're beautiful, I agree with you. But again, this is a $29 soft bro dbrand skin slapping on there or some other brand skin.

1:11:31 - Leo Laporte
they're gorgeous put a dbrand on it. Yeah, another ad for something that we don't get any money for.

1:11:42 - Doc Rock
I feel like all of us tech people have it, though, just because we're likely to resell our gear.

1:11:48 - Leo Laporte
I do not have any D brand on mine, I have a brand.

1:11:52 - Mikah Sargent
I use a different company.

1:11:53 - Doc Rock
But I mean all the same, just pick one. It's just vinyl. My neighbor is a car wrap guy so I can literally just take it over there and be like wrap my iPad.

1:12:01 - Leo Laporte
So is it hard to wrap on?

1:12:02 - Doc Rock
those on those things? No, the type of 3M it is. You just put it on and then you hit it with a little hair dryer and it's really tight. Oh, it shrinks on. It's a shrinky thing. Yeah, it shrinks on. Oh, and so your edges are still, you know, open to the public. But it's just enough that I got one scratch on an iPad years ago and I was like never again with the thinnest cover on it, just because I know I'm going to probably resell it.

1:12:26 - Leo Laporte
All right. Well, I better look for skin.

1:12:31 - Mikah Sargent
And they have like cool-looking skins right. I've seen mine on my MacBook Air. Remember, it's got the vintage skin on it. It's pretty.

1:12:36 - Doc Rock
Spigen.

1:12:37 - Mikah Sargent
Spigen no.

1:12:41 - Doc Rock
Oh, I said that wrong.

1:12:42 - Mikah Sargent
I don't know how you say it.

1:12:56 - Doc Rock
I just think spigen sounds better than spigen. No idea how you say it. Uh, fish skin, fish, fish skin. Yeah, the the three most common ones are fish skin, b brand and uh, slick wrap but anyway, they're all just three.

1:13:02 - Leo Laporte
Um, it's all three. It's slick wraps.

1:13:03 - Mikah Sargent
That's who did mine slick wraps.

1:13:05 - Leo Laporte
Wow, you're good. See, he knows them all and and. But there's no difference really in the oh look, these are pretty, though they have all sorts of. Yeah, yours looks really cool.

1:13:18 - Doc Rock
My check out the retro one you can actually just send them. I want to have you know his face on the back of it.

1:13:26 - Mikah Sargent
Oh yeah, I found that annoying too. But the retro line it's all the way down at the bottom on the right. There the retro up one from anniversary. There you go To the right Retro. You almost had it. Anyway, the retro.

1:13:44 - Leo Laporte
Oh, yeah, yeah, oh yeah, it looks like an old man.

1:13:50 - Mikah Sargent
I've got one for my iPad and everything oh nice, and the apple pencil actually, which is kind of fun. You wrapped your. You wrapped it all wow and what I like about. I don't know if the other companies do this they probably do but what I like about slick wraps is, if you mess up, you give them a message and let them know and they'll send you another one for free I feel like I would mess it up.

1:14:07 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, do you actually heat it with a hair dryer? Really, that's what you do. No, this one you don't have to.

1:14:12 - Doc Rock
You know these ones are.

1:14:14 - Leo Laporte
They're set up already. That's d brands to do that the shrinking.

1:14:17 - Doc Rock
No, no, that's if you wanted to do a car wrap thing, because there's no cut sizes. These are cnc cuts, so they're perfect.

1:14:23 - Leo Laporte
Oh okay, I get what you're saying. I get what you. That looks pretty cool, all right, yeah, that's what you have. Yeah, that's what.

1:14:32 - Andy Ihnatko
I've been trying to find it but I can't. I'll never find it, but there's a. There's a. There's a company that did an abiding love for frog design, frog design, max and the 2C, the 2CI, all the sort of stuff that adds a certain Jenny say qua to any Apple device.

1:14:57 - Leo Laporte
Jenny say what alright?

1:15:02 - Doc Rock
let's talk about the freaking pencil sorry, we got wrapped up in our last conversation. Let's talk about the freaking pencil.

1:15:12 - Leo Laporte
Sorry, we got wrapped up in our last conversation. I'll tell you the truth. It's so confusing that Apple actually had to make a chart to show you all the different. There's four of them now, and so they made a chart on their website so you can figure out which pencil you want. There's the Pencil Pro. That's the new one.

1:15:37 - Andy Ihnatko
Second generation pencil, usb-c pencil and first generation pencil, and the problem is that this isn't like oh well, for extra features, for extra performance, you can get it. No, we have incompatible pencils for each.

1:15:50 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah you have to get the ones right for the.

1:15:52 - Andy Ihnatko
And you can't, and you can't. And the thing is, when I upgrade to the next iPad, I'm going to have to buy a new pencil to actually use it for a lot of situations. Yeah, that's a bummer, yeah.

1:16:02 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, it's messy. I agree that it's very messy. Yeah, it's not just like. These are the features that I'd like to have and I've got an iPad. No, no, no, no, no, you have to check all of that compatibility. It's still unclear whether remote, but that find my is not using ultra wide band, it is just using bluetooth signaling. So I would like to know, and maybe I fix it will end up telling us, uh, if there's ultra wide band in the um apple pencil, although, as scooter x points out, there is no uwb chip in the new iPads pro. Oh, so that's indicative, I would say yeah, I that's.

1:16:53 - Leo Laporte
It's a little tight in there, even though we did have a pretty good video of the inside of this. So new features are squeeze you could squeeze it, and they they're going to call it squeeze you, I guess what?

1:17:04 - Mikah Sargent
that joins double tap, which is the feature that's already existed, the gesture that's already. Yeah, and it's not the best gesture.

1:17:10 - Leo Laporte
So now you have squeeze, which senses your squeeze and brings up a new palette, depending on the software you're using. Uh, then there's squeeze is better.

1:17:19 - Mikah Sargent
Right, because when I try to do the double tap I'm reducing the sort of leverage that I have on the pencil when I double tap it. So I like this. I don't have to take my fingers off of it.

1:17:29 - Leo Laporte
I've seen people complain about double tap that it's not working that way. Unwieldy Unwieldy, that's a good word for it. Barrel roll A new gyroscope. There's a gyroscope that allows you to rotate the pencil, which is really cool for calligraphy, but also for moving objects around and so forth.

1:17:46 - Doc Rock
That's that's going to be neat, I think especially with the brush that's going to be yeah, look at that, yeah, yeah the thing that the first thing that popped in my head when he did barrel roll is um for practicing my kanji like very is very calligraphy yeah yeah, I mean it's click, it is calligraphy to an extent, but it's very important that you get your stroke orders in a certain way, because it can completely change what a character is. That's right, and so without that barrel roll it's harder to tell. So this would be super psycho.

1:18:14 - Leo Laporte
When we did learn Chinese characters. It's the same exact thing. And you use a brush. There's no other way to do it. You use a brush and the number, the order you do it in and the way you do it and the stroke and so forth, absolutely contributes to the meaning. That's because kanji is a Chinese character. Right, I know, it's the Japanese version and it's a much poorer vocabulary. Yeah, it's much poorer. I don't know, I have no idea. Haptic feedback is cool. People were hoping there would be a little buzz in the pencil. When you squeeze or double tap, you'll feel a light buzz in the pencil. When you squeeze or double tap, you'll feel a light pulse confirming the action. Yeah, yeah, oh. Is it actually going to light up, though? I don't think so. That's just that's real.

1:18:58 - Andy Ihnatko
If it lights up, dump it in a bucket of sand, because that's the light bulb battery. That's unhappy.

1:19:04 - Leo Laporte
Hover is still there, so that's good. And the doubleover is still there, so that's good. And the double tap is still there, so you have three new features.

1:19:14 - Andy Ihnatko
There's another nice little thing where developers can create like custom interactions, so that they can create their own kind of interface with how these things actually interact, so whether the barrel roll will control brush angle of attack or whether it will simply bring up a tool palette that they can simply scroll through. I'm really keen to see Apple try to extend the user interface into hardware, and this seems like an early way to actually try to do that. They mentioned that Procreate is one of the first that's going to actually take advantage of this.

They mentioned that Procreate is one of the first that's going to actually take advantage of this. I'm always surprised to see I support on Patreon a lot of artists. That's one of my favorite groups to support on Patreon and oftentimes they will share all of their iPad Pro tips with each other and the number of times that you see these artists who have amazing experience with like traditional art tools and their solution for a lot of different things on the iPad are to just keep doing it and erasing it and doing it and erasing it until you get the line you like or the gesture you like. The ability to have this level of control, even if they have to learn, like new techniques and learn new ways of manipulating the pencil, that's a huge, huge step forward. Learn new ways of manipulating the pencil that's a huge, huge step forward. It's not. It's different. I mean a Samsung, a Samsung Ultra, has a stylus. It's not an Apple pencil.

Apple, with creating a new Apple pencil this way and the ways that artists can actually use it as an artist tool, is a good way to justify that extra expense. Apple, we do. Can I also say belatedly, I'm here, here on the east coast, you guys are on the west coast and for and farther away from that. I am so disappointed myself that I did not come up with an east coast, west coast rap joke when we were talking about raps I am. I apologize for people who are thinking about that and expecting that and pounding the table, hoping for that to happen.

1:21:04 - Mikah Sargent
I will try to do better next time if you're out there, let us know you're out there. People who wanted that to happen. I would have loved it.

1:21:12 - Leo Laporte
I'd like to meet you uh, you know I forgot we we have apple results to talk about too. Actually there's some actual apple news. One of the reasons I mentioned that is because, uh, the apple results for iPad were particularly bad last quarter 17 drop in sales missing analysts estimate. Uh, maybe that's because we all kind of sense there'll be new iPads coming, or I don't know it's been three years.

1:21:44 - Andy Ihnatko
It's yeah, exactly, I think that's it was pent up, pent up expectations. I don't think anybody who's buying an iPad is necessarily buying them without knowledge of what's coming up in the future, or at least, or their bulk buying them for for schools, so I'm not too concerned about that. Numbers were I'll probably get into this like more in depth next week when Jason has comes by and can talk about his, his chart and graphorama but results were not that great across the board. The most interesting thing was are we going to talk about the iPad or should we save this for later?

1:22:16 - Leo Laporte
Save it. We have one more break. We'll do all the other Apple news in the next segment. How about that? I do want to make sure we got everything in from the event. Talked about the iPad pros is an 11 and a 13. We talked about the errors kind of peripherally. Um, I think a big deal that the 10th generation iPad nothing is now 349. That's now the base model and that's the one where the people who only 128 gigs of storage or less and eight gigs of RAM or less are going to buy it.

1:22:51 - Andy Ihnatko
That's for the restaurants. It's more of a consumption and a gaming device than a creation app.

1:22:56 - Mikah Sargent
Oh yeah, and a kiosk device. Yeah, that's a good point. It's a kiosk device.

1:22:59 - Doc Rock
I was walking at Christmas and I have to say, after a while, when I was setting it up, I was a little bit jealous of the size and how light it was and it just felt very nimble. So I still think it's a handy device and I kind of was, strangely enough, thinking about going to get a Mini. But I'll wait and see what happens, which happened the last time the Mini came out. I was like wait and see what happens.

1:23:20 - Leo Laporte
Wait and see. Yeah, gurman's saying the new Mini will be substantially improved, so it might be worth waiting to see what happens in the next generation.

1:23:29 - Andy Ihnatko
Although on top of everything else, so probably in anticipation of these price drops, best Buy and others have dropped the price of the ninth generation iPad nothing to $249. Oh wow. That's not as cheap as a Fire tablet, but that's getting dangerously close to oh sure. Why not buy one for your kids, even though they're probably going to leave it on a bus or drop it?

1:23:54 - Doc Rock
Yeah, $249. That's fantastic. Well, that's also where you can take one and put it in a room where you use it. Okay, for instance, I always carry my pro into the kitchen. It's a little big for the kitchen but I carry it in the kitchen because I'm either watching something or a recipe or whatever. At that level that's an appliance price. I can just buy one for the kitchen and leave it there and mount it properly, protect it properly and never think about it.

1:24:15 - Leo Laporte
We had when we stayed at the Bellagio for the Formula 1 race in November. They had iPads in the room and that was terrible. It was terrible.

1:24:23 - Mikah Sargent
And it was terrible.

1:24:25 - Leo Laporte
It was terrible. You don't look, don't put. You know you had to open the iPad, open the windows.

1:24:30 - Mikah Sargent
It was just don't put that oh, it was the whole.

1:24:33 - Leo Laporte
Everything was there. You know, it was all there and it was good for them. You couldn't just control any of it manually.

1:24:39 - Mikah Sargent
No, that's annoying. You had to actually pay a 99 cent fee to open the windows, which is, you know, not ideal.

1:24:45 - Leo Laporte
I just you know. And the other thing is it's iPad isn't really designed to be in a bed chamber at night. It doesn't, unlike the phone, which has that nice sleep mode. The iPad just sits there, and you know. So I put it under something and forgot about it. New versions of Smothered it with a pillow.

I did, I smothered it. Yep, New versions of Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro designed it looks like for these iPads. One of the new features in Final Cut Pro 2 for the iPad includes live multicam editing. Now, john Ashley, didn't we have live multicam editing in the big boy version on the desktop when we had? I mean, you don't use Final Cut, I guess.

1:25:28 - Mikah Sargent
Well, yes, there's always been multicam.

1:25:30 - Leo Laporte
There's always been multicam.

1:25:35 - Mikah Sargent
There's always been multicam and Final Cut since 10.0.

1:25:37 - Leo Laporte
So this is new to the iPad, then yes, okay, but what's cool is you can use iPhones up to four different iPhones to record different angles of a scene at the same time, and then the footage is streamed to the iPad running Final Cut. That's kind of cool. The iPhone has a decent camera. It'd be really cool to do a multi-cam shoot with four iPhones.

1:25:57 - Mikah Sargent
In fact, after the event, it was made clear that not only was today's entire event shot on iPhone, it was also edited on the Mac and on iPad. Oh, interesting.

1:26:10 - Leo Laporte
There were some people who were hoping it would be shot on Vision Pro for an immersive experience yeah, I saw that it didn't happen Right.

1:26:19 - Doc Rock
There's also a Final Cut desktop release. It might not have hit the Apple Store yet or the update store, app store English, but it's coming. So Final Cut 10.8 was also announced today. So everybody who uses Final Cut, please back your stuff up before you do the update.

1:26:35 - Leo Laporte
Are you a Final Cut user Doc?

1:26:37 - Doc Rock
Yeah, I'm actually a certified Final Cut instructor, oh nice, which is why Andy and I speak at the thing at NAB.

1:26:45 - Leo Laporte
Oh, all right at the um the thing nab. Oh, all right. Multicam feature enabled via a new final cut camera app standalone which supports white balance and manual focus controls, auto metering, iso and shutter speed adjustments.

1:26:57 - Mikah Sargent
Final cut camera is on the app store free these will both becoming, uh, the update to the mac, the update to final cut pro for iPad 2, and again, that is the second version of the app called Final Cut Pro for iPad not an app for iPad 2, will be coming, according to Apple, later this spring. For some reason, logic gets a specific date, which we'll talk about in a moment, but that one's coming on May 13th.

1:27:29 - Andy Ihnatko
So I wish I knew more about how people, how pros, would take advantage of multicam. Like are they going to, are they? Are they pleased to have multicam on the iPad but are disappointed that, well, I can only use iPhones to do so? Why don't you give? Why don't you open up the OS a little bit so that I can basically use any compliant camera with it? I don't know, I don't you open up the OS a little bit so that I can basically use any compliant camera with it.

1:27:47 - Doc Rock
I don't know if that's a deal breaker for them. You can definitely use any compliant camera through a little bit of cheating, because you're just going to NDI it to the iPhone and then this thing will see the iPhone. So in theory you should be able to do that.

1:28:00 - Andy Ihnatko
Okay, so you're not stuck using iPhones for multicam.

1:28:04 - Doc Rock
Yeah, I mean, it's just N the eyes in the eye, so it should work. But I think that what they'll do and it's the easiest to test what you can control Right, so they know exactly what an iPhone is the the delta of all the things that when it becomes a black magic, or Sony or a Canon or Fuji or Panasonic, now it's out of their hands and now they got to depend on other people. Or Panasonic, now it's out of their hands and now they got to depend on other people. If they start here, they can have it work and then, after they have it work, they can be like okay, now Sony, show me what you got, fuji, show me what you got, and then they can slowly work it in. So I think it's a good jumping off point, mostly for the control mechanism.

1:28:40 - Leo Laporte
Okay, so now we've got it clarified. You've always had multicam in final cut, but it was after the fact, right, you would shoot isos and then you put it all in there, and then you could. You could switch as your oh right, that's that's what I meant.

And now the the new thing is it's live, which means, in effect, it's like a tricaster, or or Ecamm or something you're switching in final cut right. I'm well, nothing's like Ecamm. I'm joking, yes, no, I mean, but I think that that's interesting. They're turning the iPad into a switcher, in effect.

1:29:11 - Doc Rock
Yes, super interesting and again, I can't wait to test it out. I have 13 Pro Max, 14 Pro Max, 15 Pro Max, so as soon as the iPad comes, we'll find out. You're set.

1:29:21 - Mikah Sargent
See, that's really, I think, go ahead. I was just going to say, when you were saying sort of, who this was for. I think this feature certainly encourages people to, instead of selling back their old iPhones or trading them in, they end up keeping them because now they've got suddenly a multicam setup.

1:29:40 - Doc Rock
Yeah, that's why I have never traded my phones in until the third year cycle Now, for the simple reason that they make great extra cameras. Because, like Leo said at the very top of this segment, the iPhone is a pretty decent camera.

1:29:52 - Leo Laporte
so I've always kept the last two models because the cameras are pretty so okay and could, could you, can you now do in the new final cut for mac? Can you do this as well, or is this just in the iPad? This live?

1:30:05 - Doc Rock
multi-cam. It's going to work with both when the update comes out. So, yeah, and again, we've always had multi-cam, but again live, to be able to pull this live multi-cam is a whole different.

1:30:15 - Leo Laporte
Basically, you're running a switcher. So now I'm curious. I mean I wonder uh, can you let the uh iPhone run for a long time as a camera? I guess you can. I do that with Ecamm.

Oh, 100%, yeah, In fact when I was in my mom's house, I did the entire show using Ecamm and iPhone. So okay, so that's good, that's really interesting. I presume they're using continuity camera, apple's using continuity camera. Do you know, mr Ecamm guy, if Ecamm supports this as well? It must, because it's a virtual camera, so Final Cut must see it as a camera.

1:30:52 - Doc Rock
Yeah, I mean we automatically support anything that the OS can support. So, in theory, this is just going to work, and we already do this. Now we already allow you to do camera switching with iPhones, right, and so it's. You know, they're just adding this to directly to the editor, which is weird, which I think brings some. Well, it brings some cool things, like when it comes to adjusting your picture or having some, you know, sort of custom cameras or cameras in weird places, like there's a lot of stuff that you're going to be able to do with this. So I'm looking forward to this. I love the fact that it even said external projector support, because imagine, in a uh, church service or a wedding or something, and you got people running around with the phone giving you different live angles. Instead of cool everybody not being able to see you can just look at the projector. Oh, it's going to be cool all the bridesmaids are camera operators.

Yeah, I mean if I had this, like during my sets, I would have got like a couple of my boys to run around with the iPhone while I'm in the booth and I'm doing my thing and they got one person in the, say, the dance floor looking back at me and then two people on the side like handshot watching me switch the tables. I think it would have been a cool little setup. So it's very interesting.

1:32:05 - Leo Laporte
Huh, do they? And they match pretty well. So if you have last year's in the year before is in the year before, that's okay.

1:32:11 - Doc Rock
They all kind of match up pretty well or matching up is relatively easy, anyway, as long as you use a white belt, this car, they have a shader. Yeah, they have shaders built into.

1:32:20 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah, that's super cool. Logic pro 2 has added a new feature called they call it stem splitter that splits the audio into separate tracks for different instruments, so you could take it, unmix a song and then remix it. Yeah, yes, that's very true.

1:32:41 - Doc Rock
we'll have to see how well that works there's a lot of um apps in the dj world that do this already. Our buddy, michael simon's, over at algorithm um for algorithm dj, just dj, why, like? They've had this for about a year and a half now. Oh, okay, and it works pretty good. So I'm super interested to see what I was doing it doing with it. Now that they have, like, more direct access to a processor as opposed to just software, it feels like they can do stuff with the uh, the media engine, and make it even cooler. So I'm super interested in this they're claiming it's using ai.

1:33:16 - Leo Laporte
I would make mashups a lot easier, right, segue from one thing to another, take the vocals from one song and put it in another song, and things like that. It'd be very interesting. That's to me. The most exciting thing when I see the new hardware is what kind of new creativity it might unleash.

1:33:31 - Doc Rock
I'll give you one that most people wouldn't think of but could save your bacon. So I was doing some filming outside and they were playing music in the background and it was the one chance I had an opportunity to get this particular interview. And then, after they get home, I'm listening to it. I'm like I can't put this on YouTube. It's immediately going to get flagged, yeah. And then my brain said, hey, dummy, throw this at the DJ app and say isolate the vocal. And so what does it do? It? 86, the background music that would have ruined my youtube status, and it just had my voice and the other person talking. Are you hearing this? This is great, so you can save yourself. If you're ever in a situation where you need to record a video and a video happens to have, like led zeppelin playing in the back and you don't want to get in trouble for that, just strip it up and keep the vocal.

1:34:17 - Leo Laporte
That is cool, that is cool. There's a new feature called Session Players that offers an AI-driven backing band. Okay, let's not do that Virtual drummer space players, andy and the Ihnatkos. Andy and the Ihnatkos. They are both free upgrades to the existing app. Apple consistently makes Logic and Final Cut an amazing deal Buy once, get eternal upgrades. Oh wait a minute. Monthly subscription model. I missed that part.

1:34:51 - Mikah Sargent
That's for iPad Pro. So for as long as Logic Pro for iPad and Final Cut Pro for iPad have existed, they have always required a subscription it's only the desktop Mac OS versions.

1:35:03 - Leo Laporte
Logic Pro May 13th, as you mentioned later this spring for Final Cut. Same with the camera app, so don't go rushing over to see it. Anything else, what else that's a good mic. New iPad Pro lacks millimeter wave 5g and ultra wide camera.

1:35:22 - Mikah Sargent
okay, fine um, yeah, I'm okay with it ditching. And uh, a camera. Folks are saying that's because the ultra wide camera needed to stick out a little further.

1:35:32 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, and so ditching that would be 5.1 millimeters with that, exactly cool with it all right.

1:35:39 - Doc Rock
Cool with, it All right. Let's take a look at something directly to it, like there's so many clip ones that you can add to get that stuff later, cause you don't use that camera all the time. Exactly, why not just get something that can magnet to it or clip on or stick with nano grip or whatever the heck Michael called it? Nano cling, nano cling. There we go.

1:35:59 - Leo Laporte
Let's take a break. When we come back uh, there is other apple news, but I think, can I, can I put a lid on it, are we? We got everything from the event for it took us two hours, but 48 minutes.

Well edited, well, well, well, just kind of explained and annotated, um, and of course, the event event is online. You can watch it. It was well produced. I wish they'd go back to live events. Honestly, I know I can only say that because Alex Lindsay is not here, but I think that that's something missing. It's a little too promotional, it's a little too canned.

1:36:35 - Andy Ihnatko
Just my thought and, to be fair, these events are always like marketing promotion, but it does feel more like, less like hey, this is our day in which we will be informing everybody, including analysts and the press, about stuff and fielding a lot of questions and a lot of speculation about what we're doing, why we're doing. Now it feels more like I mean, I don't, I don't mean to be dismissive and calling it an infomercial, but that's the first time I thought that yeah again it's like I had the same reaction.

What if you had one pan that could let you throw out this wok, this frying pan, this grill top, and do it all for just 29? I'm with the scientists who helped make it happen. Josh, how the heck do you?

1:37:15 - Leo Laporte
make this happen. I'm kind of sorry, uh, also that you don't I mean the the live uh demos and even just the kind of the human humanity of it. Just, yeah, it feels so much less personal. It just doesn't feel as a personal. I mean I don't. I never get to go anymore so I don't get to go to the hands-on lab or anything afterwards. But I just I like that. I like the performance aspect of it and I know it's nobody can do it like steve jobs, but tim does. It does a great job and I think him relating to the audience.

1:37:47 - Doc Rock
It's one of the problems apple has is that they are so hermetic and uh him, going out in public is not a bad thing um, yeah, well, one thing when the audience gives feedback too, that actually could help sales, right, if all of the smartest tech people in the room which you know who's sitting there and they have a visceral, like happy reaction to something announced like it's the thinnest 5.1 millimeter iPad and the crowd goes round, I got to buy that, plus the acknowledgement of the team.

1:38:18 - Leo Laporte
You know when they have, and here's the team that worked on this. Thank you for you know, losing your families and your life for the last six months. I just there was something about that. But I know Alex will say no, these are information dense and they're much better and they control it and blah, blah, blah.

1:38:35 - Mikah Sargent
In three years. At the end of the video it's going to say generate it on iPad Pro as opposed to shot and recorded on iPhone.

1:38:44 - Leo Laporte
It already feels more synthetic. It already made a step in that direction.

1:38:48 - Mikah Sargent
I mean those transitions like that's not real, Right, Right. I think also with the live events we all sat around and waited for the appearance of Air Force One Always right, Always the moment in time there was was no hair force.

1:39:03 - Leo Laporte
There was no hair force in this. One is john turnus, mostly, uh, and then somebody else in the lab big at WWDC.

Yeah, we'll see them. We'll see them at WWDC. All right, let's take a little break. We will have more in just a moment with our panel, andy and ako doc, rock, Mikah sergeant, our show today, brought to you by Wix Studio. Now I've only got a minute to tell you about Wix Studio. So this is the web platform for agencies and enterprises.

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This came out in the doj uh versus google trial, which is concluded um. It was 20 billion dollars in 2022. Huge amount of money now. That's a revenue share, so it in a way, it also shows you how valuable that that real estate is yeah, so the amount of money that google gives apple.

1:41:09 - Mikah Sargent
What did I say apple?

1:41:09 - Leo Laporte
gives google I apologize, no, no wrong direction that comes into apple. In fact, that's a big part of their giant services revenue.

1:41:20 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, a huge chunk of it, and it's nice to get a real number. As you said, we have known that this is a deal that takes place, but to have that actually spelled out in such clear terms and I think it was something, leo, that you said during Ask the Tech Guys, and I think it was something, leo, that you said during Ask the Tech Guys what is it that? Google?

1:41:51 - Andy Ihnatko
is afraid of losing by not having that payment in place and giving people the option to choose the search engine. Yeah, both I mean all of these are. That was that was the 2022 number for the amount of money that Apple paid to Google. From that, we can match that up with stuff that Google has already said about percentage of revenues that they're paying back to Apple, to indicate that it's worth about 50, a little less than $60 billion a year, and when you compare that to how much money that Google makes on their services in total, that is a double digit percentage. So it's not just Apple, but it's also Google that is tying so much of its fortunes and services to this one open checkbook, and if the Department of Justice decides to close that checkbook, that's a big deal for both companies and if the Department of Justice decides to close that checkbook.

1:42:43 - Leo Laporte
That's a big deal for both companies. It was, in fact, one of the things that powered a successful services quarter for Apple. Apple did not have the best quarter, but this is always their down quarter. This is the quarter after the iPhone new iPhone comes out, so it's not surprising, but nevertheless not a great quarter, except for services, which did quite well. A record number, according to Tim Cook in the analyst ad. Let's see. Here are Jason Snell's six colors. Actually, there's only one for revenue, and you can see how spiky revenue is. Uh, it's always that fourth quarter, that's the, the big, the big quarter, the new iPhone quarter. Uh, I wonder, though, if these new iPads will, will move that needle. Iphone 51 of over and all revenue. But look at services coming on strong 26 percent. Now, we don't know exactly what chunk of that is google, but uh, it's a pretty hefty chunk yeah, again it would be.

1:43:42 - Andy Ihnatko
It would be a double digit percentage of uh of services, and again that that number is two years old, so it could, could go up, could go down. Um, a lot of stuff remained flat. Wearables is down like 10 to 11 percent, which was kind of surprising to me. Uh, I think macs are flat. Uh, they, I think they, they. Their growth rate was down to like 1%. Here I am talking as though I'm an experienced business journalist as opposed to a technology journalist, but I have a lot of seeing eye finance nerds who explain these things to me and so, yes, so they beat expectations in an okay manner. The stock wound up up about six to seven points, but mostly because they just they initiated their largest buyback in history, like so hundred billion, 110 billion dollars in stock buybacks, along with an increase, along with an increase in dividends the dividend, the dividend 4%, 4%.

So this is. It looks as though the Apple and the board were very, very aware that this was not going to be a super great quarter. Also, that every other company, like Google, also announced a really, really hefty, hefty buyback just the week before and their earnings result this year. I'm becoming very aware that the stocks is also one of these companies' most important products and that there's competition for that product, and so if other investors in the fan companies and related companies are making a really, really attractive investment package.

1:45:18 - Leo Laporte
Apple has to sort of match that to keep all the money on the table. As we had mentioned, the revenue for iPads year over year was 17% down. It was really a bad the worst iPad revenue since 2020. So not a great quarter for iPad, but maybe that'll all turn around. Now it's going to be very interesting. And, as you see, iPhone revenue down as well. Year over year revenue changed down 10 percent for iPhone. This is why China is so important to Tim Cook these days. That's where the growth is happening. And look at the services revenue. It keeps on growing and growing and growing.

1:45:52 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, he was, but he was. But Tim was pleased to pleased to say, I think, both in his main comments and in the Q&A that, well, the iPhone is still the hottest selling, still one of the six hottest selling phones. In urban areas in China it takes four of the six top slots, which sounds like a lot of qualifications. But they're very, very aware that all the analysts are looking at the same numbers that they are, so they're trying to. There was a I've always I've really been looking forward to seeing like, what kind of, what kind of mentions. Yeah, but he Tim Cook explicitly parried it off, saying, well, we'll have a lot more. We have. We're really excited about what we can do in AI. We will have more to say about that next month or soon or whatever.

So they didn't want to talk about it. They did get one direct question at the end from one analyst who was asking well, given that you're going to have to be investing so much money in AI, like how much is, how is that going to affect, like, your, your future budget and your future, your future numbers? And the answer came back that they're they. They feel as though they're investing quite enough. They did mention that and again I think they have the quote in front of me that just during the last five years we've spent more than a hundred billion dollars in research and development. So I think that's the first time we've gotten like an actual number on how much is spent specifically on r&d. How much of that was the vision pro is my question.

How much of it was wasted on the Apple car.

1:47:26 - Leo Laporte
You know now that's dead, um, but they got to do it. They got to do it. It was kind of uh. Jason Snell uh picked up on an interesting exchange between the? Uh, an analyst from Wells Fargo and Tim Cook. The analyst asked him to explain Apple's results, which said that iPhone sales were up in China, with the independent research groups that said that Apple sales of the iPhone were falling apart in China. In fact, as you pointed out, apple said the iPhone's doing well in urban China. Cook said I can't address the data points, I can only address what our results are and you know we did accelerate. Last quarter An iPhone grew in mainland China. So that's what the results are. I can't bridge the numbers we didn't come up with To which Jason said that's about as savage a shade throwing as you'll get on an Apple analyst call.

1:48:15 - Andy Ihnatko
I don't know why they're on about this. It's not as though Apple just paid a half a billion dollars in penalties to to settle a shareholder lawsuit on exactly this issue, about them misguiding the market on the effects of the Chinese market on on iPhone sales. Oh wait, that actually did happen just a few months ago.

1:48:30 - Leo Laporte
Oh, ok, so you think that's why it's misremembering a little bit.

1:48:34 - Andy Ihnatko
I don't, I don't know it's yeah, I mean it's definitely going to be a topic of conversation. I would think that if he said that he knew that that was legally a defensible thing to say. So yeah, exactly, Wouldn't say it if it wasn't something that could be said and held to. But yeah, this was. He was feeling that I think Jason was right on the guides. I was reading the transcript, and it did.

1:49:06 - Mikah Sargent
It does come across differently than tim.

1:49:07 - Andy Ihnatko
Can you tell me about how the vision pro is helping to save lives with enterprise and in the operating theater?

1:49:11 - Leo Laporte
we're very glad to talk about that. Yeah, yeah, um, apple is mulling a potential partnership with rivian. Now I don't know what that means. Does it mean that that fancy new CarPlay display will be part of the electric pickup truck? Not sure, but DigiTime says Apple's electric vehicle ambitions may not be over. Apple is, according to the story, assessing the possibility of teaming up with a certain US EV startup, and Rivian is very likely candidate. I don't know, that's just a rumor, something to watch.

1:49:40 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, it's just a supply chain rumor, so it could it could be. It could easily be like these companies. They're trying to make themselves look a lot more valuable to investors, saying, hey look, we're in, we're in talks with Apple to to, uh, have a big deal. Although I don't know if this is a juice to this whatsoever, but it does sound familiar to like what went on before the release of the iPhone, where Apple was not going to get the concessions that they wanted to get from the number one dog in the market. They tried to get from Verizon. They didn't.

However, at&t, who had some work to do to get new signups, were definitely willing to do what Apple wanted them to do to make the product that Apple wanted made signups were definitely willing to do what Apple wanted them to do to make the product that Apple wanted made. So that would be interesting to say if Rivian wanted to do a partnership with Apple to elevate its stock. Excuse me, it's not just its actual stock, but its reputation and its desirability, especially now that there's a certain rust stain on the Tesla logo that a lot of people don't want to be involved in. I actually know two Tesla owners that did not when they bought a new car. They explicitly did not buy a Tesla because they did not want to be seen as someone driving Tesla. So they didn't want to support Elon Musk, even indirectly.

1:50:49 - Leo Laporte
We're seeing bumper stickers around town that says I bought this on Tesla's. I bought this before and we knew Elon was crazy. Things like that. By the way, speaking of rumors, john Gruber at Daring Fireball does give a pretty big props to Mark Ehrman's last minute M4 scoop. He says it might be the greatest rumor scoop in recent memory. He was right. He was right. It was an M4 iPad. Let's see what other. What other stories have we got to cover here? I'm going to wait until Jason's back next week to talk about this. He did a great article Actually, it was Dan Morin so maybe we don't have to wait. I don't know. Did you see the? And I can't play it because Apple will take us down.

1:51:32 - Mikah Sargent
I used this, I used this recently the precision finding.

1:51:36 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, jason's used it too. It's pretty cool. The idea is you can narrow it down and kind of beep, beep, beep, beep home in on your friends and it was a great ad. It's a very good ad. A bunch of Boba Fetts at a cosplaying at a Comic-Con and of course it's a little hard to find your Boba Fett in a group like that. It was very funny. I thought it was great. But what Dan Morin points out is there are a lot of Star Wars references in the ad. The Princess Leia's cell number is seen twice. The 1138 is seen as a pair of apartment building numbers. The Death Star trash compact number is a phone number on an ad and the bus number 3720 are the odds of successfully navigating an asteroid field.

1:52:29 - Mikah Sargent
never give me the odds. Um, I, I love so. For folks who don't know about this precision finding, it, it's basically like AirTag, but it is, as Leo pointed out, with the people that you know. So if you and the people that you know who have Find my are using an iPhone 15 or 15 Pro, then you are able to use precision finding and essentially it lets you narrow in using ultra wide band to the person that is around you. And it's very handy when you are in a location that has a lot of people in it or a lot of things in the way and you can't quite find who you're looking for. And, of course, yes, this was the perfect time to show it because you've got a bunch of people in Boba Fett masks. Which group is your group? And being able to narrow in on your group was great.

1:53:22 - Doc Rock
At NAB, because what we did was, when we were split up, we had a group that was sharing location for each day, and it was easy to find, because in some cases there'll be like a giveaway going on in one of the booths right, and so that booth is just swamped with bodies and I'm trying to find, you know, one of the booths right, and so that booth is just swamped with bodies and I'm trying to find you know, one of the people that was with and I had didn't realize that it was on, and then she had hers on and then I literally saw the. Okay, you're 30 feet away, or you know, getting closer, getting closer, and you can hear the bb beeps and, yeah, it was easy to spot. So, yeah, it does work. It works really well in a place like nab, where there's a metric thousand tons of signal flying around very helpful.

1:54:03 - Leo Laporte
Really, it worked even there. That's pretty cool. Yeah, that's pretty cool. Um, okay, I think that's. Let's see. Uh, I think that's everything. Oh, there was one story we didn't mention in the wall street journal. Apparently apple is considering building ai chips for data centers.

1:54:23 - Mikah Sargent
We I think we peripherally mentioned it at the beginning of the show um project, ac dc yeah, bloomberg's mark german had a lot to say about this, basically kind of saying, nah, really, nah, bruh, yeah, it was interesting nah bruh.

1:54:40 - Leo Laporte
Well, that's interesting that aaron tilly and yang jie are the authors in the wall street journal. A little battle amongst the rumor mongers in duper to play and in our vision pro segment this week none of you have. Do you have a vision pro doc rock? Yes, fully loaded, anything to say about it?

1:55:02 - Doc Rock
you, you're our segment this week I still use it like uh yeah, there's some things that I'm still, you know, waiting for.

1:55:10 - Leo Laporte
No, not exactly a sterling endorsement.

1:55:13 - Doc Rock
I still use it everyone, everyone swears that, oh people who got it. No one's really using it anymore, or whatever, but I use it all the time and, yes, I use it for absorbing my content. Yes, but primarily what I use it for is I use it to calm the brains down and I'll bust a DJ set up. I love it. It's so much fun and that that, you know, is my calming nature, and I did travel with it once. It looks really stupid on the plane, but it was really nice. Did you wear it the whole time? Almost the whole time. I had to stop to eat and do things like that, but I got two batteries, so it was just long enough for LA flight and thanks to Mikah.

1:55:51 - Leo Laporte
here is Mark Gurman's subtweet. That's what you call it right, mark?

1:55:56 - Mikah Sargent
Responding to the Wall Street Journal. Yeah, well, it's not exactly because there's no link to the Wall Street Journal. Yeah, when it's not exactly because there's no link to the thing or it's not a quote tweet. So that is a pretty good subtweet.

1:56:03 - Leo Laporte
He says on Apple and AI servers. Apple I don't know why, but in case you're interested, apple started a project around 2018 to develop server chips to offload those used by Google et cetera. That project was canceled. I don't believe Apple would make its own AI server chips because of cost, lack of a differentiator and the on-device nature of its LLM.

1:56:24 - Andy Ihnatko
So there, the only way that would make sense is if they really wanted to hit the privacy angle really, really hard and be able to say that hey look, even when your data leaves your Apple iPhone, it stays on Apple servers servers running on Apple chips, using a model that only we understand and we actually never be. Our privacy policy says that we never actually take a look at it. We'll never use it to train any other AI for any other reason, but that the the lead to manufacturing your own AI chips are competitive with what everyone else is going to have and also building out enough, enough compute farms with all the energy that's going to consume. What is that going to do to their green energy? And it promises yeah, I'll.

1:57:08 - Leo Laporte
I have no inside information, obviously, but I'll believe it when I actually see it ladies and gentlemen, let's pause the pause that refreshes, and when we come back, may I ask you doc rock, Mikah Sargent and Andy Ihnatko for your picks of the week? But don't go anywhere, Doc Rock, because our ad today is for Ecamm, the leading live streaming and video production studio built for mac. Now, I think I probably got introduced to Ecamm by you, doc rock, or maybe by you, Mikah sargent, because I know you use it and have used it for a long time, and I kind of thought when I first encountered it, and as I've used it more and more, I wish this had been around when we started TWiT 20 years ago. We wouldn't have had to buy all this expensive equipment. We could have just done it with Ecamm. Whether you're a beginner or an expert, Ecammm is here to elevate your video production. Ecamm is here to elevate your video production.

Ecamm Live includes support for multiple cameras yes, already, they've always had it and screen sharing. The live camera switcher sound familiar Also lets you direct your show in real time. You can add logos, titles, lower thirds graphics, share your screen, drop in video clips, clips, bring on interview guests, use a green screen. In short, everything you would ever want to do with a live video production and you could do it all on your mac. I was really pleased, doc, when they announced Ecamm for Zoom. In fact, I've been kind of saying for some time I wish Ecamm were available for zoom because I'd like all those features in my zoom calls, my zoom presentations that went into public beta testing just a couple of weeks ago. You can automatically send Ecamm Live's audio and video output right into a Zoom meeting or a Zoom webinar or a Zoom event. You can create individual participant audio and video recordings during a live stream or recording. You can add Zoom chat messages right into the meeting broadcast and recording as text overlays, and more.

Check it out Ecamm.com/zoom. This is huge. Join the thousands of worldwide entrepreneurs, marketing professionals, podcasters, educators, musicians and, yes, us, Mikah and I both use it and I bet Doc uses it once in a while I think he's even on the lower third right there and other Mac users who rely on Ecamm Live Daily. It's E-C-A-M-M. Get one month free when you subscribe to any of Ecamm's plans. Visit Ecamm.com/twit the promo code TWiT at checkout E-C-A-M-M isit Ecamm.com/twit. I know how I found out about Ecamm, doc. They did some other software first. Was it an iPhone?

1:59:50 - Doc Rock
Oh man, the first one would be Printopia back in the day, printopia when we used to cruise McRoy. You know that wall against the wall, so I would come to the backstage to listen to you and andy and gruber whoever's on the panel you guys are talking and at the end, because you're already back there, you would just go to that back wall and they would be back to a printopia phone view phone view.

That's the one I was thinking of a call recorder which we all used because that all recorder for sky and then, believe it or not, the first program way back in 99 was before when I chat was a thing. You had um camera tricks and so you had eyeglasses which would let you do crazy things with your webcam, when all we had was a little connectix, the little golf ball.

2:00:38 - Andy Ihnatko
Right, right.

2:00:41 - Doc Rock
So then they got Sherlocked by Apple, of course, because Apple added the little fish bowls and everything into, you know, ichat, so yeah been around since 1999.

2:00:50 - Leo Laporte
Really sharp programmers. That's how I found out about Ecamm, because I use PhoneView and I was going to the website and I saw this new thing that they were doing Ecamm and I think I've been recommending it ever since. Thank you, Ecammm, for supporting the show, and we support you right back, as we have for a long time. Ecamm Live. Find out more at Ecammmcom. Slash twit and what is your title at Ecamm? Are you their creator?

2:01:20 - Doc Rock
type Well, I was a community manager, but now I'm director of strategic partnerships.

2:01:25 - Leo Laporte
Whoa, oh, you got a big crush.

2:01:28 - Mikah Sargent
I think you need a bow tie now.

2:01:31 - Doc Rock
Finding places like Twid that will run it, oh nice, let my melon head be in the bottom quarter. But like we work closely with shore and road and you know some other companies now, because I just want our users to have the best experience and not provide gear that doesn't match, so I'm like, let me go make connections with companies directly and that's how we get e-cam for zoom.

2:01:52 - Leo Laporte
Well, give us a pick. Give us a pick here.

2:01:56 - Doc Rock
Oh, I got one for you Like here. Oh, I got one for you like listen, this one. I've been traveling a lot, like I mentioned recently, and maybe even if you weren't traveling, this might even be cool for the house. Uh, but you need a switch. I picked the barrel ax. It also has a lovely title, like the gl-mt3 oh my god, wasn't this what we recommended?

2:02:16 - Leo Laporte
sunday on on Ask the Tech Guys yes, oh my.

2:02:20 - Doc Rock
God, fam, I just traveled and I was in a hotel in Portsmouth, new Hampshire. I'm still getting used to your names.

2:02:29 - Andy Ihnatko
Muth, muth Muth.

2:02:31 - Doc Rock
Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

2:02:33 - Leo Laporte
When in doubt, drop a few vowels. It's always safe.

2:02:38 - Doc Rock
You pop it in and the capture page for bonvoy pops up, and then it gives me full access to that. But I'm not limited to now. Hotels are cute. Oh, you get two devices. I'm like you know, my shoes are wired. What the heck am I doing? Two devices, right? So this thing will let you get like 170 devices or something.

But what makes it cool is a lot of times your reach out isn't just to the internet, your reach out is the devices internally, right. So if you're connected to the hotel's Wi-Fi and you're trying to capture, say, photos from your camera to your iPad or from your iPad to your computer, you're going to be stuck at that speed by this guy connecting and it being Wi-Fi 6, the 15 Pro Max sending pictures to the iPad or the Sony sending pictures to the iPad is much quicker because everybody has Wi-Fi 6. You got your own little Wi-Fi 6. Trust me, the hotel is on Wi-Fi negative. So it's glory. It does all kinds of crazy things. It has wire guard, it has VPN. You can cascade VPN Like it's. It's really hard to describe, but it's quite amazing. You can even slap an SSD on the back of it. So we were all traveling together and I had this network and say our rooms were sort of consecutive. I can be like all right, fellas, we're going to take all these pictures at NAB. Everybody dropped the pictures into this one folder.

2:04:03 - Mikah Sargent
That's so cool. That's real nice.

2:04:04 - Doc Rock
Yeah, it's crazy. If you know WRT, you kind of know what it can do, but it's a dope implementation. It's super inexpensive and I fell in love with this thing.

2:04:16 - Leo Laporte
It is literally one of the coolest things. We thought this might be the answer to the question our caller had. Let me ask if this would work. He had a hotspot uh, from his. He was up in alaska from his carrier, but of course the hotspot only let him use one device, right. And so I said, well, maybe if you got this you would join the hotspot with this barrel and then it could be your router that talks to every other device in the house. You could use it as your home router 100%.

2:04:45 - Doc Rock
As a matter of fact, you could take the hotspot and plug it into the USB port and then it's even faster than its hotspot. Wireless to wireless is one thing, but most hotspots you can plug directly. You can tether the phone. So what you're actually able to do with this is plug in the external hotspot and connect to the hotel and bond. Yeah, you can do bonded. Uh-huh, you can run speedify directly on this guy because it's wrt wrt.

2:05:13 - Leo Laporte
I mean, yeah, that was one of the reasons I liked it.

2:05:16 - Doc Rock
It was it supported a wrt uh and for for 80 bucks, I mean whatever it's it's super good.

Now you're going to get confused because there's two models that are similar, kind of side by side. Um, the reason why I got this one as opposed to the slate is this one has the newest, up to uh 300 megabytes second, whereas the Slate is only 170. But either one of them would be good. They both have very similar things. It was something about the Wi-Fi 6 built in this one that just did it for me Very nice that's kind of a coincidence the Barrel AX from GLinet, and it's available on Amazon for $86.90.

2:06:01 - Leo Laporte
Good pick, and I'm glad that we got the answer right on. Ask the Tech Guys yeah, me too, Mikah, what's your pick this week?

2:06:10 - Mikah Sargent
So I wanted to share this one, because Instagram got me Leo.

2:06:14 - Leo Laporte
I was scrolling through Instagram.

2:06:16 - Mikah Sargent
Oh my God. And they must know that I have a dog that has a dual coat. So if you have a pet and your pet is a shedder, but particularly if they have a dual coat, which means they've got this kind of nice, smooth overcoat and then underneath is this soft, fluffy. Basically my one of my dogs, henry, his whole existence is just to make hair. I put food in and hair comes out. He's this tiny dog and yet within a week there's so much hair. It's ridiculous.

And so I think Instagram knows this, probably knows that I can make entire Henry's out of the hair that he produces in a week, and I came across what they called a steaming pet brush, but it is not actually steam. What it uses is a little piezo transducer to kind of mist, so it's like an atomizer and, by virtue of it being wet, it kind of helps to clump the hair that you were brushing out, and so you can charge this. It is micro USB, but who cares? And it takes a second to charge. You put water into it, you can even put um leave on essence.

Yeah, you can put some uh like essential oil into it, as long as you check that your pet is not allergic, of course. You brush and then it, it, it collects it all, instead of what happens where I, you know, I just be petting him and there would be hair coming off. This has been great, and I just had to share it because, again, instagram got me. I saw this on there and I immediately was like what? I need to have this thing. But I'm very happy with it, henry, not so much because he doesn't like the sound that the mister makes, but too bad because it's great that the mister makes, but too bad because it's great. And then I did want to mention the rock paper pencil that we talked about earlier from Astropad, so I did put it on the device.

2:08:09 - Leo Laporte
Oh, wow, you did that during the show. You put it on.

2:08:12 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, because it has a. Really the static cling thing is no joke, so I can easily.

They put kind of two spots on there where you can lift it, it yeah and so, yeah, they're like little tabs and then, well, now I'm making, there we go, so it comes off and I can go back on very easily and it just static clings on there, and the apple pencil tip that it comes with will be difficult to see with this, but it's essentially like a little metal nib, like a ballpoint pen tip. It says, yes, exactly, I am quite impressed with the kind of bite that it has. It's quite nice. So if you have been looking for an easy to remove way to take notes on your iPad, this might be what you're looking for. It's $40. But with that you get two of the little ballpoint pen nibs that I've found to be completely compatible. I was doing brush strokes earlier and everything. It was working great. And then the cover itself that has that static cling so that it can come off and go back on.

2:09:16 - Leo Laporte
So, yeah, astropads, rock Paper, rock paper pencil and they say they're going to have a version for the new iPads coming soon. So very nice. Thank you, Mikah.

2:09:25 - Andy Ihnatko
Two picks for the price of one, mr andy and I go pick of the week uh, I've been experimenting with, like ambient sound apps, this kind of thing where, like the kind of things that will basically all it plays is like rain sounds, and they and all these different apps have all kinds of different colorful ways to describe it. Oh, it's Amazon rainforest at the, at the at the Neolithic age, and spring barley field, like it's just wheat wind weeping through wheat, wheat fields of wheat, breath of lavender Wheat.

2:09:57 - Mikah Sargent
fields of wheat Breath of lavender.

2:09:58 - Doc Rock
I was going to say breath of lavender.

2:10:01 - Andy Ihnatko
Yes, and I've actually been kind of liking them. I've started using it on my smart speaker because it has those features built in, and I'm looking at them on different mobile apps. I've been liking an app called Portal. You can find it at portalapp and this is super, super fancy, super, super Mac-like, super, super, like you know, hippie crunchy sort of thing, where it has not only like about 50 different environments, but also like ultra HD, like video of the wheat field and of the rainforest. It'll actually even have some of them are in spatial audio. It'll connect to like your smart lighting so that, like, while you're enjoying the thunderstorm, like the lighting will change to like a thunderstormy sort of lighting, I don't know. And I find it really, really useful, not only for getting to sleep, because it masks like a house, makes little bits of noises that might, as you're really just right on the precipice, like suddenly jolt you up and now you can't, like you just lost a half hour of sleep time. Even all that sort of stuff out. I have a little bit of tinnitus in one of my ears and that doesn't distract anymore. It's also really good for focus when you're working because, again, sometimes some noise is good. I can't listen to music while I'm really immersed in work because it will become sort of a distraction, but I do find that having some sort of ambient noise going does help to keep me focused. It lets me hear what's going on in my environment without every little detail. What's going on in the street outside affecting my environment, Like I don't know roofers, like ripping up a roof, like right across the street while I'm trying to podcast. You can also mix it into like whatever your standard Mac audio is, so you can still like have audio alerts, you can still have all this sort of stuff. It's really pretty good.

It comes now the the. The gotcha here is that it comes with six for free. They want you to sign up for like the bone, the extra crunchy, extra like hippie sort of arrangements. Those are like 10 bucks a month or like 50 bucks over the course of the year. I'm not a big enough fan for it as somebody who just canceled, like most of them. I just canceled like my Apple One plan, because 40 bucks for the only thing that I was actually using was the two terabytes of iCloud storage. It's a hard sell for 10 bucks for these ambient sort of sounds for me. Your mileage might be different, but you do get six that are actually very, very useful and will at least give you some idea of is this making me more productive.

To set a sleep timer, set a task or a focus timer, have the stuff going into my headphones or into my, my smart speakers? Uh, it does support airplay, so you don't have to just use spatial audio on your on your headphones. Give it a try. If you don't use this, give it another app a try. I like this one because the level of polish is pretty, pretty high. Uh, this is.

2:12:54 - Leo Laporte
You have a kind of oceany is this one the bollock, bollock mines in the uk? And oceany sound because we like to have oceans while we sleep oh, let's see, let's see the they've got amadablam the mines being ocean mines. It's the I don't think the batallic mines in the uk.

2:13:12 - Andy Ihnatko
I don't think you get. I don't think you get ocean. You get amazon thunderstorm from bra, brazil. You get Redwood.

2:13:19 - Mikah Sargent
National you get rocks.

2:13:20 - Leo Laporte
You got to jump.

2:13:24 - Andy Ihnatko
Spring on chorus.

2:13:27 - Leo Laporte
I sleep well in that kind of chain gang it is portalapp P-O-R-T-A-Lapp. Thank you very much.

2:13:39 - Andy Ihnatko
Some of these apps are pretty weird. I will say this the one that I use on my Android phone has so many. One of them includes library, one of them includes coffee shop. So if you just want the ambient noise of people making noise around you, if you're lonely, if that's what's going to do it for you, they're not going to judge. They'll give you what will help.

2:13:58 - Leo Laporte
Well, we often put sleep sounds on our HomePod the big HomePods which are on the left and the right of our bed in the house and it's very relaxing and stuff Also as we travel. We do spatial too, which is very cool. I'm going to try this. This is good Portalapp. Thank you for the recommendation and thank you Mac and iOS. Mac and iOS Okay, thank you for the recommendation, and thank you mac and ios mac and ios okay, thank you. Uh, mr dr rockter. Uh, uh, everybody knows better, knows him better as a sean brought us. No, wait a minute, that's snoop dog. Uh, doc rock joins. Uh, joins us whenever we can get uh space form and in this case, jason snell. Dropping out was a perfect time to get him YouTubecom, slash, docrock and, of course, at Ecamm, anything you want to plug. What are you up to these days? Anything new and different.

2:14:50 - Doc Rock
Man honestly just been working. I am going to be releasing my own physical product pretty soon, but I will tell you in about maybe three weeks to a month when I get back from Chicago.

2:15:01 - Leo Laporte
We'll get you back on then. That's great.

2:15:05 - Doc Rock
Andy what kind of pizza I should get when I'm in Chicago. Oh, I mean lasagna, because that's what you guys make. It's not really pizza, as in New York.

2:15:11 - Andy Ihnatko
Bread bowl.

2:15:14 - Doc Rock
But yeah, so I'll let you know. It's very close. I'm just in my last yelling back and forth with the manufacturer, but yeah, it's going to be so exciting.

2:15:22 - Leo Laporte
That's fantastic Congratulations, thank you. Always great to see you. Thank you, doc. Thanks to Michael Sargent too. Michael, he was just on with iOS Today. If you're a club member, you can listen to that right now. If you're a club member, you can see it even right now. If you're a club member, you can see it even right now. Actually, you don't have to be a club member to listen, just to see it. The video is for the club and he'll be back tomorrow, day after tomorrow for tech news weekly and, of course, with us, the tech guys on sunday, and I am going to be back soon with my own misting pet brush that I'll be launching.

Oh shoot, I just told you the Mikah sergeant misting pet brush, and I have Mikah, something you're very interested in. I was going to make it my pick, but I'll. We're running out of time so I'll save it for uh, for, ask the tech guys.

This is the just came out the new kobo libra to color which is really uh interesting, it's exciting, it's uh, you know, look, I mean, you know how color, how color is on an e-ink screen. It's not super bright. But let me go back to my books, and I have some comics on here I could show so you get an idea of what kind of a comic would look like. It is color. I mean that's kind of cool, right, it's color, yeah.

Yeah, and all I wanted, as we talked about, was just a differentiator between you know one thing and another, and that, I feel is provided, and if you don't want to get an iPad and the expensive pencil, for a lot less you could get the Kobo and its pencil, which allows you to annotate, draw, create notebooks. It even has text recognition, which is kind of cool. So I feel like this is an interesting product you might want to take a look at. But we'll do a full review on Ask the Tech Guys on Sunday. But this just came out this week and it's a good alternative. Buy this instead of the expensive iPad. You'll be so much happier. Don't think so, but your bank will thank. Your bank will thank you, that's for sure. Uh, thank you, andy and ako gbh boston. You were on last week.

Uh, yep, that's available on the archives right go to wgbhnews.org to listen to it.

2:17:36 - Andy Ihnatko
Uh, listen to whenever you want. You can also go. Go to the WGBH News channel on YouTube, because we went from the Boston Public Library awesome video studios so you get to see me in my respectable geek cosplay, as I like to refer to it.

2:17:51 - Leo Laporte
Great, we'll see you next week. Jason will be back, I think Alex will too, for another MacBreak Weekly. We thank our club members for making this show possible. Without you, I don't know if we'd be able to keep the lights on here at the Brick House Studios. We're at this point now where the club is really paying pretty much the entire salary for all of our staff members, and so we thank you very much, club members. If you're not a member seven bucks a month great benefits. Ad-free a month great benefits. Ad free versions of all the shows, video of all the shows, even the ones that are audio only in public.

We also have great events. In fact, tomorrow or day after tomorrow, I'm making a brisket and you're invited over to the Laporte house because we're going to do a watch party of Fritz Lang's 1927 classic silent film Metropolis, which really was a precursor for a lot of modern sci-fi, and it'll be a lot of fun we're gonna have. I'm gonna make queso. I the only reason I'm making queso is because Lisa and Debi went went toCcostco yesterday and bought a bag of tortilla chips bigger than me, and so we gotta have something to dip it in. So I'll make some queso for that to go with the brisket, and then I'm going to make O Docta's macaroni and cheese.

So come on over and if you can't, join us in the club because we'll stream it live in the Club TWiT Discord that's another benefit. Seven bucks a month, that's all it is. twit.tv/clubtwit. Thanks to our talented team for making this possible. Thanks to you for watching. It is now, I am sorry to say, my sad and solemn duty to tell you get back to work. Break time is over. We'll see you next time.