MacBreak Weekly 923 Transcript

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

0:00:00 - Leo Laporte
It's time for Mac Break Weekly. Andy's here, Jason's here. The return of Alex Lindsay he's got a mayonnaise pick coming up. We'll also talk about, well, what Apple news there is. There's quite a few rumors of flying as we get ready for WWDC in a couple of weeks. We'll talk about what we can expect with iOS 18 and Mac OS 15 and all those new AI features, maybe a new set of AirPod Max coming out this year, some new content for your Vision Pro in our hotly awaited Vision Pro segment, and will Apple rotate the Apple logo on the back of the iPad man? That's the biggest story of the week. It's all coming up next on MacBreak Weekly

0:00:40 - VO
Podcasts you love. From people you trust. This. Is TWiT.

0:00:58 - Leo Laporte
This is MacBreak Weekly, episode 923. Recorded Tuesday, may 28th 2024. Emotional Support Leo. It's time for MacBreak Weekly, the show where we cover the latest Apple news, of which there will be quite a bit next week. Jason Snell is here from sixcolors.com. Hi, Jason. Hi Leo, what's?

0:01:22 - Jason Snell
happening? Is anything happening next week?

0:01:23 - Leo Laporte
Actually it's not even next week. We've got two weeks, don't we?

0:01:26 - VO
Sorry to break it to you. Yeah, bad news. Yeah.

0:01:28 - Leo Laporte
It's two weeks. Two weeks. There's lots of rumors. We'll cover the rumors today.

0:01:32 - VO
I hate rumors, but what else are you going to do?

0:01:34 - Leo Laporte
right, what else?

0:01:47 - Andy Ihnatko
What else are you in the library? Yeah, it's, it's not, it's not, it's not this nice outside, it's nice to have like a week, at least at least one day a week I take a nice walk outside. I'm in air conditioning, I'm in a very clean space. I don't have to clean myself so yeah, my brain is my brain is reacting well to this.

0:01:57 - Leo Laporte
Plus, I know they're repaving your apartment. So you know, you know you don't want to be there when they're actually there was.

0:02:04 - Andy Ihnatko
There was Jack hammering yesterday, and two days earlier there was some sort of like a half hour of marching bands and cannons. Oh, of course, it's the world famous May 28th day in beautiful New England.

0:02:23 - Leo Laporte
Also, here he's back, two gone. We missed you. Alex lindsey, if you have anything to talk about that happened the last two weeks that we didn't get to talk to you about, you could just injure, interject that.

0:02:34 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, I think I'm sure it was covered we'll. I'm sure things will come up. It was all covered, baby.

0:02:39 - Andy Ihnatko
It was all so I so missed your commentary on the google, on the technical aspects of the google IO live stream. I was like, oh, alex is going to have so much to say about an hour and 52 minutes.

0:02:52 - Alex Lindsay
What'd you think? You know, I think that I think that the that's a it's a really challenging space to stream from, shoreline, and you know. So I think that there's it's it's really it's a really hard, hard place to to stream from. So, um, you know, I think that the the hardest part there is still. I just think that doing these on stage doesn't I mean, regardless of all the technical things and all the other bits and pieces, doing it on stage doesn't. I just don't know if it works anymore.

Like I keep on watching people's presentations and I just go. I don't know if I really want to watch this. You know I skipped. You're trying to skip through to the things that make sense. You're trying to skip through and I think that in doing it live creates all this environment where a lot of things can go wrong. You know, and and, uh, you know those are the. I think that's the challenge. I thought that the, you know I I think they went a little goofier than normal, you know, for some of the stuff that they did there and I don't know I think that that's still trying to make it something that you know that I think I just think that era, you know we did these keynotes because we didn't have HD. Like you know, like we did, you know, like we just remember that we did the keynotes because we didn't have video that was good enough to do it.

0:04:01 - Andy Ihnatko
Now we are forcing keynotes to still stay, stay around long after they were needed, you know and I think that that's the thing one of the most dramatic things about watching like historic keynotes like the, the iphone keynote, the ipad keynote is wow, the fonts on those slides are enormous, right well, and they should stay enormous to my, in my opinion.

0:04:20 - Alex Lindsay
I mean the, the hard part, like if someone says like well, I'm always like, well, you should be careful about putting text on the screen. And they're like what do you mean? I'm like, well, don't have it, say anything that you're saying, like it's there to support you, not to say it for you. And then the other thing is is that you should think about 20 words and that's about it. Like if you, you know the, they should be mile markers, not data. Yeah, yeah, like they're there to support you visually while you're talking. That's what, that's what's great about them. As soon as they become something other than supporting you while you're talking, like supporting your ideas, then you've gone too far. But I don't think you know, most of these big companies have a pretty good team that puts those together. But again, I think that these presentations we're in that kind of that time we get a spat of presentations, um, that we won't probably have in two weeks is. I just don't know if it makes any sense anymore I really like to actually open ai's presentation.

I thought that was very I just felt like it felt very forced. I thought I thought it was, I thought it was okay. It has this kind of dead space thing that happens. You know they have to do it live because it's ai.

0:05:22 - Leo Laporte
If, if they don't do it live, they're going to get the same accusations Google got when they faked an AI demo of a Gemini Not most recently, but the previous AI demo. So I think they almost had to do it live just to show that they were live. They were doing it live. I like live. I know you hate live. I think we disagree on that, but that's not the big story, that's my business.

0:05:45 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, live. I think we disagree on that. But that's not the big story, that's my business. Yeah, that's true.

0:05:48 - Leo Laporte
I just don't think present, I just don't presenting my product. Did you see the canva live?

0:05:51 - Alex Lindsay
rap? I didn't see it. I saw the, I saw the, I saw that they did a live thing, and then I just looked for the highlights and then I moved on.

0:05:57 - Leo Laporte
You know, it's I think that let me, let me just play, because if you didn't do, you guys did. You see it? Basically, it's Hamilton. It's Hamilton, but it's all about Canva. I'll just play a few seconds. Oh, is it not going to play? It's not going to play. Can you play it, I think? Oh, here it is.

0:06:20 - VO
Can we just take a minute to recap? Let's do it, let's do it, let's do it.

0:06:35 - Leo Laporte
You can redesign your work. Canva got that. It actually gets good in a moment, because here she comes from the audience. Turn it up a little bit. Is it me, who is you A CIO?

0:06:44 - Alex Lindsay
from an enterprise team and I have some doubts. The audience Turn it up a little bit, is it me? But what about me? Who is you? A CIO from an enterprise team? And I have some doubts. Security, that's right Now.

0:06:53 - Leo Laporte
That's a live performance and Alex that's. But can you meet the demands of a global machine? Wouldn't be any point in doing that.

0:07:01 - Alex Lindsay
No, there wouldn't be. There wouldn't be any point in doing that Canned. No, there wouldn't be. There wouldn't be any point in doing that.

0:07:06 - Leo Laporte
Canned oh, wait, I mean canned oh, in general, in general. You know they got a lot of hate for that.

0:07:11 - Alex Lindsay
I liked it.

0:07:14 - Leo Laporte
Honestly, I've always wanted to do a keynote like that Rap. Maybe that's just my fake fan. Oh wait, a minute, let me stop that. I guess I would say that Australian TV comedy is hard.

0:07:25 - Alex Lindsay
Yes, you really should never nail the landing. Yeah, perfectly, or you should never do it.

0:07:33 - Leo Laporte
All right, but that's not the big story of the week. Really, the big story, the big Apple story of the week, is that they might change the orientation of the Apple on the back of the iPad.

0:07:43 - Alex Lindsay
That turned into quite a. Thing.

0:07:55 - Leo Laporte
So two designers gave an interview with a French thing in which they talked about that's in Spanish. Maybe the people who wrote this article didn't understand the difference between French and Spanish.

That's a Google Translate link. Oh, wait a minute. El iPad es una hora de ver a magica, but then il pourrait bientôt y avoir un changement. I don't know, there's a mixture of maybe we're in Basque country, I don't know what's going on El Apple Design Studio un grande espacio de colaboración. I? I don't know, that's very good. Oh, I see what you're saying. They translated english into spanish. No, here we go. No, but thank you, google, for really screwing that up. So it's a french article that they translated into spanish for me yeah, I'm sorry.

0:08:43 - Andy Ihnatko
Portability is at the heart of the iPad experience, says Molly Anderson, who's one of the designers, the fun part of this and this is where they're considering rotating the Apple logo so that it faces the same way as the MacBook. So you're using it landscape mode. You could kind of sense there are two actual designers and one member of marketing and when you look at this paragraph-long quote, you sense the part in which she's saying that, where the you sense the part where the PR person just jumps in because she's saying, yeah, it's something we think about. It's something that the interviewer asked like, do you think about, like, rotating the Apple logo? He said well, you know, it's something we consider, we might do that in the future. And then the marketing person jumps in and says but we think it works great in landscape too. I noticed how well FaceTime works in portrait mode.

0:09:32 - Jason Snell
Because Apple has this reflex which is never discuss anything except the products that you're selling and there's no point in talking about anything that is not for sale.

And so when somebody asks a forward-looking question like that, it's just their policy and you know I understand why they do it. But I feel like this is one of the dumbest examples of that policy. I mean, you could even call it out and say look, anything is possible in the future, but people use it both ways. You could say the keyboard, when it's in there, that logo is obviously oriented the right way, but it can be oriented both and you can just move on. But they are so locked down now that, basically, when you talk to an Apple PR person, there is no past, there is no future and there's only the present, which is the product that they're selling, and that's it. And like I get the discipline, I appreciate their discipline, I get why they do it I do find it makes them sound like they're delusional sometimes where it's like what the future does, but the flow of time, the arrow of time, moves forward.

All science suggests that the future will come, surely. And plus it plays into that whole idea that Apple products aren't made and there aren't the sum of a lot of decisions. They're sort of magical things that sprung from a black box. And I think my favorite disclosures are when people are willing to say sure, we think about this stuff and we work really hard at it, right, but maybe you need a more senior person who is not going to get fired for going off the script to have a conversation like that, because I've absolutely had conversations with people who have appeared in Apple keynote videos who have given that extra bit of information about sort of like not the future, but like the decisions they made and the debates that they had and interviews like this. It's just like all you're ever going to tell me is what is on the product sheet and so I don't even know why I'm here.

0:11:29 - Leo Laporte
In a way, this applies back to our previous conversation. This is the difference between precisely pre-recorded, so everything is absolutely controlled, and the live presentation, where there's a little bit of risk.

0:11:39 - Alex Lindsay
Go ahead, alex well, and I think that I've worked with a lot of companies that have people who are basically press facing you know, like you know and people who and most of the company is not press facing. So, unless you go through training and you're told what to say and how to say it, you're not going to get to talk to any press. And, and the thing is, I think what we saw here also was someone who is in marketing, who's not the top of marketing they're not. They're not, they're not being interviewed by the New York Times. That is making a reflex decision based on what's happening in real time, and so I think that they probably could have just let. It would have gotten a lot less attention if they hadn't jumped in, but I think that. So I think that it was probably, in real time, not the best decision.

I think that it's hard, though, because it's, I think, in the in, when you're talking about it, when you're making a set of rules for the company.

It's one thing when Craig Federini says it and another thing when someone else at Apple says it. Where do you draw the line as to who can talk about the future and who can't? Because Apple does exist in the offices five years in the future, like they're. You know like they're talking about things and it's very easy to not know where the present is if you're not careful. You know, because there's things that have been you've been talking about for four or five years that seem obvious, and then you say them and no one else has seen that before or heard about it. So I think that that's the that's always.

The challenge for a lot of these engineers is because the engineers and designers and so on and so forth is that they're living so far into the future. There's been times when I've had conversations with folks, not necessarily at Apple but at other ones, where they'll say well, of course, but that's what this would do, and they say it and as it comes out of their mouth you can tell that they said something that doesn't exist yet you know, and sets off a whole slew of conversation, and I think that's the thing that we used to have.

There was an engineer at an electric image, this little company that used to make the 3D software, and he was very prone that after he had a couple drinks he would tell us what the next two years was. And we'd sit there we called it beer boarding because we would just sit there and buy beers until we knew what was going on. So I think that's the other side of it, is you do want people to be because there's a lot of things you're going to cancel, you're not going to go that direction, you're not going to do those things, and now everyone's like well, then people are disappointed, yeah.

0:13:48 - Leo Laporte
Then you have unfulfilled expectations. It doesn't make sense. They rotate it. They put the camera on the top. That would be the time to rotate it, to be honest.

0:13:56 - Jason Snell
Yeah, I do wonder what kind of holy war is going on Apple? Where they're the horizontals and the verticals, and they fight and they won. The horizontals won the camera war, but the verticals took solace in the fact that the Apple logo was going to remain oriented the other way.

0:14:12 - Leo Laporte
Does anybody use it in portrait mode?

0:14:14 - Andy Ihnatko
I mean, that's not a good Only when I'm reading comics. When you're reading comics, I play it when I'm playing Marvel Snap.

0:14:20 - Jason Snell
That's about it, yep.

0:14:23 - Alex Lindsay
I use it, I, I, I. It's in a keyboard all the time, in in landscape, you know yeah, I do the, I would do the direct quote.

0:14:31 - Andy Ihnatko
Uh, ask about like rotating the apple logo. Why is it? Why isn't displayed vertically? And here molly anderson says I think it could change. I don't think it's set in stone, we are thinking about it. The large ipad is a product that is used in landscape mode but we use, excuse me, in portrait mode, but we we use it more and more in landscape mode. We cannot say that it is fixed and then the pr person leaps and says oh yeah, but the ipad is used in all directions and is used vertically for facetime applications.

0:14:57 - Leo Laporte
So you know, I use my mini in portrait mode all the time. I use my phone in portrait mode. I think it's tied to the size of the device. Your iPad Pro or your iPad Air is so big that you really just want to have it in landscape mode, I think. Anyway, who cares? That's probably the real reason they want to talk about. It is all of the ink spent on oh, which way should it go, and especially two weeks before you have WWDC, where there's nothing else to talk about.

0:15:23 - Andy Ihnatko
And Jason's right. I don't think this would be a story if not for the fact that we never get this sort of stuff. I mean, other companies aren't quite so controlling about it. If Google or any other company said something like this, it wouldn't be huge news. Well, of course they're thinking about it. Why would they not be thinking about it? It would be weird if they were asked the direct question and said about it. It would be weird if they didn't like mention. If they were asked the direct question and said gee, honestly, I can say, I can say authoritatively that we have never even considered rotating at 90 degrees and putting a logo in a different place, implying that there's a right way or a wrong way to hold this. Um, I mean, and it is, it's gotten harder over the over the years. Uh, sometimes it was. At times it gets. I don't know if, if Jason's ever done this, but sometimes it's like a game of password where it's not so much that or at least a few years ago, it's not so much that they are absolutely refusing to go off script for any reason.

You don't say in the future. You don't say are you planning this? You don't actually. You don't actually. You faint towards it. You ask a lateral question. They might give you a yes or no about that. I had a briefing once about the developer possibilities of a certain feature and it was that comical where in 15, it's like we're, it's like we're on the different sides of a game show like console, it like we're on the different sides of a game show like console, and it was like balloon rope, helium crash and oh, yeah, yeah, hindenburg. Yes, yeah, it is. They were able to confirm that. Yes, that yes, the thing that I'm hypothesizing can be done, can be done.

0:17:02 - Jason Snell
It happens occasionally, but I think most of the time when you try to ask them something now, they're so trained and so disciplined that all you just get is a restatement of something that's in the press release, even if that's not what you asked about.

There was a time when they were a little more open, but they have really locked it down and I mean, I understand why. I understand that they are one of the biggest companies in the world and that literally anything like what just happened will be taken and blown up into a whole story and take the focus off of what they want to talk about, and so that they're incredibly disciplined At the same time. The reason that happens is because they never give you anything to glean anything from Right Like and I'm a big advocate for this and I have had this conversation with people at Apple PR before which is making your people who work on your products human beings and talking about how hard they worked and the decisions they had to make and the choices they made to make the product. I think makes Apple look better, and makes the product look better because it makes the product seem like it's the result of a very careful thought.

0:18:04 - Leo Laporte
But that's not magical, jason, that's not magical.

0:18:06 - VO
And this is where they fight against the wizards the steve jobs.

0:18:10 - Jason Snell
It's a magic thing that came out of a black box kind of approach, but I I think it's a mistake. I think that steve loved it because he was the wizard, right, um, but now you, it's not the case. And I think that apple actually does benefit when they talk about it and occasionally I will get that from somebody and I love it when that happens. But other times they just stay on message and and you know, honestly, the people who are talking to the French website or whatever you know, probably not the people who have given any latitude to go off.

0:18:38 - Leo Laporte
But surely they would have been briefed. Like you know, cause they are the design team, they probably know a lot of stuff about the future. They would have been told now, whatever.

0:18:44 - Jason Snell
And by the way, there was a marketing person, and the more you know, the harder, the more you know. Yeah, there's always a PR handler for any executive or any interview of any kind.

0:18:53 - Leo Laporte
Really, even for like a Schiller or a Cook, they have somebody, yeah, oh yeah, I mean I had it for Eddie Q.

0:18:58 - Jason Snell
I mean Eddie Q ignored them.

0:18:59 - VO
But he had a person there. He completely in there. He completely ignores the difference but.

0:19:03 - Jason Snell
But I think the more you know, the worse. It is right, because you don't know what you're even disclosed on, so you can't even hint at it. And I I definitely the designers know way more than they can let on. I've had that with the chip people too, where, like they're working five years out and they, they like they don't want to misstep because they know so much about what they can't talk about that they end up being even more locked down sometimes.

0:19:25 - Leo Laporte
Jason, what year are we in, so I know what processor I could talk about.

0:19:28 - Jason Snell
I swear, leo. I just was talking to them about the M4 and I know for a fact that they're all sitting there going God. This is what I. I don't remember what we did four years ago.

0:19:39 - Leo Laporte
It's funny because I and one of the reasons I am exactly the opposite. We have no secrets here, as everybody knows. We tell them everything, including our balance sheet and everything, because I cannot be held responsible for what I know and don't know, and there's no handler, although Lisa's just down the hall and will come screaming down the hall if I say something. But I just find it easier to be completely forthright and honest, because I don't want to remember what I can tell you and not and it feels a little disingenuous, it feels a little, I don't know, dishonest to not be fully forthright. No, we're just podcasters, we're not making magic gadgets. But it's the same thing with live and recorded. As you know, everything we do is live. For the same reason, I just like the honesty of it.

0:20:27 - Andy Ihnatko
But the part of it that annoys me is that Apple loves the magic, as Jason said the magic, but also the surprise, the big reveal and like okay, but we're not kids and this is not December 23rd. It's like we are people who are trying to figure out. I really, really, really would like to buy a new iPad, but it's January and I've heard things that we're going to get new ones in a couple of months. I'll feel stupid if I spend $1,800 only to know that there's going to be a brand new one in a month. Not that they should make their roadmap public to everybody, but there are times when we no, we knew that, we knew, we anticipated there was a processor upgrade coming up. I spoiled the surprise and not being stuck with like a two year old iPad.

0:21:14 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, I think the challenge really is that you have a lot of stock value that's connected to things and that affects employees and everybody else and everything else, and so I think that there's a certain level of and I think that marketing marketing person jumping in was also it's their cue to tell the person that's talking like, hey, you're now in a dangerous place. I'm going to correct you right now, but if I stepped in and talked, that's the time for you to stop talking. You know and and that's you know, and so I think that that was. It wasn't so much that they gave anything up there, but they're they could have been on the precipice of, you know, wandering off the field and, and I think that it's so hard, like to have an interview, um, uh, you know, I tend not to want to be interviewed about anything that I can't talk about, because I don't, because I don't want to, because I just don't remember what, what it's really hard to remember, what's what you know like, as leo said, and that's why I make no attempt.

0:22:03 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, in the interest of honesty, we're going to take a break. Come back and talk about the second biggest Apple story of the week Lego. Oh, it could be Lego. It could be tinnitus, it could be the top 100 albums of all time. You never know. You never know. Fight, fight, fight, fight, fight.

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Check it out Kolide K-O-L-I-D-E.com/macbreak to learn more and watch the demo today. That's Kolide K-O-L-I-D-E.com/macbreak. Thank you, Kolide. We appreciate the support for MacBreak Weekly. All right, next big story. Oh, it's so many choices. You know what? Maybe we'll do the AI thing. Gurman's been busy, gurman's been very busy. We'll do the Mark. This is the Mark Gurman segment. Oh boy, AirPods Max 2. Marky says they're coming this year, in 2024, but he says don't expect a lot of changes. Maybe the USB-C port. That's it.

0:24:33 - Jason Snell
Yeah, this is in the context of those new Sonos headphones that are coming out, yeah, and he says, basically, they look good, they sound good, they look like they're gonna be like cheaper than apples and uh, you know, and what's apple gonna do? And it sounds like apple's gonna release a version of the AirPods max that's probably essentially unchanged, other than usbc port instead of lightning port, which, if so, is again. It's every now and then it happens with one of these apple products where we're like why do you have this product if you will not make an effort to keep it updated?

0:25:10 - Leo Laporte
Why are they worried about Sonos Ace? I mean, apple has the Beats brands has some very good headphones. There are many, many, many over-the-ear headphones manufacturers that are better than either Apple or Sonos. I'm not sure why the Sonos Ace coming out would put pressure on Apple more than anything else.

0:25:27 - Jason Snell
I don't know if he said it puts pressure on them. I think he said that here's what Sonos is doing, and if you're asking me about a similar product, the AirPods Max, I can tell you don't expect big changes.

0:25:38 - Leo Laporte
I think that's all he's trying to say there the Aces look a lot like the AirPods Pro Max and they're roughly. They're 450 bucks. Is that not the same price as the Max? Yeah?

0:25:48 - Jason Snell
I don't know, they only come in two. They're like they're 550. No, it's 550.

0:25:53 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, they're 100 bucks more. Yeah, yeah, yeah, these look very, very similar. They do, but do they have the removable ear cups? Who cares, I don't know. They do have a Type-C adapter. I think those are my last lightning port devices. Oh, I have an Apple TV remote. The last two things that need lightning, charging, and then it's over. So it makes sense for Apple to do that.

And then it's over. So it makes sense for Apple to do that. Gurman also says and we've been hearing everybody say this that iOS 18, which Apple will announce on June 7th, will be very AI-focused. He says they have made the deal with OpenAI, that that deal is now. We knew that they were close. He says that Apple has made the deal with OpenAI. So that makes sense. We knew that they were close. He says that Apple has made the deal with OpenAI. So Scarlett Johansson will not be in your iPhone, but something somewhat similar maybe, since ScarJo declined. But they're also still talking with Google, so that you have a choice. Yeah, that makes sense. What Apple wants to do is really have a chat bot in its in the phone. I mean, right now, I can press my action button and and I get you know open ai's chat gpt launching lots of different ways for that to go, though right there's.

0:27:16 - Jason Snell
There could be an improved siri that is conversational and uses good data sources and does a lot of things that people want to do with that kind of a device that aren't the more open-ended things you get from a chatbot. They could also potentially have a chatbot that they used for things on the back end that currently they have to punt to a web browser. They could also have an API or have a system setting that integrated third-party chatbots plural as the user chooses, party chatbots plural as the user chooses or even just an app API where the chatbot apps could connect into some sort of a system, service or shortcuts or whatever Like. There are a lot of different ways for them to slice it, but it does sound like they're. The reason that they have made a deal with OpenAI, according to Gurman, and have been talking to Google is to just sort of like backstop.

I think it's going to be a backstop against what Apple is building, because they know that for some people, ai means chatbot, which is look, I know that that's where the hype is, but chatbot is not all there is to AI and chatbots have so many issues about them that if Apple could build a whole bunch of other great AI features, maybe they would end up in a pretty decent position. The problem is that they are also going to be judged on things like a chatbot that Apple has poo-pooed up to, you know, maybe the last year. So they need kind of need a backstop, even if they just say and we've added the APIs for OpenAI and then moved on for now, well and I think it's going to be interesting, given that it's wwc um, what they're going to do with xcode and and whether they're going to.

0:28:47 - Alex Lindsay
You know, do a lot of you know co-pilot, like things in xcode where you can put those together? I wasn't.

I was kind of like yes it sounds like that and that will be pretty transformational for a lot of. I was surprised, I, I, I, uh. I saw someone tweet this out so I was like, oh, I, oh, I got to try this. And so I went to chat GPT and I said give me a full spec for Tetris, you know, for the Tetris game. And it gave me, you know, the full specification. I said, based on that specification, give me a web-based Tetris game, just write one. And it wrote it. And it said take this and copy it into a file that you call indexhtml. Take this and put it into a file that you call Tetrisjs. And it just did all the things that I needed to do and I had a Tetris game that I could play on my. And then I said now write that in Swift. And it just wrote it and it explained to me step-by-step how to put it into Xcode.

I haven't gotten around to putting it in Xcode, but it said like this is the file type you'll open and then you'll do this, then cut and paste this in here, and I think that just the ease of that, of you know creating something again, it's not something that you could release, but it's something that like to think about how it's going to do it.

It's something that's kind of good for brainstorming. I think that for for a lot of and and there's like little things that it might be able to figure out how to do, like turns out, drawing lines like this smoothly took a long time, like for us to figure out how to do that. Ai might be a little faster at just trying to make sure, like I'm seeing, segmenting, how do I get rid of that? And there's a lot of drawing maps that have segmenting because the the, the person writing the code, doesn't know how to how to get that, get rid of that, and, you know, dealing with sampling and so on and so forth, and so those are the kind of things I think that that AI could help with a lot. On Xcode, given that it's WWDC that they're going to be talking about this, but even simple things are very, very great.

0:30:29 - Andy Ihnatko
I needed to get some quotes out of a timestamped transcript last week and I was about to go into BBEdit and do a regex or just do it manually, and then I said wait a minute, let me just paste this into Gemini and say hi, please format this as a single paragraph, remove all the timestamps, and there are also some places where there are two words that aren't separated by space that should be. And then it just simply reformatted it exactly as I wanted and that was it. So there are so many problems with AI is that the things that it does well are exceptionally good and there's not a lot of things that it does exceptionally well right now Do you think that, alex, that that's what programmers expect?

0:31:11 - Leo Laporte
even on the Mac platform, they expect to have an AI, because, you know, copilot on GitHub is very popular. Coders on. Windows, I think for sure expect Copilot, but not on the Mac so much.

0:31:26 - Alex Lindsay
I've talked to developers that are using ChatGPT to get ideas. It'll write code, you know. So they're again. They're not. I mean they're.

0:31:32 - Leo Laporte
It writes common Lisp code. For me that's pretty darn good, so I'm sure it could do.

0:31:37 - Alex Lindsay
Swift? Yeah and no, it definitely does. It definitely writes in Swift and it definitely writes and it will and you can sit there and chat with it. And again, most of the coders that I know aren't cut and pasting it in. They're like do this?

0:31:56 - Leo Laporte
And it's a partner, it's not a replacement, absolutely.

0:31:57 - Alex Lindsay
And so then, and then it lets them think very quickly. I think yeah, yeah, and it lets them think very quickly. But again, I think that this is where Apple kind of sits in a separate place, which is that I know a lot of people talk about it. I don't think there's that much pressure on Apple because most of these products are already available if you're an Apple user. So they're going to make, they're going to slowly start to tie it in. I don't think that they have to take, you know, boil the ocean in two weeks from now. I think that they, you know, they can show some movement. Um, I don't feel like I'm missing out on the ai wave.

0:32:31 - Leo Laporte
I'm using it all day here you know, like you know so here's a github project that, uh, our vision. Mad discordian suggests copilot for Xcode, so you can add this to your Xcode using GitHub Copilot and Codium. I guess Codium is the interface. So I guess, yeah, you're right. If you wanted it, you already have it. There's plenty of. There's anything LM, and you can always use web-based LM. Apple, according to Gurman, apple's going to take a different approach to artificial intelligence, and I'm reading now focusing on tools that ordinary consumers can use in their daily lives. The idea is to appeal to users' practical side and leave some of the more whiz-bang features to other companies. They're calling this Project Gray Matter, a set of AI tools that the company will integrate into core apps like Safari, photos and notes. The push also includes operating system features such as enhanced notifications. I don't know if anybody's demanding enhanced notifications. The idea is it would summarize all your notifications. To me, that's not going to be the. I mean, what am I going to do? Read the summary, and then what?

0:33:45 - Jason Snell
Every executive loves the idea of summarizing things. It's one of those things where it's like AI is okay at summarizing things and executives are like, great, I want to spend even less time on it. Summarize that for me. And then it's like, well, yeah, but can you trust the summary? And isn't good, do we really need a? I mean, maybe there are some applications for that, right, but like I, I look I.

I am always in this position of saying I think that ai is simultaneously revolutionary and could totally change how we use computers and overhyped, where some of the stuff that gets that gets hyped is stupid and not very broadly accessible, or that it does it badly, and that we can't and we can't pretend that it doesn't do stuff badly, right.

So maybe, if you're a some somebody with lots and lots of notifications, but I I feel like there are better, like I could see it where I've been, do not disturb.

And I come back and and there's been a long text chain and it says, oh, your family chat has a long text chain about the physical therapy that your father-in-law is doing because he broke his leg, which is true. Shout out to my father-in-law, I hope he gets better. He broke his leg. That would be great, because I have that muted and I can't take the and every time I come back there's 18 new messages. That would be a great thing, right, like I can see value in saying oh, oh yeah, your family chat had a thing about that's pretty specific, with pictures of you know, yeah, but that's good, right, like the idea that you could have a long thread and instead of it saying I have 18 messages from messages, it could say two of your text threads got updated, this was about this and this was about that, and then you know whether you need like did somebody break their leg right now or are they just having a good time talking about vacation?

it would, that could be useful, right but I agree every time I hear summary I roll my eyes yeah, it feels like people are saying well, hey, you know, uh, gpts are really good at summary, so let's have, let's do that not that people are demanding it, but it's a fact, it's a feature that they're good at, so let's put that in I used a summary system for a uh, for a dnd game I played and it was amazing because the summary system thought that we were having a meeting and it was the weirdest transcript I've ever read, where they're like oh yeah, like next steps are going to be fix, fix, get dice that roll better, kill the dragon and fix the, the connections for the connectivity for the D&D game and they're like mixing the names of that.

It was amazing how an incredibly sophisticated tool could be so bad and what it was trying to do and and the you know and.

0:36:22 - Alex Lindsay
But I think that there's a couple of things. One is is that I think it's less interesting to summarize and more interesting to interrogate a document. So if you have like a 200 page document and you start asking it questions like real, like what does it say about this, or what does it say about that, or how does it handle there, and where is that in the document where it says that, so I can read the whole thing, but you're not sitting there searching for it and trying to figure out what the search terms should be. You're just saying like this is what I'm looking for and it's coming back and I think that's the kind of like day-to-day stuff. You know, cause that could also be a textbook or it could be. You know, it could be something.

0:36:57 - Leo Laporte
No, that's essentially what I do with my CommonLisp GPT and my Emacs GPT. Yeah, I gave it all of the open source documentation for those things and now I query it saying oh, how do you what's the syntax for four again, and then it will tell you and that's very useful. I guess that's summarizing in a way.

0:37:16 - Alex Lindsay
It's interrogation based, though I agree. Yeah, I mean, I think that, like I had, I asked that you know things that I know, like how do you do a green screen? It starts talking about chroma keying. I said, well, but can you do it with linear keying? And then it goes yes, you can. And then it started giving all the math about linear keying and I said, and how do you do this in Resolve? And it literally was like open up a new project and go to the Fusion tab. Oh, that's great. In the Fusion tab, click and select this node.

And it was just incredibly detailed about and it was correct in in how it, in how it's now it was. Here's the funny thing it was wrong at the beginning. So what it was giving me was all. The only reason I knew my way through it is because I knew what it was saying about chroma keying was kind of BS. And then I said I pointed it in the right direction. What about linear keying? And then it immediately understood where it then it was right.

And same thing I pointed at my mix pre-3 and I said what is this? And it's, oh, it's a. It's a sound device, it's mixed pre-3, it's used in build recording. I said how do I record ambisonic sound on it? And it gave me this whole. It gave me a whole description on how to do ambisonic sound. I said can you really do that? No, but here's the thing I said can you really do that with a mixed pre three? Cause I knew the answer and it goes oh no, you can't. You can't do it with a mixed pre three, because it only has three inputs. You need a mixed pre six or mixed pre 10.

And then it, explained it, and then everything after that was everything after that was correct, but it was. But that's the danger of a AI, if you don't know what you're talking into is that in both cases, it was wrong when it came out of the gate and I had to kind of guide it, knowing what was wrong, and that's what that's. The thing that gets really scary is that if I wasn't guiding it down so that I use that, as I constantly am asking Chachi about things that I know, so that I can sit there and error correct, how often is it off from things that I absolutely know to be true and sometimes it actually I do research and it was right and I was wrong. So it's not always me, no, but that things that I've known for a long time. You have to be very careful with it. I think that's the thing that we don't.

0:39:10 - Leo Laporte
That's why you don't want an AI doctor. You want a human doctor. With AI, the partnership is what's very powerful, I think.

0:39:18 - Jason Snell
And partnership goes to software too, and this is the thing that I think people don't think of enough.

What Alex described oftentimes is like using the command line.

It's like I'm going to do it all myself, and like when Alex talks about doing really smart things with documents.

I think what I really want is for my document editor, my word processor, my text editor, to use to say to an AI program can you give me a few different ways of cutting this document and then put it in the UI, put those summaries somewhere where I can see them, or put their structure somewhere where I can see it in the interface, where it's using AI, fed information to give me a little bit of an interface. Right, and that that, I feel like, is a place where this stuff is going to get really interesting, is when apps are using the AI to drive some of their features. But that's and I think about that sometimes when Google says, well, just, you know, put it in the search box. It's like you know, we did that, we did command line interfaces for a long time and then it turned out that making them part of a feature set of a program, of an app that you use, might be a little better and easier for more people to use than the experts who have crafted the perfect query for an AI chatbot.

0:40:29 - Alex Lindsay
And I also think that, like when you're dealing with it, with the interface, you know there's a lot of things like saying telling Keynote, make all my slides blue, you know. Like you know, make them this blue, oh, make that a deeper blue, and just have it. Just be talking to it. I'd like this. I'd like you to put a square up and and I want it to bounce in from the right to the left, and those kinds of things I think people would find very useful and they're not what we're seeing with your basic sections. I think that one thing that'll be interesting to see Apple navigate.

I did a fireside chat. We're doing these fireside chats in office hours now, because two hours in the morning isn't enough, and so I had David Pogue on last week and the thing that he brought up that I was kind of blown away. He was like you know, but the problem really is is that as the AI starts to become recursive, as it starts to read its own, as he called it, poop. Like you know, as they're coming, it's going to become less and less accurate and it'll be interesting. You know, it'll become more. It'll hallucinate more. It could hallucinate more often than less often. So we may be in the, in the shinier version of this, and I started thinking about that and that's something that Apple might be able I mean anyone using federated solutions, whether it's Perplexity or Apple or whatever, or Zoom, all are kind of federating these, these solutions to try to figure out how to manage that new problem, which is that AI reading AI is going to be bad for AI. Yeah, I think that's actually.

0:41:56 - Leo Laporte
I've said that too. Like it's uh, that's how you get a bovine encephalitis is have cows eat themselves. But uh, from what I've been reading, it's actually not exactly how it's going to work. It's not like you're saying uh, we've run out of the content on the internet, so let's read some content that we generate for ourselves. It's more like alpha go teaching itself to play chess by playing a billion games and then playing very, very, very well, better than well, but the thing is is that we don't know what what's happening is on the internet.

0:42:26 - Alex Lindsay
We don't know what is if you keep, if they keep on building models based on the internet. We don't know how much of that Internet is now being generated by AI. It's not like it's all being declared.

0:42:34 - Leo Laporte
But I think that's not what. When they talk about AI, supporting AI, I don't think that's what they're talking about. But anyway, that's neither here nor there. We'll see. It'll either go downhill or not.

Apple says that they are going to, and this would be a big change for Apple, according to Mark Gurman, because they admit that on-device alone is not enough. So he says and he doesn't say this is according to somebody who's in the know, but I think it sounds like it is the system will work as follows Much of the processing for less computing intensive AI features will run entirely on the device, but and this is a big change for Apple if a feature requires more horsepower, the work will be pushed to the cloud. This is why he said a couple of months ago Apple's going to design its own server chips. The cloud component will be powered by M2 Ultra chips located in data centers, and because Apple will operate the data center, they're going to say to users look, don't worry, we're going to make sure that all of this off-device stuff will be just as secure as the on-device stuff. Be interesting to see how people react to that.

0:43:43 - Jason Snell
Yeah, I feel like this is going to be the difference between on-device Siri and off-device Siri. It's the same kind of idea, which is it should be on device. But you know, my guess is that unless you've got an iPhone 15 Pro Max, it won't be right. Like, everything older than that will require, you know, a little bit more lag and it'll go up to its servers and doing it. I don't think it's a big deal. Apple has been putting requests in the cloud for a long time, in its own cloud and in other data sources, and it hasn't been that big a deal. Um, I, I think they will, you know, make it clear as they need to, but I just this is, I think they do it on device, not just for privacy but for speed, for the lack of latency that you can have there.

That's a big and then you can't you can't always, you can't always do that right.

0:44:29 - Andy Ihnatko
Also, it costs less money for them because the more models they do on the device, you're paying for the energy you're paying for.

0:44:36 - Jason Snell
It's their hardware, not theirs. That's a better deal for them, much better deal for them.

0:44:40 - Leo Laporte
German says both iOS 18 and Mac OS 15 will have the ability to determine whether the tasks should be handled on device or via the cloud, so it will actually be traffic directing. Several new capabilities in the works for this year, he says, include ones that transcribe voice memos something Google's had for some time retouch photos with AI something Google's had for some time and make searches faster and more reliable. In the Spotlight feature, I feel like Spotlight does a pretty good job, but maybe that's just me. They'll also improve Safari web search and automatically suggest replies to emails and text messages. This is the one I think people are focusing on. The Siri will get an upgrade More natural sounding interactions based on Apple's own large language models. There's also a more advanced Siri coming to Apple Watch for on-the-go tasks.

And, just as you pointed out, Alex, developer tools are getting AI enhancements too. The big one that everybody focused on I don't know why is AI emojis the idea that, as you're texting with somebody, the operating system will create custom emojis on the fly based on what you're saying, so you will have your own personal emoji for any occasion. I guess in principle, that sounds interesting. What do you guys think?

0:46:00 - Alex Lindsay
I've learned not to underestimate the power of the emoji you know, like you know.

It's true, your kids are living emojis, right, they're in emoji land I don't know if they are that as much anymore, but I still think that that, uh, that that apple spends a lot of time thinking about what kids want to do with their phones, and so so I think that, yes, I think that there's a lot of these features. If you look at the music that that Apple puts out and their performances on Apple music, if you look at what they're doing with, uh, with messages everything it's it's really focused on, in my opinion, 18 and below messages everything it's really focused on, in my opinion, 18 and below. You know, like it's really focused on how do we provide things that that group really wants, because, of course, that's the future of your platform.

0:46:43 - Leo Laporte
There was an interesting image on Reddit yesterday from a classroom, an elementary school classroom, and I'm not sure exactly how they did it, but it looked like as notifications came in during the class, the teacher would put a hash mark up on the board next to the app. As you might expect, facebook was the least, snapchat was kind of low. This is remember grade schoolers. Text messaging was by far the number one way they seem to be communicating. I thought that was. I mean, it's not scientific, it was one class and so forth but I think it's kind of interesting that maybe kids are turning away from these third-party apps and just using text messaging, which is good for Apple, isn't it?

0:47:24 - Alex Lindsay
It is. That's very good for Apple and I think there's still a lot of downward push. I mean, I think Snapchat makes. I mean I know that my kids talk about Snapchat, making their friends pretty stressed. Yeah, they're turning away from these things. Yeah, my kids don't use any of them.

0:47:39 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, they use text messages, right, right, yeah. So having custom emojis is a very big thing for Apple, because I'm going to bet they don't translate well to Android.

0:47:54 - Alex Lindsay
I'm just gonna guess that, yeah, continuing to add features that that wouldn't, that wouldn't necessarily translate over, would be, uh, probably useful in the long nice thing a little more lock-in.

0:48:03 - Leo Laporte
Not a bad idea, actually. I did see the other thing as long as we're talking reddit that I saw that was really impressive was chat GPT. You know how 4chan has the blue text things. You know me? I'm working at the Safeway store and here's AI. They call it AI green text. Ar might suck tweets, james, teresa, but this AI green text is good stuff, and it was. It was very impressive. So maybe this is where I guess it's probably read a lot of 4chan green texts. Now I can generate one just for you. I won't read it. Will you read, though, jason, your AI summary of your D&D transcript? Because that was hysterical, oh sure.

0:48:49 - Jason Snell
The team discussed their recent Dungeons Dragons adventure. This was in the summary, with a focus on the importance of uploading recordings to avoid losing any files. Yes, that's what happens at the end of a podcast. They agreed to return in about a month with the next adventure planned to introduce more challenges and choices. How? Very specific. The team also expressed their excitement for leveling up and exploring new areas. Oh man Boy, do up and exploring new areas. Oh man boy, do I love exploring new areas, nailed it yeah, have you played at all?

0:49:18 - Alex Lindsay
do they? Does? The dungeon master guide still have all those random generations for dungeons and monsters in the back and that was like probably oh, I don't know, I think.

0:49:26 - Jason Snell
I think there are web tools that do that, but I'm not a rainbow so I was thinking about it.

0:49:31 - Alex Lindsay
When you're talking about it, I was like I wonder what ai would do with that or how effective it would be oh, there are.

0:49:35 - Jason Snell
There are absolutely ai tools that will help you generate encounters or monsters or things like that. I think the danger there again is that are they consistent or are they and are they cliched and and not particularly surprising? But certainly tools to sort of like randomly generate a quick backstory for a character. I think those absolutely exist. I also, I mean, I think a model that was trained not on Zoom business meetings but on D&D games would actually do a vastly better job at this. Obviously Right, and I would love that, because one of the problems we have as D&D players is you play a month later and you don't remember what happened or where everybody was. Would be really nice to feed an ai your transcript of your session and say can you write up some notes about where are we all, what did we get, what did we? You know, what did we lose? Who did we meet? Who did we kill? There's a lot of killing. There's a lot of murder and dnd anyway. Uh, that'll happen, right, but it was just funny.

0:50:29 - Alex Lindsay
Like zoom assumes we're doing very serious business on zoom and I assure you we were not well, and I think that I think that the uh, like the, literally the very first app that did something that I wrote was to build non-player characters, because I was just like, oh my gosh, these guys are dying so often. I don't want to keep on rolling the dice, sure, and so, um, but the uh, uh, I I think that it's really interesting if you take it like in a mid journey style thing of, like you know, because oftentimes the dungeon master is telling people what they're seeing and theoretically, there's somewhere in the future where it's building these images. I mean, the dungeon master would say, well, here's the dungeon, here's what's there, and this is the feel that I want, and you get pictures that you can show everybody as you're, you know, as you're going through it. I think it might be, might be fun. Let's take a little break. Jason's nodding, but he's like, no, that would not be fun. Let's take a little break.

0:51:14 - Jason Snell
No, I mean that's it's all, it's all good. I mean these.

I, if I have a thesis about AI, it's like AI tools that are designed for specific tasks and tweaked for specific tasks so that the user doesn't have to try and conjure up what you want for like 90 different ways of phrasing it in the chat bot before it figures out what you actually want, if somebody could test it and build it and maybe train it and get to the point where, as a dm, all you have to do is say I need three goblins and their backstory and have it, get what you mean and give it to you so you don't have to make it up on the fly. That is awesome. That is a. That is a perfectly good use of ai tools. Right, yeah For D&D.

0:51:52 - Leo Laporte
For D&D. Well, for any specific topic, yeah, anything. Yeah, I mean I think we're seeing more AI in medicine. I just saw who was it A big hospital that's going to use AI for radiology, I think. And, of course, Sam Altman said we're going to start working on GPT-5. Now, Get ready. Your lights may dim, but we're going to have it by next year. Nine months, he says. It takes about the same time to make a baby. Will the AI be smarter than the baby is the real question.

0:52:24 - Alex Lindsay
Well, and I think that this is where I think AI can sift through so much data. You know, another thing that came up when I was because David Pogues spends a lot of time thinking about AI so we were talking about it last week and he mentioned that I guess they had a lung. They did this study with lungs and then they knew who got cancer from these lung things and the AI could tell six months ahead of time. It could predict it. Predict, yeah, looking at the lungs. And they asked the doctor what was it? What did the AI see? And the doctor said I don't know, no idea, I don't know what it sees. It doesn't know what it sees, it just says this is going to create, this is going to turn into cancer. And then, without knowing that, eventually it did.

0:53:00 - Leo Laporte
It doesn't need to know why. It just needs to know that in all the hundreds of thousands of images I've read, this was often a precursor for some reason, and that's why it's really interesting. I agree, there is trivial cliche is a good word, jason Trivial cliched stuff that comes out of AI, and there's also kind of stuff that makes you catch your breath a little bit and say, wow, this is wow, this is not Eliza. By any means, let's take a little break.

0:53:35 - Jason Snell
Tell me about your psychological problems. Why would you say Eliza? What do you mean by?

0:53:40 - Leo Laporte
that my daughter was visiting this week in town and she is a big AI chatbot fan and so we sat in the car yesterday and talked to GPT-4-0. Had a lovely conversation. I said I'd like to introduce Abby, my daughter's you know. It said hi, abby, it tends to do a lot of Rogerian kind of well, what do you think about that questioning, but at the same time and also the other thing it does very much like Eliza is rephrase what you said and it's also ridiculously ingratiating. Wow, that's an excellent thought, abby. But at the same time there the elements were there of an actual back and forth conversation, in some cases better than the kinds I would have with a human being. So there was some well give and take.

0:54:25 - Alex Lindsay
It was interesting and I I was using 40 last week my daughter will hit me up for like, okay, what are we doing on saturday? We always do something on Saturday morning. And she's like, what are we doing this week? And I was like I don't know. So I'm sitting there driving trying to figure out on Thursday what we're going to go do on Saturday. And I said I'm thinking of, I'm trying to figure out what to do with my daughter, you know. And ChatGPD came back and said what do you like to do with her? What do you guys like to do? I said, oh, sometimes we go to the farmer's market, sometimes we go to pinballs. We play pinball, sometimes we do. You know, I talk through all the things she goes. Well, you know, there is a pinball museum in Alameda. It's got over 100 pinball machines in it, you know, and you don to have more information about that.

And I was like, yeah, and we went on Saturday. It was amazing, by the way, and the pinball museum in Alameda is amazing, Expensive, but amazing. But I hadn't thought of it that way, where I just start asking it questions, Like I'm just trying to think about something that I want to do and having it give me suggestions and it you know it was, but I think that I do think that's interesting with 4.0. It's constantly pinging you like well, what do you like and what do you not like and what do you like? It's it does have this feel of a conversation. It doesn't feel conversational, but it feels like it's. It's asking you questions and trying to figure out what it wants to do or what you want to do.

0:55:52 - Leo Laporte
A little time out here as we continue. Jason Snell, sixcolors.com, Andy Ihnatko, gbh in Boston and from 090 Media and officehours.global, Alex Lindsay's back in town Our show today brought to you by Wix Studio. Talk about powerful. I've only got a minute to tell you about Wix Studio, the web platform, the web platform for agencies and enterprises. So here are a few things you can do from start to finish in a minute or less on Wix Studio.

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Step into Wix Studio and see for yourself. Go to wix.com/studio. Click on the link on the show page in our notes and you can find out more there. Same thing, wix.com/studio. We thank Wix so much for supporting MacBreak Weekly. Thank you. One other thing that is coming. Apparently we'll see June 7th to iOS 18, big change. For the first time since the iPhone came out what is it 17 years ago? You're going to be able to leave like gaps on your homepage. You won't have to have a grid, an icon, in every single point on the grid, like nothing ever seen before.

Nobody's ever done that and you'll be able to change the color of the icons and put them where they you want. So I I.

0:57:59 - Jason Snell
I had to laugh. This is a bloomberg report, right and and, and they're like mark german again, the most and the most bloomberg way possible. For example, finance apps might be able to be recolored green for money, money money money, money.

And I thought, well, okay, yeah, bloomberg, I got it, I got it, I got it, you're Mr Monopoly, you got all the money, great. But there is a question of how will app developers actually want to allow users to like mess with their branding? Like it's a real question. I mean, this stuff is happening today. People are making shortcuts, basically to custom icons in order to do this, so that having color you know, color themed uh, you design it yourself kind of things. Like it makes sense.

Users want it, but I wonder how apple's going to roll this out to app developers and say, yeah, the user's going to change the color of your logo and you just have to accept it. My theory is that there's going to be a bigger story and that there's going to be like an API where they can offer, for example, like there's a palette of colors to choose from and you can choose to offer a diversion of your icon in each palette color, or that you'll be able to designate like part of your icon as the part that changes when the color changes. I I would not be surprised if this is a little more sophisticated than we ran a filter over your icon and gave it a color cast, but more like we're going to give you some apis so that you did. The developer can give them, the user, some features that to customize the look of their iphone that's a very way to do it, Andy.

0:59:30 - Leo Laporte
You use android and you know perfectly well, not only can you swap launchers, you can have a launcher or a theme that makes everything be. You know, times New, roman, gray, I mean. You can make it anything you want.

0:59:44 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, and I was going to mention that one of the biggest changes that they made was they went from material design to what they started calling material you a couple of years ago, where, uh, it can make your ui dynamic on its own. And part of that was by working with uh, new apis, with developers, and saying here is how to format your icon so that if material you or the user decides, hey, I want all my icons to be the same basically, color palette, I want the color palette to match your wallpaper. Here is how you can format it so that it will do so in a way that your marketing people will approve of it or your trademark people will approve of it. And I was very, very surprised when the feature was announced. I thought, okay, yeah, okay, that's much better than productivity features that people have been clamoring for on every phone for the past five years.

But once it's kind of melded in, I kind of like the fact that it all looks like it was of a piece what would be eight hours of my tweaking colors and tweaking icons just basically happens automatically when it senses here is your homepage, here is your lock screen, here is your wallpaper. I'm going to make sure it's all harmonious with the rest of the ui and just makes much, much more pleasant. Uh, it's, it's. It's one thing to give the user the ability to absolutely obsess over every element of the ui, but how many users are actually going to value that enough to actually deep into it? It's really great if Apple were to create a new, even AI powered system that would do something similar to what happens in Android, where it basically intuits what your theme is simply from what your lock screen is, what your wallpaper is, and then essentially creates brand new pallets of color cues for the entire UI. That makes it feel like it's your device, as opposed to the same iPhone that everyone else has.

1:01:35 - Leo Laporte
Well, we're all just so excited about the wonderful new features in iOS 18. June 7th we will stream it live. Micah and I will be sitting here watching. Is that a Tuesday or a Monday? I should look Monday. I think it's a Monday. All right, June the 10th, June 10th. Oh, I thought it was the 7th. It's June 10th, Monday.

1:01:57 - Alex Lindsay
That's why it's two weeks in. Is it 10 am? It's normally 10 am.

1:02:00 - Jason Snell
It is 10 am and I'll be there. The invitations actually just went out, you got an invite. I'll see you there. I'll be watching the video that you're watching, but I'll be watching it from apple park I just can't tell your screen what it is.

1:02:14 - Leo Laporte
It's a good screen. It is for me to have somebody who gets invited to the apple campus on our show thank you, jason, it's, it's.

1:02:22 - Jason Snell
It's practically like you get invited, it's well, but not.

1:02:26 - Leo Laporte
But not, yes, almost exactly. Does the invitation hold anything of interest?

1:02:33 - Jason Snell
Any clues? No, it's all the same stuff previously. It's the same logo and everything they did when they did the developer invitations a while ago. It's that WW where it's run together, so it looks like a triple U. That's that one.

1:02:46 - Leo Laporte
I'm going to go, as I do every year, look through my Gmail to see if I got anything from Apple. Nothing, nothing at all.

1:02:55 - Andy Ihnatko
Jason, will they allow you to take on your emotional support, Leo?

1:03:04 - Jason Snell
I don't think I have one of those, I think my Leo is not designed for emotional support.

1:03:11 - Leo Laporte
No, I'm cranky, leo, actually.

1:03:14 - Jason Snell
Uh, yeah, no, no I could put you, I could, I could bring you, and then I'll just have to leave you in the car. Can I be your plus one? No, you don't get a plus one, huh no, you don't get a plus one, but I can leave you in the car down in the basement of apple park and you can uh, you won't, you know, I'll roll down the window a crack. So I I searched through my Gmail Legally they're only.

1:03:34 - Leo Laporte
All I found is an email from 2014 from a guy who no longer works at Apple, so it's really pretty, pretty grim in there. Not a lot of stuff from Applecom. Well good, I'm glad you're going. So what is it? What do they tell you Anything? Is it going to be? Who knows? You're going to get lunch in the past.

1:03:53 - Jason Snell
I mean, what they generally have done is they invite a bunch of developers and they buy, invite a bunch of press, and we sit at cafe max uh in apple park and you know, tim cook appears on stage beforehand and goes good morning, we're gonna watch a video, it's gonna be great, bye. And then he's out of there and then we just all watch the same video that the rest of the world is watching is it on the yard outside of that cafe park or is it?

yeah, it's facing out of cafe max at apple park into a. It's a fairly large space. So basically, your back is to the uh, the cafe itself, or or you're in the cafe but your back is to the center. You're in the outside of the ring facing out and they've, they've, you know, they've got it down to a science now, and then last year they did the thing where it was a little bit there and then they had press over at the Steve Jobs Theater to do some press stuff and they had the press center at the Apple store and they're not using the theater itself Apple store.

For this event. No, because there's so many developers who get invited that I think they have us. I think they like it outside.

1:04:56 - Leo Laporte
Got it Must be nice. Someday I'll get to taste that sweet, sweet apple croissant. All right, so June 10th, I'm glad. At least you know the date, so that's a good thing. I didn't know the date apparently. So June 10th we will cover that. Uh, that is a monday, so that means tuesday. You probably won't be here tuesday because you will also, I'm imagining, get that golden ticket for the briefings and the thing it's unclear.

1:05:22 - Jason Snell
It's unclear if, if I am somewhere where I can set up and at least drop in for a little while on that tuesday, I will. I just don't know what, that they haven't shared a schedule with me last year. Last year it extended to tuesday, but that was because of vision pro right, and this year, if it's all software, it may be sort of like monday is everything and then and then they're out of there, and that's a year since they first showed you the vision pro.

Yeah, that vision pro was a year ago at wwc.

1:05:47 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, that was when they announced it. How time flies. Time does fly, and and what an amazing platform that's turned out to be they released some more content leo oh, I see it's time for our vision pro segment it is.

1:06:01 - Jason Snell
Where's the theme song three?

1:06:03 - Alex Lindsay
new games are available for vision pro marvel's releasing something this week I don't know when.

1:06:10 - Jason Snell
Yeah, it's thursday, marvel's releasing what if? Which is a I've? I've played it or done it, read it, seen it. It's not a game, it's an interactive thing. Uh, the, you know where you're. Some of it is animated 3d stuff that you watch. Some of it is in your space. Some of it is immersive environments. There's an interactive element, so you're watching, but you also have to do stuff. It's definitely not a game, but that's a collaboration with Marvel and ILM Interactive that they built it and it's about an hour long. I mean, it's the most substantial piece of entertainment content that I would argue has been made for the platform. What did I mean?

it's the most substantial piece of entertainment content that I would argue has been made for the platform. What do you think of it? Stay tuned. Tomorrow I will have a review, because I'm not allowed to have a review yet, but I can tell you that I think it's a really interesting experiment where they're trying some different stuff. But I just want to emphasize again not a game, it's not a thing that you play. It's interactive in the sense that there are things that you need to do and then the story continues, but that's not the same as it being like there's actual, like what you would consider real competitive gameplay. But it's a fun. I mean, they're trying it all, like they're trying hand gestures and they're trying some video components and as well as some immersive components, as well as some in your own space components. It's a fun like. It's a fun thing it's. It's it's unlike. It's not one kind of media. It's like a weird mixed media art project kind of that's marvel's characters in it I.

1:07:42 - Alex Lindsay
I think that that's what a lot of us have been talking about, that's, the future is not being caught up in one. You know, this is a different format, and it sounds like what they're doing is throwing a bunch of stuff against the wall to see what works. Yep.

1:07:52 - Jason Snell
Yeah, I think so.

1:07:53 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, so it'll be interesting. And then I said the newest thing for me with the Vision Pro is I you know, streamvoodoo is testing a spatial player and a spatial camera and I was able to do some testing on it last week and do some more testing. But basically you can take your iPhone 15 and hit I want to start streaming to this, do a spatial stream, and when you send that link to somebody in a Vision Pro, they can see a 3D stream from you. It's about a three second delay, so it's pretty quick and so, but it's streaming 3d from the camera to the.

And I think that you know this is pretends towards the future. You know, being able to say I'm seeing this thing and I'm going to share it with you right now, um, it's the first one that I've seen that does it, um, and it's pretty exciting, but it's uh, but that's that's. You know, I think we'll hopefully see more of that. You know, at wwc I think there's this it feels like the connection between the 15, the iphone, the iphone and the headset and all the pieces in between are still a little disjointed and I think that, you know, hopefully we'll see them get more and more connected like that, so, so, here's the trailer from the marvel uh thing it's.

1:09:07 - Leo Laporte
They're cartoon characters that appear in your real space. Your comp, sorry, common yeah characters.

1:09:13 - Jason Snell
Yeah, that's part of it, but there's also stuff that you watch. That's that's uh, basically like little mini episodes of the show, and then there's also stuff where you are taken to an immersive environment that is surrounding you, where you watch things happen and then also interact with things. So it's a whole combination of things that are going on. Is it mostly cartoon, what if? Uh, yeah, I mean it's in the style of uh, what if? Which is an animated series, so it's not meant to be super, uh, photorealistic or anything. It's definitely stylized, um, but it's uh, yeah, it's an interesting combination. It's, it's gonna be free.

It's out on the platform on thursday and uh, yeah, it's, I mean it's, and, like I said, it's like an hour of content. It's a pretty good. It's not one of these five minute highlight videos, right, it's a full hour where you Wong, so it's got. The device has hand tracking, so they use Wong and they teach you how to cast spells with your hands, which is smart, because that's a thing that the Vision Pro is capable of doing, and so they lean into that.

It's very clearly designed based on what the vision pro is good at and uh, yeah, it's an interesting thing I should also mention there are new immersive videos on vision pro now, um not only is there parkour, it looks really good. Those as they, as you might expect, because you get to see these guys and they and the, the depths, the heights that they're jumping from, and all of that looks really great and then are these?

1:10:38 - Leo Laporte
so it's real. These are not like uh, they're. This woman is actually barefoot walking across this giant cliff on a tightrope oh, yeah, yeah.

1:10:46 - Jason Snell
These are all absolutely real, captured with apple's immersive camera. So so the parkour guys in Paris are similar that makes my butt hurt.

1:10:52 - Leo Laporte
That's terrifying.

1:10:53 - Jason Snell
And then there is also now an immersive trailer. They've updated their immersive trailer with a whole bunch of new footage, so there's a bunch of stuff we hadn't seen before, including on the field and in the locker room after the Super Bowl, the NBA All-Star Game and a bunch of other. Like there's like elephants in a mud puddle, like there's more content, because that trailer was also like a year old that was a WWDC demo so they've updated it with more modern stuff now Nice.

1:11:28 - Andy Ihnatko
Does the? Apple Vision Pro personas like support vomiting, like if you actually do watch one of these things and just hurl, it's terrifying what would your persona do?

1:11:36 - Jason Snell
I don't, I don't, I mean, I think it all looks great and I've never felt sick for a moment in the Vision Pro.

1:11:42 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, I haven't they've been pretty careful about it. They're not. You know, there's a particularly problem is there's a in the dinosaur one, there's a flying, there's a place where you're flying over the Island or whatever, and you can feel a little. I can feel myself tense, my my stomach tense a little bit on it, but it's really minor compared to things that I've, that I've done to people, uh, in headsets and so um. So the uh, you know, I think that the key is not cutting too quickly, uh, not changing your convergence too quickly and not moving the camera too much, and I think that Apple, those are really super basic things that you can do to avoid that. I think that Apple's probably done everything I've seen so far has done that way. My only complaint has been Apple cutting things too quickly. You know you really want to in immersive, you want to just sit and watch something you don't need to cut quickly. So, like the MLS, I thought was a little bit of a fail because, it was bouncing around.

The rest of them dwell.

1:12:37 - Jason Snell
The MLS is an outlier. The rest of them they're very good at giving you time.

Even with parkour there's usually like a setup shot and then you see them and they play with it where there's like a distant shot and you think you're just getting like a cityscape of Paris and then you see the guys are running across one of the one of the rooftops and you're like, oh, I see those guys, they're down there but then like it's all you get the time, like they'll run up to the top and you'll watch them, and rather than then having it cut right away, you sort of start at the bottom and you see them run up to the top and they reach the top and they're at the top and then there's a cut. So you don't ever get that sense that you're like totally uprooted and don't know where to look, that they're much more capably built than the mls highlights were yeah, yeah, no, I think.

1:13:17 - Alex Lindsay
I think everything else has looked really good also from uh.

1:13:20 - Leo Laporte
This is these are two uh vr classics from alchemy labs job simulator and now vacation simulator, so you can simulate a vacation. Have you played with the Easy there, vian?

1:13:36 - Alex Lindsay
I have not played with the Oculus, I played with the.

1:13:38 - Leo Laporte
Oculus briefly. My son and his friends really liked Job Simulator for a while, but that's before they were actually part of the workforce, so maybe this shine wore off just slightly.

I have the Oculus Pro, the Rift Pro, and I asked Michael. I said, because he has an HTC Vive, he has the Oculus Rift and he had in the past borrowed the Oculus Pro to play the football simulator. I said this is part of my Swedish death cleaning. Do you want it? He said no, I don't want it. So this is the first mention. It will be part of Leo's garage sale. I have a box in my car. There will be other things in there as well. So you guys, you came up with a good system. Last time, everyone put a sticker on what they wanted and then you, I think, a fight to the death, something like that. Did you ever win any of those, john Ashley?

1:14:37 - Jason Snell
I got the other AI webcam you got.

1:14:39 - Leo Laporte
You got the AI webcam. Oh, you got the OzBot. Well, vacation Simulator. You can play that in the Oculus as well. If you need a vacation Also, demeo or Demeo. What is that? That's a tabletop role-playing game.

1:15:00 - Jason Snell
Multiplayer. That's now out on Vision Pro as well.

1:15:04 - Leo Laporte
This sounds like it might be a good Vision Pro title.

1:15:07 - Jason Snell
Yeah, and it's got an immersive mode so you can play it like you're doing it on a laptop or you can do a complete drop-down immersive mode.

1:15:16 - Leo Laporte
It was nice of her to bring out the popcorn for her family who are just watching her play.

1:15:21 - Jason Snell
No, they're playing too. Oh, they are, it's multiplayer.

1:15:25 - Leo Laporte
Ah, they don't need Vision Pros though. They can play on their computer, that's right. How exciting for them.

1:15:35 - Jason Snell
Okay, I'm sorry. Pros though, they can play on their computer, that's right. How exciting for them. Okay, I would not. I I cannot imagine sitting on the same couch as two people who are playing on their laptops while I'm playing in immersive mode. Yeah, that is very bananas yeah, don't do that yeah that's kind of rude yeah

1:15:48 - Leo Laporte
yeah, okay, just maybe I thought it was just me, okay. So there you go. That's our vision pro segment. I hope you enjoyed it. Let's take a little break, and then we're going to talk about the the apple store lego model. Apple must make, but almost certainly will not. First, though, a word from Yahoo Finance.

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Yahoo Finance provides a holistic view of the financial news cycle, including breaking news're invested in EFTs and even your 401k so you can really see what's going on and how it's going, and direct your investments because you should. A comprehensive perspective distinguishes great investors and Yahoo Finance ensures you have the insight to examine your wealth in its entirety. With a community of over 90 million users every single month, yahoo Finance's real strength is helping you on your way to financial success, whatever age you are. Pay attention, you can really help yourself. For a comprehensive financial news and analysis, visit the brand behind every great investor yahoofinance.com. That's the number one financial destination. It's the one I've used for 19 years yahoofinance.com, Yahoo, yahoofinance.com. I see that exclamation mark. I think I have to say it that way, right? Yahoo? I don't know, I think so. I might be wrong. We love it. Yahoo finance dot com. All right, moving right along with the thrilling, exciting news dense MacBreak Weekly. This week a lego apple store model created by a fan, right, lego truman. Yep, yeah, yeah, looks pretty darn good it looked.

1:18:56 - Andy Ihnatko
It looks really nice, I'm sure, if I'm sure, apple will have nothing to do with this. However, this is lego. Has this really really great program?

1:19:06 - Leo Laporte
the posters removed by the moderators. Oh Well, fortunately everybody screen-capped it before they took it down. Those Apple Reddit moderators are tough. Look at that. So cute with the little. They look like Newtons, but I'm sure they're iPads, yeah.

1:19:29 - Andy Ihnatko
So Lego Ideas has a really great thing on the website where anybody can propose a Lego set and if 10,000 people vote for it, then they will at least do the feasibility study to see how much would it cost for us to produce this. What's the market for this? So they don't promise. Also, if it's a licensed thing, they think about it. It's a licensed thing, they think about it. Well, yeah, but to be fair, the reason why we have the Lego Wall-E model that was designed by one of Pixar's own artists is because it started off as a Lego idea proposal. The person who designed this model just submitted it. 10,000 people voted for it and it became a real thing. Well, he's already got in a couple of days 1,445 votes.

1:20:09 - Leo Laporte
He's well on his way there. In a couple of days 1445 votes. He's well on his way. There's a couple of years left, so there's plenty of time. Get on over there and vote at legocom for this. He says there are some Easter eggs. There's a hidden tribute to the iMac G3, the iPod mini, AirPods, apple Watch and Apple Vision Pro the past, present and future of apple. He's. It's amazing, because he did this all with stock pieces right.

1:20:37 - Andy Ihnatko
yeah, absolutely you really did a good job to do. To do it like to do an apple logo in in lego at that small scale. That's impressive. Yeah, in and of itself, I want the plans for that lego does not.

1:20:48 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's so, he doesn't give. He didn't give out the plans. I think the reason they took it down on reddit is because it was a link to this external page and they see that as a plug. But uh, yeah, this is pretty cool, is that?

1:21:02 - Andy Ihnatko
maybe that's on lego there yeah, it is.

1:21:05 - Leo Laporte
It is on the lego ideas page, so you can vote for it.

1:21:09 - Andy Ihnatko
Nice job, modern design with the internal trees and everything.

1:21:13 - Leo Laporte
Yeah.

1:21:14 - Andy Ihnatko
Just like the Union.

1:21:15 - Leo Laporte
Square store. Yeah, very nice. Lots of great comments from people. But again, just if he gets 10,000 votes, no big deal, because Lego has to decide and of course, they have to be able to license it. And I don't know. You think Apple would say yes to this. I would if I were Apple.

1:21:34 - Andy Ihnatko
What a great thing for your brand. Well, they're kind of the no fun. They like fun, but only when they create it and they engineer it. I'm not sure they would let other people create it.

1:21:43 - Leo Laporte
No one else can do fun. That's our job, All right. Speaking of fun, people had a lot of fun with the Apple Music 100 Best Albums. Apparently, country music doesn't count. Not allowed no country albums in the 100 Best Albums.

1:22:11 - Andy Ihnatko
Savingcountrymusiccom said get pissed, get mad, be personally offended yeah well, that's the fun of any of these best 100 they're always dopey but it.

1:22:20 - Leo Laporte
But I think if rolling stone does it, it has more credibility than if apple does it. Who decided this?

1:22:28 - Andy Ihnatko
um, they had a bunch of people, it says. The press release said a bunch of people from inside apple, but also independent producers, independent creators, artists and industry executives. So we'll never know.

1:22:41 - Alex Lindsay
I guess my question is why, like? Why would you do this? Like it seems like an unforced error, like there's no, like I don't know.

1:22:49 - Leo Laporte
I'll tell you why.

1:22:50 - Alex Lindsay
I didn't even know it existed until people complained about it. Itunes well, that's true.

1:22:53 - Leo Laporte
But isn't iTunes the number one music retailer in the world, isn't it?

1:23:02 - Alex Lindsay
It is, but it's a subscription. I mean like you're not making more money doing it. People might go look at them, I guess. But you know like I don't know Like no one's going to switch over from Spotify to Apple to do this, and I don't know Like it just felt like there was no way to win this. You know like there was no way to win this. You know like there was like it's like uh, and so like why, like this was going to be an ugly thing, no matter what you said, come on it's publicity it's people talking.

1:23:29 - Jason Snell
It's not a pr fail at any kind this every rolling stone does it, everybody does it. It gets people to think about apple as one of the places where music exists and nobody cares. It's just not a big deal. It's PR, it's a promo, it's a stunt they would have been better if they said the 100 best rock albums, right?

Well, I don't think it is just rock, but yeah, maybe, so, maybe so Also. Yeah, here's the world's smallest violin. Sorry, I mean here's the world's smallest fiddle playing for the country music. People who are bent out of shape. Too bad, maybe your music sucks, oh come on.

1:24:04 - Leo Laporte
Oh, my God. Johnny. Cash and. Folsom Prison, come on. I mean, there's definitely some country albums that belong in here. I agree, though, dr Dre is the chronic.

1:24:16 - Jason Snell
I grew up in country music land, so I have very little time for country music. Yeah, Lisa's that way too.

1:24:21 - Leo Laporte
She said her mother subjected it to her as a child. That's all we have to say.

1:24:26 - Jason Snell
Come on, no, no, I feel for the country music fans. I feel I'm sorry they have such terrible taste in music.

1:24:32 - Alex Lindsay
Oh, Okay, I guess I feel like this. It feels very, I guess, when I look at the list, in addition to the fact that the website makes me totally nauseous.

1:24:43 - Leo Laporte
You don't like these scrolling album covers Also they haven't happened yet.

1:24:46 - Jason Snell
They had to build a website. Let's not forget that part of it.

1:24:49 - Alex Lindsay
And they had to build a website. And the website is so horrible Like no, not that part. Scroll down, wait until you get to the real horror.

1:25:03 - Jason Snell
Hold on, get to the real horror. Hold on this.

1:25:04 - Alex Lindsay
Okay, now scroll and it'll start oh no, no, yeah, it's girl jacking all the way down, no, no, no. But it's worse if you use a, if you have like a little uh roller. You know that I'm doing that. So so for people aren't watching.

1:25:18 - Leo Laporte
This is like me going to odyssey records and swiping through the stacks. That's what it reminds me of. That's fine, oh, okay, and you can hit the. Okay, I didn't see the list.

1:25:28 - Alex Lindsay
It just gave me the thing and I was like what are we what? Why am I looking at this? Yeah, yeah, you gotta do this.

It feels very then the list feels very pre pre music scan pop, like it's. You know, like before music scan we made up a bunch of stuff. You know, before 1991, september I think, or august or somewhere in there. We just made stuff up, and I was in the music industry and we did that, and we just made things up and then, uh, and then they said, hey, let's look at what people are actually buying. And it turns out that they were buying a lot of rap and they're buying a lot of country and they're buying a lot of metal and stuff that we weren't talking about, right? So, and so that's what this feels like. It's like a whole bunch of people that were there before music scan that would like to reassert themselves.

1:26:05 - Andy Ihnatko
So the only purpose of each one of these lists is to address the, the travis, the tragedies that happen with the previous version of this list, to fix it. It's a point, it's a point of argument, it's a point of discussion these are all very good albums I think everyone, everyone deserves to be on here.

1:26:23 - Leo Laporte
I haven't seen one that doesn't. Uh, you know everything from lemonade right to abby road, but uh, is the number important? Like is the best, are they saying? The best album of all time is the miseducation of lauren hill they do.

1:26:35 - Jason Snell
They are saying that and again, this is, this is a classic uh ploy, because all they want you to do is talk about it and argue about it. That's how every one of these lists ever does it. I will say, okay, I've had my fun. I, I grew up with an earshot of kvml am in sonora, california, and heard a lot of really lousy country music, and I'll just say this it is a sign of a hole in Apple's self-image vision, something else that they convened a whole bunch of experts and failed to represent a major, influential genre.

Of course it's dumb, like it's dumb. Is it a known goal, I guess? But the whole list is dumb, the whole thing doesn't matter. But I do think somebody at Apple should be like oh yeah, we did forget about country music, didn't we? I mean, they should, they absolutely should, because they blew it. And also there is an editor at Apple Music who's in charge of country music, right? That person's probably like hello, hello, I was in the meeting. Why didn't what? Right, because it's not. Like they don't have that. Uh, that stuff, that fine high quality music that appeals to a certain demographic that I grew up with, uh, yeah, it's dumb that it's not in there in all seriousness, just because why wouldn't it be?

1:27:48 - Leo Laporte
uh, what would be the, what would be the let's, let's just. I mean I would submit johnny cash at false live at folsom prison. That's a classic. What else?

1:27:57 - Jason Snell
yeah, well, one of the geniuses at uh the country music saving country music website suggest right like I think they had some in there too.

1:28:03 - Leo Laporte
Let's see what they say yeah willie nelson redheaded stranger.

1:28:07 - Jason Snell
That's a great one yeah, oh brother, where are the soundtracks? Yes, is that country, or is that like roots and folk?

1:28:13 - Leo Laporte
but okay, yeah, sure there's, there's no, there's no folk in here. There is no focus. I mean there's some bob Dylan, but I don't see. There's not a lot of folk in here actually.

1:28:23 - Andy Ihnatko
Jazz is maybe one or two. You can definitely see where their radar was.

1:28:28 - Leo Laporte
Yeah Well that's the whole point. You're right, there's no reason they should be even doing this.

1:28:32 - Jason Snell
I think it's funny because Maggie Rogers is apparently on the list of people who helped select this list on the uh, apparently on the on the list of people who helped select this list and her.

1:28:42 - Leo Laporte
Her stuff is totally uh, country folk influenced pop. I'm sorry it was live at san quentin, not, I think, live at fulsome, because fulsome prison blues, but it was live at san quentin so I apologize that's the one I was thinking of um, which is that's hello. My name's johnny cash. I love that.

1:28:54 - Jason Snell
That's great music right there steve jobs gave me that cd wait a minute now.

1:29:00 - Leo Laporte
There's a story there. What?

1:29:03 - Jason Snell
it was the ipod launch. They gave you a. They gave you a taped up box of 10 cds that were pre-loaded on the ipod so that they could show that wasn't pirated.

1:29:11 - Leo Laporte
And one and one of those was johnny cash in prison yeah I have the boxed set version of that with a story and all sorts of stuff. It's really great, see. See, we don't hate country music, do we? Well, you, you're, you're gonna. You'll be sorry for that, you'll be sorry for that. Anyway, it is, it is a dumb thing to do. Rolling Stone, that's one thing. That's their bread and butter Billboard, but not Apple. Yeah. I mean Spotify does content all the time.

1:29:49 - Jason Snell
Like this is streaming media music services. They're trying to get you to engage with the content. They're trying to get you to listen to those albums and spend more time.

1:29:56 - Leo Laporte
Do they offer that for sale? Oh, there is a Johnny Cash at of wholesome prison. I take it back never mind. So that's a different prison. He liked doing prisons what can I say?

1:30:08 - Jason Snell
shot a man in rito just to watch him die, just to watch him die um.

1:30:13 - Leo Laporte
What I would be interested in is if they sold that like as a bundle by all but that would be itunes, and they're really focused on apple music.

1:30:21 - Andy Ihnatko
They don't even want to do that okay folsom prison and think about all, the, all the think about all the playlists that are going to be created and shared about no, no, here is the real hundred best. If here's the hundred best for people who don't hate country music jason, that's great you can make your stupid list and I won't listen to it.

1:30:41 - Jason Snell
It's fantastic.

1:30:41 - Leo Laporte
That's how this works hello, my name's johnny cash. Uh, actually it was the fulsome prison album that I thought was the really uh great album. I think he did that first and then he did quentin san quentin later. Anyway, uh, it was scary because they were performing for murderers, yeah, and if they didn't like it, they in fact. I remember when they, when they went in, they said look, and they always say this uh, if you're taking hostage, we're not going to negotiate for your return.

1:31:11 - Andy Ihnatko
So you go in there knowing that you're on your own man and it wasn't like the blues brothers, it wasn't like a layer of chicken wire like no, no, they were there it was, it was. It was in the cafe gematorium with everybody yeah, with a bunch of murderers.

1:31:26 - Leo Laporte
Now that's country music. Folsom, prison Blues. Dark as a Dungeon, cocaine Blues, orange Blossom Special. You know that the prisoners loved him because he was one of their own right dirty old egg sucking dog. Who couldn't love that flushed from the bathroom of your heart. That's right there. Speaks to me right there. Uh, all right, let's. Um, is there anything else to talk about? I'm not done. I can't possibly be done. Apple pencil pro casts a fake shadow based on which tool you're using.

1:32:05 - Andy Ihnatko
It's true.

1:32:06 - Jason Snell
That's really cool Is it. It's true it even shows up in your screen recordings, if you do a recording of it. Oh, that's kind of neat Based on the tool you're using pencil, calligraphy pen, whatever it is as you move, because the Pencil Pro has an accelerometer in it so it knows what direction it's pointing and even how it's turned. So, as you bring it down, underneath the implement is a little shadow of whatever implement it is.

1:32:37 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah.

1:32:43 - Leo Laporte
By the way, Andy, the chicken wire stage was at a bar, not prison bob's country bunker yep, you knew that. I knew that they're throwing bottles, but the bottles can't get through the chicken wire, so what they do is they smash and then the shards go flying, which is much more dangerous, as it turns out. Um, apple reportedly developing an oled ipad mini. Don't get your stop. Don't get your hopes up for 2026. We're gonna get a new mini this year, aren't we? Or no, we're gonna wait till 2026. That'd be like eight years.

1:33:15 - Jason Snell
Yeah, a non-oled, a non-oled version yeah I do.

1:33:19 - Leo Laporte
I have to say, do you? You'd love the oled on your ipad, uh, pro yeah, it's beautiful, yeah, it's amazing I look at, I go that's beautiful. And then I look at the one next to it. It's not as beautiful, but that's the biggest. That's the difference right there in a nutshell have you?

1:33:36 - Alex Lindsay
have you looked at? You should compare the last keynote on your ipad and on youtube. It is dramatically better really on the ipad pro, like it is, it's not like a little better, it is a lot better. Um, in what it's? In what dynamic range?

1:33:56 - Leo Laporte
ah, okay so they shot an hdr I watched on youtube.

1:34:00 - Alex Lindsay
I watched part of it on youtube and I was like this looks really not bright and I I was like I thought I remembered it being brighter than that. It there's a, there's a. There was an odd change, an odd uh choice that they took, which was that they, um, uh, they almost everybody's backlit, like almost every person speaking. Their environment is brighter than they are and I feel like that must've been a creative choice because it just and I think it's to show off HDR, but it is it looks. The result is is it looks a little drab. They look a little underlit on YouTube as the SDR, but if you look at it on the phone or on the, on the iPad, it looks better much better.

1:34:42 - Leo Laporte
Incidentally, I apologize, Micah Sargent, I should have given you credit. He spotted the little shadow that appears when you hover an Apple pencil over an iPad pro, when we were all in the studio. When we were in studio, he spotted it and I forgot, and he forgot and he's doing it right there.

1:34:59 - Jason Snell
But as Andy was pointing out, people have dug in and found the USDZ files that are used to render this, which is also pretty cool.

1:35:07 - Leo Laporte
They create little 3D objects, he told us, and I just forgot so.

1:35:11 - Jason Snell
I apologize. It's okay, it's cool. What's great about it is it's utterly unnecessary.

1:35:17 - Leo Laporte
And it's one of those little glimmers. It's like painting the inside of the computer.

1:35:22 - Andy Ihnatko
I was going to say, Google is all excited because, hey, now you can have two apps side by side and they don't have to be designed to work together on our tablet, and Apple is yeah, we're way beyond that, we're just going. We're now just basically doing donuts, doing burnouts in front of your campus right now I think the technical term for that is surprise and delight it's like there's it's so subtle and beautiful, in fact you might not even notice it, but you get.

1:35:49 - Leo Laporte
But you know, somehow something about it says oh, this is really a great experience. That's actually probably what you really want. It's just like it, just it, just makes you know it.

1:35:59 - Alex Lindsay
good, we talk a lot about this with events is that when you get to a certain level, when when you, you know you're talking to someone at a certain level of mastery, when they start talking and they stop talking about how to do something and they stop talking about the technical and they start talking about how people feel like, and you know like, how do they feel when they're using it, how they feel when they're watching it, how do they feel and, and because that is a much more it's a much harder thing to get ahold of, because people will feel things and they won't even know that they feel them that way, and then they, they make decisions about. They're making more decisions that they can't control based on how they feel than they do consciously. And and I think that Apple is really good those little things that add it, they, they're not necessary, but they definitely make you feel like you're doing something different and it feels just more smoother and more more fun to use it makes you feel.

1:36:46 - Andy Ihnatko
It makes you feel quality. The same reason why the clunk of a car door, yeah, as long as it closes and locks, you're good. But so much time is spent on the luxury brands to make sure it feels solid. It sounds solid, yeah, it doesn't rattle, the panel gaps are perfect, yeah, and it makes you feel like, okay, I spent. I spent eighty thousand dollars on a very nice car and it's not as though they just up sticker to 26 000 kia this morning, literally I slammed my car door and I looked around to see if anybody noticed how good that sounded.

I literally did that.

1:37:20 - Leo Laporte
That's nice, isn't it? That sounds good. As long as you're going to wait for an OLED iPad mini for two years, you might as well wait for the all-screen M5 MacBook with foldable display. Ha Ha, this is a Ming-Chi Kuo joint A 20.3-inch MacBook device for 2027. Oh, that was his original, but now he says no, it might be 2026. Foldable screen, 20.3-inch display. I guess that's why you would do that, so that you could have a much bigger display in there. Where's the keyboard go? Lenovo makes something like that. It's a uh on-screen keyboard and then there's like a magnetically detached usb keyboard. It's not. I don't know. Is that good? I don't know I mean.

1:38:09 - Jason Snell
So ming chi kuo's sources are in the supply chain, and so what I would, I would say, is this a mac is. And if it is, because I'm not sure, yeah, I'm not sure that a Mac that you can fold in half a screen, you can hold in half and then have a virtual keyboard in your lap. Don't like that. I mean, it's neither what a Mac does or what an iPad does. Right.

1:38:37 - Leo Laporte
And, by the way, he says, given the high cost of display and hinge, the foldable MacBook is likely to be very expensive, not like before, like it was all cheap, everything was bargain-based with Apple, and now they're going to start charging real money. Because they want to do this crease-free kind of panel, requiring high design specifications for both the panel and the hinge.

1:38:59 - Alex Lindsay
That's how quo knows right because he's shopping this around. They look they're probably a million dollar machine or 10 million dollar machine. They have the folds and unfolds.

1:39:08 - Jason Snell
Yeah, I, so I they're going to show in the video too I have a. It's not even it's barely a theory, but I will say I I look at this and I think this is minchi quo is piecing this together from the supply chain, right?

I think we this is something we don't know about yet Like, I think this implies strongly that either iPad OS is getting features that make this product make sense for it, or Mac OS is getting features that make this product make sense for it, or mac os is getting features that make this product make sense for it. Either mac os will become more touch sensitive and be able to run ipad apps so that it makes sense as a tablet, or that ipad os is going to become more functional and that this is a foldable ipad. But I don't think the current you know, neither the twain shall meet kind of approach apple has taken with mac or ipad. Neither story makes sense for a product like this. So there's got to be another piece. It's going to be software, it's a decision that is going to happen at Cupertino and then Ming-Chi Kuo has no visibility into, and that's my best guess.

1:40:10 - Leo Laporte
It could just be somebody from Apple going around Shenzhen saying can you make this, can you make this?

1:40:16 - Jason Snell
Yeah but what is it?

1:40:17 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, but what is it?

1:40:17 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah but, what is it? I think it would be a new product category. Even if it did run iOS, even if it did run macOS, it would be an entirely new category because it's not as though there's some really nice foldables in Windows space. There's some really nice foldable phones, but those are such outliers and so niche products. It's not as though the market has said, oh my God, I have not known phone until I saw the folding Samsung and so they would have to. I only see them making a thing like this unless they say wait a minute.

There's this idea we've had kicking around for five or 10 years. That was not at all practical, because where do you put the big screen when you're not using it, or things that we haven't even considered. That's the only way that I could really see apple doing a premium product like this. That's that's foldable, as, especially if they have to, they have to simply eat the fact that there's going to be some sort of a seam or some sort of a bump or a valley that they won't be able to deal with, like after a year or two of use there.

1:41:17 - Leo Laporte
You said, alex, that you had a chat gpt right at tetris. Uh, for you. This is kind of cool. Uh, apple demo. On youtube found a prototype third generation apple ipod. Notice the difference on the menus here it's got something called stacker on it in the games. Let's see what stacker could have been never released using this.

1:41:43 - Alex Lindsay
I'd want to play it on on an ipad. Yeah, I mean, I'm sorry, on an ipod. This is on the old ipod. Yeah, yeah, they, it was some something. I think that code was hidden in there. Um and uh, they, uh, they, they found it. Apple didn't release it. I think someone at legal told them that the folks at Tetris wow, are they litigious, like you know. Like yeah yeah, yeah.

1:42:04 - Leo Laporte
Like they're a little too close, they don't mess around Uh, they, they, uh.

1:42:08 - Alex Lindsay
I mean I don't know how they still have the rights to it, even I mean, and there are other people that are doing other names. You can, of course, but there are other names of things that people put out there. The funny thing about it is the reason I started writing my own. Well, right now, when I say writing my own, I say that very liberally, giving it a head chat to all the coding. The reason I did it is because I really want to. I I was like I really want to build one that's just bare bones, like tetris. I love playing tetris and I hate everything that's come out let me find my code from last year's Advent of Code.

1:42:37 - Leo Laporte
We had to build a Tetris game. It's a common list. Can you use?

1:42:42 - Alex Lindsay
it. Yeah, right now I have it working in HTML. Actually, that's better yeah.

1:42:49 - Leo Laporte
Are you happy with your Tetris.

1:42:53 - Alex Lindsay
No, it's pretty crappy, but I feel like it's the start. Now I'm looking through it and going, oh, I see what it did here and what it did there.

1:42:59 - Leo Laporte
And now I'll start to think about how I want to do it. That's what's fun about it is to see how you solve those little. To me anyway, how you solve those little coding issues, you know how. You know how to do that.

1:43:07 - Alex Lindsay
It does everything it's supposed to do.

1:43:20 - Andy Ihnatko
It just doesn't look very nice find too when I use it a lot for programming. But mostly it's like how do I create a button in google apps script on in a spreadsheet and then it will tell me here's an example of how to do that, whereas if the the times that I tried to ask hey, I want to build this kind of tool that works inside google docs. It gave me a solution, but it would require so much rehab. That was like maybe I should just start from the beginning and just have just make make you used to use the chat bot as the friend with infinite patience who knows this and I don't who will just keep asking specific questions and I'm really interested in.

1:43:48 - Alex Lindsay
One of the things I started asking it over the weekend was also just little things for Arduino, like I have. I have these items and this is what I want to do. How do I do that? And here's the script and here's the thing, and here's where you load it and here's how you, you know, and and anyway, I think that those like small fixes are good, big fixes Not as good.

1:44:09 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, In a week from Thursday I will be sitting back in a chair looking like this. I will have a thing in my mouth and headphones on. This is a FDA-approved treatment for tinnitus ringing in your ears from a company called Lanier, and I have gone in to my audiologist and they're going to fit me for this and I have to spend half an hour twice a day listening to weird music and getting my tongue tickled with electrical pulses. But they say it works. Anyway, I'll get back to you.

Tinnitus is a very common problem ringing in the ears. A lot of us have it those of us in radio who wore headphones for far too long for far too loud, those of us in radio who wore headphones for far too long for far too loud. People like me who went to rock concerts and sat next to the speakers because I like to have it, really make my heart pound and, as a result, mine's getting louder and louder and louder and it now sounds like there's a tea kettle whistling all the time. John, would you get that? I think the water's boiling. Fortunately there are people working on this.

1:45:28 - Alex Lindsay
Nobody really knows what causes it, but university Except there, seems to be a pretty close relationship with a lot of loud music.

1:45:33 - Leo Laporte
I think that damage would probably be related. Do you have tennis? Horrible tennis, yeah I figured you would.

1:45:40 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, it's at nine. I was talking to somebody who's done a lot of research in it and as soon as I told them that I think I have it, they said 9,000 hertz and I was like ah, and I went and opened up a tone generator and I'm like, yep, it seems like all of us are sitting at about somewhere in the same. It's different, for everybody.

1:45:57 - Leo Laporte
I have two tones at two different frequencies. Some people have lower tones, some people have pulsing. Nobody really knows, but the best explanation I've heard is it's like a phantom limb. You know, sometimes when somebody has an amputation, their amputated arm itches. Your brain, apparently, as you lose hearing, uh, replaces those frequencies with loud whines and uh. So that's why it varies. Um, so it not. It's not quite 9 000 hertz for everybody.

1:46:31 - Alex Lindsay
Let's put it that way anyway, I was surprised at how many have that. Oh, it's like 10 of the population. It's very wise, but how? Many have it at 9 000 hertz. Oh, 9 000 people, like it's a lot of people, seem to have it there, it doesn't?

1:46:42 - Leo Laporte
they're not all that way I can't really characterize the frequency because, right, it doesn't, it's not like a, it's not exactly a sound. Oh, mine is. I mean it is, but it isn't all the time. Yeah, and I can hear around it, right, I mean it's, but it's there all the time.

1:46:57 - Alex Lindsay
What's's funny is that I'll hear things that other people around me aren't hearing. It's not like I don't hear things, it's just that there's this little like, there's a little tone there all the time. That's along with everything else that I'm listening to.

1:47:08 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, and I can hear here let me play a 9,000 hertz tone so I can see Everybody. You might want to take off your headphones, are you ready? Here we go. 9,000 hertz. Yeah, there you go. Do you hear that?

1:47:23 - Alex Lindsay
I can hear it yeah.

1:47:24 - Leo Laporte
I can't hear it at all. No, I can't hear it at all. You can't hear 9,000 hertz. I can't hear whatever is playing right now. I can't hear. You can actually hear something from this video I can 100%. Are you feeding it to me? Yes, I hear nothing.

1:47:41 - Jason Snell
I have to put it really low.

1:47:44 - Alex Lindsay
Well, play it a little louder, now we can really hear it. You can really hear it, okay?

1:47:49 - Leo Laporte
stop Because it's hurting people's ears. Maybe that is where mine is. I don't know, I don't hear it. That's interesting, it actually would make sense if that's where mine is. Uh, I don't know, I don't hear it. Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, it actually would make sense if that's, if that's where mine were, because, uh, I hear that all the time, so I wouldn't, I wouldn't know. But again, that would also back up the phantom limb thing, where you're replacing missing frequencies that you don't hear very well with a with a phantom frequency. Anyway, they don't really know. Uh, I will let you know how this Lanier works. It's not cheap, it's $4,000. And it's a major commitment of half an hour a day for like six months or something it's going to be-.

1:48:30 - Alex Lindsay
Well, I'm very curious to see the only thing I've heard people talk about that really had any real. There's a cocktail of antideressant drugs that some people are taking that I'm not going to do that. That will do it, and I wasn't willing to take. I was like I'd rather have the tone I'd rather be depressed, frankly I know I was like.

I was like I'd rather, I'd like what I'd I'd rather. I'll hang on to the tone, which is what I decided to do, but they were like. You know you could do this thing and you move these things but you keep on changing it and I was like I'll let you know.

1:48:56 - Leo Laporte
Fda approved, which doesn't necessarily mean it's well. I guess it has to be safe and effective, right? 83%? Of their patients and studies say they would recommend it. So anyway, I'll try it.

1:49:09 - Alex Lindsay
I'm super interested. I'm super interested to see how it works for you. It would be worth the money to do something that didn't involve drugs. Um to uh to do that.

1:49:18 - Leo Laporte
So benito also has a severe tinnitus and I bet many of our listeners have severe tinnitus and if you're younger, uh, protect your damn ears.

1:49:28 - Alex Lindsay
I took my daughter to her first concert and I was like it was like a little dive bar. I figured how loud can it be? But I was like we stopped and I spent way too much money at guitar center to buy her ones because I had forgotten about it. Yeah and and yeah, and had her put them in. And she's 14 years old and I don't want her to like, I don't want to start her off where I was and I looked at my decimal meter on my phone, you know, during the concert, and it was at 115 dB, that's terrible.

It was really loud and I was really glad that I went through the trouble of taking something that was going to bring it down a little, a couple notches. And I think that if you're younger and you're watching, listening to the show, or if you have kids they're going to concerts really think about a solid. You know it. You know again as someone who went to use my job. So I went to a lot of shows. Yeah, um, you can't get it back.

1:50:13 - Leo Laporte
No, I carry uh like three or four earplugs in my in my purse with me, because I give them to people too. I say here, wear these, don't.

1:50:23 - Alex Lindsay
One of the reasons that I don't go to concerts much anymore is now it's super painful.

1:50:27 - Leo Laporte
Well, if I go to a concert without earplugs.

1:50:29 - Alex Lindsay
It's super painful for me.

1:50:31 - Leo Laporte
I love the Apple Watch. I have it set for 90 dB. If something's 90 dB is sustained, I will get out of there or I'll put in the earplugs. If something's 90 dB sustained, I will get out of there or I'll put in the earplugs. Lisa and I both wear earplugs now, but damage done. Hello, hey, is that? I think the tea kettle's boiling there, john? Anyway, the reason I bring it up, I will review the linear treatment and let you all know I'll bring it in. I'm getting it a week from Thursday.

1:50:54 - Alex Lindsay
I'll bring it in Everyone's wondering why we're talking about this, because Leo and I are obviously very passionate about this.

1:50:59 - Leo Laporte
Yes, everybody else is going okay, but what about Apple? Well, apple has been doing a hearing study. I did not know about it or I would have joined it. Researchers from the University of Michigan this is an Apple press release released data from one of the largest surveys on tinnitus to date 160,000 people answered survey questions and completed app-based assessments on their iPhone to characterize their experience. This was one of those Apple hearing studies, apple studies you know the Apple health studies. Among participants in the Apple hearing study, 77% have experienced tinnitus in their life. 15% experience it daily you and me. 35.8% of those ages 55 and older constantly experience tinnitus. You're not there yet, alex, but it's constant.

1:51:47 - Alex Lindsay
That's something to look forward to. I have constant tinnitus. I don't like. It's not ever gone. It's sometimes much louder, but it's.

1:51:53 - Leo Laporte
Well, for a long time I only heard it when I was. You know, it's dead quiet and I would hear it now. I hear it. I'm hearing it right now. I hear it all the time and it's getting annoying. That's why I went in for the one year.

1:52:02 - Alex Lindsay
I've been hearing it since I was in my early 20s.

1:52:04 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah well, it's that thing, any. If you want to know what it feels like, go to a loud rock concert and you come out of the concert your ears are still ringing, that's it, but it doesn't go away it's's not as bad For me.

1:52:17 - Alex Lindsay
It's not as bad as a concert, but it's definitely there all the time it is for me and as you get to my age Every once in a while. One ear will pop and just go weird, yeah, and then it's off.

1:52:24 - Andy Ihnatko
I started carrying like silicone earplugs in my laptop bag every single time and, because I never know, I'm shooting Roller Derby. This week. They've got the huge, immense, like the who Tower speakers pumping up like DJ stuff and I've got to stand near it and that was the difference between being able to stay and enjoy myself and having to leave. You never know when you're going to need it, but as soon as you have it, it's like that was the best five bucks I ever spent.

1:52:50 - Leo Laporte
So this is. I mean I wish I'd known that Apple was doing this. I don't know how do you see those studies you go in your health app and and no, I didn't.

1:52:57 - Alex Lindsay
I didn't know they've been doing it for like five years.

1:53:01 - Leo Laporte
Um, so this is a big deal, I guess, because it's the largest study ever. In the study, participants cited noise trauma, or exposure to extremely high levels of noise, as the primary cause, followed closely by stress. You know, I think it's also an occupational hazard of people who wear headphones every day, all day, because what happens is you turn it up and then you turn it up a little bit more and it's a vicious cycle and eventually you deafen yourselves. Anyway, I hope there's something comes out of this. Is the study over? I think it is, but it was one of the three landmark public health studies.

In the research app on iPhone, which launched in 2019, five years ago, it says it's ongoing. So that's really cool. Thank you, apple. And, of course, it ties into the noise app on your watch so that they can also see what kind of noise level you're being exposed to. And it is a chance to remind everybody protect your knees and protect your ears, kids, and invest. That's all you need to know. That's all your elders are going to tell you protect your knees, protect your ears and invest and your teeth, and your teeth, yeah floss, floss, you're right, floss there's four, and always, always, wear sunscreen always wear sunscreen.

That's fine.

1:54:29 - Alex Lindsay
See all these things, all these people tell you you won't listen to any of them, but we'll tell you?

1:54:32 - Leo Laporte
no, I didn't. People told me that too. I didn't listen. Watch your back. Don't eat onions, I don't know.

1:54:40 - Andy Ihnatko
There's a lot of stuff Old people will tell you Don't eat stuff off the sidewalk.

1:54:46 - Leo Laporte
Five second rule is not a rule Just saying Okay, let us pause and then we will come back with your picks of the week, if you will. You're watching MacBreak Weekly Andy Ihnatko, and Alex Lindsay and Jason Snell.

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We were talking last week about um, uh, e-readers and stuff and you you know you all agree that kindle or the kobo I'm a kobo guy. I've been well, have you? You pushed your kobo uh review right, jason?

my Kobo Libra color really, yeah, love it and it's very easy to manage with caliber and stuff. Then I thought, well, you know, I've been using iBooks to read because my, my secondary reader, especially at night, uh is is my iPad and I've been using caliber. I thought, well is thought well, is there something for the iPad? There is. There's a wonderful e-reader for the iPad called Maple Maple Books and I have it. It's beautiful.

This is kind of the delicious library look with wood shelving and stuff. You can have different backgrounds. It has a lot of nice features, including an infinite scroll, but it also has page turn. You get to choose if you want that or you want the infinite scroll, but it also has a page turn. You get to choose, you know, if you want that or you want the infinite scroll, I have it set for sepia. You can have it a variety of colors, in dark mode, of course as well.

This is a really nice reader. They have several different versions at different prices. I just bought the top of the line for $7.99, one-time only purchase. I thought that was well worth it. So I think this is better than iBooks or Apple's books. I really, if you want a great reading experience, it's nice to have everything in your Apple books, but if you're using Calibre, you might as well go out and get the Maple Player I guess they call it from Maple Soft. The only thing that is a little bit confusing is there are a variety of different SKUs. I just is this the one? Wait a minute, maybe I got the wrong one? No, that's not the right one. Maple Reader, I think it is. Let me pull up the right one. Really have been happy with it. So just something to mention.

2:00:03 - Jason Snell
If you are going to use Maple Read, I think is the one Maple Read.

2:00:05 - Leo Laporte
Thank you from maplesoftcom, same company. Oh, I get it. They have different products. I get it.

2:00:11 - Jason Snell
I have maplepopcom, oh, all right.

2:00:14 - Leo Laporte
Thank you, I don't know. I guess there's a conflict. This is why you have trademarks it's canada, blame canada, blame canada.

Oh yeah, this is it works great on uh, on, uh, by the way, on the on the uh brand new ipad pro looks gorgeous. It's on the app store. The uh, maple, you're right, thank you, jason. Maple pop dot com and uh I, you know, I think I feel like, and I feel like pay for the full reader.

If you're confused about what different features are, they have the SE, which is the flagship product, the CE, which is SE without the PDF reader, and the library server. Library server is nice because it can link to Calibre over Wi-Fi, which makes it very easy to copy stuff over. Cx is CE with some limitations. Spend $8 for crying out loud. Get the SE. Split view multitasking, which is really nice. Multiple devices the library server works with Caliber. I think they've done a really nice job. Epub PDFs If you like to read and I do still read, actually I said at night I I I really read more at night with the kobo because of the e-ink screen is great. It doesn't wake anybody up. But when I want to read, you know, in a brighter light or something like that, I don't know, I just like, I like having both. That's all I can say. Yeah, maplepopcom, jason snell.

2:01:37 - Jason Snell
Pick of the week I am going, uh, the nepotism route this time, but it's really good. It's really good, but it's by a friend of mine, uh, lex friedman's lexgames website. He's just a guy who has started a whole website full of games you can play, puzzles you can do on the internet. Uh, like everybody else, but like you could have it be the entire new york times, or you could have it be one guy wait a minute.

So he's got the kind of the same games a lot of games, including a crossword, and now he has an app. He has an iphone app that lex wrote himself for lexgames. It's got all not or not all, but most of the games and it's fun to play on iphone or ipad. And, uh, there's a bunch of free stuff. And then there's stuff that you can pay as a subscription and get access to some more games and also to be on leaderboards and stuff. And this is just one guy. It's literally just my friend, lex, who is a, a consultant, independent consultant. Apparently he's doing a lot of games consulting with himself right now. I almost want to say get back to work, lex. But if you're somebody who enjoys doing Wordle or connections or things like that in the morning, check out Lexgames. And if you like having a nice app in which to do those things, you can go to Lexgames app and get his free app and play the games on your phone or your ipad. Why?

2:03:01 - Leo Laporte
pay the new york times for connections and daily mini and when you can, you could give lex nothing.

2:03:08 - Jason Snell
You could look into the mind of lex and then, if you like it, you can also give lex money this is not the same lex friedman that sits in a with a black suit and interviews elon musk. No, this is the real, le Friedman, who is a podcast industry figure for a long time and is the good one. Nice has an E in his name. It has a song prominently linked on his website. He has a song that he wrote and performs called I'm the Real Lex Friedman.

2:03:34 - Leo Laporte
So yeah, this guy must do uppers or something. How does he do all of this?

2:03:39 - Jason Snell
stuff. I don't know Leo. I mean I got 90 podcasts so I guess he's like me, yeah, but he's.

2:03:46 - Leo Laporte
I mean, these games are non-trivial to write.

2:03:48 - Jason Snell
I know, I know he's just gone off. He started with one and he just is. He's going and going. He's been involved in the sale of two companies. I'm starting to wonder who is going to just purchase Lex, and he'll make some more money at that. But the games are good.

2:04:02 - Leo Laporte
He does the rebound with Dan Morin and John Maltz yes, he does Not playing a podcast with Dan and he watched movies Sorkin in it, brian Warren and he watched the films of Aaron Sorkin. Oh, man.

2:04:15 - Jason Snell
Well, it's TV shows now. They watch the whole newsroom and I'm like, why are?

2:04:19 - Leo Laporte
you doing this? Why do? Why do you do this?

2:04:21 - Jason Snell
they do, they do it, uh, they like it, or they do it to mock it I I couldn't bear to listen to the newsroom because I couldn't bear to watch the newsroom so that's fair right that was anyway lexgames, lexgames good for you, lex, and maybe take a nap.

2:04:38 - Leo Laporte
I don't know, I'm just saying maybe maybe Andy and I go pick of the week uh, well, you know it's.

2:04:44 - Andy Ihnatko
You know that we've got lots of keynotes that we have to digest, like an hour and 52 minutes long if you're listening to google, and sometimes you really got to harvest, like what went on in this thing. Sometimes, if you're, if you're talking or writing about it, you need quotes from the thing. You can get the transcript or the closed caption file from YouTube videos just within the interface. It's only designed to just help you see where the captions are and read them like top to bottom. You can click on one and it will just navigate right to that point. What I find helpful, though, is to download the entire thing, and I found this tool called Tactiqueio T-A-C-T-I-Qio. They're a company that mostly sells services of like automatically generating transcripts of meetings, slacks, videos, everything, all that sort of stuff.

This is a free tool that seems to work with the built-in closed captioning on every YouTube video, but it does make it super, super easy to just click a button and either copy the entire transcript to the clipboard or click the download button and it's downloaded as a file. Also, it's a one-click way to get at that entire transcript, whereas in the YouTube interface you have to click a whole bunch of things. In order to get there, here it. It's a free tool. You just paste in the url of the link to the video and suddenly you have a player on the left side of the screen and a transcript on the right side. You can scroll through and say, oh, and as things get bigger, like way bigger, oh, here it is okay. Well, that happened at one minute and whatever, and it'll take you right to there, so it doesn't it doesn't do like.

2:06:19 - Leo Laporte
Is it using the youtube transcript or is it doing its?

2:06:24 - Andy Ihnatko
own, I believe it's. In this case it's using the. It's doing the youtube transcript because I've tried it with uh. I've tried it with videos that had like really squirrely captions, and it had the had the squirrely captions also. The fact file on it, basically mentioned, warns you that oh, some, not all videos will have uh. We'll have transcripts attached to them. They're the tool they're charging for can do all that stuff automatically, obviously, and this only takes like two seconds in order to open. So obviously it's not more.

This is cool and you can jump to that part of the transcript which is kind of neat yeah, and and actually I didn't even know you could do that in the YouTube interface until I started looking into this sort of thing, because it really is kind of buried.

It's like two or three clicks deep and even so, you can't just simply do a select all and save and they will also show off some of their AI flex. You can also they can't do it directly but once you have downloaded the transcript, you can send it back to Taktik and it will do an AI summary for it. I am happy you're just sending that to Gemini or to ChatGPT. But, yeah, in terms of I'm going to listen to the entire main keynote at Google IO and WWDC, but you realize that most of the good stuff happens like in the hundreds of hours of individual developer sessions, and I don't have time to listen to hundreds and hundreds of developer sessions. So that's what I've been doing essentially, uh, either, uh, using this tool to simply scroll through the entire thing from top to bottom, or downloading a transcript and then putting it through an AI and just asking questions like what happened that I might be interested in, and then maybe then I will drill closer down and actually watch the video here is, uh, the burbank tower.

2:08:06 - Leo Laporte
This is america flight 812 over. I love these pilots sitting in a room with a little curtain and a and plan nine and literally cardboard flight yokes and uh shower curtain and just just like cardboard indicators, tacked to the wall.

I like it that you chose Plan 9 from outer space for this demo. Very nice. Oh, stewardess has run in Burbank Tower to American Flight 812. We see flying saucers. Oh boy, oh boy, now that's the way to watch it. All right, very cool. T-a-c-t-i-q, dot I-O and the Tactic YouTube transcript generator and navigator. Thank you, Andy. Mr Alex Lindsey, which one of these two do you want to do?

2:08:59 - Alex Lindsay
I just have one real quick one that has nothing to do with Max, but I just have to say it has become all the rage at my house, which is this Choux Pie mayonnaise. I'm just telling you it's Japanese mayonnaise. Okay, is it spicy? What makes it good? It's like the popcorn thing. This is like the popcorn Like. I'm just telling you that it's really good mayonnaise, don't even think about it. Don't ask what it tastes like. It's not something different, it's just something better.

2:09:23 - Leo Laporte
It's just really really good mayonnaise, and one of my it better be six dollars and 66 cents for a 12 ounce bottle and you will get it all the time after that I'm just telling you all right, I'm gonna order some right now for things that you're cooking or making or whatever that you want to use mayonnaise for.

2:09:39 - Alex Lindsay
But if you really like, want to dip, like, I dip French fries in it or potatoes or other things into it and it's. But it is so much better, like, and I don't know why. I don't know what the deal is. I think it's the MSG, but that's just my Probably. It's amazing, anyway.

2:09:54 - Leo Laporte
So the second I'm buying bulk now I actually make my own mayonnaise and I have yet to put MSG in it. I decided to stop buying store-bought mayonnaise because it's so easy to make, but I will try your Kewpie or Kewpie mayonnaise Japanese style mayo that's so good In a squeeze bottle.

2:10:13 - Alex Lindsay
But what I really want to talk about, I just thought I would put it out there. Merlin Bird ID. Have you guys played with this? Oh yeah, love it, love it. Sure, so good. I uh, I don't know if we've recommended it in the past, maybe even I've recommended, but I have.

It was a you can take pictures. When it came out, you could take pictures of birds, but now they have the audio part now and it just changes the way I take walks, you know, I, you and I, you, because what happens? You start hearing stuff. You just go, I'm going to stop for a minute and turn it on and I'll hear. It'll list the nine birds that you're hearing right now and it highlights which ones are playing at that moment. You know, and it's, it's just such a uh, and I probably download it cause of Andy and like I probably share this here real quick. Here, there we go. Yeah, I have it on here too. This is what it is, and you have the sound and then, but here's all these recordings that I've done already that, but like you can see, this one is, you know, if I start to play it, it starts to. You'll see that the I don't know if it'll play it identifies the sound it's telling you which one you're listening to right now.

2:11:22 - Andy Ihnatko
And it's like the birds are in a group chat and it highlights whoever's speaking. Yeah, exactly.

2:11:29 - Alex Lindsay
And you're saying, oh, you're hearing these, these are the ones you're hearing, and this was you know from a couple a couple of days ago. But but, but, and it just it's. I don't think I really understood why people did bird watching or why they paid attention to calls until I started doing it. And now you're just, it's just fascinating to hear these different birds and to understand what is that, and now I'm starting to get good at identifying them and understanding what you know and it just kind of opens up a door. That's really interesting and it's free. I don't even know.

2:12:02 - Leo Laporte
Is there a? I don't even know if there's a paid version.

2:12:03 - Alex Lindsay
No, no, it's free because it's cornell, yeah, cornell, so it's a free app. You can donate? Yeah, right, but download it and just take it outside and turn it on and see what you got. Yeah, um, and it's uh. Anyway, it's a really fascinating app. This is the.

2:12:11 - Leo Laporte
Cornell Lab of Ornithology's famous and this is one of their things that they're famous for is to help you identify birds, not just with a picture, but now with sound. You can play their call. Lisa and I were in a debate because it looked like a blue jay and she said it's not a blue jay, and it turns out. Merlin said it's a scrub jay. Oh, it looks just like a blue jay. We have scrub jays here. They're mean.

2:12:36 - Jason Snell
They're so mean they could chase off the giant.

2:12:39 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, they sound terrible and they could chase off the giant crows which I know.

2:12:43 - Alex Lindsay
they're crows, not ravens because Merlin told me we have Anna's hummingbirds at our house Ooh nice. And they will push the hawks off of the tree like they'll be, like, they'll start darting around it like you need, this is our tree, this is where we get food, so this uh, yeah, because so it's based.

2:13:02 - Leo Laporte
Basically it's kind of crowdsourced, because people birders will submit to their their database, the ebird database, and then that has become part of our island. So that's really cool, that's's really neat.

2:13:13 - Andy Ihnatko
No joke If you're listening. Download it right now, before you forget, because at some point in the near or far future you'll be walking around thinking, gee, what kind is that bird? Oh wait, wasn't there an app? Hey wait, I've got it. And this is one of the few things that in 2024, when I demonstrate this app, people are like I live in a world of magic and wonders beyond my understanding that such a thing is possible.

2:13:39 - Leo Laporte
Yeah Well, and the other one that's very similar to that that I keep on my phone is called Seek by iNaturalist. It lets you take pictures of plants and trees and do the same thing Identify them from the pictures on your phone. So if you have both of those as you walk through life, you will no longer be be be be say well, that's mysterious, what is that? I don't know what that is. I like this app too. Is this, is this poison?

2:14:04 - Alex Lindsay
oak. Yes, that's a good one. Poison oak I have at one point.

2:14:10 - Leo Laporte
Mitch Mitch Waite, the book publisher, who is a big birder, gave me the great bookshelf because he also has some bird apps. The great bookshelf of stuff. But I have to say this I think supersedes all those books that birders have it's. I mean, what else would you need besides eBird? I mean it just does it.

2:14:30 - Andy Ihnatko
If you've got the Google app, google Lens is also really really good for that too.

2:14:34 - Alex Lindsay
And Apple I mean for images, apple's Notes will do it as well. If you take an image and put it in Apple's Notes, it'll tell you what it is. You can click on it and tell you, but I don't know if it's, it's not as dedicated, it's a little wonky, so something like Seek or Plants or something. But the Merlin is just such a fun. Now, anywhere I go now I'm like turning it on, like okay, what am I listening to?

2:14:55 - Leo Laporte
There's a whole world out there. See, this is where AI is really interesting. It is, I mean, 20 years ago, you know, you could say well, you can identify everything you see. You know, you wear those glasses and it has pictures and you just say what's that? And I think that that's coming, and I think that that's coming, and I think.

2:15:13 - Alex Lindsay
With ChatGPT 4.0, I take picture stuff all the time. What is this? And it'll tell me what it is. It told me I think maybe I didn't mention it because it's been a while since I've been on I pointed it at this color checker and it told me this is a color checker, this is how you use it. Yeah, it's just like okay, wow, yeah, yeah, so I uh, 4-0 is is uh. I take pictures of stuff all the time. Just go, what is this? And it just explains it.

2:15:39 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, it's pretty cool. That's my idea of augmented reality, not not an agent or something like that, but just basically the ability to say what am I looking at right now or what does that sound?

2:15:47 - Leo Laporte
yep and uh, my qp, uh mayonnaise is coming tomorrow. You're going to dip a little French fries in there. Put it on everything.

2:15:58 - Alex Lindsay
A little French fries, some roasted potatoes.

2:16:00 - Leo Laporte
It's a Kew bottle. It's Japan's original mayonnaise.

2:16:03 - Alex Lindsay
Put it on. You barbecue some hot dogs and put it on there Hot dogs with Kewpie.

2:16:08 - Leo Laporte
Man, that is Alex Lindsay. If you want more of him, you can get more of him at officehoursglobal. You can get him every morning for the rest of your life. This week, today, metahuman, which is very interesting.

2:16:26 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, we had Nick Justian from Drexel University on. We were talking about the creation of MetaHuman. We're going to do a couple of them on different ways of building that out and I think it's just such a really interesting, nice model you do so many good things.

2:16:38 - Leo Laporte
All you have to do if you want to participate, just uh, just fill out the invitation form, the join us form. Uh, but you can also watch the YouTube videos.

2:16:47 - Alex Lindsay
Uh, it is a Zoom call, you can join if you wish, If you go to our YouTube channel, which is just Office Hours Global. I've started this little fireside chat thing which is just me with somebody else talking, and we've had, you know, we had Colleen Henry on was the first one, and then we had Andy Carluccio from Zoom and we had Emery Wells I think I haven't been here since Emery came on, so Emery Wells came on, and then David Pogue last week.

We'll have Dave Wiskus from Nebula on next week and then on Gray Matter, we had Mike Elgin came on.

2:17:18 - Leo Laporte
Oh nice, Did he come into the studio?

2:17:21 - Alex Lindsay
No, he came in from. He's in Venice. He's in Italy right now. Yeah he came in from Venice it sounded great and it was a great conversation. Oh nice, yeah, Mike's just the greatest.

2:17:34 - Leo Laporte
I will have to start watch these uh, these uh videos that you're doing uh interview. It's not interviews, they're fun. I do them all by myself. It's conversations.

2:17:38 - Alex Lindsay
I do them all by myself. There's one person, Laura Laura Thompson, helps me with the questions because we take live questions while I'm interviewing.

2:17:44 - Leo Laporte
So I.

2:17:45 - Alex Lindsay
I start the interview and then, and then about halfway through we start taking questions from the audience and um, uh and to, to, to, to build it up. But I'm running the whole show on Mimo Live, so I'm tapping it. You'll see me kind of it's like our old school, like back in the brick house where you're running, you're doing the interview and doing the show, and so I'm kind of experimenting with that as well.

2:18:07 - Leo Laporte
Well, you got to do that research so that I can follow along. There's Colleen, I'm thinking about the Mevo cameras. What do you think about those for the home studio.

2:18:19 - Alex Lindsay
I'm a sensor snob, so I won't use anything less than Super 35. So what are you? Using. I'm using. Mine is a.

I was thinking of the Blackmagic cameras because I have a lot of micro lenses as a webcam, I tend towards Sony because of the autofocus, this, this, being able to do this yeah, boy is that fast and I can move around, and so the autofocus works really well. I'm using an FX30. It's a, you know, it's not super expensive but not super cheap either. It's like $1,800 each or whatever. And I have a. I have a fixed lens on it. That's pretty fast, like a 35 mil or whatever, and so.

But I think that the Sony's it's because of the autofocus, and then super 35 or full frame sensor are the two, because what happens is that, like, the stuff behind me is a bunch of junk. That's just out of focus. It looks okay, you know, and so I don't have to like, depth of field takes you a long way, so short depth of field is a useful thing, and so I find that I can cheat a lot with my wall of depreciation by having it out of focus, and so that's the big thing is having that control over the depth of field.

2:19:29 - Leo Laporte
What kind of lenses does the? Fx have Sony lenses, so I have a ton of Sony lenses that's good to know, so if you have.

2:19:36 - Alex Lindsay
Sony lenses I use. These are just Fe. I mean, I have a, I think the Fe 30, five millimeter or whatever. It's a nice. I have a fast one and it's like a 1.8 or something like that. But you don't have to. I don't even think the autofocus that's great. Huh else's? And it was funny. I was talking. I'm not surprised. It's true on their still cameras too. They're really amazing cameras this is yeah, so so I I like it a lot.

2:19:59 - Leo Laporte
I mean, obviously, actually that's what this is this is not intended to be a oh it is.

2:20:04 - Alex Lindsay
It's the cinema it's a video camera. Yeah, it's okay.

2:20:07 - Leo Laporte
I mean when I build studios just like the sony alpha camera I share with the a9 or the.

2:20:12 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, no, absolutely, and you can, you and uh the um, when I build studios for people who have more resources than I do, um, you know, we're building them with fr7s, which are the sony full frame ptz cameras, and those are the ones you can just rotate around and you can reframe everything and they're, uh, they're a little more expensive, but they, you have a lot of control and that's how you build a real studio without with PTZs. So, and it's, and it's full frame and oh, it's only $10,000.

2:20:38 - Leo Laporte
I think I should yeah, you know Stick with the other one myself.

2:20:41 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, yeah, the problem with the PTZ you need somebody else Because you don't want to sit there going no, no, no. Save all the positions. You just save all the positions. And then you just tap on a thing and it goes. So the advantage of this you would only need one camera and then you go in and out and out, or you have one overhead camera that looks down on something you want to look at and one to you, and then you can. The big thing is being able to reframe without having to get up.

2:21:06 - Leo Laporte
Yes, Like I can, I'm going to move this around a little bit. Or you buy two or three FX30s and you can do the same thing, which is basically what we did here. We have fixed cameras. No totally, yeah, 100%. I'm stealing all the lights, that's for sure. There you go, and I think maybe I'll take this chair with me. You should come.

2:21:26 - Alex Lindsay
Hey, leo, you should come visit my house, okay, and come look at my studio.

2:21:29 - Leo Laporte
I will, Because you know, this is looking more and more like we're going to have to build our own home studio.

2:21:38 - Alex Lindsay
I don't want to. You can come over. I really it was.

2:21:40 - Leo Laporte
Jason can come over and we'll all have barbeque. I started the radio show at home many years ago, in 2004. And it was like I would it was sloppy, I would like get up and go. Oh, I guess I'm going to do work, and I'd slop in there and I'd still have my jammies on practically and do a show, and then I'd slop out and I said I need an office. So that's why I moved to the attic in the old cottage, because it just felt like I needed somewhere to go. So, whatever I do, I have to make it feel like it's work.

2:22:09 - Alex Lindsay
Mine only feels like space. I don't do anything here other than be yeah. Yeah, that's probably the way to do it.

2:22:12 - Leo Laporte
All right, jason you me, alex, barbecue at Alex's house. And Andy, if you want to fly out, you come on out.

2:22:18 - Andy Ihnatko
I'll tell you that's good, you can just send me the cash equivalent of the meat and the sauces, okay.

2:22:23 - Leo Laporte
You can do that too.

2:22:25 - Andy Ihnatko
I don't want to be in over zoom.

2:22:27 - Leo Laporte
We'll bring you over. Zoom is graymattershow and uh sounds like a good interview with mike elgin. I'd love to hear that. It was great. Thank you, alex, great to see you. Welcome back. Don't don't take any more work, stay here, I'll do the best I can. Yeah, don't work, no more work. Uh, Andy and ako, when you're gonna work at gbh next?

2:22:47 - Andy Ihnatko
a week from friday at the boston public library at 1 10 in the afternoon. So just show up, buy yourself a coffee and a cookie and enjoy about two hours of talk and news. On Friday there's usually a musical guest and it's often very, very good. So just hop on by the Boston Public Library For my last one, go to wgbhnewsorg. Or, if you don't happen to want to go to the Boston Public Library a week from Friday, wgbhnewsorg has all these streaming stuff ready for you to watch.

2:23:16 - Leo Laporte
How are they doing? I heard there might be some layoffs.

2:23:21 - Andy Ihnatko
I'm not a spokesperson, but they are a couple different branches of GBH. They are trimming some shows that. They Some long-time shows, yeah, yeah, long-time. Basic Black, unfortunately, I believe, is going, which is a big, big shame. It was a mainstay of of GBH for years and years and years. I think 10 percent of the newsroom is gone and the same Boston has two NPR stations, us and BOR, and both of them have had to, like, cut back pretty severely are, and both of them have had to, like, cut back pretty severely.

2:23:57 - Leo Laporte
Oh, it's nationwide and and frankly, I think it's related to what's happening to podcasts, which is there's a there's so many things to watch, but b there's a whole generation of people growing up who just don't watch tv. They don't watch long form, they, you know it's it's. If it's not tiktok or instagram, it's nothing, and I think that that's what's really honestly. Honestly, that's what's happening to old school media. I never thought podcasts would be old school media, but apparently they are. And well, you know, that's life, that's what happens.

2:24:22 - Andy Ihnatko
I mean you know and you can't follow. I mean they've been GBAs, they've been trying everything. I mean they hired me to bring the lowbrow audience back in, but I've been trying hard to really lower the level of discourse my mom.

2:24:34 - Leo Laporte
My mom calls them swamp yankees. Just, you know, it's always good to have the swamp yankee Andy and ako on the show. Thank you, Andy. And, of course, our neighbor down the road, a piece, uh, mr jason snell, sixcolorscom. Hello, jason, yes, who has decided that podcasting is the next big thing and is doing about 100 of them.

2:24:59 - Jason Snell
I mean, I decided that 10 years ago. Yeah Well, you were right 10 years ago. Still here.

2:25:04 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, some great stuff. Upgrade with Jason and Mike Talking. Apple, the Incomparable Mothership. Look at this list. Downstream robot, or not? Yes, there, incomparable mothership. Uh, look at this list downstream robot. There's many more there's many more.

2:25:15 - Jason Snell
You want to hear us talk about the end of star trek discovery? I have a podcast for you. You want to talk about the new season of doctor who? I have a podcast for you. Um, when for all mankind comes back, I'll have a podcast for you. But yeah, the incomparable mothership, of course, and, uh, upgrade are the things I think most most likely to be interested to this crew. And, of course, my review on my review on Six Colors right now, about the Kobo Libra color. I got to write a follow-up about the general state of e-readers. I'm kind of feeling a little despair. I feel like they may be run out of ideas.

2:25:44 - Leo Laporte
Well, I think Amazon is the problem. Right, they're just so big, such a giant, and they just took all the oxygen out of the room.

2:25:57 - Jason Snell
Yeah, and they have weird beliefs like you don't need buttons on your e-reader, so they've discontinued the ones with buttons and there's a leaves you with kobo. Uh, and then, yeah, this kobo color it's nice, but the screen's not as high contrast or as bright as the old black and white model that they discontinued.

2:26:06 - Leo Laporte
So so I was gonna put my oasis in the leo garage sale. It's in the box right now. Should I save that Oasis, cause it still has buttons?

2:26:15 - Jason Snell
Oh it's, it's pretty. Somebody will. It has value. How about that? I think it has value.

2:26:20 - Leo Laporte
Should, but I mean what I'm saying is should I keep it for myself?

2:26:27 - Jason Snell
Uh, no, I mean, if you're happy with it if with a Libra color.

2:26:31 - Leo Laporte
But you're right, it's not quite as contrasty, but it has a little bit of washed out color. You can't knock it for that. And actually I really do prefer the Kobo UI to the Kindle UI.

2:26:42 - Jason Snell
Yeah, kindle's better than it was, but Kobo, I think, is still better.

2:26:44 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah yeah, Some good comparisons too, if you want to see side-by-sides right there. I gave my last Kobo to Stacey Higginbotham she said what is this?

I said it's a Kobo. She said I don't want it. Okay, fine, uh, sixcolors.com. That's where you find Jason Snell, and you'll find us here every uh tuesday morning, right well, morning our time 11 am. Pacific 2 pm. Eastern time, 1800 UTC. We stream live both in the Discord that's for the Club of TWiT-tians but we also stream on YouTube. Every time we start a show, we start the stream, so it doesn't start until the show begins and it stops when the show ends.

Youtube.com/TWiT/live, and that's a great place to go if you want to watch us live. But we are also a podcast. Ever hear one of those? So that means you can download it. After the fact, there is a youtube channel dedicated to the MacBreak Weekly visit video. The website is twit.tv/mbw has every episode going way back. What is this? Our eight, nine, hundredth episode, something like that. We've been doing this for a long time, started with Alex Lindsay over there. They're all available at the website. You can also subscribe on your favorite podcast player and that way you'll get them as they come out, each new one, and you'll automatically download it and can watch it or listen. Thank you for being here. We will see you next time. A special thanks to our Club TWiT members. We really appreciate your support Makes a big difference. I'll see you next week, but now I'm sorry to say it's time to get back to work because break time is over. Bye-bye.