MacBreak Weekly 924 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, the show where we cover the latest Apple news. Jason Snell is in town, so is Andy Ihnatko, so is Alex Lindsay. We've got lots to talk about. Well, we actually had nothing to talk about, because WWC is just around the corner, but we'll talk a little bit about what Apple's strategy should be with regard to announcing their AI advancements. A lot of competition coming from Qualcomm and Intel. Apple Silicon is in the crosshairs. Also, we'll talk about these, my petunias. They glow in the dark. It's all coming up next on MacBreak Weekly.

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

This is MacBreak Weekly episode 924, recorded Tuesday June 4th 2024. Wireless Wired. It's time for MacBreak Weekly, the show where we cover the latest Apple news with our esteemed panel of Apple experts. Jason Snell sixcolors.com. He is at his mom's house.

0:01:14 - Jason Snell
No, don't tell anybody, I'm totally where I always am in my garage.

0:01:18 - Leo Laporte
You haven't moved one bit.

0:01:20 - Jason Snell
There's actually roofers standing on my garage right now, so trust me, you don't want me to be there. I'm here in my virtual space in in arizona it's beautiful.

0:01:29 - Leo Laporte
I love it great to have you sixcolors.com from WGBH in Boston, And Ihnatko in the library.

0:01:37 - Andy Ihnatko
Hi library man actually, I'm actually on vacation. I am here in wonderful dover del. I just made this green screen backdrop so that you wouldn't be jealous of me, did you go down for the crab yeah. You know what I was reading about Cesar Rodney's ride to be the signer of the Declaration of Independence and I said you know what? I want to visit his birthplace. I want to hold up that state quarter and see if it matches up with what I see in the relay.

0:02:06 - Leo Laporte
Cesar Rodney, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence you don't hear a lot about Not the John Hancocks or the you know you should Big deal.

0:02:17 - Andy Ihnatko
Actually that was. If there is such a thing as a state quarter with a good story behind it, they chose that. Okay, dude in colonial attire racing out of hell on horseback. It's because he actually was not present for the signing and had to race all the way back to Philadelphia.

0:02:32 - Leo Laporte
He rode his little E Pluribus Unum, that's what he called. It. Doesn't look like he's holding the reins, but that's a stickler. That's a stickler point. He had a style. He had a panache he's holding his hands in the position without actually having access to the reins. Here's something I didn't know the first state. That doesn't sound quite right. The first state compared to what. That's all they got First to ratify. First to ratify, first to ratify Everybody. I'm not knocking it.

0:03:09 - Jason Snell
But I do think philosophically, if there's only one state, is it a United States at that point? I mean, there's just the one.

0:03:15 - Leo Laporte
The United State of America. You need two to make a United States. That's a good point, that was an excellent point, Also with us. You heard his dulcet tones. It was so nice to have you on. Ask the tech guys. On Sunday, Alex Lindsay, you're great man, I should, just, you know, just I should cede my chair to you.

0:03:34 - Alex Lindsay
You know this stuff uh, alex, I had a great time doing it, so anytime, just let me answer there's more questions than any human alive.

0:03:40 - Leo Laporte
On office hours dot global. You told us what it was 58 000 over 55 000. We did the math. We don't know exactly how many. We haven't been tracking it that tightly on officehours.global you told us what it was 58,000?

0:03:46 - Alex Lindsay
Over 55,000. We did the math. We don't know exactly how many, we haven't been tracking it that tightly, but we did the math across the show and, since COVID started, about over 55,000 questions.

0:03:55 - Leo Laporte
You need like golden arches or in a sign that says 55,000 questions answered. It would be really, it'd really be something to be proud of. We did the math for my 20 years of doing the radio show and it was like one quarter of that. So good on you. All right, there's one question everybody's asking today what the hell are you going to talk about Apple's WWDC?

0:04:23 - Jason Snell
is Monday. Somehow we find a way, don't we? We find a way, yeah.

0:04:26 - Alex Lindsay
It always starts this way. Yeah, it always starts. Then it's like 3 o'clock.

0:04:29 - Jason Snell
Three hours later. We have to stop.

0:04:32 - Andy Ihnatko
The problem is we peak too early about speculation, rumors, what we want to see, and we basically, even now we're sort of tired of talking about it.

0:04:40 - Leo Laporte
Well, one rumor that came out. Mark Gurman on Sunday publishes his Power On newsletter. He said there won't be any hardware at all.

0:04:48 - Andy Ihnatko
Right, At all. A lot of people were hoping for an Apple TV hardware update, but nope.

0:04:59 - Alex Lindsay
Or Pros or Studios or anything. All of those are pretty long in the tooth.

0:05:01 - Jason Snell
Yeah, so Gurman has said that they're just not going to do the M3 for those, so it's going to be next year, before the studios and the pros get updated at all. And there they did this unusual ipad event right right before WWDC. And yeah, I mean, apple's always felt that hardware was not essential for WWDC, but if they had something they could use the stage to launch it. And this time they decided, uh, non-essential.

0:05:26 - Alex Lindsay
And sometimes it's just not ready either. There was one at WWDC where there was all of this subtle Apple TV graphics all over it. Everything was in the Apple TV shape, but no one talked about the Apple TV and all I could think of walking around was I bet you that there was an Apple TV announcement. That didn't happen, Didn't make it.

0:05:45 - Leo Laporte
Is it necessary? You could almost say the apple tv is done, although the second and third generation apple tvs netflix just announced will no longer.

0:05:54 - Jason Snell
Netflix will no longer work on them man, that's back when, when there were literally no apps and there was just like a menu protocol. It's pretty, they're. They're obsolete products, so yeah yeah, it's amazing, it works forget about it.

0:06:08 - Andy Ihnatko
They're good for screensavers bad bad news for people who are still using their apple tv through composite video oh, are they really, that old nothing gold can stay so?

0:06:18 - Leo Laporte
okay, I'm guessing so those are really uh. If you're still using that, you might want to get one of the newer apple tvs. Uh, the I think the 4K is pretty much done. What would we add besides a faster processor? It has the A15 in it, I think the latest one.

0:06:35 - Alex Lindsay
I think the current Apple TV, even though they're not using it, and this is what Apple does. There's a bunch of stuff in there that they're not using, but the current TV theoretically, is capable of 4K 120. So they could go to high frame rate if they wanted to. It supports the protocol and the processor is powerful enough to do it, and all the TVs that you buy now are 120. So if Apple wanted to do anything that was moving down that path, they could do it with the current version.

0:07:01 - Leo Laporte
I think it's just the newest version that will do that. I wish I could find it. I can't. You're somebody who's recommending we show the John Hodgman WWDC uh video, is it somewhere? Is it on YouTube? Is it anywhere?

0:07:17 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, I've got it's a it's. I put the. I paste it in there. Did you? Yeah, in there, did you?

0:07:22 - Leo Laporte
yeah, well, did you paste it in, did you?

0:07:25 - Apple News+
I says for giggles hang on, I got it, I got it.

0:07:28 - Leo Laporte
Give it give me, did you paste it? Did you really, unfortunately?

0:07:33 - Andy Ihnatko
unfortunately we are there you go see if you looked for it.

0:07:37 - Leo Laporte
I could actually did find it. Actually, I could show this. Uh, why not? We don't need YouTube, Do it All right. This is this is then there's a. There's actually a tie into today's news. This is John Hodgman. This was before. Is this the one though? No, I don't think this is it. I was thinking the one where he pretended he was Steve Jobs. Is this it?

No, this is the Apple Silicon announcement, where the yeah, announcement where the yeah, this is more recent from three years ago. Yeah, yeah, um, there's one where he actually uh opened WWDC, right or maybe not. Maybe I'm wrong. All right, we'll play this one this is. This is the for the apple silicon launch everybody's favorite pc, john hodgman stop, hang on, wait.

0:08:23 - Apple News+
Uh, one more thing. Hi'm a PC. Is there time for questions? Good, because I have one. Why, why, why make all these advancements? What's the point? Oh, you're so quiet now. Look, I'm a machine, I'm proud of it, that's my thing. Longer battery life. Plug it in. Where are you going? Just plug it in Fast. I'm fast, I'm still fast. Check it out Still got it.

0:08:47 - Leo Laporte
You see, I still got it. He's running in place. I've always been there. Looking a little like David.

0:08:51 - Andy Ihnatko
Byrne in the yeah Fast.

0:08:54 - Apple News+
Okay, my battery's drained, I got to go plug in Good luck.

0:09:00 - Leo Laporte
That's a great way to begin the announcement that we're leaving Intel behind Also kudos to Mr Hodgman because realize that this was three years ago.

0:09:09 - Andy Ihnatko
He had to get a haircut and shave his magnificent beard to do that. To get back into I'm a PC form.

0:09:16 - Jason Snell
Kudos and a big check.

0:09:19 - Alex Lindsay
I'm sure that he was paid well for that. And he probably said hey guys, I'd love to do it, but I I don't want to shave my beard. That would really be a big deal if I had to shave my beard and they pulled out a big wad of cash, would just start flicking it off a little thumb. Look, just tell me when to stop, just tell me it's such a big deal.

0:09:36 - Leo Laporte
I don't know okay but can I?

0:09:39 - Andy Ihnatko
can I can I point out the four-year judge. Like he's making judge john hodgman money now he has a need Big money, oh, podcast money.

0:09:47 - Jason Snell
That way it beats Apple marketing money.

0:09:50 - Andy Ihnatko
And a column in a print newspaper.

0:09:53 - Jason Snell
New York Times Dang, he is the. Yeah, imagine that Podcast money and newspaper money.

0:09:58 - Leo Laporte
Wow. The tie-in is, of course, that John Hodgman in those I'm a Mac ads was always the PC and Justin Long was always the Mac. Justin has gone over to the other side. Qualcomm is using him, not for the first time, I think yeah, second time. It does again have to do with the size of the check he's going to promote for Qualcomm, the ARM Windows and ARM PCs. He did this, I guess, at Computex, which is where they're announcing. I loved it because at Computex you've got the Intel CEO, pat Gelsinger, saying yeah, you know Apple's, we're going to be better than Apple. You just watch.

0:10:39 - Andy Ihnatko
You just watch. But it was such a like, if you've got John Long there, if you've taken all that trouble, so he's in like a nice white indicating like minimalist design kitchen. Okay, so you got the white background. He's in front of a MacBook, but what's prodding him to do a web search on like new Qualcomm co-pilot PCs is wow. Look at all these pop-ups I'm getting on my Mac. I'm tired of them. I've never seen that happen. I'm tired of them. No, I've never seen that happen, no.

0:11:07 - Leo Laporte
Such a bizarre choice and in fact, the pop-ups are nasty on Windows Windows puts ads in the menus. I mean it's out of control.

0:11:18 - Alex Lindsay
Anybody who's used a PC knows Was it the notifications that he was talking about? Yeah, yeah, and it's out of battery, so was it the notifications?

0:11:24 - Jason Snell
that he was talking about Was yeah. Yeah, it was like it was. It's on a battery now, oh no.

0:11:28 - Leo Laporte
You could turn it off.

0:11:30 - Alex Lindsay
Caution my notifications all come at 9 59 PM and then they stop again at 10. Like you can't turn them all the way off, but you can say, yeah, give me no, no notifications until one minute. If my computer happens to be open, a whole bunch of them go down the side. I kind of feel like my computer's like oh my gosh, I got to tell you all these things that happened today, and there's like this long list of things come down, but that's the only time I see them.

0:11:52 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I actually am getting and okay, this really doesn't fit the show because it's me and my personal support but for some reason my MacBook Air has started to pop up. You need to update your recovery, your recovery, not partition but your recovery person is update, update, update, update. I keep doing it. That's happened. But I've seen this before where the notification keeps coming and even if you do everything it says, it doesn't stop it. It's very annoying.

I can barely use the I did disk utility to see if maybe there's a disk permissions error. It can't write or something. I don't know what to do now. What is it telling you? It's? You know you can set a recovery person for, like, if you forget your password. So Lisa is my recovery person, but it says it keeps giving me this thing. You've got to update it. You've got to update it. You've got to update it and I keep updating it. I deleted one and I put it back. It keeps doing it. It's very annoying. Every once in a while, mac OS gets in this loop thing with various there's like yeah, I think it's often.

0:12:59 - Jason Snell
it's like there's something missing in iCloud somewhere. Yeah, and some weird iCloud thing that should I just rebuild the machine?

0:13:06 - Leo Laporte
Should I just erase it and start over?

0:13:07 - Jason Snell
I think you should, I think. I mean, have you tried removing her as your recovery contact first Cause you that could just do a reset right.

0:13:14 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, maybe I did. I re she was in there. I removed one of them. Okay, I'll try removing the other one too. I guess I don't need a recovery contact. I'm not going to die. I I'm not gonna forget my password nope, never. Uh, so it's ironic. I am in fact getting a lot of pop-up notifications, but that's not typical and you do totally control it. And, believe me, justin long, when you use windows on your arm pc, you're gonna see worse.

0:13:38 - Jason Snell
You're gonna see you know, marketing is less exciting when it's we caught up. We may have this actually with Apple and AI stuff next week, but it's that same thing of like hooray, we've caught the competition sort of almost close, maybe a little ahead, a little behind. So instead you've got to have that narrative that's just like oh ha ha, now I can use windows and it's, it's better than the Mac and all these things and it's that, you know. Know, it's also that classic thing like when they accuse you of doing it, it's because they do it.

0:14:06 - Alex Lindsay
it's a little like that, which is like all these pop-ups like um, hello it just definitely felt like it was someone who uses a pc writing about about what they think might be a problem on a mac like what's actually like what they was not a lot of co-pilot wrote it.

Maybe it was a lot of life experience that was connected to that ad you know like, and you notice that hodgman didn't show up for that one because he would like to someday maybe show up again for an apple ad where long has decided I'm never showing up for an apple. As soon as you do that you're gonna like.

0:14:35 - Leo Laporte
Well, that's done apparently, it's not the first time. In 2017 he was, uh, he did a thing for the huawei mate 9 smartphone. Yep, yep and then four years later, he did it for Intel.

0:14:46 - Jason Snell
Yeah, he's trying to kind of stay working. If Apple wanted to keep Justin Long from being in other places, apple would pay Justin Long and he's got to work.

0:14:55 - Alex Lindsay
He's got to work. No, I don't have any blame for Justin Long.

0:14:58 - Leo Laporte
He doesn't have that John Hodgman money.

0:15:00 - Jason Snell
That's the difference. He needs a podcast.

0:15:03 - Leo Laporte
Does he have a podcast? Maybe he has a podcast. Maybe if he only had a podcast. Everybody has a podcast you have a podcast. Everybody in Hollywood has a podcast. Now, everybody has a podcast. It's part of the problem. There's a little bit of congestion.

0:15:14 - Jason Snell
Get back to work. Stop podcasting. Stop podcasting. Do a movie for crying out loud.

0:15:19 - Leo Laporte
Leave podcasts to the pros, pros, all right. So WWDC is going to be all AI all the time. You think it is going to be ketchup, or you think Apple here's, here's. We should do our predictions. My prediction is they're going to come on stage and say AI just wasn't ready and they're going to show Google's AI overview telling you to eat rocks. And they're going to show you know, chat GPT, hallucinating some weird fact, and then they're going to say it just wasn't ready until now.

0:15:54 - Jason Snell
I don't think they're going to show those examples, but I do think they will allude to it, because I think what they're going to try to do is their narrative is say, look, there are things that it's time for and there are things that are not ready yet, and we are always careful and responsible with what they do, and there's truth in that. I think that there's truth in Apple trying to find the solution to the problem instead of a solution in search of a problem. I think that's one of the things Apple's always done really well. So I think they're going to allude to those problems and it's a way to try to shield them a little bit. But the fact is they've also been really reluctant to roll out a lot of things.

They've been working on AI. They hired I looked it up today they hired John Gianandrea from Google, who was the head of their AI, to be the head of Apple's AI five and a half years ago, and I'm sure I saw somebody say this last week on the internet Uh, oh well, you know there's just they're working on it and I'm like you know he's had five years to ship things and Siri is still generally considered somewhere between not very good and terrible, and I think it's a level of hesitancy within Apple to take that step forward. And the great thing about the pressure cooker of all these AI things happening in the last year is that I think it finally made Apple somebody senior at Apple, maybe even Tim Cook, say you just got to do it, don't stop hesitating, you got to do it.

0:17:18 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, this is. It's possibly I wouldn't say a dangerous moment exactly, but it's a moment where, a year from now, iphones could be the phones that don't have the cool features that everybody wants. Mac OS is the one that makes you work a lot harder because it doesn't do things automatically for you that your partner who uses Windows machine can get things done like super, super quickly and causes people to ask why am I still using this iPhone? It feels so old and outdated. I wish it could do as much as an Android phone could do. You want to get ahead of that story and I agree that Apple has a good line of defense if they even choose to go that way. Even Google said, to be fair, three or four years ago well, we're going to go into AI. Ai like responsibly, slowly, carefully, cautiously, but as soon as open ai dropped the chat gpt bomb, it was suddenly we don't care about shipping a right changing google search so that it's recommending kind of stupid things to us. Um, so apple will probably say the exact same things, whether we can believe it or not.

Turns out what happens in the next year. The good news is that, like. The good news news is that, like, microsoft just handed them a big big Apple, big big gift by saying hey, you know that, excuse me by releasing a recall, this horrible, horrible feature for windows that screenshots everything you do every five seconds, and promised everybody. Oh no, hackers cannot get access to all this information. Researchers found that not only what was the quote from one of them saying? This is the most profoundly stupid security I've ever seen in my life. So they can say that here are some practical, hands-on, useful features that people are going to enjoy, probably starting with. Here's a demo of Shlomo that does things that are way, way better than Shlomo, and we will see new features arrive prominently. Fortunately, they don't have to compete at the same level as everybody else. It's okay if they get there eventually. So long as they get there and so long as a year from now, they don't appear to have the inferior product Right.

0:19:18 - Jason Snell
And to Leo's point, I think that's the key is they need to pivot from hey, everybody's talking about these things that are kind of impractical and tell you to put glue on pizza, to how does it actually improve your life? And here are a bunch of things we did that totally improve how you use your iPhone or your Mac, and this is why you want this, not because there's some theoretical thing that's never going to be sentient and tells you stupid things like eating rocks. Forget about that. And and again, I think they're going to only allude to it, but like that's how they succeed or fail is do they have features that make people say, oh yeah, that's great, that solves a problem I have. Or do they not? And and because the danger is that in yeah, in a year, is your android phone or your windows pc incredibly capable and apple is still stuck in the mud. That's the danger.

0:20:05 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, and they can't go too hard. They can also make themselves look stupid by pretending that there are no useful AI features out there, at which point every person who writes about Windows and Android and everything else and most of the honest people who write about Mac will say yeah, actually I was able to get an app. It didn't. It didn't write. Copilot didn't write the app for me, gemini didn't. It didn't write. Copilot didn't write the app for me, gemini didn't write the app for me. But I got the script done in about three or four hours. That would have taken me two or three weeks. And also, I was able to simply drag a 500 page PDF of something I needed to research, ask it some basic questions about what was in it, where I could find certain things, and I was able to get my work done so much, so much faster there's not a huge.

0:20:45 - Jason Snell
There's not a huge mode there, only in the sense that a lot of those features are on apple's devices too, from third parties. But they do need to, not you know, the places where this the os vendor matters need to be buttoned up tight or it's going to be trouble yeah, and I think again, I think apple's got a lot of time.

0:21:02 - Alex Lindsay
I think that the apple average apple user probably would take years to change direction for what they're doing. But I think that the and I and again, I use chat, gpt or some version of that all the time. I use the desktop version, I use the phone version, I use the web version and I don't really feel like I'm missing anything right now. And I don't really feel like I'm missing anything right now. The only the first time I felt like I was missing something was talking to someone in Excel and they're talking about building spreadsheets with Copilot and I was like, ok, I really like numbers to do that. So, and I think that so that was the first time I had this twinge of oh, I have something, they have something that I don't have, and so I think that'll be, you know, like how the office, you know how pages, numbers, keynote interact with this. I think is going to be, is going to be kind of interesting to see what they do there.

I do think that Apple's narrative is going to be hey, there's a bunch of things we're going to let you do on your device that you don't have to go out to the Web. There's all kinds of security and privacy issues with going out to the Web, and so we're going to let you do that, let you do that. But the big thing, I think, that Apple has that they that they own, and they own the hardware and the operating system and software and being able to do a lot of the work without having to to go out to external servers for a whole variety of reasons, is where Apple, I think, can be distinguished themselves from the stuff that's already there. That and again, their apps, the interrogating all of their mail in mail, in the mail app, um, you know, being able to create things in in pages or numbers I think those are things that'll be important, I think I, I don't, but over time, you know, and again, I think that, uh, I think what will be interesting is to see what kind of tools they may provide in that private engine for developers, given this WWDC.

Hey, we're going to give you a bunch of hooks that let you take full advantage of the machine. You know, the ML stuff that we have built in so that you can do some of this stuff on on-prem, so, you know, being able to figure out how to do it on device and being able to give developers tools to do that really effectively on device and acceleration, you know, like being able to do whether it's Whisper AI or you know that kind of thing and we're going to give you a bunch of stuff that turbocharges what Whisper AI needs, for instance, to do what it does, so it's not taking 15 minutes, it's taking 30 seconds or you know those kinds of things. I think it would be really interesting.

0:23:17 - Jason Snell
It makes your app better, and that would be a great developer because it is a developer conference. If the story is, hey, we've got a bunch of user-facing AI features and nothing for developers, I mean, I think we all expect Xcode to have a copilot light thing in it. I think that that's almost a gimme. But it's going to be disappointing for developers if they say we've got a bunch of AI features but they're really only in Apple apps and you don't get access to them they want. Developers are hungry for access to the features and to a system-wide resource for AI features and to being able to tap into the neural engine.

0:23:50 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, the ability to do things like an APAD that says you feed it some text or you feed it a picture, you ask for something and you get a result back from the app, the ability to wrap that in a good interface. But also there are things that only an operating system maker can do. One of the most intriguing things is just the ability to give a chatbot access to my screen and be able to say, as I'm navigating, saying, is there a higher resolution version of that picture that I'm looking at somewhere on the web? Or who is linking to this article? Or what does this document actually mean to me? The idea of having a microphone channel open all the time simply because my hands are busy doing human things on the keyboard, and I just want to say, oh, what does that word mean?

I read a New York article that had a hell of a word in the opening line that made me think that, wow, you really think that you're going to be promoted to like you were holding this word in your hip pocket. It's not senadoche or something like that. And I say, couldn't you just say, when people think of this, they think of this one word instead of using? And that's the sort of thing where what does that word mean? The word that starts with S in that paragraph, when it starts to become an actual companion that you do your work with. It's not just integration with what you're looking at and what you're seeing on the screen, the ability to be so freaking fast that you actually can have a conversation. It's not request, wait three seconds and get the answer. It's like the web used to be 10 years ago, like now. It's you click something, you get something. You don't have to wait for someone to download.

0:25:24 - Alex Lindsay
You know that's the power that these other companies can do, and I don't think I'm going to say this, I don't think that apple's going to do what I'm about to say, but I think that the, the nuke that apple could roll out is hey, we've licensed enormous amounts of data. We have put it all into a package that's going to sit on your device. It is protected. You know, it's not it's. We're paying for it so that you can use it as a developer. It's going to do a lot of the things, maybe not do everything, but it's going to be a huge data set that can sit on your device and and do a lot of the things that ai does, and we're going to make that available to the developer.

So you don't have to figure out how to do that. All you have to do is just ask for, you know, throw the, the stuff into it. That would be a massive, you know, like basically taking the stability AI kind of you know that process, making it a bit bigger and sticking it on devices would be something that. And then making it available to developers so they don't have to think about it would be a huge bump from where everybody else is, but I don't that would be. That's a pretty long shot, but I think it would be something that somebody's gonna someone like Apple could do. So the existence there's so many.

0:26:30 - Andy Ihnatko
There are so many hot potatoes with us too, like even if they, even if they did do something as good as that where we have actually we have actually already trained this AI from a number of sources. All I have to do is ask a question. It will work. Answer back that from that will provoke a lot of people say, yeah, okay, where did you? Where did you license this from? Did you license it from Reddit? Because I wrote a whole bunch of history posts that I don't want to be fitting into your AI product without me being paid for it. There's so many hot potatoes that maybe Apple is wise to go slow and low and just wait for legal stuff to sort of work itself out and wait for people to get used to the temperature of this new environment before they decide to volunteer to have the next piano crushed by a 40-ton press incident in their portfolio.

0:27:10 - Jason Snell
Yeah, it'll be really interesting to see how they balance their normal conservatism and hesitancy and being careful. I do think there are approaches right, like I mean, honestly, a lot of the chatbot stuff that hits people is because it's over-relying on the chatbot and that a chatbot that is capable of looking up things from specific vetted data sources and then summarizing it is much less likely to hallucinate than something that has just been trained on the internet and then just makes things up. I do think the neural engine is a thing that is going to be an interesting advantage because Apple's been shipping that for a long time, and I do wonder for app developers if you end up in a situation where, right, you're using processing time and power and heat from the users, from all those iPhones that are out there, from all those Macs that are out there running Apple Silicon, instead of it being necessarily in a data center, and that's interesting. It might also lead to developers having different approaches to their apps because of the ability to do something.

Like I was listening to Marco Arment talk about Overcast, his podcast app, and like Apple has big servers that are basically transcribing every single podcast for Apple podcasts and Marco is a single guy doing this.

He can't do it right. So I had this thought which is like well, wow, if there's a transcription engine that uses Whisper or something like it that's on device, could somebody like Marco basically have a system where it looks to see on the server if there's a transcript, if there isn't a transcript it's the first time this podcast episode has been seen it transcribes it and then sends it back to the server. So everybody else who listens to that episode already has a transcript and doesn't have to transcribe it, and you've basically crowdsourced your AI-driven transcription. Like I'm not saying he will do that, but like that's really interesting. Where you can use this, your, your, your AI powerhouse is all the iPhones that your app is running on, instead of it being something that you can't afford because it's an enormous cloud service thing that and your business model doesn't connect to it. That's really interesting, like potentially for developers.

0:29:08 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, I mean Apple's conservatism is kind of a hindrance to what they need to do in the next year or two. They may not have time to say, well, we're going to think things out, we're going to wait to see what the market wants. It's like sometimes you have to show something that the market has never seen before and get them super excited about what you're doing.

0:29:24 - Jason Snell
Well, theoretically they got a kick in the pants last year, right, and theoretically they are not complacent.

0:29:30 - Alex Lindsay
But we don't know until we see it right, and I think that, again, I think that they solve some of the issues and especially take advantage of what they can do on the device.

And then again, the thing that saves them is that they're not only a software company, and a lot of us are already doing a ton of AI stuff on their hardware without Apple doing anything, so we don't need them. They don't need to reproduce what ChatGPT is doing or what you know any of these solutions need to do. They simply need to look at what makes them different. What can they take advantage of in a vertical stack that no one else can do? And and really, you know, make that happen and then make sure that these other things are accessible. Because, again, I think that there's a lot of people like me that are pretty happy with the AI solutions that we have on our devices at the moment. And again, I think that if Apple starts to show some stuff, potentially with some of their office products and so on and so forth, that's going to be, you know, to make those things easier. That could go a long way as well.

0:30:27 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, and there's also. What we haven't talked about yet is that there's a big opportunity for Apple here, because AI features are not great for running on older hardware. It's like you really need the neural engine, you really need extra RAM and people who are still lagging behind with a three-year-old, four-year-old, five-year-old I've seen people with much older iPhones than that. They're just, even if they can't run the latest operating system when it becomes. Now, for the first time in a long time, there is a divide. The wall has come down. You're either on the side of the wall that can use Apple's really wonderful iPhone AI features, or you are not on that side of the wall and people will want to say, hey, let's find six to six, six hundred thousand dollars and get on the other side of that wall because it looks like those people are having a good time.

0:31:13 - Leo Laporte
So I mean, and also it's possible, apple will just say look, you can make really good Memojis with AI. I mean they might, oh God please.

0:31:22 - Jason Snell
I mean, they know the knives are out. They know the knives are out.

0:31:24 - Leo Laporte
You really agree? They have to do something right.

0:31:26 - Jason Snell
It's mixed, because their mistake would be to say we're going to jump in with everybody else and just do this dumb stuff. Their advantage is they can be a little more careful because they're Apple, if they've got the material right. If they do, you've got to think that, given all of the talent and given that they've had a year or more since they really got the kick in the pants to turn this over, that they will have an interesting. Also, by the way, I should say we're thinking about like the traditional way Apple rolls out features, which is most of the features happen in the beta over the summer. They've been changing gradually over time. There's totally going to be features in here where they're really just saying over the next year we're going to add this and some of that stuff's not going to be ready yet, but they're going to announce it and they're going to say it's coming.

And that's how Apple responds to a crisis. Sometimes is they kind of back away from there. Oh, no, no, no, we only announce it when it's ready to go and they're like nope, next spring, all hat, no cattle. I guess I don't know where that came in Arizona, maybe that's where it came from. Then they're in trouble, right, but I think that they don't have to do the. You know see, we got a chat bot in order to get there. I think they've got to show that they've got some substantial introductions to things that are going to be throughout the operating system.

0:32:44 - Leo Laporte
All of this presumes that AI will in fact be something useful and it won't just turn out to be a flash in the pan another Bitcoin or VR it will be useful for specific tasks.

0:32:54 - Jason Snell
The problem is that there's a lot of runaway AI hype and that's what I hope Apple doesn't buy into, because you know, again just saying, we have this amazing thing, well, what do you do with it? Well, kind of nothing, but maybe someday. That's not what Apple needs to focus on. They need to focus on appreciable features matter. Features matter to customers. You're going to upgrade to the new iPhone if it has all these amazing AI-powered features that help you. No-transcript.

0:33:29 - Apple News+
Yeah, but I mean you want to say we're doing something new and better, don't you Sure, and photos.

0:33:35 - Alex Lindsay
I think photos is a great place that Apple could be adding a lot of AI features of. You know the kind of thing that we see in Photoshop 100%, where we go like take this person out, do this thing over here, add this thing over there. That's like especially for the kids.

0:33:47 - Jason Snell
These days You've been able to do that in Photomator on iOS and on macOS for years now. And as somebody who has written a book about the Photos app, let me tell you it's clearly and it's not a technical issue, clearly, philosophically, there are people inside Apple who are like oh no, we can't retouch a photo because that would be wrong. And it's like what are you even doing? Like you can't even retouch a blemish on somebody's face in iOS photos. You can do it on the Mac, but they still haven't in 2024, the year of our Lord, 2024.

0:34:20 - Alex Lindsay
There's some product manager in there or somebody that just, or someone above them and saying no, we know, the integrity of the photo must be maintained, and first off that horse is the horse died.

0:34:29 - Jason Snell
It left the barn, it had a family, it had foals, it ran several races and then it died as of old age. The horse of editing photos is out of the barn. It was out of the barn when photography was created, quite frankly. So that is my. That's what troubles me. I'm hoping that that kick in the pants last year made people like that lose the argument right, because there's no reason that photos shouldn't have all those features in there. Now they've got I mean, they've got the reverse of it right. They've got the ability to extract something from a background, um, the ability to compute like oh yeah, there's a person standing on a beach, I want to erase them. It's been done, it's been done years ago. That's a case where I don't think it's just that they're behind, I think it's just that they're philosophically opposed to it, and that's the kind of thing that just. I think maybe the culture change has made those arguments be lost inside Apple now I agree 100%, and this is what I'm on about.

0:35:20 - Andy Ihnatko
Apple can't be the company that doesn't have the feature that everybody, that the. It can't turn the iPhone into the less than model Absolutely Every, I mean. I can't tell you over the past three or four years the number of times where I've blown the minds of an iPhone user by simply casually, like tapping on a figure in a photo and sliding it over, and there isn't just like a blob left behind, there is actually like background filled in and left behind and things. Things like oh well, here's a YouTube video or here's a live stream, but it's in French. I need an English translation. I don't have to launch an app, I simply have to touch the volume control and underneath the volume control there is a translate button, live caption and like how is your phone doing that and why doesn't my iPhone do something like that too?

0:36:06 - Jason Snell
I need to make this photo square, and I don't have enough to make it square and keep everybody in the photo. Well, imagine if you could expand that photo taller and it would fill it in, right, like I mean, that's that's making people's lives better, right?

0:36:20 - Andy Ihnatko
That's not a dumb demo, that's a real thing, and like I can hope it like onto something you said a minute ago where Apple can't simply introduce these AI features and say well, we don't know what this is for, we don't know how you do this, but here it is, Because they already spent an entire keynote talking about that with the Apple Vision Pro, so they can't really use that again for a while there aren't a whole lot of rumors about hey, we're going to see new Apple Vision Pro hardware, we're going to see great new Apple Vision Pro demos and APIs.

0:36:47 - Alex Lindsay
I mean, maybe we'll see them in like developer talks, but this is probably not something that if they're going to do a tight 43 minutes, they're probably going to hope we don't, and I think that they could literally just show a bunch of upgrades to photos, and if it was, if it was impressive enough and everyone go, ok, they got it. But you know, that's not the only thing they could do, but that would be a huge jump forward. And again, I think, I think that simple things that Apple can do that are that are useful every day, which is I talked to. I was emailing Jason and Andy in 2016 about this Just show me what those emails, you know where are those emails, and having them pop up like that is like, you know, like the cause, the search and mail is so bad. So so, being able to have just like hey, we fixed this, you know, and little things like that that save people time every day, or just being able to say, you know, like a slightly more complicated, like, I want to create a calendar event, I want to invite this person, this person, this person, this person, um, go ahead and send them an invite for 10 o'clock on Wednesday and be able to just say it in natural language and have it just occur.

Or you know, I'd like to have a. You know, you know those those kinds of things. I think it doesn't have to be. They don't have to boil the ocean to, you know, to make this work. But some of those things that are happening on your device with the products that you use, that make life, that make your everyday life easier, I think, are things that apple are low-hanging fruit for apple, whether they and, as jason said, it'll be a philosophical reason that they don't do it, not a technical reason that they don't do those things hey, shlomo, find me that pdf about qualcomm that I downloaded, I think, about two weeks ago yeah, it simply opens in preview.

0:38:20 - Andy Ihnatko
It didn't, didn't have to, it didn't have to screenshot every five seconds, it just said okay, I got all the keywords. I popped everything I need out of that request to do the right spotlight search and I know that's a pdf and you want to see, and I can intuit what you might have meant.

0:38:31 - Jason Snell
I had this where I was looking for a, uh because I got the new ipad. I have an ipad stand that isn't compatible with the magnets and whatever, and I and then I want to get a new one from the same company and I heard that they had one, but I forgot it's some nameless Chinese company, random letters, uh, right on Amazon and I'm like, but I didn't order it from Amazon, I ordered it direct. I'm like, how am I going to find this? And I spent like five minutes with different search terms and I'm telling you, I'm pretty sure that if Apple had a search field like this that had some AI magic behind it, I could say can you find? The last time I bought an iPad stand and have it figured, because you could figure it out, it just took me, as a stupid human, five minutes to do it. And I had that moment where I'm like, you know, an AI system would know this.

0:39:15 - Alex Lindsay
And even if, even just shortcuts, if you said, hey, I want to, I want a shortcut that does this Like when I walk into the room and I walk over here, when I click on this, I want it to turn the light on, or I want to be able to tap on my watch and have it just do all the things that needed to be done for it to do it, rather than trying to figure out the nomenclature of the. You know it geekifies a lot of the stuff.

0:39:32 - Jason Snell
This is the end state of user automation. It's actually funny when you think about it, like at first it's you're writing oh well, we can simplify it with Automator. It's like no, no, no, not enough. We can simplify it further with shortcuts and I love shortcuts. But the real end state is you tell your computer what you want to have happen. Okay, that's good. The next thing is you tell your computer to remember that and every time you give it that command, do that thing contextually again, and at that point you're just reasoning with it. You don't have to learn a block building interface or anything like that. And that is the next frontier of computing I really believe is you shouldn't have to be an expert at all of these details in order to get your computer to do stuff for you. If you can just tell it what you want the end state to be and it can figure it out.

0:40:22 - Andy Ihnatko
That's the dream One of the brilliant things that Douglas Adams once said about the evolution of computers is that when personal computers started out, it used about 90% of its computing power to do the thing you had asked it to do, and only 10% figuring out what the thing you asked it to do. You type something, a complex command. It executed that command and, like with the Mac for the Ron, it's using so much of its and, like with the Mac for the ROM, it's using so much of its very little of its processing powers to do the actual thing. Most of it is to operate the mouse, operate the windowing interface, operate this, that and the other, and I think that this is just another demonstration of how brilliant of an observation that was. This is going to be. Now, most of this is just a box that processes an AI that you ask it to do something. It's up to you computer to figure out how to do that.

And another step towards obliterating the idea of our awareness of files and apps. Because I don't need to know about the preview app. I don't need to know. This is a PDF. I'm saying I've got this document that tells me all about this new ARM architecture that Qualcomm has come up with. I just want to know some information about it. I don't care if it's a PDF, I don't care what created it, It'll just simply give me a container that has information or, better yet, just simply pull the information out of it.

And maybe this is if you're talking about people who are annoyed about software as a service and subscriptions. There might be a time when, five or 10 years from now, when really you don't buy Photoshop, you don't buy, you don't install pages, you, you don't install pages, you simply have a service that your computer can connect to through a built-in package or something it connects to over the cloud that does a discrete task or discrete feature that your AI can actually access. That's the level of sophistication that we're hoping for. We don't want pull-done menus, we want no menus.

0:41:57 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, yeah, and even tell you what you need to go get. I was sitting there talking to ChatGPTT and I said I want to create a countdown clock that when I push a button, I want to do it with an Arduino and I want to push a button and have a countdown clock start. What do I need and what is the program? And it literally said you need to get this display, this Arduino, this button, you plug this in. And it gave me the pins to plug it into. The code is I ordered it all. I'll just show up this week, so, but it was just like. It was just like I just just tell me how to do this and tell me and give me the code to do that, cause I just want to build this countdown clock and you know like that's the kind of stuff that we're going to get into where, and I think that one of the things that Apple's missing is actually that Arduino, like you know interface that's cheap, that ties into the rest of the world Um, you know, but but even even if that doesn't exist it, you know like I think that again, the Tetris example I used last week was that I, you know, I wrote Tetris in 15 minutes and the hardest part was cutting and pasting it into the.

You know, pasting it into the, into the thing, in less than 15 minutes and five minutes. Um, I asked it to do it in Swift and it wrote it in Swift and then gave me the instructions on how to put it into Xcode and obviously, what we do expect, as Jason said, we expect that to be an Xcode. Now, like, I'm going to open up Xcode and just go, you know, this is the specification for Tetris. Write me a Tetris app and it's just going to write one.

0:43:21 - Jason Snell
The OS vendor has that power right. That's the really extra thing is saying well, I can look at all your apps and I can look at all of you know, you've got the development over here. You don't have to like open the app that does this and then open the app that does that, and it can integrate it all. And to Andy's point earlier too, when he was talking about the example of forgetting about files, I thought it was interesting because he said find this PDF. And I thought one of the things I want to do is forget about where the files are, in a broader sense like not just like what folder it's in, but like is it in an email attachment in my email account, or is it saved to my cloud storage? Or is it on one of my devices, in my constellation of Apple devices, in Apple's ecosystem, or is it in a bookmark mark or like.

At the system level, the system should be able to and this is where Apple's ecosystem really could be powerful is if Apple can say oh, I know where all your files are right and I know where all your emails are, and it's just me, your computer and I can find it for you, and then, as a user.

You're like great, I don't. I mean, I had this moment, um back when I switched to Gmail, where I used to use Eudora and I used to file all my mail and I used to set up filters to file all my mail in the right places, and I started using Gmail and I realized, you know, I never need to do anything but have an inbox and an archive because I can just find it. I don't need to file it, I can just find it. And that was a transformative moment for my email life to not have to file emails. And this is what we're saying for some of this AI stuff is the potential as an OS vendor, if you're Apple or Microsoft or Google is saying we can abstract this, not in a way that's like, oh, you can't see where your files are, but like you don't need to care because we know where your stuff is and we'll tell you.

0:44:58 - Alex Lindsay
And when you abstract that even further, it's not even. You don't need to see the file, you just need to see the file.

0:45:02 - Jason Snell
You just need to see the information. I just need the content.

0:45:04 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, I, yeah, I just, I just had this thing, I just need to know, you know like um what it says, what is? In the content right.

0:45:10 - Jason Snell
I don't even need to open the PDF. I need you to tell me what's in the PDF.

0:45:14 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah or or or. Andy recommended this to me, uh, in an email in 2016 or somewhere in that. Very just order it on Amazon for me yeah.

You know, like, you know, like it's like I remember that thing or whatever, and and um, or just again, the photos, like we spend so much time doing automation, just I, this is um, grab, grab all the photos of my daughter or of my son or my family and, you know, lay them all out into a collage that I, that I want to do, and and and then lay them all out so that I can assemble them the way I want them, but or scale them all, or make them all square, or make them all rectangular, and if they're not rectangular, add the details, you know, add to the image. But those are the kinds of things that I think that we are going to get to. Someone's going to be doing that in the next year and a half and hopefully, for Apple users, apple's doing some of those things you know that are built into the OS.

0:46:03 - Andy Ihnatko
I mean, you reminded me of one of the AI features that I've been desperate for for a long, long time, because my I've.

I've said before that my favorite game on my phone is the photo editor, because that's the where I have the most fun and and I could observe the edits that I tend to make to most photos and learn what my house style is. Do you like it a little bit more saturated? You tend to always add sharpening at the very end. You usually like to boost the highlights and take the blacks down a bit, but you leave the shadows alone, that sort of stuff and eventually to essentially, instead of having a generic enhance button that is based on whatever Google or Apple thinks the right enhancement is, it's basically, maybe there's a little star next to it that says, oh, this is your custom AI enhanced enhance, where it will basically do what we think you tend to do to all photos, at least as a starting point, and I don't know why it doesn't do that. It's something that seems like it could learn and it would transform the experience of enjoying photos into the device.

0:47:00 - Leo Laporte
Well, we will be finding out coming this Monday. It's not too far away. That's 1 pm, Eastern 1800 UTC. Mikah Sargent and I will anchor our live stream as we watch together. And Jason, you got an invitation, so you're going to be there. You're going to be. I'll be in the side of the belly of the beast.

0:47:20 - Jason Snell
Watching a video with the rest of you, but I'll be doing from apple park, do you know?

0:47:23 - Leo Laporte
yet if uh tuesday you'll be there to look at stuff, I guess there's no hardware, maybe not I?

0:47:28 - Jason Snell
think I think there are some pr things that are happening on tuesday morning. So, um, in terms of this show, I think what I've told all the producers is, if I get some moments while you're on, while I'm not being taken to a secret lair underneath apple park or something, I'll try to chime in from apple park during the show, but it's probably I'll probably just be like a cameo but yeah, do a cameo.

0:47:50 - Leo Laporte
You could do it from your, your phone, if you want, yeah, yeah, hey, it's me. I'm standing outside apple park and uh reporting live reporting live cool that'd be great, I'd love to get your impressions live next.

0:48:03 - Jason Snell
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I should be able I mean this show's on for what?

0:48:06 - Leo Laporte
like eight hours I'll find a way to get in there at some point. Yes, it's like a telethon they're going to give you a lunch break, exactly.

0:48:12 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, exactly, Jason, I love the way that you put it. Like Apple takes away that they did design everything from top to bottom in Apple Park under the explicit guidelines of Steve Jobs. I'm not saying there is a torture cell for misbehaving journalists. I'm saying that maybe there is like a room that could be converted into one.

0:48:32 - Leo Laporte
I don't think you have to worry until they put the hood over your head A drain in the floor. Yeah, but the wood is lovely. The wood is custom built in Europe and lovely, steve picked it yes, granite carved out.

0:48:47 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, that's great, the the chamfer angle on those manacles that are tying to the wall. It is hard to bind aluminum, aluminum to the right right alloy of steel, but we developed a new metallurgical johnny, I've denied it busy you know, you know my, you wouldn't see this kind of design from google. I have to. I have to give them credit for that.

0:49:03 - Alex Lindsay
It's biting into my wrist, but not so much. There's a short there somewhere of high design torture.

0:49:08 - Jason Snell
You know it is I will say you know, it is the part that gets me, as always and anybody can do this. By the way, if you go to the apple park visitor center, which they built very, they know that people are going to be fans and they're going to go to make a pilgrimage, and so they built a, an entire building with an apple store and a cafe in it and a viewing area across the street behind the big wall, so nobody can actually get into apple park. But if you park there, they may instruct you to go down into their parking facility and it. I love it, because I don't know how many levels it goes down, but it feels like it goes to the center of the earth and I like that because it's. It's like you're enteringillain lair through the parking structure. It's pretty great, nice.

0:49:46 - Leo Laporte
All right, we will cover it Monday and then, of course, a big Mac break weekly, a week from today, with or without Jason Snell. Snell on the scene. Dustin says yes, reporting live. Snell on the scene.

Our show today, brought to you by something we just installed over on our engineering room, and it's pretty cool. In fact, it's so easy to do.

I got Mikah Sargent. All he took was a Phillips screwdriver and he could install the Eufy Video Smart Lock E330. Look, he's popping it right in. That's all you do. You screw it in like that. But boy, the features you get when you install it are amazing like that. But boy, the features you get when you install it are amazing.

In a way, it combines the features of a video doorbell with a automated lock. It's easy to install, no drilling required. A 0.3 second fingerprint recognition, very fast, one second unlocking, and it's a deadbolt. So it turns and unlocks, and the embedded AI self-learning chip becomes more accurate with every use. So he's setting it up, he's pairing the battery. There it is, he's set, he's ready to go Scanning the QR code.

It was really literally that simple. Now watch, when you touch it, it automatically recognizes your fingerprint and unlocks. There's a keypad there, as you can see, so you can also have a number to enter, which makes it easy to share with other people. It even has a keyhole right there behind the doorbell so it's easy to open the lock. Even if the battery dies, it won't die. It's a 10,000 milliamp hour rechargeable battery. It should last about four months. You'll get a low battery notification, but it's nice to know. You've got a hardware fallback. And look at this somebody rings your doorbell. They've got a camera. You can let them in even by pressing the button so a handyman comes by or you want somebody to drop something off. It's very easy to do control your front door completely remotely through the Eufy video lock app Passcode unlocking, remote control, 2k clear sight camera, two-way audio so you can talk to them. Enhanced night vision yes, it works in the dark.

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Now some of you may say well, what's the Eufy? I'm not familiar with them. You do know anchor, though. Anchor makes all the batteries and the power stuff we use around here. I have so many anchor devices. Eufy is their home automation brand. So there you go, and it is a really good one. Get your Eufy video lock today the Smart Lock e330 by searching Eufy VideoLock on Amazon or go to the website Eufy.com E-U-F-Y, Eufy, e-u-f-y.com. We really love this device. It's just, it does it all in one easy-to-install device. Eufy.com. We thank them so much for their support of MacBreak Weekly. We thank them so much for their support of MacBreak Weekly.

Okay, well, ai and WWDC together, no hardware, be very interesting to watch and see what happens. And that's our show. Thank you very much. We'll see you next week. Goodbye everybody. No, there's other stuff. Let's see If you use HomeKit'll see you next week. Good night everybody. No, there's other stuff. Let's see If you use HomeKit. This is kind of cool. They're rolling out controller for HomeKit with an updated 3D floor plan feature. This would make it a lot easier to plan your HomeKit installer. This is a third-party app controller for HomeKit. Very cool. I should have made that my pick of the week, except I don't use it, so I don't know anything about it, but I like this idea. I'm looking at doing more home automation, and HomeKit seems like the best way to go, and this app seems like it would make it even better.

0:54:02 - Jason Snell
Yeah, use the LiDAR scanner to build a little 3D model Build a 3D model. It's cute.

That's one of those things, that is, you know Apple should do stuff like that right, Like Apple should make your. I mean HomeKit should be better and do better and connect better and all those things too. But a little more whimsy would be nice. I know that ultra-wideband is eventually going to get us proximity, exact position of every device around, but we don't have that right now. But we do have a lidar scanner on our device, like we could walk around and make a little model of our house with all of our objects in it.

0:54:31 - Alex Lindsay
That would be cool and and the what, what really works. Polycam has this, this great piece of it that you can walk around and you can get the height you know, kind of like it's mungy 3d. But it also does a version where it kind of simplifies everything and so you just walk around and you see the lines going along the edges of your you know, as it figures it all out and in about I did my one whole floor in my house in about 10 minutes just wandering around and everything else and it it basically says it doesn't try to do your couch. It goes oh, there's a couch here.

So it just fills the couch in and there's a there's a thing here. There's a refrigerator here.

0:55:04 - Jason Snell
There's like a dollhouse or something. Yeah.

0:55:05 - Alex Lindsay
It's like a dollhouse version of it, but it's nice because that means that you can show it to people or you can look at it and you don't feel like you have to clean up.

0:55:12 - Jason Snell
I mean, if a Roomba can do it, your iPhone should be able to do it.

0:55:16 - Alex Lindsay
And it's so convenient, and then being able to bring it into to figure this stuff out. It could even now know where all your objects are and it would show you in 3d of, like this is where your keys are, like you don't have to do that stupid thing where you're wandering around trying to figure out how to stay in. You know, because it should know that now, like you know, it's just not, it's just not doing that, you know, and a lot of that has to do with, I think, more of apple's privacy than what it's capable of. So, but the but.

I think that, and I still think that HomeKit is another one of those things that every WWDC, you hope that Apple gives up on their partners and just starts developing things you know like, like. You know like it's just never going to work, like. In my opinion, it is never. Everyone keeps on talking about it and I just feel like it's never going to work until Apple just builds the five core things that we want. You know the lock, the light. You know the light, the outlet, the. You know the. You know like. They just build those five things.

0:56:09 - Andy Ihnatko
Let everybody else do with the other things, but that would get people using it a lot more if they did a handful of things that just worked, you know it's too bad that HomeKit and that's true, it's true basically of every home automation thing it really is just for wonks at this point, unless you turn lights on and off, a couple of smart features that are built into thermostats and things like that but the things that this kind of system could do to appreciably like take a lot of the unnecessary, like mental bandwidth off of your life are just untapped by anybody. I'm surprised if any, if many people who are Apple users even know what HomeKit is. It's so underneath the radar.

0:56:46 - Alex Lindsay
And the problem is, apple is desperately trying to get other people to play along rather than just going. Here's the deal we're just going to do the first five or 10 things. Everyone will start using it all the time and they'll all be buying them. There'll be another $10 billion vertical for Apple. There'll be buying them. There'll be another $10 billion vertical for Apple. There'll be some service that you pay 10 bucks a year for 10 bucks a month for it. It'll do all the things and and um, and Apple will make a bunch of money on it, and. But the thing is is now everybody's using it. Now you can start building other tools on top of that that are doing it.

But rather than waiting for partners to do core items that make your house work, apple, I think Apple just needs to give up on them, because they're never going to.

They're never going to do it, because they always want to see how do I make it work in six different different platforms and how do I do all this other stuff? And, and I think that Apple just should just and it would plow their, plow a lot of their businesses under, under, because I think that Apple users would very quickly if Apple made a thermostat, they're not going to buy any more nests or anything else, they're just going to buy Apple thermostats. And if Apple built a plug, they're not going to buy any more. I mean, they're just going to buy the Apple plugs. You know like, that's going to, you know like and that, but there's all these other services and all these other things. That would happen if all those Apple users now had all of those things. But I think Apple, trying to work with that very good at working with partners, like they're good at doing their own thing and I think that they need to do their own thing it feels like right now, I desperately want to work.

0:58:03 - Leo Laporte
It's Google and Amazon that rule the roost, and you know everything works.

0:58:08 - Alex Lindsay
I don't think anybody rules the roost. I mean, well, everything works with.

0:58:11 - Leo Laporte
A-L-E-X-A. I mean, they're even. You know. Nobody wants to piss off Amazon, so they make sure that they work with Amazon stuff.

0:58:22 - Alex Lindsay
I just don't know how many people that are doing that much automation. I have a lot of friends that are geeks and they've kind of given up on most of it. They don't do very much of it because it's broken all the time or they don't want to have Google or Amazon listening to them. Those are the other ones that are really geeky, don't want that either.

0:58:40 - Andy Ihnatko
I think you hit on the head with the first. The first one it's like um, I've again, I I've got all kinds of like google stuff in my house for the for limited things like turning lights on and off, it's okay. But even then it's like why one out of every 10 times it says I'm sorry, I can't help you with that? Or why did you pick that up in the smart display in the kitchen when I'm right here in the bedroom and there's a display like two feet away? Really, for every sort of feature, not just home automation, all it has to do is be 10% unreliable to make someone think.

In this case, I think I'll just turn the lights on and off by myself. I think I can set the thermostat myself. If, for some reason, I can't connect the doorbell and find out who just rang the bell, because here's the, here's the one time and in a week when somebody rings the bell and I don't know who is coming, I really want to know if I need to drop what I'm doing and for some reason, I can't find the doorbell. Now that's when you decide. You know what google or whoever has a new version of this. I don't think I'll buy it.

0:59:40 - Leo Laporte
I think I'll just I'll deal okay, let's see what else is going on. Apple, speaking of privacy, has rolled out something new and interesting in their m4 ipad pro. It's the secure indicator light, or sil gooey rambo, uh posted this Mastodon Fun fact about the M4 iPad Pro it's the first device to support and use Apple's new secure indicator light mechanism. When using the microphone or camera, the corresponding indicator dot is rendered, effectively rendered in hardware, using the display, making it a lot less likely that any malware or user space app would be able to access those sensors without the user's knowledge. That's kind of interesting.

1:00:23 - Jason Snell
This is so smart. So Apple? A long time ago, apple made the camera light on your MacBook, for example, essentially hardwired to the camera being turned on.

And the idea there is. The way you surreptitiously record or take a picture or record audio for somebody is you make it so that the light doesn't go on and you're secretly recording. And I know people are paranoid about that. But Apple has for years now made it that basically to turn it on, the light comes on, and that's how it has to be. But what do you do in a very compact space on a mobile device where you're probably not going to make room for a little light? You could do that. But what Apple has done in software up to now is they make a little indicator dot, but it's in software.

And so what Guy Rambeau is saying here is that in the M4 iPad Pro it's not. There is something wired in that is connected to the camera and the microphone. That's connected to something about the display. Where the system is not drawing that dot, the hardware, essentially when it's on, is flipping a switch somewhere where the dot gets put on the screen, which is a wild idea. But I love it because this is their solution to the problem of not being able to let somebody sort of hack your system so that it can grab your pictures. You grab your camera without you knowing.

1:01:44 - Alex Lindsay
And, at the same time, one of the things that Apple did a couple of weeks ago was that they gave us, as production people, one of the big complaints that we have is, hey, we're doing an event and we want to share a screen and there's a little orange dot in the corner and we we have been asking for that to be removed for four years, like like, hey, I get why you're doing it, but don't like, we got to have some way to turn it off and there was a way to hack it, but it reduced our. There was a security problem with the hack that you go into command line and do a hack. Apple finally published a way like here we're and they built it. They built it for people who need to know who to do this. You can go into recovery mode, you can go in it. You know like it's not like something. You can just write a little script on somebody's computer. You have to really dig into the computer and you can turn off that orange dot.

You know like you know and and that's really towards creatives it's literally everyone doing presentations and videos on zoom and everything else. It's it's that people were like hey, we can't use max and we were getting to a point. There were some events that we were like I can't use a Mac anymore because of this orange dot, you know. And so I think they finally built something. It took us and, again in Apple's way, wouldn't tell us anything, just said no, it's going to be an orange dot for three years, and I'm sure it took a while for them to write it into the code and figure out the best way to do it and everything else. And then a couple weeks ago they turned it on so that we can turn it off.

1:03:04 - Leo Laporte
And my apologies to Guillermo Rambo for calling him gooey. It's a graphic user interface Rambo, it's fine.

1:03:11 - Alex Lindsay
I think he's mostly just known as Rambo.

1:03:14 - Leo Laporte
Guy Rambo. Yeah, Guy Rambo, of course I feel bad. I feel like the guys on what we Do in the Shadows. We keep calling their Guillermo Gizmo. I'm sorry.

1:03:23 - Jason Snell
Guy, that's right.

1:03:24 - Leo Laporte
I apologize, although if you called him Gizmo he might not mind so much.

1:03:29 - Andy Ihnatko
Don't do it after dark.

1:03:33 - Leo Laporte
We'll be back with more of our esteemed panel Alex Lindsay from officehours.global, WGBH's, Andy Ihnatko and Jason Snell from sixcolors.com.

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I kept the Gmail accounts, but I just have it collect the email from there and so it's all in my FastMail. I just love FastMail. I've been recommending it for years. I'm glad now I have them as a sponsor. FastMail advancing open standards, leading industry cooperation and focusing on serving you with great support and your privacy. Together, fastmail and you are making email better for everyone. Try FastMail free for 30 days. You get 15% off your first year. Go to fastmail.com/twit, the smart money's on FastMail. Whenever I see somebody, I talk to them about email and they're using FastMail. I know they know what they're doing. fastmail.com/twit If you care about email, pay a little, pay a little, get the best best. fastmail.com/twit. You're using it. John Ashley good man, I like it. Uh, what was I going to talk about before the break? I had, uh, something picked up. Oh, apparently, apple mislabeled the gpu cores.

1:08:33 - Jason Snell
Oh yeah what the heck is that? It's amazing. So in their marketing material for the new M2 iPad Air, they said there were 10 GPU cores, which is what the M2 has, except if you bin it, and then there are only nine, which is actually what's in the M2 iPad Air, and so they had to release a statement and update their website and update their reviewer's guide and all sorts of things that are. It's very unusual, however, and I'm sure somebody will file a class action lawsuit or something, but I think what's interesting about this is they did also just make a statement that said all of their speed claims, all of their benchmark claims in their marketing are correct. So they tested the actual device. The numbers they got are the numbers they got, but they got the specs wrong. So I'm not sure there's much of a story here in the long run, because nobody was misled about the performance of this system. But if you are curious, it does mean they're binning the M2 that's in the iPad Air. It's one with a deactivated GPU core.

1:09:35 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, what a surprise, though they got even just a simple technical mistake like that.

1:09:39 - Jason Snell
Yeah, core, yeah, what a surprise though they got even just a simple technical mistake like that, yeah, yeah I I wonder if it was like, literally, somebody filled in a spreadsheet somewhere who wasn't, who assumed that it was an m2 spec and it wasn't, but like the fact that it got propagated all the way and nobody pointed out like wait, no, wait, it's a, it's a bit, it's a bin chip. Oops.

I won't happen again, probably not, I bet you there's a lot of it has has the feel of something that fell through the cracks in a very particular way. That will never be allowed to happen again.

1:10:06 - Andy Ihnatko
They discovered a very, very rare fault in a very well-established process and now they've changed the process to make it Apple doesn't do that sort of stuff twice.

1:10:15 - Alex Lindsay
They've changed it. They've paved over it, they've built a building. They have howitzers on the outside. That's never going to happen again.

1:10:20 - Jason Snell
It's all yeah. Well, I think sometimes people say about those numbers that Apple has, they're like oh yeah, no, they cook the numbers or whatever. They're real numbers. Right, they choose, they cherry pick, but they're real numbers. And I think I've said this before here, but, like several of the people, that's a group called Performance Marketing Group. It has a bunch of people who used to work in the Macworld lab and the Mac user lab from back in the day. Like these are people I worked with for years. They are experts in doing tests that are real tests. Now, again, it is marketing, and so Apple only publishes the tests that look good, Right, but they are based on real numbers. And this is a great example of that being true, which is the numbers are right. Like, the numbers aren't lying. The numbers are for the system as it shipped, which had nine GPU cores in it. It was just the spec sheet that was wrong, and so, for what it's worth the numbers they choose to reveal and it is marketing, but they are based on reality, not fantasy.

1:11:13 - Leo Laporte
They should have just said they base zero. Oh no, that wouldn't work. We started at two. That's what it was.

1:11:22 - Andy Ihnatko
I don't know I don't know we can have faith in apple. The only time they ever lie about performance, it's by changing what's on the y-axis of the graph other than that, other than that percent trustworthy? And it's not a lie really.

1:11:33 - Leo Laporte
It's just misleading. Yeah, it's marketing it's marketing.

1:11:36 - Jason Snell
I mean, yeah, they learn from the best. They learn from amazon.

1:11:39 - Leo Laporte
Don't label your charts alex, have you ever done this? You're at an airport and you travel a lot in a foreign land and you, you, you're, you lost your pods or you don't have them with you, and you go to the airport store and you buy a pair of earbuds uh, to put in your iphone. Have you ever done that?

1:12:04 - Alex Lindsay
phone. Have you ever done that? Uh, I carry, so you never need to. I have, I have. I have a primary backup. Uh, I have wired ones. I have the, the, I have the, I have. Usually I'm walking around with four or five headsets. Let me tell the story then.

1:12:13 - Leo Laporte
This is from josh whitton on xcom. Josh said crazy experience I lost my earbuds in a remote town in Chile so I tried buying a new pair at the airport before flying out. But the new wired wired underscore that iPhone lightning cable headphones didn't work. Strange. Went back, swapped them. Still didn't work. Tried a third brand, didn't work.

By now the gift shop people and their manager and all the people in line behind me are super annoyed. Until one of the girls says in spanish you need to have bluetooth on. Oh yeah, everybody nods in agreement. Wait a minute, says josh whitton. Wired headphones. These plug in the lightning port, they're wired, they don't need bluetooth. The entire point of wired headphones does not need bluetooth. So I turn bluetooth on with the headphones plugged in the lightning port. Sure enough, phone offers to pair my wired headphones. See, they all say in spanish. I must be the dumbest person in the world. With a little back and forth I realize they don't even conceptually know what bluetooth is. I've actually programmed for the bluetooth stack before. I was submitting low-level bugs to Ericsson back in the early 2000s. Yet somehow, with my computer science degree, I am wrong and they, having no idea what Bluetooth even is, are right. My mind is boggled, I'm outnumbered. My plane is boarding. I don't want wireless headphones, especially not wired wireless headphones or whatever the hell these things are.

1:13:38 - Alex Lindsay
Did he try unplugging them to see if they just still keep?

1:13:40 - Leo Laporte
no, no, no, there's an answer there's a battery they're powered by they're powered by lightning, oh my god.

1:13:46 - Andy Ihnatko
So I convince him with my last ounce of sanity.

1:13:48 - Leo Laporte
Let me try one last thing, a foolproof solution. I buy a normal wired old school pair of mini stereo headphones and a lightning adapter. We plug it all in. It doesn't work. Bluetooth on, they tell me. No, by all, that is sacred. My wired lightning adapter cannot require bluetooth. It does, they assure me. I turn on the bluetooth. Sure enough, my phone offers to pair my new wired lightning adapter with my phone. Unbelievable. So what this is is a lot of companies, you know, making cheap chinese headphones, don't want to pay for lightning, you know, because it's a license fee. So they they use lightning adapters to power bluetooth headphones. They don't have to put a battery in either. Uh, they he says in these remote markets.

These manufacturers have no qualms by with slapping a lightning iphone logo on the box, while never mentioning bluetooth, knowing apple will never do anything yeah, I don't think it's.

1:14:51 - Jason Snell
I don't think it's the money for lightning, by the way, because there's still a cable right. The issue is they don't want to build in a deck. Yeah, they don't want to. They don't want to bother. They get all that for free being in the bluetooth stack, and they probably got a part. It's a bluetooth receiver that is super cheap and they this is clearly I mean bottom line one of the things that's amazing about a lot of manufacturing, especially in china, is they find the absolute cheapest way to do something yep, and this is it which is the cheapest way to do.

It is to, and you can can imagine somebody saying you see, here's the trick is you do the power by lightning, but you don't do the audio, because that's too. Then you got to have a data. Then you have to have circuitry in the cable, and that costs us a dollar but the Bluetooth chip costs us 10 cents, so we make 90 cents on that decision and you get a bizarre product like this. I love it.

1:15:40 - Andy Ihnatko
I like this, I love it. I'm tapping into my inner weasel here. If I can find out what AliExpress vendor sells those for like a hundred, for $8, I can like re-box them with a very good marketing campaign and say hello, I'm Andy Anotko. I'm the president of Tree Love Electronics. Now, the problem with most Bluetooth headphones me and my colleagues discovered is that they have these wasteful rechargeable batteries in them. That means that it's toxic stuff that goes right back into the Mother Earth's soil and it means you have to throw them away. After two years we, our innovative engineers in our labs, came up with a solution Power it from the battery that you're already carrying anyway. You're welcome. That's right, $80. The world welcome.

1:16:20 - Jason Snell
That's right $80. The world's first wired Bluetooth headphones.

1:16:24 - Leo Laporte
And you know, the funny thing is, josh must have turned off Bluetooth, maybe because I don't know why his Bluetooth is on, maybe for security, maybe he does know a lot about Bluetooth and decided not to do it. But probably most people didn't even wouldn't know that you have to turn on Bluetooth.

1:16:39 - Alex Lindsay
It's just on, it just works. Most people would plug it in, most people would plug this in and it would work.

1:16:44 - Jason Snell
It would say I have to pair, but other than that we pair a lot of stuff now.

1:16:48 - Leo Laporte
Everything pairs, you got to pair. Sure, I'm trying to trying to see if where I can find some cheap here we go Headphones for iPhone, ipod. I wonder if it says Bluetooth required. You think this is on Teemu. They're cheap, they're $2.98. Very colorful.

1:17:10 - Jason Snell
I highly recommend. I'm going to be for Dollar General later on If you have any chance I highly recommend. Apple makes some very cheap. There's a lightning headphone adapter and a USB-C headphone adapter and they work great with any wired headphones, and that's Well not these, because there's no audio going through the wire.

1:17:28 - Leo Laporte
It's just power.

1:17:29 - Jason Snell
So you still Any actual wired headphones. He tried it.

1:17:32 - Leo Laporte
He tried it with the adapter. It still didn't work Because it's only it's not trying to get audio from that, it's not even bothering. Anyway, great, great little story, cute little story. So you mentioned last week what if it's time for our Vision Pro segment?

1:17:50 - Jason Snell
Oh yeah, Ladies and gentlemen, Woo, what.

1:17:54 - Leo Laporte
I'm hearing some people loving. What if there he goes? Hello I am. You didn't bring it.

1:17:59 - Andy Ihnatko
Hello, I am inside with you just saved 3 500 bucks I did.

1:18:02 - Jason Snell
They're back there, but I don't like to wear them on podcasts. It's unseemly and all that. Yes, did you wear them on the airplane? Actually I did not, they're just in my back I do, I did last week.

1:18:12 - Alex Lindsay
You like it.

1:18:12 - Jason Snell
It's amazing san francisco to phoenix.

1:18:14 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, yeah, mine I did dallas to dallas, to burbank or whatever, and and san francisco to dallas. I had had to go in on dallas last weekend and, um, I got on both flights. Well, on the flight back on the burbank flight, I got um, what we call southwest first class, which is the no, no, uh, no seat in front of you.

1:18:33 - Jason Snell
Yeah, it's the x-ray. Oh, I saw your I saw your insta.

1:18:36 - Leo Laporte
yeah, yeah, I was like Southwest first class.

1:18:39 - Alex Lindsay
So anyway, but I now, like we generally now, once we take off, I get the 10,000 feet and I was talking to somebody. He's like I do this gate to gate, no one bothers me and as long as you look over I don't think they'd let me do it in the exit row, but anyway, so as soon as we get 10,000 on, I do not look. I mean, I am gone, I played chess, I watched some movies I watched and it is so good like it and I don't think it's worth 45. It's not 4500. Good, if that's all I was using it for. It's not enough, but but it is. It's such an incredible experience to be on a with a vision pro and in a plane.

1:19:13 - Leo Laporte
You don't get um uh motion sickness at all from it. No, not at all it seems like that might be a possibility, though, or no. It could be, but because your body's moving and it no, not at all. It seems like that might be a possibility, though, or no, it could be, but because your body's moving and it's not moving in.

1:19:25 - Jason Snell
But not, not very much, I mean you know, I mean yeah there's a travel mode, too, that's trying to take advantage of the fact that it realizes that you're you know you're in a moving vehicle you have to use travel mode, am I right?

1:19:36 - Alex Lindsay
yeah, the only thing that is kind of annoying is that, because the of the, that the tracker works, because some of it's optical and some of it's LiDAR, you do leave your light, like on a night flight. I still leave my light on because it won't track properly. Everything starts sliding around. So you learn to leave your light on like you're reading a book. But you just got your headset on and you know I have my AirPod Maxes or whatever on, and airpod maxes or whatever on, and I was just like the movies are so good and and what happens is when, if they, if you do want to drink, I I just move my movie or I just grab onto it, I just move it over to the side and I turn down the opacity so that I can see them walking.

So I'm sitting there walking out of the corner of my eye. I see them. How did they react? Do the flight attendants think you're a bug? I take it off. I take it off. I don't try to do it through the, I think that's too much, that's still do that no, I don't talk to somebody who I mentioned it.

They said, oh no, I leave them on. I just talked to him. You can see my eyes.

1:20:24 - Leo Laporte
They know that I'm there, but you know they're thinking like what an a-hole.

1:20:28 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, I was wondering about this, like the social programming there, like when, uh, how long will it take before? Like a flight attendant would not walk past you thinking, okay, he's wearing goggles, he doesn't see me, it's a, it's a fool's errand to even try to engage them to see if they want to drink or not, no, and simply have to know that, well, look, I don't. It's like if you, even if you have just like a, just like a, an eye mask on because you want to sleep, like, do they know that? Okay, is it worth disturbing this? Is it worth interrupting this person's movie? What?

1:21:01 - Alex Lindsay
I was surprised by is that it was like nothing. I thought someone was going to treat me differently or ask me questions or whatever. I was really worried about it becoming like half the thing it's describing. No one reacted. People sitting next to me.

1:21:15 - Leo Laporte
They're thinking what an a-hole.

1:21:20 - Andy Ihnatko
They might be thinking that, but they didn't say it yeah that's how you keep people away.

1:21:23 - Jason Snell
That's the answer, andy's question I was I was just on a flight that was just, yeah, it was san francisco to dallas actually, but it was, uh, it had come from osaka and so it was a wide body, just giant united airlines plane, and, um, it had on the little screen because I had a screen and a seat back you could. When you turned it off, it said do you want to say don't bother me or bother me for meals? Right, I thought that was really like a way you get when you're on a flight that is overseas, that's overnight that you're going to have that issue. You can. Actually they've now got screens that are set up to market, which is like just wake me up for the meal but otherwise let me sleep or just let me sleep.

1:22:05 - Leo Laporte
I thought that was a really, I mean, it's over, lisa has uh sleep masks that do that uh oh yeah say, wake me up, she's one one says wake me up for meals, the other one says f off it's implied anyway once, once for airplanes, once for subways once, once for sleeping with me. To be honest with you, uh, it's, it's, but yeah, you could. Yeah, that's a good idea, because flight attendants don't know and if you don't want to be awake, awakened, that's nice for them to know.

1:22:34 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, they don't have to do that's. That's an interesting thing to me. Like I remember when, like, I spent like a couple of months when I got my Google Glass just wearing them around, not everywhere, but just places where it would be helpful to me, and I quickly learned to keep some alcohol wipes with me. Is that Google Glass? How does it work? And it surprises me Maybe that's not what the statement you were making, but it surprises me that people aren't seeing you all the time. Oh, I've heard of that. How is it? Do you like it? Can I try it on? Nobody wants to try it on.

1:23:03 - Alex Lindsay
What's funny is is with the, with Google Glass, I have so many pictures of me around the world. Me too, I'm going like this.

1:23:15 - Leo Laporte
Like, like this Cause.

1:23:15 - Alex Lindsay
I was like cause, I would see it take a picture, yeah and um, and so they, they all, every. You know I have the same thing, every person. And to Andy's point, with Google glass, everybody wanted to see it and I think part of it is they can see you and they can still hear you with with, uh, with this thing, you know you're just out for the. It's like when I put headsets on, I mean I usually my general state is that I put headsets on pretty quickly when I get on a plane, so it's not like I'm not a super social plane guy.

1:23:49 - Andy Ihnatko
I wore a Google Glass to Boston Comic Con one year and I have an album of my picture taken by some of the greatest comic book artists in history.

1:23:52 - Leo Laporte
Seriously, it's sad it used to be. You could get a new gadget, a new gizmo and expect some attention on an airplane.

1:23:58 - Alex Lindsay
Now it's just no, I love. I have a picture of you taking it in Rwanda and I had given it to the head of security for Kagame's security detail and and he took you know he liked it and he looked at it all and he goes. This is amazing. He hands it back to you. This is amazing. But you may not wear the Google eye when the president is in the room. That's good, I like it.

1:24:17 - Leo Laporte
You may not wear the Google Eye. Don't go there. So you gave us a little preview of what If, because you had just gotten it last week, jason. But you've now got a full review at sixcollarscom. Yeah.

1:24:31 - Jason Snell
Mostly, it's been very positive.

1:24:32 - Leo Laporte
I think from everybody I've seen.

1:24:34 - Jason Snell
Yeah, it's definitely a tech demo. It's definitely built around Vision Pro-specific features, but I think they did a good job. It's fun. It's probably the most fun hour long kind of entertainment experience I've had in the vision pro because it is immersive in lots of fun ways. I have seen it likened to an amusement park ride and I think that's the best way to do it right. It's a whole bunch of different stuff right. Amusement park rides, modern ones, maybe they have an interactive element. There's like you're, you have a part where you're walking through a location and then things are, are talking to you, and then maybe you get on a conveyance and you go somewhere and you're doing something interactive and then you get off like a lot of modern things that you would see at disneyland are are like that and it's kind of like that right where it's in your house and then you're in a location and then you got to do some basic interactivity it's not a video game, it's not meant to be, but you do need to do things to progress the story.

And then there's a choose your own adventure style kind of like choice you have to make at the end because there are two endings. Essentially they couldn't. The budget in this was clearly not enough to create. You know 20 different environments that branch out and that you only ever see three of them. You need to see basically all of them because that's all the money they had. But at the end you do make a choice and there's a different ending depending on what you choose, and you know you can and it's all chaptered.

It's actually one of the nice things about it not being a video game is if you want to go back, you can go back after you've played it, to any of the chapters. You know they're telling the story in the foreground. You can just ignore them and like look around and be like, oh, there's a video game console over there and oh, what's floating back there? And um and see that they've designed these things. Interesting art direction too, because you're taking a 2d cartoon, basically 2d animation, of the what if series and there's a 3d version of that that some of the video plays, but then in the immersive environment, how do you translate the art style to something real? And and I talked to one of the people who did that and they said they tried to keep some of the like pencil strokes and things. So you're like in a it's a 3d environment. It's immersive, but it also feels a little bit animated, like you're inside an animated world.

Uh, interesting choices that they made and I think I think it works. I think it's really smart. I don't think this is like now we figured it out. This is what art and entertainment on the vision pro will be. I think it's really smart. I don't think this is like now we figured it out. This is what art and entertainment on the Vision Pro will be. I think it's more like here's a lot of potential and here's a fun experience and we'll see what the next thing is.

1:26:48 - Leo Laporte
Well, we know a little bit more about how Apple makes these immersive experiences, because, thanks to a Redditor, we've seen photographs from a major league soccer game of the Apple immersive video camera. They usually keep it in a box so you don't get to see it, but here it is out in the wild, not still in a box, still in the box. I'm not telling you that much yeah, it's just.

1:27:11 - Jason Snell
In the alicia keys video, for example, there's a mysterious white monolith. That is this thing inside the box. But but yeah, they did. And there's a new. You know they updated their sizzle reel and like so these things are out there because they had them at the nba all-star game, they had them at the super bowl on the sideline, like they are. Apple is out there doing stuff with this. Uh, we're just not seeing a lot of it right now, but it's out there capturing it's interesting they have level of little spirit levels on the top of the box.

1:27:38 - Alex Lindsay
I guess that's really important yeah because if it, if it gets cockeyed, you know you have to, it has to be, it has to be straight, yeah, so that's why that's where the levels are there.

1:27:46 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, and is this? Does this confirm that's that canon uh dual view lens, or it?

1:27:51 - Alex Lindsay
doesn't necessarily confirm anything. So inside of that box could be a canon camera. It could be two um raptors or could be a raptor. Um, you know this is that's the. So it could be. This could be a Canon camera. It could be two Raptors. It could be a Raptor. You know this could be delivering all of those things inside of the box. Or it could be Apple's own sensor and electronics. So we don't know for sure what's inside that box. The three big ones would be the Canon R5C, the Red Raptor or Apple's potentially own secret sauce.

1:28:25 - Leo Laporte
The operators who would not discuss their work were seen to swap storage cards at halftime. And here's the back of the box, which looks a little bit more like a standard kind of kit on the back. Anything more to say about this uh, it's interesting that they're.

1:28:43 - Alex Lindsay
I don't know what they're using for that. That looks like it might be a zoom audio interface. Um, oh, at the top there, yeah, top there. I'm not. I'm not 100. Is that a sound devices or it's? Not sound devices maybe it's a zoom. It could be zoom and it has that kind of form factor, but I don't like it. I don't use enough zooms to it, doesn't look like my f3, but it might.

1:29:01 - Leo Laporte
It might be a higher end, but it could be delivered.

1:29:04 - Alex Lindsay
I mean, they could be delivering all of that stuff out. But again it does feel like it's something that apple may have put together.

1:29:10 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it feels a little cobbled yeah, but it's.

1:29:13 - Alex Lindsay
It's like the, but you know they. If only they had the money to build their own camera. You, you know like that would be. The thing is. You know that. So, if only there, there'd be a lot of advantages. If you want to take full, the problem is there's no perfect camera out there right now.

So Apple has the opportunity, if they wanted to, to build a camera that did what they needed to do for the Apple Vision Pro. That would then give them an advantage over every headset out there and also allow them to do what they want an advantage over every headset out there and also allow them to do what they want. So they, because really, where they need to get to at some point is 8k, 120 frames per second, 8k per I, 120 frames, a second hdr. That's where they need to get to. There's nothing out there that doing that right now, and definitely nothing. Nothing that does it easily. So so it does feel like apple could go down that path if they wanted to remember we have to remember that they did buy the next vr you know, an xvr a long time ago, so they've had time to think about this for quite some time.

1:30:04 - Leo Laporte
This uh, this is a side view from joe, not a bot on reddit, and there's the little microphone, so I guess you want to record audio. When you're doing immersive video, you want to record audio from the same place, is that?

1:30:17 - Alex Lindsay
yeah, it's an interesting um orientation for the microphone. It's underneath all the gear uh, normally, if we were doing ambisonic, for instance, so the pretty popular thing to do if you're doing immersive would be to ambisonic. But this could be more of a stereo mic like, hey, I'm going to give you a stereo feel, but apple's already talked about ambisonic in the past, so we would expect them to, and normally what we'd want to do is a unless that camera is perfectly silent, we want to get that mic away, away from the camera. We also having things in close proximity to the mics is going to change the the nature of the sound, and so it's not something you know. So if you're doing ambisonic, that wouldn't be a great place. If you're doing some kind of stereo uh, x, y then that that could make sense, you know. So it just depends on what kind what they're recording there.

1:31:00 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it looks like it has multiple mic jacks in the Zoom light. It's interesting. It looks like an.

1:31:06 - Alex Lindsay
Ethernet jack on the end of the mic, you know so it's. Oh, yeah, that's right. Yeah, and there are some. There is an Ethernet based, which would also lead you towards possibly doing an ambisonic. I'm also lean you towards possibly doing an ambisonic.

1:31:24 - Leo Laporte
um, uh, I'm just trying to see if I can find it really quickly. There's a lot of stuff hanging off of this.

1:31:26 - Andy Ihnatko
Let's try it out here, wow, typical apple product nothing but dongles, nothing but dongles uh, anyway, thanks to uh joe dash, not a bot, it could be the.

1:31:38 - Alex Lindsay
Voyage. The one that it looks like it possibly could be would be the Voyage. Let me cut to it here. Hold on. This has about the same form factor. It does look like that. $3,000 microphone.

1:31:53 - Leo Laporte
Wow, what would?

1:31:53 - Alex Lindsay
you do with that? Wow, it's taking 360 ambisonic.

1:31:57 - Leo Laporte
Ah, does it have fins on the side?

1:31:59 - Alex Lindsay
This one has fins, and this looks like it might be capable of a. This looks like it could be a second order as opposed to first order. Let's see here so that muff is hiding the fact that there are many microphones. Yeah, see, it's got a Dante network connection with PoE.

1:32:15 - Leo Laporte
Oh, there you go. So that's why? It's because one of the challenges is dealing with all the you there you go.

1:32:17 - Alex Lindsay
So that's why one of the one of the challenges is dealing with all the you know, the outputs. I have to admit that now I want this.

1:32:24 - Leo Laporte
It's also got an Apple equipment sticker on it.

1:32:32 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, exactly so this is not a third party. This is in-house, but it could be it.

1:32:36 - Leo Laporte
Well, it could, definitely could be, Well, I can't believe you identified that.

1:32:43 - Alex Lindsay
I am so impressed. Well done, wow, unbelievable. We have a lot of, a lot of ambisonic mics, so there's, but there's not many ambisonic mics with an ethernet cable, and so there's. I was like I know I've seen that one before, so yeah, but yeah, there's um in the uh, uh, but that's it. So they have an ambisonic there and, again, that would not be the place that I would put that mic if I was doing ambisonic. So I don't quite understand why they would do that, because the problem is is that ambisonic is a sound field and that that mic, some of those mics, are going to be pointed at the bottom of that camera. Right, it's going to flatten out everything.

1:33:12 - Leo Laporte
You don't want that.

1:33:22 - Alex Lindsay
They don't when it looks like the mic, although it's in a dead cat, is out farther, maybe from under the what's interesting is, like the way I do it I mean because I do do ambisonic recordings with some of the stuff that I do is that I give it a pull that goes straight up, you know. So it goes up and it's straight up, so that it grabs everything and I get a couple feet away oftentimes from the camera itself. But they obviously have, you know, obviously different opinions.

1:33:44 - Leo Laporte
And they might know a couple things they might be doing. Might have done a couple of these so far. Scooter x says that looks like a zoom f6 uh, which it could be. It's got a lot of extra, extra knobbies. Looks like these are different cameras, I don't know. Maybe maybe joe not about it got some different ones.

1:33:56 - Alex Lindsay
Uh, you know, it feels like it doesn't. Yeah, it does. It definitely doesn't feel like uh this is not, yeah, this is no, it doesn't. It very much looks like a zoom f6. It's just a really odd solution for them to use a zoom.

1:34:14 - Leo Laporte
This is analog sound. This is this is a regular cable.

1:34:18 - Alex Lindsay
This is not dante yeah, these are well and could be using. You can see that there's four cables in them, so if they were taking the four, I think that that the weird thing about it is, I think that ambisonic mic it may have what happens with ambisonic if it's a first order ambisonic it's got four outputs and those four outputs are the four of the mics, but it looks like it has more mics than that. That's why I'm confused by that a little bit. Yeah, but what it's doing is it's taking those four mics that are in this, this uh quad pattern, and it saves it out in a format a and then that gets that can be just recorded raw into your recorder. So that's what the f6 would be, and then you then you convert it to the B format to make it something that you can work with, and and then you can go and put it into Atmos, or or we use it to go to 5.1 so we can send it to YouTube.

1:35:10 - Leo Laporte
Well, I think that somebody out there who knows exactly what that setup is is chuckling right at the moment, or impressed or impressed around aimlessly.

1:35:20 - Jason Snell
Yeah, exactly uh as we continue our vision pro segment, the apple vision pro mindfulness mindfulness app may get a respiration tracking feature based on back-end code discovered by mac rumors it sounds like a lot of one of the things we've been trying to guess about what's in watch os 2, and one of them might just be more native apple apps. Right that they didn't ship a lot of their apps native on vision os, so maybe they'll get that this time. I need internet respiration tracking. I like.

1:35:51 - Leo Laporte
Okay, I mean, I need a four thousand dollar headset to tell me how to breathe. It's about time it works for you whatever works for. Lowe's wants you to use the Vision Pro to design your kitchen and you can do it right there in a Lowe's. In three cities they're letting customers use Vision Pros and then it looks like he's kind of laughing at you in the background there, I don't Go ahead. Try this. Yeah, how do you like that? Um, that's actually a smart idea. You want to put one toilet in the kitchen, let alone three. What's wrong with you? Uh, visualize your dream kitchen right there in it.

Uh, first, they're going to do this. Uh, I guess, go through stores. So the first stop will be in Charlotte, north Carolina, june 8th through 12th. Then, uh, then customers at Lowe's stores in North Bergen, new Jersey, and Sunnyvale, california, will be able to experience the program. You have to book it online. Store associate will have to be there. They'll accept a limited number of walk-in appointments. Anyway, interesting Is Lowe's the place for the helpful hardware man? I can never remember Ace, ace, I don't know. I can never remember Ace, ace, okay, I don't know.

1:37:01 - Andy Ihnatko
I don't know.

1:37:03 - Alex Lindsay
I don't know if Jason downloaded that. Yeah, the the low zap was not over the great app Like the low zap on on the Apple vision pro. I've downloaded all of those Cause. As I've talked about many times, I think visualizing furniture and other things would be a great thing to do in the Apple Vision Pro. I haven't found any that were worth using yet. Yeah, it's been pretty rough.

1:37:22 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, I mean, it's no surprise that they're using this as a way for people to get into. Of all the places you can go to, like, spec out a kitchen renovation, come to our place instead of someplace else. But the thing, what I've been wondering about the Vision Pro for stuff like that, something that seems to be very, very attractive is that number one. There seems to be a lot of consensus that unless the fit is right, unless you've got it dialed in really, really well, it's not really comfortable to wear. Maybe this is a short enough experience that that doesn't really matter. But also, like, does Apple provide those or some place or other people with some sort of a box that will sterilize the interface between the device and people's faces?

1:38:02 - Alex Lindsay
Or is that something that they have to deal with? That section pops off so they can you know. I mean, I don't know, is there?

1:38:07 - Andy Ihnatko
guidance from Apple. Like here's a sort of device that will sterilize that part.

1:38:11 - Alex Lindsay
I think a lot of people I mean, I know that what a lot of folks are doing is using, you know, ultraviolet, you know. So you put it into an ultraviolet thing. It will actually reduce the lifetime of the item, but it will work. It'll kill everything. So I think that that's the most common way to do that. You can wipe it off, but a lot of people are putting them in. Usually what we had to do during COVID was these ultraviolet boxes that you put things in, not for the Vision Pro but for other things, and there's a lot of the ones that work. There's a whole lot of warnings about closing the box and making sure that nothing gets out because it will damage your eyes.

1:38:53 - Leo Laporte
Like you know, that's the one that's got the teeth to it because it's warning you not to look at it all right, let's take a quick break and back with more of our esteemed panel of macintosh experts as we continue MacBreak Weekly. Glad you're here, thanks especially to our club twit members for being a such great support in these times of troubles. Uh, club to it, of course, seven dollars a month, but you get so many benefits ad free versions of all the shows. You get access to the club twit discord where you can chat along with us as we're doing the shows, but also have great conversations after the fact, any time of the day or night. And then the twit plus bonus content, like our our video watch party we did a couple of weeks ago at the LaPorte house or this was an escape box. We did. That was a couple of weeks ago at the Laporte House, or this was an escape box we did. That was a lot of fun.

Stacy's Book Club is coming up on the 20th. There's a lot of good things happening in the club. Of course, they'll be watching our WWDC content as well as everybody else in the Discord. If you're not yet a member of the club, can I invite you? Oh, I forgot to mention Mikah's Crafting Corner. Look at this. Mikah's going to do a cozy, chill, occasionally informative and fun crafting session Knitting, crochet, painting, lego and hang out with Mikah every third Wednesday. I love this. Thank you, Mikah. At 6 pm, pacific Mikah's Crafting Corner. This is what the club lets us do. It's some fun and interesting experimental stuff.

If you're not yet a club member, I would appreciate your support and, yeah, I think you get a lot out of it. It's a great community of people. I'm very happy to report that at this stage, with nearly 12,000 members, the club covers two weeks payroll. So that's great. That's really keep up the good work. I would like to maybe get it to cover even more. That's one of the reasons we mentioned it. Advertising has dwindled to practically nothing. Lisa and I are not going to be paid for the rest of the year it all looks like, but we would really like to keep as much of it going as we can. So if you enjoy what you hear on our shows and you'd like to support us and you could spare seven bucks a month, do me a favor, visit twit.tv/clubtwit. We thank you for your support.

We do thank our sponsors because they are also helping us out like Mylio. We love Mylio photos. Uh, because they are also helping us out. Like Mylio, oh, we love Mylio photos.

Actually, this is the tool I use everywhere now to keep track of not just photos, but all the documents on my computer in a safe. Secure way that no one else can see. Many of us rely on the cloud these days. Uh many apps and services, though, are not doing the job they ought to do to protect your data. That's why I like Mylio Photos Plus. It protects my data. In fact, I can store it locally. I do. I don't even put it in the cloud. I store it on my Synology as well as all my Mylio-enabled systems, but it's one consolidated library in all those systems for photos, videos, documents scattered across your devices Mac, Windows, iPhone and Android. It's better than Microsoft's Recall. It stores everything, makes it easy to find, but it also automatically categorizes in the background. So, for instance, it does face recognition, and again, local only. So I give it a few pictures of Lisa and then it finds all the rest of them in my database.

I have more than 200,000 photos right now in my Mylio database, and it does. It doesn't slow it down at all, it is super fast. They make it so easy to organize, curate, protect and sync files from everywhere they store. They'll even pull in my social media photos from Instagram and Facebook. It uh, it's the first thing I've found that will take Google's. You know you can download your Google photos, but they don't make it easy. You have to use Google's takeout and you get these files where they separate out the data into XML files. It's just really a mess. I've done it by hand. Mylio does it automatically. They even de-dupe if you have Mylio Photos Plus, which means you can download all your photos from everywhere you've put them, combine them into a perfect database of exactly one copy of all the originals and, the best part, they all stay on your devices, not on distant servers. They even support your photo structure.

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By the way, the first, the first devices is free entirely. So if you're curious about Mylio's capabilities, download it on the device you have the most storage on uh, your Mac and try it out. I think you will agree it is worth the subscription. But even if not, it's free. Just to put it on one device Mylio M-Y-L-I-O.com/twit. We thank Mylio so much for their support and for the digital asset management tool. I've been looking everywhere for they really solved, they scratched my itch. Thank you, Mylio. Oh, I really really appreciate it. On we go with the show. Let's see Apple News Plus subscriptions are growing four times faster than major publishers, according to a report from an analytics firm, cirp. According to a report from an analytics firm, cirp. So the New York Times, wall Street Journal, washington Post growing at a quarter of the rate of Apple News Plus subscriptions.

1:45:32 - Alex Lindsay
Apple doesn't Apple. But they got to make up a lot of ground too. I mean, the growing is a big word, I mean. So what are they at now? Is their subscription? You know, of course the publishers have already have a big or a shrinking group.

1:45:47 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's kind of meeting in the middle right as they go down. Yeah, apple News goes up, but this graph is pretty telling the blue bar 2020, the green bar 2024. This is Apple News, which is 24% of Apple buyers using Apple News, compared to 17% using New York Times, 11% Journal, 11% WAPO. So it's I mean as much as I mock Apple News, and I really do mock Apple News. It's pretty popular with Apple users.

1:46:17 - Alex Lindsay
I have to admit, I use it all the time. You know, it's funny. I used to be a really big Flipboard user and Flipboard started doing pop-up ads that sit over top of their over Flipboard and after using Flipboard for 15 years or something like that or more, it only took two days and I was like, well, I'm done with this app. Yeah, like I'm totally embedded into that app. And it was like it just took two days of them putting these little floating ads that pop over everything else and I was like, well, I can't use this anymore. And so I just went and now I'm only almost almost. You know, for me, I listened to news over audio a lot.

1:46:51 - Leo Laporte
And then it will read to you right, so you can. You've got a Washington post story and you're interested, you can say read it to me, Is that right?

1:46:58 - Alex Lindsay
You mean Apple News? Yeah, no, no, some of them are recorded, but it doesn't, and I'm sure that they're trying to protect the publishers. I mean, there's a lot. My biggest complaint about Apple News is there's obviously a lot of deals they made with the publishers that are super annoying for the user, like when I mute a publisher, I don't want to know that they exist, instead of having these big gray windows that say you muted this, like, like. I'm like, ok, that's what I didn't want to look at anymore, you know, and and so, oh, I see.

1:47:29 - Leo Laporte
So if you go to Apple News they have an audio tab and select audio articles.

1:47:34 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, the select public are red and the red really nicely, I will say the production value is very. Of course it's Apple, so it's extremely high. Uh, production value, um, for for uh, audio, uh, but you know we have ai like. I feel like I could read everything crime published in the print issue of the new yorker with the headline land of make-believe so that's a human. That ain't no. Ai read no, no, it's, it's a human. I'm just saying that I would definitely prefer. The problem really for publishers is how do you make money?

1:48:06 - Jason Snell
A $2 million treasure appeared in a Kentucky cornfield.

1:48:10 - Leo Laporte
No one knows, this is like a podcast. It's what it sounds like. It's like a podcast.

1:48:14 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, it's really high quality. I have to admit, I don't like the music thing at the beginning, and so I wish they'd stop doing that. And then they it does warn me that they're about to happen, so I can turn it off by if I accidentally clicked on it. So but but I think that you know, you just feel like sports.

1:48:31 - Leo Laporte
Jason. Jason's a big sports fan and I know that they now have sports coverage. From who is it? The athletic, the?

1:48:39 - Jason Snell
athletic, which I already pay for, so it's not that big a deal for me. But I mean, it's an interesting thing. I I feel like they're comparing apples and oranges, talking about penetration, because you end up with like apple, one bundle and like how much are people actually using it?

1:48:52 - Leo Laporte
yeah, see that's the thing I don't pay for.

1:48:54 - Jason Snell
News my news plus use is entirely wall street journal articles I want to read because they're not paywalled there.

And that's it. But that's about it. But you know they could build a different bundle. I think it's weird. I think the story is sort of trying to tell a story that doesn't exist, because it's trying to piggyback on that story about how more publishers are finding that they're getting increased revenue from News Plus. I think that's good right. Increase revenue from News Plus I think that's good right. Like, I think a lot of publishers want extra revenue, but whether they can rely on News Plus as a solution to their business model, it seems really unlikely. But I don't, yeah, I mean, I don't read, I don't go to news as my source for information. I have other apps and RSS feeds and things for that.

1:49:36 - Andy Ihnatko
But that was a pretty significant story. On Semaphore, a couple weeks ago, the Daily Beast they talked to the Daily Beast saying that's contributing like three or four million dollars a year. Timecom said another seven million dollar. Excuse me, seven figure annual payout and it's. I don't know if that's going to last, but in an era where, like Google, Search is returning fewer and fewer rewards and sending fewer and fewer people to new sites, I mean you've got to diversify. I thought it was interesting that even the Daily Beast was saying that the amount of money they were getting from their Apple News deal far exceeded what they were getting from paid memberships, which I thought that if you're a fan of this, it's some interesting metrics and not something that I would have guessed when they launched the service a few years ago.

1:50:22 - Jason Snell
Yeah, the argument was always well, why should I do this when I can sell direct memberships? And I think there's truth in that, especially if you're a big player. I think, though, that maybe what people are learning is there are two audiences here. There's Brand X's audience, and you love, love Brand X and you pay for Brand X and you get it Like I pay for the athletic and I have for years Great. And then there's Apple's audience, which is you're in the Apple one bundle, maybe you get Apple news plus, you're on Apple's devices, you use their news app to read things and you see this stuff, and just because you see it and you read it, basically money will flow back to the publishers from those people. It is kind of like another revenue source, like how Google search, you know, leads people who are not your loyal readers to you and you monetize it through ads or whatever, right? It's a little like that from another source, and that could be good, right?

I mean, the argument there is that the Daily Beast has its core audience that loves it and pays for it, and then there's a portion of Apple's audience that will sometimes read content from the Daily Beast, and they get some money from that, and that's not necessarily bad. They might convert some of those to paid, or it may just be that they get to take a little piece of all the Apple money because they speak to a portion of that audience. I think that's an interesting. Again, it's not a solid news plus and Apple news when it launched, we're almost portrayed as being like the savior of journalism and that's not what it is but as an aggregator of lots of content that can give you a little love and a little bit of money in addition to you trying to build your own direct to consumer business over here. Put those together, put sweep the money together and you've got enough to have a business.

1:51:59 - Alex Lindsay
I think that's pretty good you know a lot of cable providers and everything else you know they all went to these a la carte like but can you actually get people to subscribe? You might be able to make you know Paramount selling a subscription for X amount of dollars when they were getting much less as a per sub from the cable networks, but they were getting all of the cable networks they were getting. They were getting 50 cents on, or a dollar or two dollars on every person that was in that network and I. And so I think that there is a value to trying to persuade people to download your app and be part of your thing and everything else compared to you know, in, if you know, at 24 percent, it's X amount of.

If Apple got to 60 percent or 70 percent or 80 percent, it could start turning into real money where some publishers that aren't successful at selling their own um, their own version of this end up making enough money that that's all they do, and some publishers will continue to try to do do their own or or this and you know of of both of those, those markets. But I think that there is a, there is a play here, that is, I'm just going to make money with the apple news. It's not when it comes rolls out. It's probably not big enough to do that. But if apple got to 40, 50, 60 percent of their market of paying the the apple one, whatever they would definitely it would definitely may be enough for a lot of publishers to survive on.

1:53:24 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, you know, and so the the obvious risk is that, um, apple, a knock-on effect could be that apple does to these, to that individual publisher, what they kind of like to do with, uh, developers on the app store where they don't want to create new customers of that news source, they want to create new, they want to basically create people that are just apple news customers. And oh, by the way, you happen to read an article from the Beast, you happen to read an article from this, that or the other. It kind of feeds into why I don't.

The thing that made Apple News Plus not useless to me but really really unattractive was that I can't pop a URL out of there. I can't get a link right back to the Daily Beast or the New York Times or Wall Street Journal. It would always pop out in Apple News. And right back to the Daily Beast or the New York Times or Wall Street Journal, it would always pop out in Apple News. And I'm sure part of that is to the benefit of the news source, because when someone clicks on that link, if I send it to somebody they get credit for oh, someone clicked on that link through Apple News but it's like I'm not there to. It becomes useless to me when I'm trying to like stay on top of things and save something for reviews.

1:54:25 - Leo Laporte
I can't use it to prepare for shows. It's not useful that way.

1:54:29 - Andy Ihnatko
Not necessarily the greatest part of the audience, I'm sure, but it's like I thought. I thought it was. I like how. I like how Google news and others like if you want the direct URL, they will give you the direct URL. You don't have to. You know, mission impossible your way through macOS to get the URL.

1:54:43 - Alex Lindsay
The advantage, as you see, apple continue to add more and more audio. The advantage of publishers starting to make more and more money on the subscription is that, because the real problem that publishers have is that if we went all audio, you know that they wouldn't. It's very hard because you can't get people to listen to ads for very long unless they're read in. You can't just place ads. You know, like you know, and so you know that that ad insertion thing doesn't really work for very long and especially people are paying for it, um and so. So the so the advantages is that as people start to do that, like I pay for Noah and I listened to a lot, a smattering of news. They don't give me all the news, I can't get all the foreign affairs or all of, but I listened to a smattering of the news and I'm sure they're getting money back for me listening to those things and they're getting some. You know there's some licensing fee there, but if Noah started adding uh, ads, I'd stop listening almost immediately, like you know, like it would, it would be an instant. You know, I, I, finally, I.

For a while I put it off, but with Amazon prime there was enough shows that my family was watching that I went. I finally spent the $3 a month to get rid of those. The ads are so horrible on Amazon. I feel like they're just trying to get you to pay $3 a month because it is just the most horrible experience for Amazon Prime to just you have this. You're in the middle of a show and it's louder, it's brighter, it's all the horrible things happen. You just suddenly like savaged by the ad and I just don't feel like they're even trying to make money with ads. I think they're just trying to get everyone to pay $3 more a month.

1:56:16 - Andy Ihnatko
I was kind of thinking the same thing about the news that Instagram was testing out unskippable ads. Where you're scrolling through, you hit an ad.

1:56:23 - Leo Laporte
Oh, can you believe that?

1:56:28 - Andy Ihnatko
And it would be useful if you were now saying oh, by the way, if you want to get rid of these ads, give us three dollars and eighty cents a month. I'm like okay, how much do I want instagram anymore?

1:56:33 - Alex Lindsay
yeah, no I mean I have to amazon's doing enough that I'm. I have definitely turned from being a big amazon fan to a I'm putting up with them now. Yeah, well, like, that's the risk because, like, like you know, you know, whole Foods is turning into Trader Joe's and Amazon is now making the returns harder and they're charging me for, you know, they're squeezing me in every different direction that I've, that I've used, and I think that's always the risk is that you go too far down this path and people, it's not that.

1:57:04 - Leo Laporte
I'm because the good news is all the local retailers are out of business we lowered the prices so low. No one can compete. Now we own you. Welcome. Exactly. Yeah, and I think it's uh, that's where we're headed. That's where we're headed well.

1:57:18 - Alex Lindsay
It always opens opportunity when, when, when companies do too much of that, then people start to go well yeah, that's right.

1:57:23 - Leo Laporte
That's really the more important part of cory's famous and shitification piece. Is not that how and shitification works and how widespread it is. That's become very apparent. But the antidote to that is making it easy to switch. Because if the switching costs are low, then your response when they start squeezing you to get every penny out of you is say sorry, red Lobster, I'm going down the road to whatever the pie place is. You know. Problem is these companies like Amazon end up squeezing out your local retailers.

1:57:54 - Alex Lindsay
So all you have to do is Walmart or Amazon.

It's part of that, but it's also part of just bad user, and bad user experiences is really the lock, lock in. A handful of companies have figured out how to make this easy and everyone else thinks that they can just put up, add a bunch of features and people are going to use them and right, if I get a bad user experience, I'm just being like, okay, I don't want to do this anymore, you know and doesn't matter, like that's the like, I don't, I don't go to gas stations that don't do apple pay there's a lot of choices in gas stations.

1:58:25 - Leo Laporte
That's the point. There's there's competition. When there is no competition, they can squeeze you, but I feel like so many web pages don't get it. How do you like your cable?

1:58:32 - Alex Lindsay
company Right? Oh yeah, I don't have. I mean I don't use. I mean I use the internet for my cable company yeah, right, so there's no other choice.

1:58:43 - Leo Laporte
They got you and so that's when they can squeeze you.

1:58:45 - Alex Lindsay
But a good example is Comcast is only here. Frontier keeps on giving me flyers, but it's the moment Frontier. This is the problem for Comcast. The moment Frontier arrives at my house, I'm done with Comcast Right and that's the risk that they have.

1:59:05 - Leo Laporte
Without competition, free markets do not work period. Uh, speaking of competition, intel has lunar lake. Is this competition? Uh, intel's this is from the verge, utterly overhauled ai laptop chip that ditches memory sticks, has 40 plus plus tops trillion operations per second. So it is, you know, Intel saying, look, we can do AI. They're getting their lunch eaten by Apple and Snapdragon. But you know, as long as you don't look at the power consumption, these guys can really crank it out. Intel says this is of course. Computex is going on in Taiwan. So Intel says we've got it. Stay tuned. Here comes. I have a Meteor Lake laptop from HP that I like, but they're planning to go even farther with Lunar Lake, Doing, honestly, a lot of what Apple kind of did with this roadmap of efficiency and performance scores.

2:00:09 - Andy Ihnatko
Mm-hmm, yeah it will be enough to get over Qualcomm's announcements and Microsoft's announcements.

2:00:17 - Leo Laporte
There's some real competition, but that's a great See. This is the thing. Competition is good, right? That's when you spur innovation, that's when you've got people trying to get your dollar Prices go down. Power goes up.

2:00:29 - Jason Snell
Competition is a good thing, and Intel will provide it Just remember that one of the things that Apple has taken shots at over the last I don't know how long has been integrated RAM. They're like, oh, apple's just trying to make it, so you don't. And Apple would say, no, there's huge performance in having a shared pool of memory. That's right on the chip and there's huge value there. But in the discourse it'll be like well, it's just a typical Apple. Well, guess what?

2:00:54 - Leo Laporte
Intel's doing it too, and everybody else is doing it because they were right.

2:00:57 - Jason Snell
They were right Performance and efficiency cores, and it's a very similar roadmap because they were right and that's fine Like a good time. We talked earlier about an AI kick in the pants for Apple last year. I mean, intel's last decade has been a series of of kicks in various places, but I I I don't know whether they can salvage it, I don't know if they can make it work, but I, I look at something like this and I can see that Intel is trying work. But I look at something like this and I can see that Intel is trying. Intel is trying to be relevant and current and take advantage of new ways of thinking about chip design instead of, you know, stubbornly holding on to the way it used to be, and I think, in general, that's a good thing, whether it works for them or not.

2:01:41 - Leo Laporte
Well, one problem is TSMC. Of course, apple has locked in all the production of TSMC for three nanometer chips. Now I think they're about to do the same for two nanometer chips. But there is a problem Despite the fact that TSMC has broken ground in the US to build a chip fab here, they say we cannot leave Taiwan. This is from Reuters.

Tsmc says it's discussed moving fabs out of Taiwan, but such a move would be impossible. Of course Chairman CC Wei is worried about the saber rattling from China. Instability across the Taiwan Straits, he says, is indeed a consideration for supply chain. I want to say we certainly do not want wars to happen, but it will be impossible to move chip factories off the island, given that 80 to 90% of its production capacity is in Taiwan. I'm sure Apple would love them to move because Apple's very reliant on TSMC for Apple Silicon, for Apple Silicon. I know you've been, you've got your finger on the pulse of international relations, alex Lindsay, and you've been warning that. You know China is. You know they just had a war game simulating an invasion of Taiwan.

2:03:01 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, it's a real deal. It's a real deal, man. It's a real concern. Everybody's concerned about it.

2:03:06 - Leo Laporte
You know like don't worry about it.

2:03:07 - Alex Lindsay
So you know they're not. They're taking it pretty, everyone's taking it pretty. China's pretty seriously and you know our poor response in Ukraine has made it worse because China feels like they, a lot of people, will move slowly and not effectively and that makes us. That affects Taiwan.

2:03:29 - Leo Laporte
So that's been part of the problem. Snapdragon will be not just in laptops, but all PC form factors, according to Qualcomm. More news from Computex, including desktops. We still haven't figured it out, but I think they don't use TSMC. I think we believe they use Samsung for their fabs. Tsmc I believe they use Samsung for their fabs. Qualcomm is working with Samsung, as well as Acer, asus, dell, hp, lenovo and Microsoft, to create Snapdragon-powered PCs. June 18th is the day we'll start to see these. Of course, microsoft has announced its Snapdragon-based Surface laptops, but desktops too? That will be very interesting, as they claim better performance than the M3 from Apple.

2:04:18 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, and also, fewer fans means less cost to manufacture smaller form factors. Fewer power draws means that if you're the company that's buying 1,000 of them at a blow, you're not going to spend so much on electricity.

2:04:38 - Leo Laporte
It's. You know, if anything, it's. If anything, it's encouraging that this might be that this might be the actual time that Microsoft does a move on ARM that actually they stick with. Yeah, games work. Twelve hundred plus games, including some triple A games, have been tested with the Snapdragon X Elite from Activision. Some AAA games have been tested with the Snapdragon X Elite from Activision, blizzard, owned by Microsoft, epic Remedy, ea, ubisoft and Xbox Studios. So they're talking very bullishly about the future of Snapdragon and while Qualcomm has done this before and disappointed, it looks to be this is the summer of Snapdragon and I think it's going to be a good competitor for Apple.

2:05:11 - Andy Ihnatko
It really is a revolution. I have less than zero interest in switching from Mac to Windows, but if I were a Windows user who had been tempted and looking over the fence at Macs for a long, long time the announcements that came a couple of weeks ago, that will have to be validated once this hardware is actually put out in the field. The idea that the things that I would be most envious is oh God, I wish I didn't have to have fans turning on. I wish I could have really good battery life. I wish I could get a level of power and performance that was disproportionate to the size of this device. I wish I could have a MacBook air that has all of those great things but it wouldn't force me to switch to all new apps and all all new services and everything that would keep me entrenched in windows for another four or five years of that. If that were, if that turns out to be as good as the hype exists.

2:06:00 - Leo Laporte
Well and the, you don't have to use windows. That's the other thing that's interesting. The Linux kernel will support Snapdragon Elite X, so there will be Linux distros not immediately, but there will be Linux distros that will run on these, uh, these pieces, these PCs. So it you know that actually, to me, the threat to Mac OS is not Windows. I just I don't think I'd ever switched to Windows, like you, andy, but I love Linux. I'm running it right now, and Linux running on this might be a very compelling platform.

2:06:33 - Andy Ihnatko
I have a great love for Linux and I always have an older laptop that has Linux installed or a desktop. I've just never gotten it to stick in terms of I've got a choice of two, three, four different machines mobile and desktops and laptops and I'm going to go to the Linux machine. That's never really really happened. Every time I use Linux is because I want to enjoy the process of using Linux, which is its own special I'm not saying sarcastically, its own special treat, but in terms of no, I got to get stuff done. It's always Mac, it's sometimes Windows. When there's a special instance where it doesn't work that way on Mac, I just can't get. That's always been the case for the past 10 years. I can't find a distro or a setup or anything that would get me to say this is my device of choice.

2:07:18 - Leo Laporte
Well, unlike you, I love Linux. I'm very happy with Linux and it would be. I'm never going to move to Windows, but I would absolutely consider a Linux desktop running on Snapdragon, and you know it looks like we're very close. Qualcomm really wants this to happen. They don't want to be just a Microsoft or Android hardware. Remember, snapdragon also runs on Android, which is in fact Linux, so it's not such a big stretch to think of it running on the desktop. All right, let's take one final break and then, if you will prepare your picks of the week, you're watching MacBreak Weekly Andy Inako, jason Snell, alex Lindsay, my pick of the week.

This week I don't have much of a green thumb, but I just got sent some bioluminescent petunias and to me that seems like it would be well worth growing. These are from lightbio, is the website. There is a story behind this. We had the founders of lightbio on the new screensavers, gosh it must have been a couple of years ago and they were trying to use CRISPR to do gene splicing to create bioluminescent plants, which is a really interesting idea. He said he wrote to me just the other day and said you know it didn't work out, but we've tried another approach and now we do have, in fact, bioluminescent petunias that glow gently in the dark. They call it the firefly petunia. I guess it's firefly genes in the petunia, a beautiful plant by dayunias, I'm told, are easy to grow. I hope they are mesmerizing luminescence after dark. It's not dark enough in here and these just came, so shipments uh are going out now 29, the only plant you can see when the lights go off. I cannot wait.

2:09:24 - Andy Ihnatko
The blooms glow a little brighter, but the leaves also glow it looks nice, but if you it looks like the sort of thing that you would send your mom without telling her anything you're usual about, and then she would freak out were these radioactive?

2:09:42 - Leo Laporte
how did this work? These are uh, uh. The usda has approved firefly petunias in the us. You'll be glad to know this is a usda approved plant. I think there'll be more. I don't think it's the last. The last we've seen uh of uh the petunias? And I do think uh, uh. Actually I should find his name. The fellow who started this all was on our show, omri Amirev Drori. He said hello, leo. A long while ago I was involved in a glowing plants project. Anyhow, that approach back in the day didn't work out, but a different company I invested in was able to do it and get approved to sail in the US, so he shipped me some plants from lightbio. I guess he's an investor, not the scientist. So very cool, I'll report back. Watch my Instagram right after the ads the forced ads, andy, your pick of the week.

2:10:45 - Andy Ihnatko
Every time there's a new version of Ulysses don't care if it's huge or not so huge that's a good excuse for me to recommend ulysses. Uh, right now it really is my go-to writing app. It's uh, it's uh. It's just complicated enough to be able to support your higher priority, higher intensity sort of writing projects like an entire book or, in my case, having to like get multiple stories, like in line for two or three different shows or two or three different sites and things that I'm, things I'm writing at the same time. Keep them organized, keep them, have all the tools I need to keep myself on track, also publishing tools, so that some of the stuff is going to go to a word file that gets sent someplace, some of it turns into a text file that gets emailed someplace, and some of it turns into a text file that gets emailed someplace, and some of it can be published directly to WordPress, directly to Ghost, directly to any of these other self-publishing things. It is so flexible and yet very, very simple.

I'm also a big fan of Scrivener, which Jason introduced me ages and ages ago, and it still is my absolutely nuclear weapon tool for writing projects. When something that is so huge that there is an enormous amount of PDFs for research, pictures, sketches. I want note cards that help me get formulate ideas for when it gets up to that level, then, yes, I go to Scrivener, but for something that is not as complicated as that, ulysses is absolutely doing the trick. I cannot go through all of the features, but they're so well thought out. Also, the syncing between devices is exquisite. That's one thing that Scrivener just still hasn't gotten a handle on. It's very, very easy to sync through either a Dropbox folder that you've got or iCloud or whatever, and there's iPad versions, desktop Mac versions, iphone versions, and they all will give you appreciably the same experience from one place to another.

2:12:35 - Leo Laporte
And when you pay for the subscription you can have them in all of them right. One payment for everything. I like that.

2:12:43 - Andy Ihnatko
In terms of what they added. Once again, very, very good, sensitive choices here. Again, they don't make it super complicated. If you want it to present to you as a distraction-free, one-window text editor, that's what it will give you. It uses Markdown for basically all your formatting, which is more than enough for again getting this thing written. So headers, links, bullet items, all this sort of stuff it becomes second nature after a second. So, yes, you're looking at a plain text window. So when they do add features, it's always about what is the simplest thing we can add that could have the greatest possible reward.

So there were only three features that they added. They added a go menu so that you can quickly move between projects without having to navigate through the rest of the interface. I like that. You can now have links. You can always have links in these documents, but now you can link to other headers and other places within your project.

So if you want to create just a central place to navigate through what is becoming a huge mess of research notes and drafts of a novel, that will help you through that. And now there's a I hate to admit that I've needed this, but there's a history like this is a back button so that when I find myself that I was adding something to a chapter or adding something to a story for something that's going on later on, I've forgotten how I got what I left to get there. Now there's a back button inside the editing window so you can just tap on that. It will take you right back to wherever you were when you click through to that other thing. But again, this is just a blanket recommendation.

If you do lots and lots of writing, this is such a great thing. It doesn't impose its own theory of how a project, a writing project, should proceed. It gives you the tools and the features so that you can develop your own structure for how you want to create stuff and how you wind up publishing it. It's pretty cheap 40 bucks a year, six bucks a month, and for those for that you do get extra features. I do think that it is multi-platform. For that amount of money too, you don't have to pay extra for the iPad or the iPhone edition.

2:14:36 - Leo Laporte
And family share, so everybody in the family can use it for the same amount. That's good.

2:14:41 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, it's, it's super good. Again, highest recommendation Ulysses at Ulyssesapp.

2:14:48 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I've used it off and on, I just don't write enough. But I resubscribed because I thought you know I should write more and I like it that it posts to your blog so that'll make it very easy for me to update my blog. Is do it in Ulysses and then push it. That's great, I like that.

2:15:05 - Alex Lindsay
Alex Lindsay pick of the week. Zoom has got the beta for Tiles out, and Tiles is a. Tiles is if you're building events and you want to be able to display, whether it's for broadcast or whether it's for screens behind you or around you. Basically, what it allows you to do is have Tiles join. This is a Mac only solution right now. Have Tiles join the meeting and now you can say, well, just show me everyone with their video, or everyone with, or just the hosts, or just the co-hosts, or you know my favorites, or other things like that, and it can and you can build how it's going to look.

A lot of us have spent a lot of time working on this, like, like, how do we make the? How do we do this ourselves? And right now, what tiles allows you to do is to is to do those around the corners and give it a certain border and lay them out at a certain way and and, um, you know what? What is the aspect ratio? What's the resolution of the screen? That I'm going to so, if you have a big led wall. So this is very much of an events, um, and it is something you need events for zoom events to use, but it is a free beta inside of the zoom events platform Zoom is just killing it, aren't they?

2:16:09 - Leo Laporte
Oh, this is from Liminal. Oh neat, it's the.

2:16:11 - Alex Lindsay
Liminal team. Yeah, yeah, yes, so things move quickly with them. So this is you know, and so anyway, it's an incredible jump forward. If you've been trying to figure out how do I do a gallery but have it feel like my company and feel, have the right colors and have the rounded corners and do all the things and lay it out the way I want to lay it out, this is. It's an incredible tool set that they've, that they've rolled out for that type of thing and really Zoom is so far ahead of everybody else in the event slash broadcast solution world. It's not like this is just pushing that out further. So really really incredible. Beta that just came out.

Andy Carluccio did a. He was on Zoom Test Kitchen on Friday. I don't know if that's recorded, but it was somewhere that he showed it off a little bit. He's going to be on office hours in a couple of weeks to show it. We wanted a little time for us to all play with it so we'd have better questions for him. So he'll be on on the 25th to talk about it. Anyway, great platform. If what I said makes sense to you and you think that would be amazing if I was using it on my event, then it's for you. And if you're like, I don't understand why I would ever want to display galleries, it's not for you.

2:17:24 - Leo Laporte
But it is something in my world that's pretty important. Yes, yeah, yeah, andy's amazing and we're very grateful to him. He is so helpful to us. You introduced him and he's really been helpful. We use Zoom ISO. That's what we're using right now from Luminal.

2:17:39 - Alex Lindsay
It's just one of the most effective corporate production teams I've ever seen, and it's that whole team. They're outputting so many new features to the broadcast slash events world that it really just is very, very Are they owned Office hours.

2:17:54 - Leo Laporte
They're fully owned by Zoom. Now right, fully owned by Zoom. Yeah, so that's another. Actually, that's good, yeah, because it means you can kind of trust that.

2:18:01 - Alex Lindsay
yeah, this is going to work with Zoom. They're fully owned by Zoom, but they still have this kind of startup mentality of putting out products and doing all the you know. But they have the power of the infrastructure of Zoom as well, so it's a pretty powerful combination, Neat.

2:18:19 - Leo Laporte
You can also. Is this true? You can use Unreal Engine to create even more. That's a different product.

2:18:25 - Alex Lindsay
Oh yeah, that's a different I didn't talk about that on Mac break because we used it at. So we used that at NAB. And what that allows you to do is you, you can join a Zoom meeting from Unreal Engine and then just populate screens with it, and so what that allows you to do is you can have these screens in 3D that are all like you just put people where, like what we did is we had a you know um, we had a camera in the center, but we wanted to place all the people around it, like this in a 3d world like, so that they're not no one's behind that, and we were able to do that in about you know half an hour. Wow, you know doing. And it's just literally like, okay, the this screen, you know, but you're not trying to figure out how to use it in Zoom ISO and then sending it over NDI Literally, the Zoom meeting has happening in Unreal and delivering the videos to those screens.

So that's the next step, past Tiles, like, if Tiles doesn't do what you want, then you're. But that's more of a PC solution because Unreal I mean I know Unreal runs on a Mac, but not very well. So that's really more of a PC solution because Unreal, I mean, I know Unreal runs on a Mac, but not very well, so that's really more of a PC solution. So that's why I haven't chosen it as a pick, but I have a PC dedicated only to that.

So, it's just doing Zoom in Unreal.

2:19:38 - Leo Laporte
So yeah, thank you, Mr Jason Snell, your pick of the week to wrap this show up.

2:19:44 - Jason Snell
Yeah, it's a little bit weird, but I am in Phoenix visiting my mom, and I realized a while ago when I was here that having a better background than a generic guest bedroom background would be a good idea, and so what I did is I bought the WebAround Big Shot 5 for 50 bucks on Amazon.

2:19:59 - Leo Laporte
Wait a minute. This is on the back of your chair right now.

2:20:02 - Jason Snell
It is on the back of my chair right now. This is a green screen. It is a green screen. It is a green screen. We're gonna just zoom all the way back and it's got like it's, it's a uh, it's got a little uh thing that you wrap around. It's got little, it's got little elastic things that go around and hug.

They hug your chair so that your chair is uh. So basically it's a green screen that lives on your chair back and you, uh, you kind of have these big elastic bands that go around the front of your chair. So it's a green screen that lives on your chair back and you, uh, you kind of have these big elastic bands that go around the front of your chair so it's held on. There's also a little foot that is resting on the back. That is adjustable, so you can make a big circle, green circle, around you as you sit, and then uh, and then you know, and then, when you're done, you fold it up like it's a reflector on uh like you put in your car with the taco to keep it from getting, to keep it from getting hot, and then it goes in a little tiny bag.

So if you are traveling and need a green screen, I recommend it, it's, it's good. I might have to get this, Carry it around. You know the rest of the story.

2:21:02 - Leo Laporte
Wow, you blew the illusion.

2:21:05 - Andy Ihnatko
Wow, and I think that there's some parades or Comic-Cons where you would look great just walking around with that strapped around your waist like a big peacock.

2:21:13 - Leo Laporte
People do that. I've seen videos of people driving in the car with these things strapped.

2:21:19 - Alex Lindsay
I've seen someone ride a bike on it Like he was in a meeting and he had a bike and a blue screen or a green screen you don't know exactly why he's wobbling like he is, but it looks like he's sitting in his office.

2:21:29 - Leo Laporte
He's not Look at this. No, oh, I got to have this. That is so cool.

2:21:36 - Alex Lindsay
So cool, and are you just using Zoom's green screen removal?

2:21:41 - Jason Snell
I am With Zoom. If you choose no green screen, everything's a little fuzzy around you, especially around your hair, but really around everything. If you choose the, I have a green screen function and then you pick the color of your green screen. It is so much better at keying it live.

2:21:55 - Leo Laporte
I did not know you were keyed. Honestly, yeah, yeah, so that was that.

2:21:59 - Jason Snell
It helps a lot. It looks a lot better when you're, when you're doing it. Yeah, geez.

2:22:08 - Leo Laporte
Rewind folks. If you're watching the video and you can see, you'll see it's like no one knew. I'm actually not.

2:22:13 - Jason Snell
I'm on an airplane right now Amazing, using a vision pro it's incredible Using a vision pro.

2:22:16 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, thank you, jason Snell. Sixcolorscom the place to go for Apple coverage from Jason, dan Morin and others, and if you go to sixcolors.com slash Jason, you can see all of the podcasts and things Jason does. He's a very busy man. Upgrade Many podcasts Six Colors, macbreak, weekly, downstream, robot or Not. Actually, this list is shortened. Did you take some things off?

2:22:44 - Jason Snell
No, I think I rearranged it a little bit.

2:22:46 - Leo Laporte
Oh, you got the seasonal stuff all in one line. There you go, busy, busy man. Thank you, jason, really appreciate it. Thank you, leo, hope you enjoy your visit to mom.

2:22:58 - Jason Snell
Yes, and then my visit to Cupertino next week too.

2:23:01 - Leo Laporte
Oh and maybe we'll get Snell on the scene.

2:23:05 - Jason Snell
I'm going to bring the green screen to Cupertino. That's not going to happen, you know what you should just walk around with it.

2:23:11 - Andy Ihnatko
The key is to get it. That'll be great for a social club because you could tell people oh no, I've got a one-on-one briefing with Tim Cook. Yeah, apple Campus. Just key out all the hundreds of people behind you.

2:23:22 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, just me and Tim. That Me and Tim, that's it, yeah, it's amazing.

2:23:25 - Alex Lindsay
Taking a bunch of photos of the, you get a bunch of backgrounds.

2:23:29 - Leo Laporte
I love it. Andy Anotko GBH is calling sooner than you thought.

2:23:33 - Andy Ihnatko
Yes, I was supposed to be on Friday at the Boston Public Library live. Unfortunately I got moved up two days, so I'm on tomorrow at 1230. Go to WGBHnewsorg to stream it live or later. So this morning. Actually. Another plug for Ulysses. I wrote like three or four in haste. I had to write three or 4,000 words worth of briefing papers about news stories just two or three hours before the show, but Ulysses made it into a snap. That's really cool.

2:24:01 - Leo Laporte
Thank you, andrew, always great to see you. And, of course, alex Lindsay, who was on Ask the Tech Guys. You should watch that show if you didn't see it. It was a really great episode. He, uh, he's. I guess he got some practice answering questions at officehours.global, because he does it every morning wow, I prefer, I prefer.

2:24:21 - Alex Lindsay
I don't understand how people make, like you know, two minute, two, even two minute vods. I'm like it's much easier just to answer questions, so I know.

2:24:28 - Leo Laporte
That's why I did the radio show six hours a week for 20 years, cause you know you don't have to prepare. Prepare you just to answer questions.

2:24:36 - Alex Lindsay
Ask me questions, or at least sound like you know. That's the key to the operation. It sounds like fun.

2:24:42 - Leo Laporte
Today's show was on Z weave 3d clothingD clothing design for fashion, gaming and beyond. But every day is something new and something different. Yesterday was the content.

2:24:54 - Alex Lindsay
Ecamm is also supporting Zoom now internally, so Andy's actually going to be on the show on Thursday as well. Thursday, yay, talking about that Along with Doc Rock yeah, and a lot of people are pretty excited about that with Doc Rock and the other folks at Ecamm.

2:25:06 - Jason Snell
It's really good.

2:25:07 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah.

2:25:08 - Leo Laporte
Oh, ATEM Audio have you.

2:25:10 - Alex Lindsay
Hmm. You know ATEM they have a whole mixer built into your switcher and so we're going to talk about tomorrow. Jeff Francis, who's an amazing audio engineer, is going to how how that works, the workflows and the buses.

2:25:28 - Leo Laporte
It's amazing, all the stuff you do find out more at officehours.global. And if you want to hire Alex to do your next event zero nine, zero dot media I would say it's your day job, but honestly I don't know when you do it Right after this, like that implies you do something else during the night?

no, that's right it's his job, job. Thank you alex, thank you andy, thank you jason. Thanks to all of you, especially our club twit members, for joining us. We do MacBreak Weekly every tuesday, 11 am, pacific 2 pm, eastern 1800 utc. You can watch us do it live on youtube. youtube.com/twit/ive when the show's on all of our shows, when they're on, when we're recording. You can watch us do it live on YouTube. youtube.com/twit/ive when the show's on all of our shows, when they're on, when we're recording them. You can watch us record them live on YouTube. After the fact, on-demand episodes are available at the website twittv slash mbw. There is also a YouTube channel dedicated to MacBreak Weekly's video. We have video and audio, or you can subscribe to the video or audio in your favorite podcast player and get it automatically as soon as it's available. That way, listen at your leisure. Thanks for being here. We'll see you next time. Now it is my solemn duty to tell you you're having trouble. It's great, it's great, it's great.

2:26:47 - Jason Snell
It fell off. I'm gone.

2:26:50 - Leo Laporte
I'm gone.

2:26:50 - Jason Snell
I'm not here, never mind, never mind.

2:26:52 - Leo Laporte
Back to work. Break time it's over. Did it pop? Is that what happened you?