MacBreak Weekly 927 Transcript

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

0:00:00 - Leo Laporte
It's time for MacBreak Weekly. Andy Ihnatko here, Alex Lindsay, Jason Snell. The whole gang is here. Coming up. Apple's in trouble with the EU and, as a result, maybe they're going to withhold their AI. What's next for Apple's Vision Pro? And, can you believe it, we might have to wait till next year for Mac Pros and Mac Studios. All of that and more coming up next on MacBreak Weekly.

0:00:28 - VO
Podcasts you love. From people you trust. This. Is TWiT.

0:00:38 - Leo Laporte
This is MacBreak Weekly episode 927, recorded June 25th 2024.: Algae Wars. it's time for MacBreak Weekly, the show where we cover the latest news from Apple. Jason Snell is here, which means there isn't really any news from Apple, because if there were, he'd be in Cupertino, but he's not. He's here.

0:01:00 - Jason Snell
Here I am, I'm present. I've not been summoned back to the mothership to be transmogrified into uh, I don't even know what something a chicken.

0:01:11 - Leo Laporte
uh, he is, of course, the editor-in-chief of sixcolors.com, the man in charge. Thank you for being here Jason, in the library once again, Andy Ihnatko of WGBH in Boston wearing his pix Pixar beanie. Hello Andy.

0:01:25 - Andy Ihnatko
Thank you, hello, Jason, be really, really careful. It is like the end of 2001,. Except the spaceship campus is the monolith, and if you enter it you don't become a star child, but you become a being of pure marketing. Some people think that that's our next evolutionary step.

0:01:40 - Leo Laporte
It's not a bad one. It could be worse.

0:01:43 - Jason Snell
Gold over a double rainbow Wow.

0:01:49 - Leo Laporte
And from officehours.global, Mr. Alex Lindsay Hello Alex, Hello, hello. Oh, you look tan. You've been out in the sun.

0:01:57 - Alex Lindsay
I have, I have. It's the summer, so I'm out it's the summer, mostly working on my pool, because I'm the pool guy.

0:02:03 - Leo Laporte
Oh, I didn't know you had a pool. That's nice. I have a pool. I'm on my way. That sounds great.

0:02:08 - Alex Lindsay
It's a complicated pool and so keeping it clean is a it's a thing. That's why I don't want a pool. I couldn't find someone willing to do it well, and so I was like I'll. It's now back to being a pool. You don't really want to swim in a pond. I grew up swimming in a pond, it's just the rest of the family doesn't want to. No, it's the algae, it just clings. We used to have algae wars where we would throw the. The algae was so thick in the pond that I grew up in we would throw it. If you hit someone in the head, just right, it would just form like a wig, like it's like a green wig go around their head and it was uh, but it's like huge. You're not like little algae like you see in a pool when you have it cleaned. I'm talking like you can pick it up.

it's like it's like algae it's practically seaweed, is what you're saying it's very, very close to seaweed and you can throw it at your brothers and sisters and it's good clean fun for us. Uh, I don't know if it's clean, but it's.

0:03:03 - Leo Laporte
It's good fun in the summer good, unclean fun, which is the best exactly of fun, actually. So, uh, apple, uh, has been busy. It's been busy, uh, I guess that's the best way to put it. The EU has said, yes, spank, spank, spank. Apple is not living up to what the EU wants. And so Brussels says they're breaking EU's competition rules, the gatekeeper rules, in the Digital Markets Act. This is the FT. The Financial Times told us that was going to happen. It has now happened.

The European Commission has been gearing up for years to unleash the full authority of its new Digital Markets Act against big tech. The lanDMArk rules were designed to help startups by forcing powerful online gatekeepers, most of whom are, completely coincidentally, us companies, to open up their businesses to competition, completely coincidentally, from European companies. In a preliminary finding issued yesterday, regulators in Brussels said they were concerned about restrictions Apple was imposing on developers' abilities to quote, freely steer their customers by directing them to promotions outside the app store. This was. They couldn't do it. The anti-steering rules still apply in the US, but now in the EU, they're not supposed to do it. Thierry Breton, who is the EU Eternal Market Commissioner, said Apple's new slogan should be act different. Oh, I say Today. We take further steps to ensure Apple complies with the DMA rules. If found guilty, a big, as you know, it's a big penalty up to 10 of your annual revenue. But I don't think that we're that stage yet. I think, well, I don't know. I mean, can apple say oh yeah, we let, we'd be sorry, how about this?

0:05:01 - Andy Ihnatko
this is. This is part of, like, what made the DMA a little bit flexible. This isn't a ruling, it's a preliminary thing and, according to the DMA, the process is now that they inform Apple that. Here is our preliminary finding. We have now a year from the date of this preliminary filing, which happens to be, I think, march, to basically make a final decision. In that time, you get access to all the information that we have. You get access to all of our documents and how we came to that decision, and you can talk to us about, like, why we might be full of it or why you know this is not such a big deal. There can be an open conversation between now and March. Right now, nothing has happened. It's just part of the conversation where you can now have access to our files and take a look at what we're thinking about.

0:05:47 - Jason Snell
It's sort of the flip side of the we're not going to tell you what to do and we're not going to tell you that what you're doing is OK. You're just going to take your best shot and then we'll tell you whether you got it right or wrong, and the flip side of it is right. So it's like that's frustratingly vague, but at the same time, it also means that there's this whole part of the process that happens afterward, which is all right. We didn't like that. Let's talk about it some more. And they highlighted some very specific areas. So it's steering.

It's the idea of Apple still being convinced that web links are dangerous and hazardous to your health and no, we can't have web links and also insisting that if you do link out, we demand an affiliate cut of everything you sell for the first two weeks or whatever it is.

But it's also the all of the scare dialogues for for alternative marketplaces or downloading outside of the app store, where I think Apple's argument is they need to warn users, which I think is good, which I think is good.

We've seen, even on the Mac, that scammers are very good at walking people through how to turn off all the settings that are there to prevent you from installing non-notarized software, and so the easier you make it, every step you remove it makes it that much easier for a scammer to talk you into installing something bad.

At the same time, it feels like Apple is also just sort of motivated to try to frighten people into staying in the app store.

And then I think another interesting one that they cited is this idea that in order to even do apps outside the app store, you first have to be a member in good standing of the app store, which means, in order to sell apps outside the app store right now and this is a proxy to keep shady characters from just putting up these, you know, fly by night app stands and selling you a bad app and then disappearing into the ether. But the contrary opinion might be why do I have to have a hit app and be in the app store for two years if the whole point is that I don't need to be in the app store? So you know where this goes. I imagine there will be some negotiation, and that's good right, Although, again, this would be simpler if the parties could agree to this stuff up front. But you know Apple's going to do the minimum required and the EC is not going to tell them the minimum required.

0:08:01 - Alex Lindsay
So here we are.

0:08:03 - Leo Laporte
Also they use investigating developer fees. The fees include a charge of 50 cents per download that companies have to pay if their app is used by more than a million people. Brussels says it's looking into whether Apple is imposing too many restrictions for users to download and install alternative app stores. Apple says we have made a number of changes to comply with the DMA. Apple says we have made a number of changes to comply with the DMA in response to feedback from developers and the European Commission. We're confident that our plan complies with the law and estimate that more than 99 percent of developers would pay the same or less in fees to Apple under the new business terms we created.

0:08:46 - Alex Lindsay
Which is really true. I mean, the issue is that this is really a very game of the aristocracy. I mean, the companies that are complaining about not getting having to pay more, having access or other things, are very large companies, very rich companies. The average developer probably will not feel anything, you know, from this whole process, and so the, so the you know it's big companies trying to make sure that they, that the biggest company, pays them more money, you know, like I mean, or allows them to make more money. Um, but it's not really. This isn't really a fight for the common developer or the common user. Uh, this is, this is, these are, uh, wealthy, uh, englishmen or not Englishmen, the only ones, the aristocracy, you know, fighting between each other.

0:09:27 - Jason Snell
Well, spotify was one of them.

0:09:30 - Alex Lindsay
If you're watching like Henry V or Braveheart, think of all the people with the big wigs. That's who's fighting here.

0:09:34 - Leo Laporte
Apple. It's not the average people. Apple was fined 1.8 billion, with a B euros earlier for stifling competition from rival music streaming services, I think chiefly spotify. So, uh, you're saying is is it the case that you don't pay anything under a million downloads? Is that? Is that why you're saying it's only rich companies?

0:09:55 - Alex Lindsay
yeah, yeah, I mean it's. You got to remember that 86 of the of developers don't don't uh, sell things on their product. You know the way that they do that those products are not. They're not paying anything to apple in in the way that they do that those products. They're not paying anything to Apple in the way that they're delivering?

0:10:06 - Leo Laporte
And what if I don't charge? What if I give away a free app and it gets more than a million users? Do I still have to pay Apple 50 cents per user?

0:10:14 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, I don't know actually, but there's not that. But you have to remember that there's not that many, If you're an educational institution or a nonprofit or something like that.

0:10:26 - Jason Snell
But there, I mean, it's not all. Alex is right that a lot of the fight over big money and links out and things like that is for the aristocracy. I will say there are also a bunch of smaller companies that are trying to use these terms to build alternative app stores, and they are not the giant, the tech giants of the world, and they are also getting hit with a lot of these issues, including, for example, riley tested, who has, you know, has been trying to do a alt store and finding out that he can't get apps in his store because Apple refuses to notarize apps because they don't like them. And that's going to be another one of these issues that comes up, where Apple's now using a security process to control what it wants on its platform, even if it's not supposed to do that. So it's not just that, but you're not wrong that a lot of this is. You know, spotify and Epic want more money.

0:11:12 - Alex Lindsay
That is one of the components here and we can, we can say that, that, that, that. Oh well, if you, if you gave it away and there's more than a million people a million people is a lot of downloads it's like winning lottery like wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute, stop, stop, stop a million.

0:11:26 - Leo Laporte
What if I'm signal?

0:11:29 - Alex Lindsay
yeah, well, that's signal. I mean, that's still big company don't charge.

0:11:32 - Leo Laporte
I don't charge, I give it away. I've got more than a million downloads. Do I pay if I'm on the app store?

0:11:38 - Jason Snell
yes, I think so, unless you're a non-profit. If signals a non-profit, then yes, and then they wouldn't. Um, then they would have. Signal has a weird profit and nonprofit structure, so I'm not sure how Apple would define that Riley Testwood's point was that when he made the Delta emulator, or the first version of it, he was a kid and under Apple's rules his parents would have owned $3 million to Apple, and Apple even admitted that's wrong. We shouldn't do that, and so they've amended the rules a little bit since then.

0:12:04 - Leo Laporte
If you're a kid, you don't have to pay. Is that the rule?

0:12:07 - Jason Snell
well, it's sort of like there are like, if it's if you don't have any commercial apps and you're or you're a student developer, or like. They added a whole bunch of other caveats in there, which is which is good, but the truth is that apple is still, in terms of riley's business, apple is still holding up apps uh, being approved because they're in categories that Apple doesn't like.

0:12:25 - Leo Laporte
Wasn't Flappy Bird free.

0:12:25 - Jason Snell
Even though that's contrary.

0:12:27 - Leo Laporte
Flappy Bird is free. Flappy Bird is free. Wait a minute, hold on. Had more than a million downloads would have had to pay 50 cents per download to Apple under these rules After a million right.

0:12:38 - Jason Snell
Out of his ad revenue.

0:12:39 - Leo Laporte
presumably he had ads okay, so he had some revenue.

0:12:50 - Jason Snell
But there are people who give away apps who have more than a million downloads and we're not non-profits. Yeah, well, and the larger point too is, if you wanted to start a business, you had a really good idea, um, that you thought could work really well in europe but will never be approved by apple. Uh, you can't put it in an alternative app store because you would first have to register with apple, spend two years in the holding bin, release an app on the app store I don't know what app that would be with a million downloads, and that's what they're saying is that's unreasonable access to that market. Sorry, Andy, I cut Andy off.

0:13:16 - Andy Ihnatko
Oh, no, I'm sorry, no, I'm just going to say I mean, you're making a lot of great points. It's not like this is just benefiting the aristocracy Number one that presumes that open markets are not a good thing for everybody, and I have the position that it is. Secondly, as Jason's been saying, I mean there are app categories that Apple either A has no interest in, b thinks is contrary to their business plan, or C just doesn't like, and they have the ability to strike that from every iPhone on the planet. And this DMA can allow an alternative app store to allow those kind of apps in there, and this should not be too difficult. It should not be a burden and part of the EU's complaint. They refer to Apple's multi-step user journey to download and install alternate app stores or apps on phones.

That is not as simple as it needs to be.

That is not satisfying your customer. If you're forced to add a feature, they're being petulant, they're being squirrely, they're pretending that, they're pretending that this is they're doing something that is absolutely terrible and awful. When they're just doing something that is again according to the law and if they are going to hide behind that for all the other things that they cop to, they should be able to do this as well. And let's, and finally let's, remember that Apple was perfectly fine to charge everybody a lot of money, no matter what the scale of your app was. It was only until regulators and other external forces started beating on their door, saying we're going to start to put the hurt to you if you keep doing this. That's when they suddenly saw the lights and, oh you know, it's not necessary for you, small developers, to pay any more money, and we're going to pay any more money and we're going to introduce the sliding scale. That was something that we had in our back pocket. We were going to give it to you on your birthday, because you know how much we love.

0:15:12 - Leo Laporte
So I don't want to get past this point, which I'm making and I'll make again. Chrome is free, has more than a million downloads. In the past, has Google had to pay to be on the App Store or Firefox for you to download Chrome? No, right. So this is a new rule that says after a million, you pay 50 cents, whether you charge or not, right, am I wrong?

0:15:37 - Alex Lindsay
But this is outside of the App Store. No, no, is it?

0:15:40 - Leo Laporte
Well, that's what I just asked, Jason. I think you said that it was inside.

0:15:44 - Jason Snell
No, it's if you opt into the new terms, then you're covered under this, and you do that because you either want to link out or you want to also be outside the app store or whatever else there is. There's sort of like an eye for it.

0:15:57 - Leo Laporte
So I'm Amazon and I want to offer Kindle for free in the app store and I want to have a link out so that people can buy books in it. I will now have to pay 50 cents a download.

0:16:12 - Jason Snell
If you're, I forget exactly whether that triggers the new. There are different rules, right? Because there are the rules that are Apple's just changing and they're very restrictive. And then there are the rules that are Apple saying you must now agree to brand new terms in the european union, and I I think there are, believe it or not, different terms or different ways you can link out, and and there's a one way to link out, that is with the existing terms, and there's another way to link out, that's with the new terms. It's a it's a whole mess here, but if you accept the new terms, you're accepting the core technology fee, which is one of the things that Apple is or that the European Commission is saying they might have a problem.

0:16:52 - Andy Ihnatko
And again the core technology is if you're stepping Specifically one of the things that they were calling out that they were allowing steering only through those link outs. And not just that, but they were putting restrictions on how you could link out. So, yeah, that was a fundamental problem on how you could link out.

0:17:04 - Alex Lindsay
So yeah, that was a fundamental problem. But if you're normal, if you're normal, let's say we could go back to the flappy bird or signal. If you're not doing something that Apple's trying to. You know that Apple doesn't think is a good, is good to be on the app store and you're not and you don't care about the, you're giving it away, you just leave it in the app store for a long time will be very low, you know, because if we look at Google, who already has their own stores, I mean no one really uses them, like you know. So so it's, you know they're. They're kind of a wasteland of of effort, you know.

And so, um, so the chances of, you know, getting a million downloads, uh, on an outside app, even for, probably, spotify, unless they really put a lot of money into way more money than 50 cents a user into the PR, is going to be harder, is going to be very, very hard for them to even get over that hump, you know.

So it's only going to make sense for people who are building, you know again, edge case stuff, or they're a large company who wants to try to get their market outside of the app store. But it's not going to be. You know, if you're a regular, it doesn't mean that everyone selling into the EU now has to agree to pay a certain amount per app. If you're in the app store as a regular developer, it's all going to be the same as it was before, you know? And so it's not uh, so it just it's only. And so again you have edge cases which are probably probably not the most popular apps, uh, out there, um, you know competing for this, but it's not like Chrome or Signal or Flappy Bird. They would just be in the app store.

0:18:31 - Leo Laporte
Well, let's say I'm Meredith Whitaker running the for-profit Signal company and I don't want to be in the app store because I don't trust Apple, because I want to make a messenger that does not have a company keeping track of who's downloading it. Let's say, and I would like to offer it in my own signal store, where we have an agreement not to keep track of who downloads it, I will pay 50 cents per over a million and you would calculate that against the fact that you are.

0:19:06 - Alex Lindsay
how many people have already downloaded it, how many people makes?

0:19:10 - Leo Laporte
single makes no money, though they they rely on foundation support and gifts. Right it, it seems all right, but I guess, I guess it's not just the aristocracy, however, right, but it's not not.

0:19:24 - Alex Lindsay
It's also in theory. I mean, the thing is, is what we find in general is just the way Apple says everything's going to be in danger. Everyone's saying, well, everyone's going to be affected. Very few people actually end up getting affected by these numbers, because the numbers are actually pretty high. I mean, you, building your own individual store is a strike against you. You can say that you want to do that, but the average, the average apple user is not going to go to an app. I mean these external apps app stores will call to the top to 10 of the of the population.

0:19:52 - Leo Laporte
That'll be really excited to have them. If you're really going to this page and you try to read the verbiage, it is extraordinarily complicated. I'm sure these companies will have attorneys who can understand it, but it's uh, it's gonna take years to unwrap, and and it's going to.

0:20:10 - Alex Lindsay
But again, even after they've unwrapped it, there's going to be 10 of the population in europe, not the rest of the world, just 10 of the european population. And of that, what percentage are apple, apple users, which is less than half. Um, so 10 of the less than half will be excited. This is your market. So look at that. You're going to sell. You're going to try to sell a million units to, or give away a million units to, so all developers are universally happy about this new core technology?

0:20:36 - Leo Laporte
No, it's not that they're universally happy.

0:20:38 - Alex Lindsay
It's just that this is way more effort than most developers are going to want to go through.

0:20:48 - Leo Laporte
I mean, we can talk about people that we know that are going to be really excited about this. So let's be fair, then. What Apple's saying is we're going to make it so onerous if you don't sell in the app store and so complicated that you're going to sell in the app store. And this is what the E's upset about, I think, is that is malicious compliance. It's saying, well, you could sell outside the app store, but we're going to make it as hard and expensive as possible.

0:21:05 - Alex Lindsay
Well, I don't know how. How hard is it to do it with Google, cause Google has its. You can build your app stores outside of Google as well, but no one uses them.

0:21:16 - Andy Ihnatko
Like nobody uses those, or you could just release an APK file that you can sideload without any hullabaloo whatsoever, which also nobody uses. Don't get much Nope. No, it's not true that nobody uses it. A lot of people use it for nefarious purposes. But the people who actually need it and want it, those are the people that these laws are designed to enhance, and I don't think we know how many people use it, and I don't think it's fair to say nobody uses it, because I don't think that's Nobody I know uses it.

If you look at demographics, that's a very different thing than nobody uses it.

0:21:40 - Leo Laporte
Nobody I know uses it.

0:21:41 - Alex Lindsay
It's not the same thing. Do you know very many people that use the external stores?

0:21:45 - Jason Snell
I don't know, I'm saying I don't know, I think there are cases, quite a few cases, where people sideload on Android.

0:21:53 - Leo Laporte
I know I do it all the time, so I think, yes, the answer would be yes, and it's not Apple. Well, this is the fundamental question. I know where you come down on this, Alex, but is it Apple's job to say that it's up to them? Yeah, I guess it is, isn't it Whether you are allowed to do that, as opposed to what users want?

0:22:15 - Alex Lindsay
No, no, no, no, no, no. Wait, I want to say something there. It's not what users want. This is what developers and these rich companies want. The vast majority of users don't give a crap about this, like they don't care about this. They don't even know it's happening. Like we're in this little thing. But we should not pull in what the users want, because the users that want this are less than 1%. Even know it's existing, you know, and so this is. This is not what the users want. This is what rich developers and some other developers and edge developers want.

This is not a service to the users. This is just going to make their life more complicated, you know, and it's going to make it. You know it's not going to help. It's not going to help the average user. It's just making it more complicated for them. And so the thing is, this is not a user-centric thing. This is a company-centric thing, and mostly a large company with lots of lobbyists. Sense of thing, you know. That is what. The only reason this is here is because big companies are lobbying europe and saying these are non-european. You know thing. They're making it harder for us to make money. You know so. But this is not a user. This is not a user-centric no one. No, they don't care about the users, they just want to make more money.

0:23:20 - Andy Ihnatko
No, disagree on pretty much everything you said, but we'll let.

0:23:23 - Leo Laporte
I think you don't care about the users, Alex. I think actual users want flexibility. Normal users. Look there's no. This is the point. There's no harm to these users.

0:23:34 - Alex Lindsay
You're talking about they don't have to know there's a side loader. They don't have to know there's another store.

0:23:38 - Leo Laporte
That's not who this is for. This is for people who want that. There's a lot of people who want that on Android and do it.

0:23:45 - Alex Lindsay
Nobody does it on Apple because nobody's allowed to.

0:23:48 - Leo Laporte
But the average user, you and I, who are either unaware or don't care about a third-party store, aren't going to be affected by this in any way, we are going to be eventually affected.

0:23:59 - Alex Lindsay
If it's successful, we will be affected because a company like Netflix will go. Well, I'm going to take my app completely out of the app store and put it into this external where, and you have to go outside of the app store to download my app, which now, as a user, I had something which was that I could easily download it, and now I don't. So it will. If, if large companies make this successful and they start taking these things out, they're taking something away. It won't be the little companies that do it, it's the large companies, the Netflix or the Facebooks or whatever. If they take their apps out of the app store and put them into the, that means as a user, I have to now leave the environment that I'm in to go use their app, and so something's being taken away from me as an app, and as soon as that happens it's not going to happen anytime soon because this is a mess, but if it actually happens, users are going to start being upset, you know, and the thing is and like a perfect example of why it's not even good for some of the developers is the app store on the Apple TV.

Everything is linked outside, everything has its own little thing and I just stopped even considering apps valid on the Apple TV. Like I was excited oh, there'll be apps on the Apple TV. But every time I sign up for an app I got to go to an external site to pay for it, or I got to go sign up for something and someone else is in it. At some point I stopped. I just deleted all the apps on my app, except for the handful of media apps that I have on my Apple TV and I don't develop.

I don't think about anything on the Apple TV because the because Apple did not do that on the Apple TV and it is a complete disaster and that is my number one reason. I don't want to see that happen on my iPhone, because I actually like downloading things on my iPhone, but I would. But if it becomes this thing where suddenly everybody wants to link out and everybody wants to do something else, it is not a good experience for the user and it's not a good experience for small developers who want a habit of buying apps to occur. But the habit, my habit in Apple TV has gone away. Like it is, like I don't even bother, like it's just a complete, you know dumpster fire.

0:25:53 - Jason Snell
Alex, I hate to do this, but I do not understand what you're saying now, because there is no external app store on the Apple TV.

0:25:59 - Alex Lindsay
Do you not like logging into?

0:26:00 - Jason Snell
services Because you have to log into services on all sorts of Apple platforms.

0:26:05 - Alex Lindsay
That's not a magical thing that happens only on Apple TV. They're all with the app. It's not that there's an external there's not. There's an external store but it's like every app that you download on Apple TV wants you to log into some external service. You can't just pay for it.

0:26:19 - Jason Snell
There's a handful of them that let you pay for it Because they're TV. So what you're saying? You're saying that you shouldn't ever have to be able to have to go to Netflix to log in. Netflix should be mandatorily charging people inside?

0:26:31 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, all right, I think that is ridiculous, but at least we're clear about it now. The thing is is that, as a user, I just want everything to be.

0:26:39 - Jason Snell
I think it spans all your platform views now. It's just ludicrous.

0:26:46 - Alex Lindsay
It's ludicrous it's ludicrous, alec. No, but this is what's great we have a broad spectrum of opinions and Alex is very much on the apple side of things now.

0:26:53 - Leo Laporte
Actually, I'm curious what you have to say, apple, about this next story. But before we get to that I want to take a little break. You're watching matt break weekly. No, this is not hot warfare. This is a cold war occurring between our panelists. It's a great conversation. We disagree. No, and I think it is, it's a good conversation.

I think this is completely appropriate. I don't have a problem with it. We will continue on with this ludicrous conversation in just a moment. And by the way, for the club member who said I look like Charles Nelson Reilly. Why I like those glasses, I think that you glasses. I told you they're made out of recycled records. The company's called Vinyl Eyes. It's hard to see, but there's actually grooves.

0:27:33 - Alex Lindsay
If you see me in person. There's grooves. Do you remember what it was?

0:27:38 - Leo Laporte
Well, they have different names. This one is called the Fleetwood, so I'm guessing it's rumors. And then there's a Rolling Stones one. I don't know if they're actually true to the brand. I love that. Wouldn't that be funny? If it's just Rumors albums, there was an Elton John, I don't know. I love them. Anyway, we will come back because I do Apple. Apple's, I do look like a little like Charles Nelson Reilly. You're right. Apple's response to this actually is even more like something out of the schoolyard playground. But we'll get to that in just a second.

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So Apple's response to the EU, besides saying we're fully in compliance with the law, now, I guess they're going to have to. Maybe they'll have to compromise, I don't know, maybe they'll just convince the EU. But the other way they're responding, they're not going to roll out a lot of the AI tech that they announced at WWDC. They say it's for security reasons. We're concerned that interoperability requirements of the DMA could force us to compromise the integrity of our products in ways that risk user privacy and data security. Mark Gurman, I think I kind of agree with Mark when he says it's not clear how the features might violate the DMA, but withholding the technology threatens to irk consumers in the region, who might potentially put pressure on regulators.

0:31:34 - Andy Ihnatko
Oh, that's an interesting ploy, yeah I mean, none of this makes sense. I'm quoting, uh, article 7, subsection 9 the gatekeeper shall not be prevented from taking measures to ensure the third party providers do not endanger the integrity, security and privacy of its services. So, ok, I mean, if you, it's, it's, I understand that they're going to have to make sure that they're they're compliant and or talk to their people at the EU to convince them that this is why we have to do this, but we can't let it do this at the eu to convince them like, this is why we have to do this, but we can't let it do this. Uh, but the idea, but the idea to put a put out a blanket that, oh, we're going to blame the eu, that we think that we're, that we, it would force us to compromise the security and integrity of our product for our users. That's a little darling, I think, at least at this stage.

0:32:22 - Leo Laporte
So among the things that will be withheld, apple intelligence, iphone sharing will not be available. Iphone mirroring and SharePlay screen sharing will also be held back. I could, maybe, maybe I could see if the EU said okay, you can offer Apple intelligence and, yes, you allow people to go out to open AI's chat, gpt, but you must include Mistral, our favorite French AI, as well.

0:32:57 - Andy Ihnatko
Maybe that's what it is. I was wondering if it was more like the experience that you get and the knowledge that Apple intelligence gains from you that makes it a great intelligent assistant. If I wanted to switch to Android and switch to Gemini, are they worried that the EU will say, well, no, you got to make sure that you export all of the personal experience out of your AI model into their AI model and the mirroring feature. Maybe they're saying that they want to make sure that all users will have access to this, because this is a communications feature, if they want to define it that way. There are a lot of questions about that. But again, number one, there are already cutouts for that. That may or may not apply, but again, that's why I think it's kind of darling to say that this is why we're not going to do it, because we are so concerned about our users. And number two, it's not as though it's always roll the dice and see what happens.

There is parts of the provisions of the, of the of the act basically say that you can actually talk to us about what's what's Jake and what's not Jake before you actually make a move. It's not as though you it's not like. Let me put it this way it's not like being an Apple developer submitting something to the app store. You it's not that you have a totally blind submission and then when they reject it, you will. You may or may not know exactly why it was rejected.

There is a provision that's actually baked into the thing to say that you can actually have an open dialogue with us to figure out and there are commissions that are actually set up for this purpose. You can basically try to figure out what's going to be okay, what's not going to be okay. If it's not okay, you're going to get a year of conversation before we make any sort of decision. That's why again, if they had had a broader explanation that there are a lot of different, there are a lot of things we have to take a look at and the regulatory environment is different in the EU. We want to make sure that we comply in every way, but to phrase it this way, that this is that the regular, basically to throw shade, that these regulations are themselves bad and that they would force us to compromise the security and safety of our users. Again, I, I cry. It's the fig leaf.

0:34:57 - Jason Snell
Right, it's the fig leaf that they they have been accused of holding. It's like security. Apple says security a lot, and do they mean it the same way every time? I think some, a lot of times they do mean it, but they, I think they also sometimes hide behind it. I, I think, they purposefully have.

What they don't want is they don't want europe to get the idea that the european commission and the DMA are giving them cookies, right, like, hey look, apple had to do all these things for us, because we are taking a tough stand against apple and they had to add all these features, and we got them doing whatever we want, and they're eating out of the palm of our hand. And apple's like oh yeah, here's the other part, though. For new features that didn't already exist in your market, you don't get them or you don't get them soon, and it's because of the regulatory regime. I think they feel that that is an important message to be sent, that it isn't just about Europe getting more, it's also about Europe and consumers in Europe potentially getting less. I do think that they're trying to send a message with that and, Andy, you're right, there is a conversation that could be handled, although the way Apple handles its own business until they announce these features, that conversation can't even begin. And I wonder if Apple is sort of like maliciously analyzing its own feature set for ways that it could be, in their terms, inappropriately abused in order to make them do things that they don't want to do or can't do.

Because I think if somebody at the European Commission looked at a feature like the iPhone screen sharing and said, there's no issue here, go ahead and ship it as is, apple would probably say, ok, we'll ship it as is for Europe. That's fine. But if they say, well, are you preferencing the iPhone over Android for this feature, and should you make that as a publicly available API so that other phones can also be shared onto the Mac, apple might be like well, you tell us what you think, but we're not building those features in for this fall, so it's going to not launch in Europe. And I think that there's an aspect of that which is like Apple saying I don't know how unreasonable do you want to be with these features? So, again, it's muddy right, because I do think they're sending sending a message.

I also think that there's some truth in what they're saying. It's just a little bit of both, but the politics of it and the optics of it is part of it. Right, they want to say this is not going to be the case where every year europe gets features, nobody else in the world gets. It also is going to be the case that europe loses features, doesn't get new features, because of the DMA and you. You know whether that will make any difference with the way that the regulatory regime works in Europe. I honestly don't know.

0:37:31 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, I mean the thing that kind of shades, a lot of this is that they are very, very well invested in the position that a plank in their platform is, that we know what's best for our users. Regulators do not. And so when we get five years into the DMA and all kinds of other national regulations and it turns out that the world does not end that things get a little more convenient for some people but better for most people. But basically it did not turn into a world in which iPhones are loaded with malware, everybody's getting scammed left and right. Apple has to basically sheepishly, at least tactically, admit that. Okay.

Well, I guess we were wrong about all of that. So the more that they can create an impression that all of this stuff is making it bad, not for us oh, we're okay, we're going to be fine, we've got $2 trillion. We're worried about the effect it's going to have on consumers. That's why, consumers, you should be against this sort of stuff. Anytime their regulation comes in, you should be writing your lawmakers to say do not regulate Apple or other tech businesses. Let them do exactly whatever they want, because they not you have the best, our best, interests in heart.

0:38:36 - Leo Laporte
Does it boil down to whether you believe in regulation, government, regulation of big tech? Is it as simple as as that, Alex, or is it?

0:38:45 - Alex Lindsay
more complex? I don't think so. I mean, I think there are places where it it makes sense to potentially regulate to big tech. I don't think it's unregulated, but I think that when you start micromanaging people's business models, I think that that gets into a, you know, a fairly complex place. I mean, and I think we finally saw in the united states, the united states is going after you know live nation and so on, so forth like that one was like we're all.

0:39:05 - Leo Laporte
We're all rooting for that one right. But here's.

0:39:08 - Alex Lindsay
The difference is that is that nobody likes live nation. Right, like nobody like there's the only people that like live nation or live nation. The artists don't like them, the users don't like them, the venues don't like them, like nobody likes them. And so because they've taken advantage of this for a long period of time and so they're in in a different place. But you know, when you look at telecommunications in the United States, that probably needs to be looked at pretty tight. You know we all feel it every day because of poll access. You know like so when you talk to internet folks that off the record no one will talk about. No one in the internet world, in telecommunications, wants to talk to you on the record about what the problems are, because a lot of it has to do with bribery you know who does.

0:39:49 - Leo Laporte
Uh, who's been very vocal about this is our friend dane jasper at sonic. He still won't talk really about it, no, but he does say that this is the big. He doesn't mention the B word, but he does say this is the biggest problem with rolling out an affordable, competitive fiber plan is access to the polls.

0:40:08 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, and the thing is is that I have a friend who owns an ISP who just will talk endlessly off the record about poll access not on the record of poll access, but the point is is that there are huge places that actually affect everyday people all day, every day, and telecommunications is one of them in the United States and and yet we still don't look at it. Why? Why is that the case? Could it be? Could it be campaign finance?

0:40:35 - Leo Laporte
We have the best money can buy, that's why?

0:40:39 - Alex Lindsay
So we have to be careful when we say business models, because the business model here is paying every Congress person enough money that they'll stop not bother with you so so so when we say the government regulation for who you know and whose lobbyists are better, whose lobbyists are closer, whose lobbyists or whatever. But that's what we're really talking about here. We're not talking about the good government and the bad companies. We're talking about one big company that's run by a bunch of little companies lobbying them, regulating the other companies. But it's not like we just stopped being Pollyanna about like governments doing anything good. They're a function of the people that are lobbying them, and so it doesn't mean that they always do bad things. It just doesn't mean that they're a function of the people that are lobbying them, you know, and so it doesn't mean that they always do bad things. That just doesn't mean that they're always doing good things and they're always on our side, you know, and so the thing is is that, and so the the issue is is that I think that they're going to find this complicated. Apple doesn't even have to send a message if you know like it's. Basically, you know, the developers are going to have to start thinking about. You know how they, how they release things and everything else, because they're the golden egg on. The new Apple platform is going to be AI over the next three to five years, and I think that it does make sense for Apple, regardless of the regulatory or any messages.

If you're not clear, like you did what you thought was going to be enough to get the EU off your back, and then they said no, I wouldn't release anything into the EU until I, until I, got through that process. So the next year or two we're going to figure out where our app store sits and then we can talk about the other things that we might bring into the EU. But I would absolutely freeze everything I'm doing in the EU. I wouldn't even release Apple Vision Pros into the EU, which they are, by the way.

I wouldn't do anything new until I knew where this piece is going to go and especially what they're going to possibly find. I mean, apple makes about $14 billion a year in the EU and so at 38, and they're not going to find them $38 billion, but $38 billion is twice over, twice what Apple makes over. You know it's per year. Like you have. They have to decide how, like, how invested they want to be in the EU at all, you know, like, and so that's the other thing for them. That's a good point.

0:42:34 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, if you charge a fine of 10% of global revenue and it's more than the entire revenue.

0:42:39 - Alex Lindsay
It's an absurd number From a region. Well, they need it. We're talking about absurdity, the reason the number is so absurd and, by the way, it's a maximum.

0:42:58 - Leo Laporte
It's not a minimum, but the it's meaningless to them.

0:43:00 - Alex Lindsay
It's the cost of doing business. You have to make it cost less for them to actually do the right thing. You have to hurt them. Yeah, well, and the interesting thing is is that, as you look at the VPN tools that Apple's adding to some of the operating system and a lot of the privacy tools, it also gets to a point where Apple may not know where you are with your phone, which means that you get to a point Well, it's problematic for you, because the thing is is you could say, well, I'm in the United. A user of Apple hardware could say that I am in the US and completely bypass all the. You know all the stuff that the EU is doing. So that's a there's a whole bunch of things here that that could you know, as Apple may creates that privacy bubble that even they can't puncture. It allows their users to kind of quote unquote be anywhere.

0:43:41 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, but I would ask you hypothetically do you think that Apple is going to be so concerned about everybody's privacy that they won't be able to know if you have access to the EU App Store features or not? I think they're going to make sure that they're not going to make. They're going to make damn sure that nobody, who nobody, that they don't have to extend those, those, those power excuse me those features to can get access to them.

0:44:03 - Alex Lindsay
So I don't think that's a big problem For the EU store, though I think the thing is, is that Apple would prefer all those EU users to just move over to the American store, and if they have a VPN and they're completely able to hide that, then they don't have to. You can be living in the EU and using the American store, and Apple wouldn't even know. You know, and Apple doesn't care if you're in their app store in the EU. All you're doing is draining the users out of the out of the EU and into the American store. So I think Apple would want you to not to not know where you are they, they, they, they.

0:44:31 - Andy Ihnatko
They're not going to want someone in Canada or America to be able to say hey, vpn, I'm in the EU right now, so please let me sideload this app or let me access this wonderful app store that focuses just on retro games that I really, really, really like. They're going to make sure that they can figure out where you are for the purpose of limiting your access, and this happened in iOS 17.

0:44:52 - Jason Snell
There's a robust way, more robust than like. You can use a VPN or you can turn off location. There is a robust region detection system that was rolled out this spring. That is exactly what you're describing, Andy, which is it's going to be increasingly difficult, especially for the average user, to even attempt to fool the system about where it is.

0:45:13 - Leo Laporte
There you go. All right, let's move on. Let's talk about Vision Pro. We should do our weekly Vision Pro segment. Mark Gurman weighing in on a story we talked about last week that Apple was backing off on its high-end Vision Pro 2. He says it's still on the calendar, but they're also working on a less expensive version. Well, not cheap.

0:45:42 - Alex Lindsay
I mean I don't know. I guess I don't know why he's going for backwards. It's always. I don't know.

0:45:48 - Leo Laporte
Well, last week, remember, we heard from the supply chain A low-end version. No, last week we heard from the supply chain that Apple had canceled the high-end version.

0:45:56 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah.

0:45:57 - Leo Laporte
You didn't. I mean we didn't necessarily believe it, we believe it Sure. Gurman writes. Pessimists see insurmountable problems. Mainstream consumers don't want to wear something on their face. For more than a short period of time that's been my contention. There's still no killer app for the product, despite Apple spending nearly a decade developing. Its. Sales Started off slow, and the $3,500 price is so high. Even a major cut would keep it out of reach for many consumers. He says this has led to some soul searching at the Vision products group. Months ago, top executives on the Vision team re-evaluated their roaDMAp for the device. They ultimately decided to make it a more mainstream product. I'm not sure how this will become more mainstream, because they're sticking with the plan to sell a high end and a low end uh of the device.

Um, early step he says is the international launch which apple has announced at wwdc. It is a different version, by the way. It's the international launch which Apple has announced at WWDC. It is a different version, by the way. It's the N301A version. I'm not sure how it is different. He says the cheaper device, codenamed N107, is now the focus of Apple's Vision products group. So maybe that's what it is. Is that they're working on a low-cost version without kind of killing the high-end version?

0:47:19 - Alex Lindsay
and the low-cost version, once you've done it for a couple years, may not be very different than the version we have now right, so the thing is what we're really talking about is the vision, the vision pro that we have now becomes.

It might have a couple little bells and whistles taken out of it, but not much, but things that are kind of where they can carve out where, oh, we can say $500. We don't do this whatever. That is Right. And so they could do a little bit of reduction and get that down to 1500 to $2,500, somewhere in that range. That's when they say low version, I don't think they're thinking under $1,500.

I think they're thinking 2,500, 3,000, somewhere in that range is the low end version, and then there could be an upper end version where we go well, we're going to go a little bit higher or maintain the same price that we have now. That is, getting a slightly higher frame rate, slightly higher resolution, and again, most of the content that we've seen so far isn't, you know, isn't at the full resolution that the headset's capable of the current one. So so, so, there it, you know, and so we're. That's still uh to be seen. You know what, what's possible there? So I, I think we're still going to end up with two over time. German says this higher it's go ahead.

0:48:24 - Jason Snell
Yeah sorry, go ahead.

German says it's about fifteen hundred dollars, as I said I don't think it would go below that a thousand to fifteen hundred and I think I think the goal over time is to to make a version that is cheaper and what I want to hear as somebody who actually thinks that there's potential in the Vision Pro but that it's going to take time. I find it funny, by the way, that Mark Gurman is like oh, it's sales and they don't have a killer app. It's like, well, we knew that going in the story hasn't changed. This is a weird intro product.

0:48:50 - Leo Laporte
You don't think there was some hope that there'd be a killer app or something that people would go wow, that's great.

0:48:55 - Jason Snell
No, they're still hoping to figure it out. I mean, we're whatever four months in. I think that there's still plenty of time. But what I like to hear, even as somebody who thinks that there's potential here, is that there's been some soul searching inside the Vision group.

Yeah, Because, at launch, at announcement, it was very clear that there were things that they were choosing to do. They didn't make a lick of sense, including spending all that money on that external lenticular display. And you're like guys like, bring it, bring it down, bring it down. And they're like, oh no, thirty five hundred dollars is going to be perfectly fine, which I remember thinking 2000 was too much, right when the first reports came out. Which I remember thinking 2000 was too much right when the first reports came out. So if they're rethinking things, or even possibly that people who were like super influential in the early days of it sort of Johnny Ive and his disciples who were like oh no, no, no, we've got to do it this way, and they've been kind of cleared out, and they're like how do we get this thing to be cheaper? Because you know they're not going to sell a load of them at 1500, but they're going to sell a whole lot more at half the price than they're doing at the current price. So I hope they really are considering that. And then I'll just throw in my other little mini rant I'll do I'll do it quick which is they also got too precious about hand tracking, like their.

Hand tracking is good. It's better than what Meta has, and they got so proud of it that I saw somebody today said to me Jason, it's like when they didn't put arrow keys on the original Mac keyboard. It's like we want to force you to use the mouse, so no arrow keys. It's like arrow keys are actually useful. You know what else is useful? Hand controllers because it unlocks ports of all sorts of games, which puts more stuff on your platform, and I understand why they are justifiably proud of their hand tracking. It is fantastic. It's still not good enough to do games, so for me that's the big question is I hope they're doing some soul searching about some of the basic fundamentals of this product to make it cheaper and more useful.

0:50:47 - Leo Laporte
I think they expect it to. Just as you said, this is version one was market research, if nothing else, and as a result, they will change things. Gurman says the Vision Pro as it is now is less of a priority, but Apple is still working on a second generation of the Vision Pro, the N109. It looks much like the current model, but includes a faster processor and improvements to external cameras. Apple has also looked at ways to make it lighter and more comfortable. So they are. He says very clearly, the company has no plans to abandon the high end of the headset market, but this second generation Vision Pro will take longer to arrive.

The company was yeah. Months ago the company shifted a planned 2025 release to the end of next year at the earliest. Meanwhile, they are working on AR only glasses, lightweight spectacles. This is what I want that users could easily wear all day Long. A holy grail for the tech industry. There's a lot of technical challenges to this, he's saying. A launch date around 2027 has been bandied about, but no one believes the glasses will be ready by then.

0:51:59 - Jason Snell
You know, what I think they should do is something that Andy brought up last time, which is they need to make something like AirPods, that's glasses, that's like the Meta Ray bands, something that's got a camera and some integration with your phone and machine learning to understand what you're seeing, and some speakers, so that you don't necessarily have to be wearing AirPods and then start from that direction and then, at some point in five years, converge those products. But it doesn't even need to be an AR product at all. It could literally just be speaker and camera, and that would be a very interesting product if it integrated with the new Siri stuff.

I guess what I was saying and like as a basic, simple, wearable, and then in five years those two things come together.

0:52:39 - Alex Lindsay
I guess I just I really missed the screen from the Google Glass. It is a. It is a, you know, like there was something that they took Google took away from us almost immediately, and then I stopped using Glass altogether, which was we were able to hang outs back and forth and I could see what you're looking at and I and you could see what I was looking at, and we were able to do training 10,000 miles apart, you know, through wifi, right, and it was amazing. And then Google turned it off because it was being used for nefarious things, and so, um, and as soon as that happened, we stopped using them. I mean, I literally never put the glass back on again Like it wasn't, I wasn't angry, I just stopped, stopped needing you're talking about the little thing over your left eyebrow.

That was good enough, yeah, but it was a little thing but I well, just it looked like a 70 inch screen that's sitting there, or 50 inch screen that was sitting there and I could say you could see my hands from the camera and I could say go grab this thing or whatever, okay, and the other person could show me what they were looking at. And it was. It was on your head what you were looking at, right, and it was, and it was just it was have you tried? Hololens.

0:53:33 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I have tried HoloLens.

0:53:35 - Alex Lindsay
It's fine. I mean, it's good for industrial stuff, it's not something that you wear around. It's really cool. I mean, the thing about HoloLens that I saw that was really impressive was someone had scanned a location and you were able to put the HoloLens and you walked through a location that was in a 30 by 30 empty room and that was probably the best presentation I'd seen. You know, and and and they also had AR, where you could see a building being finished. You can see where the rest of the building is going to go when you only see the, the, the base pieces. So there was, there was definitely some stuff there.

I felt like the HoloLens was just quirky. I mean the big thing with the Apple Vision Pro that I noticed and I know everyone says you don't wear it very long the biggest problem I have with the Apple vision pro is, once I put it on, I just I lose track of time. You know like I, I I've noticed that I spend hours in it. You know like I don't like it's not, and I don't do that with a. I mean I have a, I have a quest and I go on and I play something on the quest and then you know like I go there to do, you know, to play some game or to do something that I want to play with there, but I don't. It's not in the with the Vision Pro. I hang out in it, you know, and I'm texting people and talking to people and passing stuff back and forth and you know having a conversation, and I think that's a very different behavior.

I do think that Apple is missing the boat in the same way that I'm going to say this again and again and again the same way that they screwed up books. They're not putting enough into the content. We can see hints of things that would be amazing. You know, some of the I think the immersive video stuff is going to start coming up to speed with a Blackmagic camera, but the other things are like you look at JigSpace. Jigspace is something that I find to be completely inspiring. On the Apple vision pro, I can walk around an object, I can draw circles around things in 3d, I can pull things apart. I can eventually share with other people. With that, they're working on that part. The problem is that the development tool itself is too expensive. That's something that Apple could just fix. You know, like letting people very quickly put things, put these 3d models together, um, so that they could, you know, show people explode an object out or something. From an education and sales perspective, it's pretty exciting, but JigSpace is too expensive to develop for.

0:55:41 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, I hope they go in the other direction. I mean, I think, like we were talking about last week, there's a good market for $3,000 to $4,000 really really high-end VR headsets for training, for education, for virtualization. There's a market for $500 fun headsets for training, for education, for virtualization. There's a market for $500 fun headsets that do basically everything that people tend to like about the Vision Pro in terms of what they use it for day to day. There's very little room in the middle. I hope that Apple decides to put a lot of effort into taking it down and taking the information that they get from this first generation of users that they we decide that, okay, we over engineered this. If our goal was to create a mass market thing, something that relates to actual people, so what can be removed, starting with the spooky eyes feature, maybe we'd have a whole bunch of other hand tracking does not necessarily have to be as good. Or perhaps we can basically put put better support for for hand controllers. Maybe we'd have a whole bunch of other hand tracking does not necessarily have to be as good, or perhaps we can basically put better support for hand controllers. I mean, part of the fun of meta is I think Logitech actually did. They recently announce like an actual stylus sort of thing. So if you want to sculpt in 3D, like, here is basically a really really good precision 3D tracker. That sounds like an interesting thing. That sounds like something that would open your eyes to being able to do 3D sculpture that I would not have the ability to do without getting a whole bunch of clay in here.

I don't think they're going to get anywhere in terms of changing the world with a $3,500 headset. It's not until at least it gets into MacBook territory. I do think that $1,500 is a good figure because you walk into a store, you walk to an Apple store. Nearly everything is between $1,000 and $1,800, whether you want to buy an iPhone, a good iPad or whatever. So that's okay. I would love to see them get under $1,000, but that's not what Apple does best. They do great when you start to put like at least middle budget into it. But the thing is they are going to be competing with these $500, $800 headsets that do great stuff and a lot of the people who've been enthusiasts about VR and AR for a long, long time. Basically they say, well, I keep grabbing the MetaQuest because this is the thing that actually works for me and I can actually afford it and I can share experiences with other people, and the idea of something the glasses that you actually wear around that is the ideal.

Okay, and although obviously the display technology to give us anything even close to a MetaQuest experience in transparent glasses, the technology doesn't really exist yet. However, the existed the technology to do something like Google Glass, which I mean, I agree with you, Alex I love the idea of I don't necessarily need an immersive display, the idea of having this, I mean for those majority of you who have never used Google Glass, just imagine like a screen that's like right about here in your vision, so that it's not, it's not blocking your vision and, of course, this is translucent. But when it, when the, when the device has something to actually show you like, here is what the building you're trying to get to looks like. You could just simply glance up and you're looking at it without really being distracted by it. That kind of technology exists right today and the big, if you ask me, the google's biggest misstep during the google I o keynote was that they showed us the most awesome thing actually working, as they kept subcaptioning this. You're seeing someone actually putting on a pair of glasses that has a camera and a little display and asking questions like what does this code and my screen do? And getting answers back through the audio and seeing words coming in for translation.

And it broke my heart when they said oh no, this is just a demo piece of hard work we put together to show off an experiment we're doing with some of our AI. It's like no box, it ship it, put a sticker on it. That is something that's actually useful, that when people see it they say, wow, when are they shipping that? Okay. So that's why I'm hoping that Apple essentially takes the $3,500 one and says what can we knock off of it? Also, what do we learn from the manufacturing process Now that we started cranking these up by the hundreds of thousands?

That we can actually find a different way to design this so that it's cheaper to manufacture. Right now. It is a fun experiment for people who have $3,500 to be an early adopter or people who are actively interested in this category. We're not at a category where suddenly everybody has a touchscreen phone. Suddenly everybody has thrown out their BlackBerry and bought this new thing because it works so much better that iPhone transition did take two or three years, but they got someplace with the first release and they got a whole bunch of people after the first year, once it started being a first generation product apple needs to.

Apple needs to get there with the vision pro, and they haven't shown us that they're getting there yet I think they were very fortunate that they played as hard as they did.

1:00:27 - Alex Lindsay
Even if they end up going backwards a little bit on one of the one version of the device, I still think there's another version that's going to go a little bit higher, because I feel like this one was kind of, for me, a little weird compromise. Like, the frame rate's a little lower than what a lot of us would. A lot of us doing production would like to see the frame rate at 120 frames a second, like it's. There's a bunch of math there that we want to see. The 90 frames a second is not quite enough, but it's a lot of data, so we recognize that. But there's 100. There's some value going over the 90. There's a threshold somewhere in the mid 90s where content looks different to you, occurs differently to your brain, and so we want to see them get safely over that hump in the mid 90s and we're not quite there yet. So but as we get into that 120 frames per second, as we look at that high res, you know, let's say even 8K or even higher per eye, it is a different experience and again I'm glad that we have access to getting close to that. The problem is is that there's been so many compromises. I mean, I think that the problem, the challenge for Quest, is to get into the under $1,500 range. There are so many compromises to the platform that you can't really build great content for it, can't really build great content for it, Like it's just really hard to build the kind of content that a lot of us know is possible for that headset, because it costs money to make those, those headsets.

And so I think one of the things that we're seeing that's excitement and you know, like black magic is building this, this camera. They building a camera that three other or two or three other companies have asked them to build, like this. Isn't that Apple's not the first one to ask them to build it? And finally, we're going to get a camera that can actually generate this content. That's a huge deal, because everything before this Blackmagic camera that came out has been an art project.

Like every time you want to do stereo 180, it's like an art project. It's complicated, it's super expensive, it's $50,000 to $100,000. It's $50,000 to $100,000. And now we're going to have a camera that costs $25,000 or $30,000, which means it rents for a couple grand a day to shoot, and that changes the math on how that content gets done. No-transcript. But it's hard to get people to think about what's possible and be able to test that. So the over-engineering, I think, made a ton of sense for this first one. I'm hoping actually that they still keep one that keeps on going that direction. But I definitely think that a less expensive one is going to make sense to widen the market out.

1:02:54 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, I appreciate the potential for these 3d immersive experiences. Um, I think that at this stage it's at least as important, probably more important. Just the things that make this useful, like again having a virtual display, uh, the ability to like for free, to like be working in the library and not have to take like a laptop and my iPad, cause I want to have two different displays in front of me and the stand, and everything like that. It would be if I could find something about the cost of, let's say, two or three times the cost of a decent display. That would be just hey, I can just plug it into. I can just plug it into. It doesn't have to do all the comp, all the compute on itself. It can just use a phone for the computing, use an iPad or the or my laptop as a compute.

That would be a wonderful product and I could take it home and play games with it. That would also be really, really cool, like these it's I want to make. I wish that Apple. Excuse me, I just don't think that trying to focus on the 3D immersive experiences that may be coming in five or six years isn't the way to move the platform forward, I think, I guess. To sum it up, I think that the Vision Pro shows of idealized philosophy, of let's build something that will change the world.

1:04:05 - Alex Lindsay
I don't think. I don't think at all. I don't think that's at all. I don't think. I think I'm going to finish the sentence, if it's okay, yeah.

1:04:11 - Andy Ihnatko
I'm going to finish my sentence if that's okay. Yeah, sure, thank you. Sometimes it wants to do everything. It wants to show you an entire paradigm for computing. Sometimes you just want to give someone a really good cheeseburger. Start them off with a really good cheeseburger. You know what they want, you know it's good, you know it's potential. Instead of starting people five years in the future, start them off a year or two in the future and make sure they don't have to stay for five years in order to buy it. So that's why I'm rooting for the thousand dollar headset and I'm rooting for the Meta headwear to get better and better, because I think that stuff and these wearable glasses that Meta is doing with Ray-Ban, I think that's the right track. I think that the Vision Pro is a good idea that might pay off in the long future, but right now it's not relevant to pretty much anybody.

1:04:57 - Alex Lindsay
I think the challenge and I'll end with this, but the challenge is that you need to create content and you need to inspire content creators to create content. And one of the problems with the meta headset is you put it on and you have this sinking feeling of everything. Looks like 320 by 240 video. Looks like 320 by 240 video, you know. And so the thing is, is that the big thing, that the that the Apple headset does is suddenly, as a content creator?

You put it on and you can see a vision of where I could go with this, even if Apple's own immersive content isn't that great, to be honest, um, it is. You can see, oh, I could do this and this and this and this with it, in a way that you can't with the quest. You can't see that vision with the quest because the resolution, just the resolution, performance just isn't high enough, and so you just go into this like, oh, okay, like, and you're not willing to spend the kind of money and time on that it would take to make to turn it over the, you know, over that corner. So so, anyway, it'll be interesting to see how this all runs. You know, I'm going to be doing a lot of experiments over the summer on it, so hopefully we'll have more to talk about in the fall the good news is, german says.

1:06:01 - Leo Laporte
Given that the Vision Products group has thousands of employees and continues to hire, my sense is that Apple is willing to keep spending for another several years or so.

1:06:11 - Alex Lindsay
Apple has a job posting out there for someone to help them design and manage broadcast trucks. Really, just understand how big this is going to get. What this is like. We're at the very early days. There's something on LinkedIn Broadcast trucks or jobs.

1:06:26 - Leo Laporte
What do you think that means? They're getting into sports. I guess yeah.

1:06:30 - Alex Lindsay
No, no, no, no, no, no, you would need trucks that were dedicated to these kinds of productions. Oh, no, no, no, no, no, you would need trucks that were dedicated to these kinds of productions?

1:06:36 - Leo Laporte
Oh, to make immersive spatial broadcasts? Yeah, although you know I was reading a really interesting article about the streaming wars and it really is the case that live sports is about the only sure thing in streaming period.

1:06:52 - Alex Lindsay
Well, it's because. It's because the, the, the content creators, or the con, the streaming companies are so limited in their view of content that, of course, that's the only thing that's going to work.

1:07:02 - Leo Laporte
Netflix dominates so much that, well, I think Barry Diller said Netflix hasn't won the war, but they're completely dominating the battlefield.

1:07:10 - Alex Lindsay
Well, I mean, but again they they're dominating because you know they they got in first and they really built it up well and they did a great job at doing that. But you look at, like all the content that's available live. I mean, I do a lot of things where we have actors and directors and so on and so forth, having discussions about the films and discussions about the content, and there's all these ancillary and I've done that for the last decade and you're just like I cannot believe they're not streaming those because those are so cheap, like they're so cheap to run, you know, and to make available to their viewers, to build up that relationship with their viewers, and because all you're trying to do you're not trying to sell the next hundred million dollar film to X number of people, you're just trying to get people to not unsubscribe, right. And so when you're talking about that having cheap content, that's like you know that's built on it and Disney probably does it better than anyone else right now. It's their unconstructed or unstructured or whatever. That where they give you a little behind the scenes. It's a little canned and a little overproduced, but it gives you a sense. It's extra content that costs them one tenth per minute that the actual content cost and it's added value to the platform, you know, and, but they could be doing lots of live streams like that and it be they are relatively inexpensive to do.

Even even Netflix live stuff is really you know, I mean there, there it's been good. I mean, like the the Dom, the Tom Brady uh roast was very successful from a social perspective because they got a lot of one comedian got a lot of of of uh uh work on it, you know, so, um, but but I think that in general, spending tons of money on big activations and live is still kind of, I mean, for sports it works pretty well, but there's so many sports I mean you look at there's a lot of things that people would watch in small numbers that would keep them subscribing, and they're just not. They're not. No one's really doing that because they don't understand how to get that into their model.

1:08:49 - Leo Laporte
This is an article in the New York Times the future of streaming according to the moguls figuring it out, and they interviewed a whole bunch, a dozen media executives. The consensus was you have to have 200 million subscribers to survive. Netflix does it, amazon does it and Disney does it. The rest are under that number. This is Hopkins of Amazon saying if you're going to be a full entertainment service with live sports and tentpole blockbusters, today 200 million is the kind of number that can give you the scale with a hope for growth over time. Netflix has that. They have 270 million paying subscribers and they're expensive. They are one of the most expensive and that's why they're experimenting with live, like that Tom Brady roast, expensive, and that's why they're experimenting with life like that tom brady roast. But I think apple makes sense. Apple would be looking at trucks because if you want you to build your service and that's why they they do friday night baseball. That's why they bought major league soccer for 10 years and I know they're bidding for other properties. They couldn't quite afford sunday night's nfl ticket but uh, youtube got that one. Anyway, let's take a little break. Come back with more because german has some predictions that we haven't got to. Uh, you're watching mac break weekly with Alex lindsey, Andy inako, Jason snell.

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Mark Gurman also says the bench. That's my favorite part of his Power On newsletter the bench, the bench, newsletter, the bench, uh, the bench on the bench. Uh, apple is looking at m4 based mac pro and mac studios still on track for latter half of I can't even say it next year, more than a year off. There's speculation about when to expect the M4 Mac line. After checking around, I don't see a change in schedules. Mark says the M4, imacs, the MacBook Pros, low and high-end versions of the Mac Minis, low and high models due between the end of this year and early next year, new MacBook Airs a year from now and the MacBook, or rather the Mac Pro and the Mac Studio models, will be updated second half of 2025. Do you think Apple might accelerate that schedule, because that seems like a long way off? Is it because they're skipping the M3?

1:13:31 - Jason Snell
I mean, I think it's availability of the new process, uh, new 3d animator process. Right that they and they are prioritizing not just the ipads that are out there now, but remember they're going to presumably be shipping a lot of iphones, right, using the new 3d animator process as well they gotta make this fall yeah and honestly I mean, at that point can you blame them?

you gotta prioritize the iphone. The mac is in a pretty okay place right now. I don't know if everybody's like oh my god, I can't believe it, I I haven't had a macbook air in nine months or whatever, like I think or what. Right now it's like three months, like we can all calm it down. But I do think that they would probably have a more um aggressive schedule if it weren't for the availability on the new chip process.

That means the m4s will be hard to come by for a while, yeah m4s and whatever the the iphone chip is, but it'll be that same product and if you put them in, you're going to put them in their best-selling products the macbook air, the mac mini, yeah, so the macbook pro this fall kind of makes sense, because if they've got a higher end model and those have been out there a little longer, I can see why they want to do that. I'm surprised the MacBook Air is sort of a laggard when it comes to the chip generations. I don't know. I think they must think that even though it's their best-selling computer, that the people who buy it tend to not care as much about whether it's a 12-month-old chip or not, whereas a MacBook Pro user is going to probably be more sensitive to. Am I getting the latest and greatest and fastest chip in my new macbook pro?

1:14:57 - Leo Laporte
so maybe that's the calculus there well, I you know maybe it's just me but I really like the studio. I don't know why. It's like a mini with more room and more air.

1:15:07 - Jason Snell
Me too, me too, I have an m1 and I'll, I might buy an m4 studio what next year, I guess. But that studio I sometimes leo. I think how lucky we are that that product exists, because it would have been really easy for apple to be like. Yeah, you know mini is good enough.

1:15:22 - Leo Laporte
We don't really need it, and they said no, mini's not good enough.

1:15:24 - Jason Snell
We need we need a desktop enclosure that's just big enough that we can put our higher test chips in and our better cooling in that, and then even there you can get the max or the ultra so you can really push it to like mac pro level or you can be at this really nice mid-range, which is what I chose. I mean, the max is an incredible line. You don't necessarily need the ultra, unless you're I have an m1 max.

1:15:46 - Leo Laporte
You know who you are. Right, that's, uh. I like it. Actually, I brought it in so john could use it. Now I'm repatriating it for the.

1:15:54 - Jason Snell
I love it.

1:15:54 - Leo Laporte
I mean, that's my studio it's a nice machine, yeah, not as fast, this is an m3 max on my, my macbook pro, and it is definitely faster, at least in you know kind of low level comparisons, but not in.

1:16:10 - Alex Lindsay
In perception, I mean, it seems just the same I mean I have to admit I'm ready to buy the Pro because I'm out of IO Like that's my problem is the IO Like, so the Mac Pro and the Mac Studio, but the Studio has, I mean, I've got four screens.

1:16:21 - Leo Laporte
The Studio is beautiful. It's a beautiful thing.

1:16:29 - Alex Lindsay
I do all kinds of work on it. I mean, I'm really, really I'm that the Mac. You know, I'm looking forward to the Mac pro, just because, again, I don't want to buy the one. The problem that you get into now is that I don't want to buy a Mac pro now because I I feel like there's something coming out and I'll I'll hang on to this one as long as I possibly can, but the next one will probably be I and again, I know that I need all that IO and I'll fill it, because mine is all filled. I have to choose to pull things in and out of my current Mac studio, and so that's the. That's the challenge.

1:16:59 - Leo Laporte
So that's so. You know, as some of I've I've mentioned, as some know, we're probably closing the studio in a couple of months, so I have to build a home studio. So you recommended the Sony, the Sony cinema FX 30 camera. Yep, I'm going to put that in right now. Yep, that's a good. Yeah, that's why I like it. I look how good you look and then, uh, I think, uh, the whole the kind of there'll be multiple computers involved, but the one that's going to be doing the, the bulk of the work, will be that Mac studio.

1:17:30 - Alex Lindsay
And what's great is that one of the hard parts for me to leave my house is that my desk has five Mac mini's and one Mac studio. The Mac studio is kind of the heart and then the Mac mini's are all these. They do all these little services that I want to keep separate from each other. You know so I, and a lot of it has to do because I have a switch. What happens is you start building around a switcher and you're doing, you know come.

1:17:53 - Leo Laporte
I think it's more than what we really need, honestly. But uh, but I don't need a telestrator, not that it wouldn't be fun, it's so nice uh, I don't need that. I mean, I have a. We're gonna have a mini that's in my studio right now and m1 regular, m1 mini.

1:18:14 - Alex Lindsay
We'll have that m1 studio my thing is is that I I like I have one that is uh, that just does some graphics that I don't use for the show, but I have graphics and I have one that does.

I have one that just does my keynote. So if I want to do a presentation, it that's all it does is do that. And then I have the telestrator that's on top of that, and then I have john john is sending you must have a telestrator, oh, and on top of that, and then I have john john is sending another one must have a telestrator. So, and then, and then I and and john, I'll send it to you guys. I mean, I'm getting an 810.

1:18:42 - Leo Laporte
So I'm getting the 810 mini extreme, the eight, eight input. Yeah, 810 mini and that. So I will have on that three cameras. I'll have the single, a wide shot I want to set up so I could have a second person. If you wanted to come over, Alex, I could have you on. Yeah, so I want to have enough. So I have a, two singles and a wide, and then I haven't this over the shoulder, uh point tilt zoom that we've been using for the over the shoulder from. Uh, that's from new tech, that's from viz rt. Um, so I think, camera wise, I'm okay, there's, I do want to. Okay, call me crazy. We, we bought one of those sliders. Remember those things that you put the camera on and it slowly moves. Yep, I think the wide I might put on that. So it goes back and forth.

1:19:24 - Alex Lindsay
I don't know, just to give it some life. It sometimes works. I got into sliders for a while. Yeah, I remember. That's why we got one, and then after that you're kind of like, oh, okay, you're done. Like it's it's not bad to cut to every once in a while.

1:19:37 - Leo Laporte
I, you know, both you and Jason are the kind of canonical I'm at home, single shot good, great backgrounds, beautiful. But I, I I feel like going from this fantastic studio to that is too too a step, too far. I feel like I want to have some sort of maybe, I don't know open with us. Actually, russell said or no, it was anthony said you know, you still have that insta 360, you could make that be like maybe I will dedicate an m1 mac to have that be like the, the big, wide I mean part of my problem is it.

1:20:12 - Alex Lindsay
Part of my problem is that I'm actually I know this will sound crazy is that I'm cheap and that is that cheap too.

1:20:17 - Leo Laporte
That's why we're moving to this camera. I'm moving to the attic, why you pull the other one, Alex, pull the other one I get it.

1:20:23 - Alex Lindsay
He ain't cheap this camera. I only have to dress this part of the set and most of what's back there is junk yeah it's just. It's just that it's out of focus and so I don't have to think about it that hard.

1:20:31 - Leo Laporte
I'd lay things down I wanted to be in focus whatever both of you have my whole thing is is that, if I have multiple cameras.

1:20:37 - Alex Lindsay
I have to start dressing the whole, the whole, like I got a like a work table over here and I have like another.

1:20:43 - Leo Laporte
That's why it's in the attic it's an unused just greenfield space.

1:20:48 - Andy Ihnatko
Just one suggestion is there a public library like, yeah, maybe I just go to the library?

1:20:52 - Leo Laporte
the good conference room they're remodeling're remodeling the Petaluma Public Library. Maybe I should just go over there. That's a nice one. That's a nice one. It is a nice one. Yeah, actually, the twit sign, the metal raised metal sign. It was inspired by the library sign. I really liked how they did that and I said it was copper and it's raised. Anyway, enough about me. Let about iphone game streaming. Ant stream. No relation to ant pruitt. The first iphone game stream. Remember? Apple allowed uh emulators on the store and it didn't take long before a whole bunch of them. Uh, january, or sorry, in two days, june 27th, ant streamade will launch with 1,300 classic games for iPhone and iPad.

1:21:39 - Andy Ihnatko
That's pretty exciting, see this is why you want to store. Yeah, it's not just emulation, it's also streaming. Another thing that they like forbade.

1:21:48 - Leo Laporte
Oh, so this is not an emulator, this is streaming.

1:21:52 - Andy Ihnatko
I believe it's a streaming platform. Yes, you're right. Check me if.

1:21:53 - Leo Laporte
I'm wrong. I believe it's a streaming platform.

1:21:54 - Andy Ihnatko
Yes, you're right. Check me if I'm wrong, but one of the selling points is that it does have a whole bunch of like, really like classic, classic, classic Asteroids, pong Space.

1:22:02 - Leo Laporte
Invaders, hogs of War. Yeah, this looks like it'll be a lot of fun. So one thing, though, that Apple did not allow with emulators is Windows emulators is Windows emulators? Apple has now refused at least two Windows emulators from the App Store, saying iDOS 3 was one of them, which is a DOS emulator so not even a Windows emulator and UTM-SE, which lets you operate Windows on iOS. The new release is, according to Apple, guideline four, stroke seven of the app review guidelines, which only allows well, that is the one that allows retro game emulators. Well, what does four seven say?

1:22:52 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, that's what the developer, Vidos said in his blog post a couple of weeks ago, that there was an exception not for all emulators but just for game emulation. But that in itself. I hope they revisit that because one of the reasons for like DOS emulators and like early Windows emulators to work is because they use them to run like old 80s and 90s DOS and early Windows games.

1:23:15 - Leo Laporte
See, this is the argument for Apple keeping the app store to themselves, so we don't get that evil 80s and 90s DOS games on our app store.

1:23:25 - Andy Ihnatko
No one wants that. You're in a maze of twisty passages, you know. I think that if I had to suffer through the pain of trying to get the Babelfish, I think that all kids should have to try to find the babblefish as a condition of graduating high school.

1:23:39 - Leo Laporte
You're talking about the Incredibles. Infocom Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy game.

1:23:44 - Andy Ihnatko
How am I supposed to know that I'm supposed to pick up the junk mail that early in the game, exactly.

1:23:49 - Leo Laporte
It took me a couple of days just to take an aspirin. That was a tough game. That was a hard game that was.

1:23:56 - Andy Ihnatko
That was a brilliant game because douglas adams wrote it himself. He wrote like a almost an entire novels, hitchhiker's guide novels worth of stuff. You could basically see how devious like his mind was the good news is there.

1:24:08 - Leo Laporte
You can play it on the web. I think uh, yes, because the, the uh infocom emulator is uh is pretty lightweight, somewhat lightweight, but limited I read somewhere, limited to 100. I was just reading an article about the they call it IF, now interactive fiction about the rise of IF and the Infocom emulator is limited to 128K worth of space. This is a rule for seven Mini apps, mini games, streaming games, chatbots, plugins and game emulators, but not OS emulators.

1:24:50 - Andy Ihnatko
I mean this is pretty exciting what a lot of people are doing with AI, not even just developing their own stuff, but just operating through like ChatGPT, teaching it to continue to make up characters, to make up environments that you just simply walk through, and the idea of having a brand new adventure every time you go through. No consistency and no predictability. That's an interesting area of development for gaming as an art form. I don't know if it'll be as good as a patch on what people actually think up. I think that men and women can be very, very much more devious than any algorithm can ever cope with Did you ever play any MUDs multi-user dungeons Did you ever do those?

1:25:33 - Leo Laporte
No, no.

1:25:35 - Andy Ihnatko
I skipped out of that.

1:25:35 - Leo Laporte
Me too. I missed that, but that was basically what these were like. Zork Online with many other players in there. I played Colossal Cave for hundreds and hundreds of hours on CompuServe, racking up a rather massive bill. Yeah, it was fun. That's the. You are in a dark cave.

1:25:58 - Andy Ihnatko
Maze of Twisty Passages. I'm sorry that was the original adventure, yeah.

1:26:02 - Leo Laporte
In my history. Yeah, Colossal Cave, Crowther and Woods. I just read a good article about that and I'm blanking on where I saw it. I'll see if I can find it, because if you're interested in this, it is still quite alive. It is not. It is an ongoing movement.

1:26:24 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, this is where I don't. I don't fault Apple for this. They don't have to be completely open about everything they do. I am curious as to where the line is. Obviously you don't want to have internet access on anything.

Windows, that's that old, but DOS it's more like it's an interesting. It's like going to Surbridge Village and watching people churn butter. The idea of being able to use WordStar with just slash commands, that's an interesting thing. It seems like harmless fun. And I'm just curious as to why, if there really is that much danger in it, maybe it's not necessarily the emulators, but that a lot of this stuff is built on JavaScript or built on frameworks that in themselves aren't aren't very, very secure. I really have no idea. It just seems like innocent fun and I don't know why Apple's not.

Again, I don't blame blame them. I don't think this is any big like scandal that should be held to account for. But it seems like an odd thing to say oh well, it's okay to run a game emulator, that is, it's okay to run a game emulator. It's not okay to run like an IBM PC XT emulator, because you're emulating a PlayStation excuse me, a 1993 console. You're emulating something. Playstation excuse me, a 1993 console. You're emulating something that's three times, four times more powerful than anything the XD ever was.

1:27:41 - Leo Laporte
Here's the article. It's by Anna Washenko in Ars Technica From Infocom to 80 Days an Oral History of Text Games in Interactive Fiction. It's kind of a survey of it, but if you're at all interested, it's a great starting point and you can find most of these online and on the web. I don't think anybody's made Zork available on the iPhone. You don't need it. You can do it in the browser. It's just text. Look at this. This is the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. That's the package it came with, including in that little plastic bag a microscopic space fleet.

1:28:17 - Andy Ihnatko
Including in that little plastic bag a microscopic space fleet. You also got some pocket fluff a pair of Jujanta apparel sensitive sunglasses.

1:28:22 - Leo Laporte
Black, of course. What a fun game that was. It was hard. Was that one of the hardest InfoComms? I don't know. I think it was. I think so yeah.

1:28:31 - Andy Ihnatko
I think so because the thinking was just so lateral. Yeah, like I mean even the first puzzle where it's just like, again, you're drunk, you're like you know you're just waking up and all you see is dark. It's the sort of thing where, once you finally solve that first puzzle, you're like oh, I am in.

1:28:54 - Leo Laporte
And I already gave it away. But just you know, look for some aspirin. You're hungover, it's a reasonable reasonable thing.

1:29:04 - Andy Ihnatko
You have no tea oh no, no Tea, and no tea, and no tea.

1:29:11 - Leo Laporte
There is a documentary about this? I did not know there is a documentary about this. I did not know. The Discord XR in the Discord says watch Jason Scott's Get Lamp documentary, which is Get Lamp was one of the commands of course in the Zork. Before there was the first person shooter, there was the second person thinker, get Lamp. Oh, they sold it out. Oh, you can just download it. Oh, okay, nice, I guess I know what I'm doing tonight. I played all I loved those text adventures. They were great. Yeah, apple and meta. I did talk uh about, uh, adding metas, llama, ai to uh the, to the growing menagerie of AIs that you can use with Apple Intelligence, openai. We just think Gemini is coming. Apparently, apple spurned the idea of a partnership with Meta, saying you guys are such scumbags. Mark Gurman says the two companies aren't in discussions. They only held brief text talks in March. It didn't reach the formal stage because Apple decided.

1:30:24 - Alex Lindsay
Someone at Meta was like, hey, let's go talk to Apple, and Apple said no.

1:30:28 - Leo Laporte
And that was the entire conversation. No, Apple decided. Mark writes Apple decided not to move forward with formal meta discussions, in part because it doesn't see the company's privacy practices as, yeah, stringent enough.

1:30:42 - Andy Ihnatko
According this is when, like you're, you're, you work at meta and you know that. The correct answer to the question your boss asks have you talked to apple about working with apple intelligence? The correct answer is yes. Even if it was, was we talked to him. They hung up on me but we talked.

1:31:00 - Leo Laporte
That's pretty, pretty funny, and here's a story that well, it's intriguing. According to the information, which has very good sources, wayne Ma writing, apple would like to cut the head count on iphone assembly lines by half. How with ai and robots? Um, I think wayne ma is very well positioned.

1:31:26 - Alex Lindsay
I've been working on this for sure. Foxconn's been talking about this for a decade. Like is that we can, you know, reduce the headcount with robotics. The hard part is some. Some of the stuff just does require some human decisions and human dexterity, but I think we all knew eventually that a certain percentage of that was not going to be. It's a lot of doing this.

1:31:44 - Leo Laporte
We know that they have gotten the headcount down in 2022. Apple's annual report said there were 1.6 million people in China building iPhones in 2023. One year later, only 1.4 million in China building iPhones in 2023. One year later, only 1.4 million. So they are. They have been shrinking, but they want to shrink it by a lot more. There's another advantage to doing that, of course, is you can move it out of China. Perhaps it's also interesting because I you know, we were talking about this on Sunday. The whole explosion of drones came because Apple went to China, built the iPhone. There, a lot of technologies and manufacturing technologies were developed to build the iPhone, and then these companies said, well, what else could we build with accelerometers and and this intelligence? And they end up building drones very shortly after the iPhone, and one of the reasons all the drones come from China is because that's where iPhones come from. So if you start really innovating in robotics, I would expect something similar.

1:32:44 - Alex Lindsay
It's a big. I mean the we're going to see, I mean the AI is going to make a big difference when it comes to robotics, just because there's a lot of things that you have to error correct for that robotics up until now haven't been able to do. And I think that you know we're already seeing some of the stuff that you saw with the NVIDIA keynote. You see the hints of what that's going to look like, where the object is, because most of the Boston Dynamics demos that we see are not. You know they were pre-programmed to do everything that they did, down to the last move, like there's nothing. It's figuring out.

1:33:18 - Leo Laporte
You want some it's autonomous, but you want some higher level thinking.

1:33:23 - Alex Lindsay
You want to make some decisions. Yeah, you know, and well, maybe you don't want it to make decisions, but I'm just saying that it is. The next step for these is for them to start being able to respond to their environment in a more natural and more robust way, and again, there's a whole bunch of problems with that as well. We look at drones and you know, drones were really fun until the Ukraine war and now they're, you know, a big deal.

1:33:47 - Leo Laporte
Not just for fun anymore yeah.

1:33:50 - Alex Lindsay
Well, the problem is is that Ukrainian engineers have figured out how to deliver two pounds of something 10 miles away for a thousand dollars. That affects all of us. So, while it was fun to take pictures and fly around, now we have a situation where we have, you know, weaponized objects and you know, and then we have to deal with that. And so I think that when we look at any of these technologies, there's a lot of things that are fun, there's a lot of things that are good and there's a lot of things that are probably negatively affect our life, all of our lives, not just where we see them in the hotspots.

1:34:20 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, especially with uh, with manufacturing robotics, the one of the. I mean, we have robots in factories for a long, long time. You know you're not talking about humanoid robots. We're talking about, you know, mechanism that's designed specifically to put this part there and solder it or weld it into place. But the thing is like programming those robots takes such a long time that you can't really do it unless you have a very, very, very long range strategy and you've crunched a lot of numbers to do it.

In five or ten years there is going to be ai powered robots that are flexible enough that the reason why they're making a humanoid is that the current workforce is humanoid in shape and the tool of process that have been developed for most manufacturing is based on hands and hands and arms and feet and people can walk.

So the ability to train, to have a generic machine that does not have to be custom built for this one process that you're doing, a piece of hardware that can be leased out to a textile manufacturer one month and then leached to a repair shop a year later, that's a very, very big, flexible thing.

And the ability to program those in a period of weeks or months, as opposed to many months or a couple of years. That suddenly means that you can have companies that are doing nothing but leasing workforces of robots and, just like those trucks that are now doing broadcasts, that just simply are rented and parked below, uh, the the stadium where all of them are going to broadcast from, you will now have trucks simply that are just domiciles for robots that shuffle in, shuffle out. For as long as the project is done with, the contract is up, you don't have to own them, you just simply send them back to where they came from. And that is going to. If they ever get to the point where even the cost of an hourly gig worker that you can abuse and break labor laws with and they can't do anything about it, once you get robots that can work as cheaply as that, that's going to be a very, very big, dramatic impact upon society.

1:36:11 - Alex Lindsay
Well, and I think that you see it, you see it like in the self-checkout line is, the problem with the self-checkout line is a I mean, you know, first of all no one wanted to use them and then people started to use them because, oh, I don't have to talk to anybody and it's faster and I can do it, you know, and people start leaning towards it and then people figured out, oh, I can just walk through and no one, and so. But you know, like, for instance, as someone who buys mostly raw vegetables and stuff like that I don't buy a lot of things in boxes I can't go to the checkout line. You know I can't go to the self checkout line because that will take forever. You know, like, I have to have a human making decisions about what it's looking at. It's got to look at oh, those are limes, and are those the organic limes or the regular limes or the whatever, whatever. That is Right, and that's when it comes to manufacturing. The issue is is that you need to get to a point where the, where the, the, the machine, is looking for an outcome and understanding what it's looking at, not just doing what it was told to do, you know, and so it has to look at it and go, well, you put that little piece in, is it in the right place? You know, and it can do a little bit of machine learning, can do a little bit of that. But AI can start to go. Well, I can figure out what's wrong if it's not right, and that's what a human can do on a, on a, on a assembly line. It's not what a machine does very well.

You know, when I worked, I worked in an electronics company when I was in, in, got right out of high school, and you know we had a bunch of, we had 35 people that were building boards until the minimum wage went up, minimum wage went up by 50 cents. And then we had a big machine that did all of their work, you know, and it was a surface. It went from them wiring, you know soldering, to surface mount. You know and and it was and, and the and. That machine could do surface mount really well, but it couldn't figure anything out Like you had to be very, very clear about. You know, the board is the board and that's the difference is the people that were there could work around issues that were there. But also the board was actually, the machine was actually way more reliable and this was more expensive until it amortized properly.

1:38:06 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, well, just another example of how nvidia has demonstrated that if there's anything involved in ai, we want to make money off of it and put a chip in it. And their keynote last month, the month before they're talking about developing brand new like ai models that are for robotics where just understand part of the language of the model is arms, hands, vision, sight for feedback.

1:38:27 - Alex Lindsay
You just came with the perfect tagline for them. You know, uh, you know, nvidia put a chip in it. So, anyway, what are you gonna say, Jason?

1:38:34 - Jason Snell
oh uh, and he talked about the self-checkout robots and I just wanted to say, um, you know, and and societal things, right, because there's efficiency.

Like I don't want to say robots are bad, right, but but I I do want to say we all need to be aware of robots or any other technology, and those impacts that they have on our society. And I want to point out about something like the self-checking line, like it's not just that people wanted to do it for convenience sake, right. It also is that the moment that they exist, they don't open as many humans checking you out and that line gets long and then you sort of are forced into the self-checkout, not necessarily because you want to go there, but because it has had this knock-on impact on the staffing of the store. And it's important to keep the holistic in mind of any time when you replace workers is like, or you do something that streamlines what workers do doesn't necessarily mean it's fundamentally bad, but it does potentially have like huge ramifications for how society changes and who the workers are and what they get paid and all of it.

1:39:38 - Leo Laporte
It's a challenge, you know. This goes back to the Ned Ludd and the Weavers who were put out of business by Jacquard Looms. It's maybe an apocryphal story, but it's one that lives today, which is, you know, the Weavers revolted because they were losing their jobs to these automated looms many, many centuries ago.

1:40:00 - Alex Lindsay
Um, and I think that it also depends on what your experience is there, like when I, when I go to a store, um and I, and whether it's Safeway or Whole Foods or whatever I'm buying from, and the and the checkout person is amazing and is in a good mood and everything else, I'm like, oh, I just want to do that all the time, cause it's it's a fun experience. I like people, I want to be with people, but when they're not in that space, it only takes a couple times, like my wife used to go to this I don't know some restaurant in in Port Madera. She loved it. She had one really bad experience and it challenge that you can do with, with that process and and so, and I look at like sitting in, like my I was waiting on a phone call for about two hours yesterday.

I was like you know, this is all going to go away. I realized in 10 years we're not going to have, we're not going to wait on hold, like you're going to open it up and you're going to talk into an ai unit that will talk to you until until it figures out that it can't answer your question. But it's all going to be. Operator, operator, operator. I sit there and just go representative representative representative, representative.

I just keep on just saying it until it breaks the system and it opens it up. But but we're going to get to a point, I think, very quickly, where you're gonna. I mean, in the next five years, maybe 10 years, you're going to get to a point where you pick up the phone, it's going to sound like a person and you're going to be talking to them, and then it it's going to say well, let me send you to my supervisor, who happens to be a person.

1:41:18 - Jason Snell
Who might be a human might? Not be a human.

1:41:21 - Alex Lindsay
But you're going to get the information that you need very quickly. A lot of times you're calling and you're waiting on hold for something that you just can't find on the website. You know they're not making hard, difficult and it can very quickly decide. Oh, this is a hard, difficult decision and they've had problems with this. You know the AI told somebody that they could have something for free. I don't remember what it was, but it was some story where the AI said oh yeah, you can do that.

1:41:50 - Andy Ihnatko
It costs a lot of money. It was very expensive, if it makes you think. But humans do the same thing, and so they were able to say hi, I want you to say yes to everything. I say yes, I can do that, okay. Do you have this car in the lot? Yes, will you take 20 for it? Yes, can I pick it up tomorrow? Yes. Is this a legally binding offer? Yes, yeah, I know what you're.

1:42:11 - Jason Snell
You know what you're getting into I mean it is a part that we don't talk about as much about technology, but it is taking it back to the Luddites and all of that that society, like technology, is not fundamentally bad or good, but it does have impacts on society that can be bad or good, and how we react to them and how we deal with the people involved is important.

And so you know, I think about like one of the political footballs in this country in the last 10 years has been the fate of the coal industry and the coal miners, and it's like I feel for the coal miners and for the towns that have built around I have it where my, where my grandfather grew up, is right next to a coal plant Like I get it, but at the same time it's going away like, like it's already not financially even feasible that, leaving all the debates about the environment aside, like all of the other methods of generating electricity have essentially surpassed it, coal is all going to vanish.

It's inevitable. So you can fight it if you want. But what really is important is what do we do with the coal miners and what do we do with the economies that are built around the coal miners? And that could be true for factory workers, for people at Amazon warehouses that might be replaced by robots that do all the picking for them. Like that's the part that I feel like we're really good at making technology and really bad at dealing with the fallout.

1:43:31 - Andy Ihnatko
This is why I believe that I don't think that there's a solution to the problem of industries are going to be affected by technology or just changes in markets. Ok, I mean, it stinks that Amazon has caused so many independent retailers to go south, but they were offering something that consumers really, really wanted, and that is a store 20 miles away from my house really couldn't offer. But this is so. You can't. I don't think you can really regulate that or do anything about that.

But this is why I feel as though it's if you're a positive society, you have an obligation to make sure there's always a very, very strong and secure safety net underneath all your citizens at all times, so that when they are disrupted by these things, they are not going to be three months away from losing their homes. They shouldn't have a heart attack and then not be able to not be able to get medical care. This is what these are. I think this is part of the social contract that we should absolutely insist on. So, when you decide that, no, we're going to let big businesses and corporations absolutely kick the butts of people who don't have a whole lot of money or power or influence, and we're also going to make sure that, hey, if you've starved to death, that's your fault, that's because you weren't go-to-itive enough, you didn't learn how to code fast enough, and even though you can just go to a kiosk and learn about that stuff, we need a social safety net.

1:44:49 - Alex Lindsay
That's as much as we need a police department and a fire department and someone who picks up the trash well, and I think that, and from a business perspective, I think there's an opportunity for businesses to be more aggressive about how they do retraining, how they make things available to people, how they you know, I think that, um, it's hard to retrain a coal miner, to be honest. No, no, no, absolutely. But but I think that there is, and in those cases, a safety net is is the thing that you're probably looking at there. But I I think that there is a lot of times when we're going to, there are many opportunities for things Like there's a lot of things that can be done if the cost of doing those things was lower Not that it would displace people that are doing something. Like when I walk into a store and they've handwritten, you know, something on the window in the front, bad handwriting. I'm like there's something on the window in the front, bad handwriting.

I'm like there's somebody who doesn't know how to use pages or Word or something like that, because it's just you know, and the thing is is that I always look at these are opportunities where you know if you had students or other people going through it, and the thing is is there's so much content that we haven't created, there's so many things that we're not doing because of the cost of that production. I'm not saying the cost is below minimum wage, I'm saying the cost is below $150 an hour, $100 an hour. You know, there's definitely things that would be people would do more of if they weren't as expensive. You know, and I think that the the thing is is how do we get people who are being displaced into something, doing something that is actually you know? How do we train them to do that? And I do that. I mean, I have a school in Africa, that that's all it does, you know. So we've, you know, trained hundreds and hundreds of people to to do something, to do media production, as an example.

But that's just workforce development and that's and that, by the way, to Andy's point, that's something that Rwanda government spends an enormous amount of energy on is the workforce development. They're teaching bricklayers and and, um, you know, electricians, and we just happen to be one other aspect, which is media. But the government to Andy's point has spent an enormous amount of time because they know that when people aren't skilled, they can't move forward, and when people are poor and broken, they want to disrupt the country. And so, by making sure that you're trying to lift everybody's boats in the entire country, that they're able to, you know, stabilize the country that way and actually prepare it to move forward. And so I think that there are countries that are more aggressive about that than than this country, which is culturally more of a you're on your own buddy than many other countries.

1:47:08 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I mean, this is a much larger conversation.

1:47:13 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, we've gone way far, but it's huge. It's appropriate for us to talk about.

1:47:19 - Leo Laporte
It's one of the reasons that the boys in AI are all saying, well, you need universal basic income, but I think that's mostly them saying, hey, don't slow us down.

1:47:31 - Alex Lindsay
Don't do things like how about we tax all AI income? So we can pay for displacement. Let's not talk about that, whatever you do.

1:47:39 - Andy Ihnatko
Don't listen to billionaires, particularly tech billionaires, because you find out that they have a lot of very, very strange ideas about their role in society and being able to shape society. And we're not just talking about oh well, gosh, we need to build. We're talking about we need to have a bubble of domed in which certain people get to live and other people do not get to live, and that is almost a direct quote from.

1:48:00 - Leo Laporte
I need some help, gentlemen. Uh, on a lighter subject, uh, a couple of weeks ago, uh, ben parr was on the show, was singing the praises of a Midwest food product called Runza. Not a bit not a good name, it's a fast food hand pie. It's actually delicious, and he made it sound so good. We immediately ordered a dozen, which I have been slowly nibbling away at, and I guess the Runza people caught on because they've now sent me Runza socks.

1:48:32 - Alex Lindsay
See, those are the pies on the socks you can see right there, this is like a McDonald's, but it's not.

1:48:43 - Leo Laporte
They're famous for their onion rings. You can go, you can look it up. It started in Lincoln, nebraska, and they're all over the Midwest. Have you had them, Alex? I have not, but it looks great. They are surprisingly good. They're basically poroszki or porogi, the Polish Eastern European meat pies, right, but they're baked, not fried.

1:49:03 - Alex Lindsay
They're very good, they're tasty. That's their famous sandwich. They have everything at their store, I guess. Oh, yes, legendary burgers and garden fresh salads.

1:49:10 - Leo Laporte
He's found them. Well, this is why I need your help, because they've sent me also a packet of Runza stickers. I can't decide which one goes best on my laptop, Maybe this one. I guess they call their French fries fringles because this one says all the fringle ladies I don't know, that's a Beyonce. All the fringle ladies. Put a ring on it. Put a ring on it. There's the ring. All the fringal ladies. Put a ring on it. There's an actual runza bleeding its stuffing.

1:49:41 - Alex Lindsay
I kind of feel like it's the actual runza. Put that on there.

1:49:45 - Leo Laporte
It's so disgusting. I don't know if I put that. It looks like a hat. It is a hat. It's a hat. It is a hat, it's a hat. It's a sticker. That's a hat with meat pies meat pie hat. Anyway, you're watching lamb and cheese. That was a big change of subjects from uh economics to runza stickers.

1:50:04 - Jason Snell
I'm sorry, but it's not, though, because those are people who came to the united states from those far off lands with their cuisine because of jobs in various parts, so that's why I like why is an Eastern European bread thing in Nebraska? Because that's where the Eastern Europeans went.

1:50:21 - Leo Laporte
That's where they landed. Yeah, yeah, and and someday these brunsas will be made by AI and they won't be as good and there'll be a lot of Eastern. European descendants robot runs us who need UBI, but you know what you're missing out on, Leo?

1:50:39 - Andy Ihnatko
The fact that AI will give us so much free time to enjoy our lives. We will have time. That's what. Marc Andreessen says All those coal miners to take a road trip with their RVs and their RVs.

1:50:46 - Leo Laporte
yeah, enjoy you. Finally, leisure time. Yeah, fortunately, none of our jobs. Oh, wait a minute, we're in journalism, never mind. Did you see the stunning? And this actually scares me. It's a little off topic, but I I'll get us back on topic in a minute.

Uh, 404 media, which is in itself a response to the collapsing media economy. Right, right, uh, and I love it. I love it and I pay for it and subscribe because I want to support these guys. Emmanuel weibert, who's one of the refugees from a failing media. Uh, which one was it? Was it the outlier? I can't remember which one, it was. Anyway, his article I paid 365.63 to replace 404 media with ai. He paid a freelancer on fiverr to generate an ai generated site that basically stole the content, reworded it and put it on a website. He says I'm not putting it up for public consumption because it's too good. Uh, you could, I mean you can kind of tell. But this is the problem is we're going to be you guys. Well, not you, Alex. I think people will always need somebody to string cable, but that's the good news. Ai can't do that. But Andy has already suffered a little bit from the collapsing economy and the journalism and well, thank god I pivoted to terrestrial radio actually, all three of us are refugees from mainstream media from mainstream media sure

1:52:23 - Jason Snell
and what's, what's benefit from technology advancing, so we could do this on our own right.

1:52:28 - Leo Laporte
what's cool is we've managed to make our own way independently. Yeah, that's good For a while I actually made more money doing this myself than I did on TV.

1:52:39 - Jason Snell
Yeah, the issue is the people like, right, I mean for every kind of star, columnist, reporter and this is the challenge with a lot of this stuff is it's just a smaller number every time, right, so you're like, oh well, we don't need, we can do this is it's just a smaller number every time, right, so you're like, oh well, we don't need, we can do this. And it's like, okay, yeah, but you used to pay an intern to do that, or you used to pay an assistant to to do that, or you used to play, pay a secretary or a receptionist to do that, and those jobs, uh, all have dissolved away. Like I was a senior vice president and editorial director at a media corporation and I never, ever, ever had an assistant in my entire time there. Can you imagine that Nobody to take dictation or answer my calls or whatever, why? Because we have computers with like email and stuff and we didn't need it anymore, right, like I was on the forefront of not needing help to do that part of the job, and that's the danger. Right Is like is AI going to kill all writing and all reporting and all journalism?

Is AI going to kill all writing and all reporting and all journalism? Well, no, but I'll tell you. There are people working jobs now in media that are absolutely automatable in the next, if not now, in five or 10 years, right, and they're not the best jobs, but they are where a lot of the people get their training in order to do the next job. And that's the part that really scares me is that you're going to end up with no entry point in any of these areas. Where you need creativity and you need to be able to. How do you learn, how do you do news for AI? If the AI can't do reporting? Believe me, it's going to be a long time. It can make things up, but to do reporting and talk to people and find out what's actually going on, you need to actually have a human being to do that. So it's, I don't know, it's wild, it's scary.

1:54:16 - Alex Lindsay
Well, and some of the imperfection of that whole process. I mean, in the visual effects industry we had this thing called rotoscoping that we do, and rotoscoping was this kind of 80% of the visual effects shots have some rotoscoping. That means I'm drawing a line around a person or an object, every single frame, and that's how you pull them out of the frame so that you can put something else around them or whatever. And even if you have green screen, you end up rotoscoping half of it anyway. And so that was something that was just kind of like this random. You just kind of charge for rotoscoping and it wasn't very precise and everything else, but it was the fat that sat in visual effects firms all the time, because you have this big roto team and it costs you typically pennies on the dollar to do it, so you'd be able to make up for the fact that this other visual effects shot was way more expensive than you thought. But the rotoscoping budget kind of evened that out.

Well, to make more money, the visual effects firm started sending it to India, and at first it wasn't very good and then it got really good and then it got really good, and then what happened was then suddenly the production companies realized it was going to India and then they just sent it to India and suddenly the visual effects firms, instead of making more money, they actually had all this fat pulled off of them and you saw a lot of them fail Because they suddenly couldn't make their room, for their margin for error became way too small to make money and you saw them start to fold. And that's where you get into, where this starts to take out sometimes the imperfection. Same thing with podcasting this whole precision of like, the exact fault, the exact listener and how long they listened and everything else that makes sense to the number crunchers. But the reality is is that podcasting generally is delivering way more value than what they're measuring. But they're now getting into this ticky tack thing that is squeezing the margin of error out of it.

So you know, and so because the inaccuracy is actually what made it work, because you were actually getting way more value out of it, it's just that that inaccuracy allowed it to make money and allowed it to do its thing. And now, when you start to squeeze all of that, all that precision or all the inaccuracies out of it, you start, you think that you're going to start at that baseline. Instead of saying, oh, we're going to make it more precise and we're going to pay more for that, you're just saying we're going to make it more precise, we're going to pay less for that.

1:56:21 - Leo Laporte
That's really a great way to market. Yeah, I think you're right. Yeah, I think you're right, but fortunately we have managed to keep the office secretarial pool and they're they're working right now typing up all of those scripts and teleprompters and all of the things that we need. No, this is another thing. I think this is why mad men was so fun to watch is because it had all this nostalgia. Many, many offices had typists, selectrics oh no, that's that's a manual type.

1:56:52 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, this is the 70s before Selectrix yeah, the idea that even throughout the 80s, before computers became ubiquitous, an executive sending a letter would record it on a dictaphone machine. The tape would go into an envelope. The envelope would be picked up from their desk, taken to the typing pool.

1:57:13 - Jason Snell
Or a pneumatic tube.

1:57:15 - Andy Ihnatko
Or a pneumatic tube. Or oh, mr Fancy Pants, right. And then a day later would be deposited in your inbox to get a letter and it's like, oh my God, there's the tube.

1:57:26 - Leo Laporte
There's the tube right there, right behind her. That's the 20s Unbelievable. Well, I didn't license this film, so we're gonna have a takedown notice for having typo typist pool uh videos. One more note I want to mention uh, thank you to the discord chat. Oh, this is too bad. You can see my runza buns uh in this in the shot. That's. Maybe I should make it lower.

Um, bbc, for the 30th anniversary of the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy from infocom, published a 30th anniversary version complete with keyboard and information. So let's see, turn. I mean, this is kind of maybe I could do it with a real keyboard. Yeah, turn on light. Oh, the light's on and see, it's even got a little graphics. Bedroom in the bed. The bedroom is a mess small bedroom. There's a flathead screwdriver here outside the bed. There's a toothbrush here. How about if we just get up? Very difficult, but your management, the room is spinning. It dips and sways a little. This is awesome. I'll put a link in the show notes. Thank you, uh to the chairman. Uh, the discord for finding that. That's that, Jason. Oh, Jason snell in the discord found that. Thank you, Jason, I got it.

Thank you Jason, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to get my google powers, I didn't mean to stay. Take away your uh bbccouk. Slash programs spelled the british way slash article articles just google bbc radio for hitchhikers guide to the galaxy.

The game 30th anniversary edition. That'd probably do it, isn't that cool. Yeah, this was a while ago. This is not recent. Still very playable. I really like it.

Uh, you were watching mac break weekly, believe it or not. If I had the rat hole music I would play it Jason snell, sixcolorscom, Andy and iko who's old enough to remember the rat hole from WGBH in boston? And the progenitor, the man who started it all back in the? Uh, what is it? The mid 2000s, in the aughts, aughts, mr? Uh, Alexander lindsay. Great to have all three of you. Uh, let's see what else is going on in the world. I'm sorry, I got kind of carried away by playing. I'm going to play it tonight. That was really a fun game. I don't know if I'll remember all of that right.

China is a very big part of Apple's AI push, according to the Wall Street Journal, but not easy. It's a missing piece. Chatgpt is not available in China, prompting Apple to seek local partners for its artificial intelligence services. But you know that iPhone is. You know China's a big market for Apple, for the iPhone, and I guess they really want to offer Apple intelligence in China. But the Chinese government really prohibits any of these Western models. But the Chinese government really prohibits any of these Western models. So far, no deal has been announced. What's the solution?

2:00:40 - Andy Ihnatko
It's going to be a little bit touchy because, from what we've been learning about how Apple intelligence works, it's all about running models on device and then if you require something that's more powerful than what your phone can handle, it will run a model off device but on an Apple server running Apple Silicon, and government regulations might not make either of those things possible. So if they're going to have to subcontract to a local cloud computing provider, can they keep their promise about how Apple intelligence works, or are they going to have to say, like many things in China, we had to adapt to suit local laws, and the idea of having a phone that does not have does not have AI features, particularly in a country where, I mean, google has no presence, but Huawei just. They just had another another breakthrough in their mode to create their brand, an entirely independent phone operating system that has not a single grain of Android in it. It's not based on an Android open source project or anything. I think the lanDMArk they had in the last beta was now developers can write their own software for it.

So the idea of having an operating system that is being done largely to the approval of the Chinese government, that's certainly going to comply with whatever they got built in. They are going to have a hard time competing with AI on these phones. If they have to go through all of these hoops, they're almost going to have to contract with a local company that essentially has already gone through those hoops and has the right people, but Tim's on good speaking terms, so they'll navigate it because, like you said, they have to have China. If they don't have China, that's a huge bite to the pie. They're missing.

2:02:19 - Leo Laporte
It's a tightrope, apple. If you include China, taiwan, hong Kong and Macau, 18% of Apple's global revenue for the quarter ending March 30th came from those Chinese territories. Huawei is 17% of China's smartphone market. Apple's share is dropping from 18% to 16%. So while they do well in China and it is clearly an important part of their revenue, this is going to be a very challenging thing to develop. The Chinese government, the CCP, tightly regulates what AIs can be used and no foreign AIs are available in China. They're all of the 117 generative AI products available approved by the Cyber Space Administration of China. None of them is developed outside of China. So Apple's got virtually no chance of getting its own AI in. But more than that, let's say they use somebody else's engine, can they? They aren't going to be able to have the private AI safe servers for the off device. It's going to be it's just going to be a different product in China. I guess right, it'll be basically the Chinese.

2:03:31 - Andy Ihnatko
AI. I mean they've yeah, I guess right, it'll be basically the Chinese AI. I mean they've yeah, I mean they already have an app store that goes with the approval of the government. They always, they already don't do VPNs in China. It's not that much different.

But the question is if they have to compete with, if they have to compete with a local company like Huawei in a country where, as a matter of policy, as a matter of domestic policy, the government is like we want to have as much technology developed here as opposed to relying on foreign IP, so much so that we're willing to support it either with ease of use, ease of regulation or actual grants. That's going to be really, really hard to compete with and it's hard to know how much they can dumb down, excuse me, how much they're willing to put up with a degraded what they consider to be a degraded AI experience without having a one-to-one analog between all the features we're offering to the rest of the world with the iPhone. 17, 18, 19, 20, whatever are equivalent to the versions that we have in China. Apple's not going to be happy about having a degraded experience, and that's not just PR on their part. That's going to be a huge, huge source point.

2:04:37 - Leo Laporte
The world's first spatial computing hack. Who put this in the show? Was this you, Andy?

2:04:44 - Andy Ihnatko
I did. I thought it was hysterically funny.

2:04:47 - Leo Laporte
He found a bug that fills your room full of bugs. Jason or Alex, have you tried it? You're not going to do that to your nice Vision Pro.

2:05:00 - Jason Snell
Fill it with bugs. No.

2:05:00 - Leo Laporte
No, I didn't. I think it's kind of fun, though. Look at it. There's bugs on his keyboard. There's spiders everywhere. Spiders are spiders Insects. No, they're not. Oh, the bats aren't, but the bats eat spiders insects. No, they're not. Oh, the bats aren't, but the bats eat the insects. So maybe if you added the bats, the insects would be gone. Okay, fine, yeah.

2:05:21 - Andy Ihnatko
What a great way to demonstrate a vulnerability in the version of Safari that's in the vision pro. It's bad Like oh no, oh no, there's a pop up here. No, how about we surprise you by tricking you to opening a URL and suddenly your room is filled with vermin?

2:05:34 - Jason Snell
Oh, he discloses to Apple and Apple fixed the bug.

2:05:37 - Leo Laporte
Yes.

2:05:37 - Jason Snell
Yes.

2:05:40 - Leo Laporte
But threats to the platform are unique, as he points out, because it's not just hacks. I mean, it could be bugs, real bugs.

2:05:50 - Jason Snell
Yeah, I like it. That's amazing If you view a malicious website and your room fills with bugs.

2:05:56 - Andy Ihnatko
Yes, chef's kiss, just amazing I mean it's not subtle as a line of attack. They I might be checking out my credit card statement after that, but it might be a feature.

2:06:07 - Jason Snell
Yeah, it might be fun, maybe. Maybe surfing the web should be an adventure, and you never know when a clown might appear in your living room while you're surfing. Isn't that terrifying?

2:06:17 - Andy Ihnatko
Or maybe Apple should license this as like a stream time feature. Say we think you've been spending too much time on Apple. How about, every time you keep every 10th keystroke, another bug Jingles the clown is here.

2:06:29 - Jason Snell
He says you've been using the Internet too long. The clown is here. He says you've been using the internet too long.

2:06:33 - Leo Laporte
I was quietly minding my own business at home the other day when a very overexcited Micah Sargent texted me the Final Cut camera is here. The Final Cut camera is here. It's now available on the App Store. Alex, have you played with it? I haven't had time yet what.

2:06:49 - Alex Lindsay
You were so excited about this when they announced it. No, I'm excited about shooting stuff on the iPhone. I shoot a lot of ProRes on the iPhone. I'm using the Blackmagic camera and I'm playing with the Halide version of that as well, the Kino. So those are the two.

I can only absorb so many cameras at one time, so there's some folks that have been playing with it and you're able to now get these all tied together. I just haven't had a need for it. I'm, I have to admit, I'm not very much of a. I open it up and bang on it a little bit. I'm usually waiting for something like oh, I need to use this and I'm going to start using it in some project, and, and so, so far, the the Kino is is really fun. I think it's probably a little easier to use than the black magic one. The black magic one is the one I use every time it matters. The Apple one is the one I'm still using for spatial capture as well as, um, you know just, I just want to pick something up and take pictures of my kids, Um, so this one as the ability to bring in some multi-camera and so on and so forth, and so it looks cool. I just haven had time to play with it.

2:07:50 - Leo Laporte
You know, actually, given how much now I'm thinking, given how much this sony fx30 cost, I could have bought an iphone for less.

2:08:01 - Alex Lindsay
Maybe I should just buy three iphones you know, you know it's, it's the here's, the here's. The hard part is it's the overall ecosystem so this has hdmi out, which the iphone does not.

I, what I, what I do, my HDMI out of my iPhone is for me to I screen share to an Apple TV. That's always an older Apple TV. It's always plugged into my switcher, so my switcher always has an. Anytime I want to show like a wireless, you know, if I want to, you know the, if I want to show something, it's just really easy for me to do that, and that that has been been the. You know the way that I've solved that and then I have basically a wireless camera. You know, in that area and for some reason I was gonna, I was gonna, I think I just started sharing my phone with my uh, my wife's tv. Here's the somewhere else in the house, the uh the screen is sideways and skinny yeah, yeah, exactly so, yeah.

So I think that that's the um you know, like for me, and see if I can turn. I don't know why it's not working.

2:09:01 - Leo Laporte
Anyway, um, yeah I uh, I skipped this story last week that Andy put in, but I do. I do love it. The the Macintosh computer for under five pounds and I'm not taking weight, I'm talking pounds Sterling. This is the mini Mac. Andy, I think this was your story.

2:09:23 - Andy Ihnatko
Yes, yeah, yeah. I thought it was really cool, like we're, we're, we've all seen hey look, a Raspberry Pi can run a Mac emulator and be turned into a what's it? What's it? This person, as a project, decided to try to make it work on the tiniest, tiniest, tiniest control he could find with almost no resources. So he wound up actually writing his own emulator, based, I think, based on some other open source work, with the goal saying, well, this counts if it can run the original suite of apps for the Mac one 28 plus plus missile command. So Mac right, mac paint missile command. I think he also has Mac draw, it has.

It has a few quirks you can't like. You can't swap discs for it. I mean, it really is exactly like a Mac one 28. You can't swap disc images for it. It's obviously not designed to be terribly robust, but as an idea of literally a five or $6 little controller you have to solder in a few wires to get a VGA out, uh. But it also has USB working so you can get a keyboard or mouse working. That's uh.

That is so intriguing and I, I, I would be really, really intrigued by like an emulator like this that does have file save, that could, in the background, like the whatever's, whatever's running, it can understand, automatically translate a Mac write document into, like Markdown or something like that. Because, nostalgia aside, there is kind of a nice little refreshing mindset of working with something that is a modern ish user interface, like not just simply DOS text but simply incredibly limited what you can do with it. All you can do really is write, and, yeah, just the idea of knowing that you want to do something so ridiculous. I think Jason and I talked about this a while ago that we have a mutual appreciation for an absurd idea executed flawlessly, and this is that executed flawlessly, and this is that does he say it runs as well as a 128k mac, because it's gonna actually a little bit, a little bit faster.

He, in the, in the, in his, in the project page, he mentions the things that it doesn't do, and one of them is essentially the. The interrupt system is not exactly right, so it will run a lot. So a game like missile command will run a lot, lot faster than it should. Uh, and there are a few other details for it. It wasn't just, it wasn't designed to be hey, so a game like Missile Command will run a lot faster than it should, and there are a few other details for it.

It wasn't designed to be, hey, build your own Mac. It was the challenge of how can I make a full emulator with keyboard, with mouse, with a screen that can run these apps fit in this tiny, tiny, tiny little thing. And, honestly, if someone ever made like a credit card size mac, like that, that had bluetooth for controlling and, uh, wi-fi just, or just usbc, so I could simply mount the storage to get files off of it, there's an amount of money I would definitely spend for that, just just, even just as a curiosity, because it, because 1984 is a good place to visit, not so much for the politics but the technology was.

2:12:17 - Leo Laporte
The politics are looking better than they did at the time.

2:12:24 - Andy Ihnatko
Reagan revolution yeah.

2:12:26 - Leo Laporte
I know.

I know, I know Well, I have mixed feelings about Joanna Stern's piece on the Apple parental control. She said it took three years to fix an X-rated loophole in Apple's screen time. My son's iPad is set to restrict him from visiting most websites, yet I was able to use it to access the most X-rated parts of the Internet. Now I might blame apple for this, but I have to say I've yet to see a parental control that couldn't be bypassed. That's been the story of parental controls since the very first days. Apple apparently ignored for three years the bug reports, um, some even suggesting a fix, but they they didn't apparently want to fix it. So who's who's at fault here?

2:13:21 - Andy Ihnatko
I don't. To me that's. That's part of the story, not not that obviously bugs are going to exist and obviously ways of circumventing a parental control will always exist and will always be found by the people that designed us to screen things again, and by kids who are strongly motivated to get around them Exactly very strongly motivated Teenagers are resourceful when it comes to this stuff.

The thing that kind of calls us out for me is the idea that, look, this person found this vulnerability and was calling it to Apple's attention and they did nothing about it for years and years and years, so much so that they finally fixed it. I don't know, I can't remember. I read this story last week, but he, the story exists because he decided to whistleblow to Joanna Stern because he wasn't getting any, any response whatsoever from Apple. And it's not so much that it's not a problem that it was a bug, not a problem that it was a hole in something that's very, very important, but the problem that for three years this person had to had to go to kind of go to like a journalist to say hi, could you possibly make this as annoying as possible as a pr problem for apple that they might be, it might be inclined to fix this very, very simple trick that people are using to kids can use to access extremely inappropriate content. Does this story?

2:14:33 - Leo Laporte
have a happy ending. Did Apple fix it? No, not, that we know of, not, yet I don't think yeah. She also pointed out there were other problems with screen time app limits that didn't limit screen usage, charts that are inaccurate or just blank time and app requests that don't always work. The ask to buy loophole, uh, which allows his uh, a child and adolescent psychologist in maryland's daughter to to re-download an app after he deletes it and then doesn't have to ask the get, the ask the buy permission anymore. Um, so there are more than a few. I think really, the most important impact of this story is don't leave it to screen time to keep your kids on the up and up. It's not. It's historically always been, you know, difficult for any parental control to work. It's one of the reasons I don't really like parental controls. If you're relying on them, you may well be missing a lot.

2:15:43 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, I think it's good to at least make it difficult so that it gives kids a lot more time to think about what they're doing.

2:15:49 - Leo Laporte
Right Well, and Apple's offering it as a parental control. So they really should make it work as best they can, and if people find their way around it, they do. But fix them when you find them.

2:16:02 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, and Apple, apple and Google and every company that is both legally required and also feel an ethical obligation to do things to restrict access to kids. They they're kind of at a. They have a little bit of a quandary in that they wouldn't put it out there, this feature, unless they thought it worked well. But they really do have to make sure that, as part of the basic knowledge that all parents have, that realize that nothing is flawless. If we made this flawless, we would make this browser useless to everybody, and we don't want to make this useless to everybody, so there are going to be ways around this.

It don't feel as though this, this problem, is solved because you decided to flip a little switch in settings. It's. This problem is mitigated somewhat. Yes, the problem, the question, is when your kid finds this brick wall where they thought they were going to find elf porn or whatever they're looking for. Hopefully it gives them a chance to think about the conversation that you had with them about why certain things are inappropriate and why you do not want your child to be able to see that until they are mature enough to really process what they're seeing, and maybe they'll think that, okay, maybe I don't have to see the story about hobbits and well, and I, I think also I mean also to go back to, like, why people do things I mean, Apple wants parents to have some control, but giving parents absolute control could affect the number of kids using iPhones.

2:17:24 - Alex Lindsay
So you know, like, like, if Apple could turn that dial a lot harder if they wanted to and be a lot more aggressive about it, but then they wouldn't have 87% of kids under 18, you know, and so I think that there's they have. They don't necessarily have a vested interest in making it perfect. You know, like I, you know, I just don't think there's there's some, there's some. I'm not saying that they're thinking about that too much, but I think that that's a counter weight against them pushing too hard of make giving parents absolute control over what their kids have access to, because the kids would go well, I want an Android phone after that.

2:17:54 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, and not to turn this into another 20-minute rat hole. I know we're kind of long, but it's a very, very sensitive subject in general, because you also don't necessarily want to give parents the ability to block literally anything on the phone, because these are kids who are discovering their identity and maybe they're in a household where exploring certain parts of who they are are going to get them in physical danger, but they need a source of actual, real information so that they can make it into adulthood. So it's hard to know where to set that dial. Where you're doing some responsible things to give parents control. However, you are not giving them so much control that their kids can get hurt by lack of information access and lack of communication to communities that could help them out in a very, very big crisis.

2:18:44 - Leo Laporte
You're watching MacBreak Weekly Andy Anako, Alex Lindsay, Jason Snell our Picks of the Week coming up next, let's kick off the Picks of the week coming up next. Let's, uh, kick off the picks of the week with Jason snell. What do you got for us?

2:18:56 - Jason Snell
oh, I got a fun gadget. It is called the combustion predictive thermometer. I have one and I love it and we haven't done a pick. I I got mine about a month ago. I haven't done a pick about it yet, so I'm gonna do it. It's uh, it's a probe thermometer. You can use it for baking. You can use it for cooking meat. You can use it for cooking meat. You can use it for the grill. It is not cheap it starts at $149, and it's got a cute little. But you know what I love it. I love it because of a few reasons. I love the industrial design of it. I use it now for all of my For baking and for meat in the oven, or for meat on a pan or for meat on the grill. The little thing which is not necessary, that's the little readout, but it's cute. You can set it up somewhere. It's yellow, it's bright, it's colorful. It's a Bluetooth RAGE extender as well. This is all just rechargeable.

2:19:43 - Leo Laporte
There's also an app. Save your money. Yeah, just get the thermometer and use the app right.

2:19:48 - Jason Snell
Get the probe thermometer and use the app with your phone, and the thing that I like about the most is it's got I think it's got seven or nine temp sensors on it and so it can detect. It knows the ambient temperature of wherever your thing is cooking, it knows the surface temperature and it knows the interior temperature, so it will dynamically find the place that is the coldest, which is the one that you want to temp and use that and represent that. It's got algorithms to do that. And also it looks at the trajectory of the temperature and, based on that and and you put in the target temperature, it will tell you a surprisingly accurate amount of time, counting down to when it's going to be ready. So it'll. It'll sit there for about a minute and then it'll say, oh, it'll be ready in seven and a half minutes.

It's amazing Pretty much. It'll be ready in seven and a half minutes. So I like I know it's pricey, but this is a tech show and I'm just going to say, if you like your tech gadgets and you like your kitchen gadgets I know it's $150 probe thermometer. It's so much fun to use and it works, and so I give it a. I give it a big endorsement. It is, uh, so nice to not have to worry about if that hamburger is going to be ready or not and instead literally have like 100 confidence that the burger is going to be medium rare when I want it to be it's's really great for things like long cooks, like of a brisket.

2:21:14 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, because you know you want to see all the temperatures and you want to know what the highest temperature the lowest temperature, I guess is, so that you make sure it reaches a safe level. It also is very accurate at predicting there was a bug in it. In case you get bit by this bug early versions of the firmware, it would become unresponsive and I thought, oh great, I just spent a lot of money on this thing and I got to get a return it and all that stuff. But I went on Reddit and a lot of people experiencing this bug. Their advice was take it, let the battery die on it, take it out of the charger, let the battery die, and which sometimes takes a few days. I left it out for 10 days, then charge it up and what it's doing is rebooting the microprocessor and then make sure you get the latest firmware, and I haven't had a problem since since then. So just a little tip. This it's an.

2:22:06 - Jason Snell
You know there's a little experimental product, new product, new company product but they did but it solved it and I've been I I won't cook without it. I love it. Yeah, it's really good.

2:22:19 - Leo Laporte
So if you're what I mean again, that's why, john, my brisket was terrible during the movie thing, because the combustion wouldn't start and so I had to guess, and that didn't work so well no, nobody wants to do that.

2:22:29 - Alex Lindsay
I, I'm afraid I'm gonna have to probably get this, because oh, you need this of stuff and for me the big thing is chicken. If you're not sous vide chicken, which I do mostly when you put it in the oven it goes from being unsafe to cardboard incredibly quickly.

2:22:43 - Jason Snell
So fast yeah, yeah.

It's like you've got about 90 to 120 seconds between unsafe and cardboard, and so you really have to have that temperature every thanksgiving I roast a turkey and the most, literally the most stressful thing about the whole process is we're trying to figure out when everything else is gonna be needs to be ready, because when's the turkey gonna be ready? And you know, a 15 pound bird or something like that. Like, even if you've got a probe thermometer in it which I? I mean, I have one the little cable that runs out and you've got a little plastic thing, you don't really know how long that that curve is going to go, and the combustion software. They've got it set up so that they will give you a really good estimate early on about how long it's going to be before it reaches the the safe temp.

And that's just a huge. It's just a load off to not have to worry about it. And in this case it's Bluetooth and if you get the little thing, it's a Bluetooth repeater so you can be far away from it and still get the details. There's lots of little gadgets but even if you just get the one base model again, I buy a lot of stuff. That's silly tech stuff. You know all of us do this. One wins the blue ribbon, like it made it to the, not a waste of money but actually a product that I really really like.

2:23:59 - Leo Laporte
I was so embarrassed to tell my wife.

2:24:01 - Jason Snell
I bought this.

2:24:02 - Leo Laporte
But it really is good, it really works, but it's great.

2:24:05 - Jason Snell
It solves a very real problem.

2:24:07 - Leo Laporte
It's great. Yeah, I am with you 100% Combustion inks, combustion predictive thermometer. And yeah, you don't need a display because your phone does everything the display does.

2:24:18 - Jason Snell
Display is adorable, though Actually I've got the display because I didn't want to tell my wife. I want my wife to use this and there's no way she's going to use it with her phone, right? So I said there's just a little thing, it's just like a wireless. It's just like an appliance. Don't worry about it, and you know I will. And it still will show you the estimate of when it's going to be ready, even on the little cute and it beeps at you when it's ready.

2:24:38 - Leo Laporte
It beeps at you. So you know. Yeah, it does. Chicken's done. Alex Lindsay pick of the week.

2:24:44 - Alex Lindsay
So my main pick of the week is Final Cut Pro. They just did an update and here's why I'm picking it. It's because everyone complained about the fact that Apple didn't put out any. They only put out one feature color enhance. This advanced color enhance that it analyzes your images and then corrects them, and so I can't show any of this up because it's all projects. But I started grabbing stuff from my projects and throwing it in there and just going just to test it and, oh my goodness, it's so good. It is so good at what it does and it just sits there and analyzes your photo and it's not like it just fixes the color. It's not like it goes oh, you shot in 32 and you should have done 56 and changes the color balance. It's doing some pretty deep and it does it very fast. It's almost instant. It'll just go and it makes this correction correction. And the thing is is that I think that it's such an Apple thing to do, which is that I'm sure that that took a lot of engineering to do well, to do it quickly and to do it easily. It is not impressive on the outside. It's not doing predictive text or blowing something up or changing your scale or rotoing you out or doing all the other things that a lot of features that we want to see are, but it is something that will affect many final cut users every day, which is that you're not a colorist. You're not an expert at this. You just need your stuff to look good, you know. And if you're a, if you're building content for social media, you're not a colorist. If you're building a lot of times the education and corporate and many of the other bread and butter things out there, you know. I just want to make sure people don't miss what Apple did, which is they created a button that makes everything look pretty darn good, like you know, and it's just and it's not. Again, if I hand it to a colorist, I'm actually going to be comparing this soon, where I'm taking one of my projects I'm going to hand it to an actual colorist and say, okay, what would you do here? And then I'm going to hand it to an actual colorist and say, okay, what would you do here? And then I'm going to look at what compared to Apple, and I know that there's way better. But I also know that there's so much out there that people put out that is not very good because they tried to color correct it or they tried to work on it or whatever, and this tool is a huge jump forward. So if you haven't played with the Final Cut the new tool that they put in there, this enhanced color check it out, cause it.

As someone who does this all day, day in, day out. If someone, if I, was in a rush, I would absolutely just go, oh, just put this on all the things and then go out and it'll be okay, like it'll be okay, you know, and I, you know I'm not gonna. I, you know I don't have time to send it to a colorist, you know, and so so I would. Um, it's, it's free. If you don't have Final Cut, it's $300. So somebody comes with an editing system. So it's pretty awesome. So I would check that out. Also, just because I'm about to do a bunch of tests this summer, I would highly recommend going to streamvoodoocom slash spatial. I'm working with them to do a bunch of testing. You want to get on that list right now. Streamvood, this slash spatial. Um, we're going to be doing uh, I'm going to be doing some spatial tests. So this is don't bother if you don't have a apple vision pro oh, thanks for letting me know.

2:27:41 - Leo Laporte
Oh, you just want me to feel bad, don't you?

2:27:43 - Alex Lindsay
no, but I'm just saying that, if you're an apple, we're going to be doing some a bunch of apple vision protests, uh, hopefully starting. Uh, not, maybe not next week, but the, and uh, I'll be streaming to that and we're I'm kind of working with them to try to make it so that it's free for people to watch, you know. So, hey, we're going to do this stream and you can go there and watch what we're doing and give us feedback on it. I don't like, I don't, you know, like it's going to be experimental, but but it's going to be something that, uh, what we we're streaming spatial video from an iPhone to the Apple Vision Pros, to any number of Apple Vision Pros, I don't know. I think they told me I can't stream to more than 10,000 at a time. I don't think I'm going to hit that number.

2:28:21 - Leo Laporte
That's interesting. Has anybody done that before? That's interesting, okay, first spatial stream.

2:28:32 - Alex Lindsay
Wow, to be fair, the sandwich spatial.

2:28:37 - Leo Laporte
Oh yeah, spatial stream.

2:28:38 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, yeah so we did one a couple of weeks before that, but it was just experiment with like 10 people or something watching and and and so the Daring Fireball did did theirs. This one is what I'm really trying to work with them on is just we're going to. We're really excited about. What I'm really excited about is is where it can go and what's what's different about what you saw with Daring Fireball is they had a pretty complex. I think Jason wrote it. Well, it was on Six Colors, I don't think Jason wrote it.

Yeah, Joe Rosensteil wrote it, but it's the detail of so they really break down what that looks like, and I think that that that's a great way to approach that we're doing it. What I'm experimenting with is doing it from the phone. So literally I hit a stream on the phone and you get to watch it on a headset and I don't have to have any other gear or anything else. And we are going to experiment with sending you binaural audio, since we know everyone's going to have a headset on. So there'll be a bunch of experimentations with that, but you'll see us playing with it.

It's not the end result I mean, it's not the end product that we're trying to produce, but it's something we want to experiment with. And it's easier for me to experiment with it and get bands and other people to play along if there's a lot of people watching. So I want a lot of people. There's no money in this. I'm not getting paid for it easier if I say, hey, there's a bunch of people watching on the Apple Vision Pro, so if people want to download it, it'll help me get better guests to be part of the process. But that's all we're trying to do. There's no money in it, it's just fun.

2:30:03 - Leo Laporte
Join the beta. Go to voodoocom, slash spatial and you can fill out the form and then you'll get a notification.

2:30:11 - Alex Lindsay
You'll get more information down the road as we get a little closer to the surface. But I just want to you know you want to be at the top of that list rather than the bottom, because we can't open it to everybody all the time. I just want to keep on telling the people here that we're going to be doing some kind of fun.

2:30:23 - Leo Laporte
Very good actually the website is streamvoodoocom. Streamvoodoo. Sorry, streamvoodoo, sorry. Yeah, stream Voodoo. I said it. Slash spatial. Yeah, yeah, I said it wrong, not you Stream Voodoo Dot com. Slash spatial.

2:30:37 - Andy Ihnatko
Andy and I go pick of the week Long overdue. I've been using this brand new Shure MV7 plus podcast microphone because it's nice outside and I do like doing stuff at the library because my brain's a lot more alert after I've had a long walk and I'm outside my regular office. But it's hard to find a microphone that you can take with you because not only am I sometimes going to a library that's just a couple miles from my house, sometimes I go to New York and I'd rather do a radio show screaming from someplace and it's just not going to work out. I don't like having these cheap little USB microphones that don't sound very good or are unreliable, as I found out a couple months ago at the Boston Public Library. I also don't like necessarily having to take the big box USB interface and the big studio microphone that I have. This is a really nice medium between the two because it just came out a few months ago, so it is pretty much short technology optimized more for voice than for music. I'm sure if you're a musician you'll find the voice quality not as good as you might like on a $100, $200, more expensive Shure microphone. But it also has an onboard DSP that can do things like pop removal, background removal, hiss removal all kinds of optimizations that you can set.

It has an iOS app, has a Mac app. You use the apps to make those settings on the microphone, but once you've set them, you don't necessarily need it. You don't need to have those. Their settings will stick through thick and thin, so you don't have to keep this plugged into another device. I've taken this from really every single device. I have the ipad, my macbook, my android phone, all this other sort of stuff. It has some nice creature from comforts for it too. It has this, has it has this cool a little l uh rgb strip at the side of it again, and if you tap it it it'll mute oh, that's nice. And it'll change colors.

2:32:34 - Leo Laporte
So that's a mute button.

2:32:35 - Andy Ihnatko
That's pretty good, that's neat and it's also mute. You can also have like a rainbow RGB effect, that kind of changes that pulses with what you say, and the good news is that these are also things that you can turn on or off via the app.

2:32:49 - Leo Laporte
Thank you for turning that off.

2:32:50 - Alex Lindsay
Including this Exactly it via the app that you use. Thank you for turning that off, including this Exactly.

2:32:55 - Andy Ihnatko
It's the only thing that's a little bit weird about it, because oftentimes, like particularly when this is on like an arm, you might just simply touch it to move it and you accidentally touch the mute, yeah, and because, like, I can't see the LEDs while I'm looking at it this way. So you can turn all of that off if you want to. But the point is that it's one mic that will work with everything. One last nice thing is that if you look in the back of it, it has all the connectors built into it, so I don't need to have a separate audio interface for my headphones. It has both USB and XLR, so when I'm home at my studio, I can use this as a regular XLR mic. I can use this as a regular XLR mic.

And the other nice thing is that both outputs, both USB and the XLR, work simultaneously, so I can do things like I can be using. Like, if I'm on one of Jason's podcasts, I can be using the USB output to be connected to Zoom, so I'm having the group chat. Meanwhile, the XLR is plugged into my nice USB recorder interface, so it's recording audio locally, and that's something that I can do, even just on my phone. It's so easy, so very, very, very versatile. Not that expensive $279. I've seen it discounted by 20 or 30 bucks, so it's pretty affordable and it really is exactly what I was kind of hoping for. Good enough to be better than a cheap travel microphone. Not so good that it takes up so much room in my bag that I'm wondering why I even care.

2:34:20 - Alex Lindsay
Nice. The other thing that I think that they did there is they gave you the larger foam. So there's a larger foam than the original MV7. So it's a little longer, which gives you a little bit less popping on its own, just physically. We send out the MV7s for gray matter and we're moving. The next ones we buy will be all MV7 pluses as the kind of don't make it hard, just get it out there and get it to work.

We found that this is the sweet spot, you know, of being able to have USB. But oh, by the way, if we want to use it and hook it to XLRs into a mixer, we still could. And. But oh, by the way, if we want to use it and hook it up to xlr's into a mixer, we still could. Uh and so and and. Again, it has the right level of simplicity. We have a lot of problems with other mics that actually have way more features on the mic and we just can't get them into a configuration that works when we're talking to someone for the 15 minutes before they show up on the show we spent a lot of time with yetis just tweaking them and tweaking.

2:35:07 - Leo Laporte
I hate them people talking about rock side they don't even and they don't sound as good as the mv7 no, no, the mv7 is like we.

2:35:13 - Alex Lindsay
Every time someone says, oh, I have a yeti, and I'm like, are you sure you can't show up early because I'm gonna have to figure out which switch I'm on and which one you have and which one which is the front, which is the back, and it's just, this one is just pointed towards them. Uh, and we have been again. It's not there. I have many mics that are better than that mic. I have many mics that are better than that mic. I have many mics that are worse than that mic, but for one, that is the right size. Exactly what Andy said the right size, right level of complexity. You throw it in something. And the USB-C upgrade that's the biggest upgrade for us was the USB-C. The micro USB is what we have that eventually breaks down. You know like especially the way we use it. And so we're, within the next probably two or three months, all of our stuff will be MB7 pluses.

2:36:00 - Leo Laporte
And we're going to do something else with the other mics because the micros are giving up $279 for sure. S-h-u-r-e dot com. And that is that. Thank you for joining us for MacBreak Weekly to our Club TWiT members who make this show possible and all the shows we do. Without you I don't know what would be the status of twit, but it wouldn't be this. I can tell you right now. It's seven bucks a month, which is not much. You get ad free versions of all the shows. You get access to the club twit discord and a great group of people as a wonderful community. The TWiT+ content, including Thursday Stacey's Book Club High Voltage, will be the book I think we make it worthwhile. But the real reason to join is to support what we do. If you listen to the shows, if you like what Twit's up to and you want to keep Twit around, you got to join the club twit.tv/clubtwit. Thanks to all of our existing members. We really appreciate the support.

We do MacBreak Weekly every Tuesday, 11 am pacific, 2 pm eastern time. Uh, that's 1800 utc. You can watch it stream live. youtube.com/twt/live. After the fact, on-demand versions of the show are available on YouTube there's a special channel just for mac break weekly. Also on our website, twit.tv/mbw. There are links there for YouTube and for various podcast clients. You can use those to subscribe. That way you get it automatically the minute it's available. Thanks, a deep thanks, to our wonderful panel. As always, Jason Snell writes at sixcolors.com. You must visit there and when you're there, check out his multifarious podcasts at sixcolors.com/jason. Is that a proper use of that word, Mr. Editor in Chief.

2:37:52 - Jason Snell
I wouldn't use it, but I'll speak out what you mean, I get it.

2:37:56 - Leo Laporte
Multifarious. I like it. It's a good word, but it seems related to nefarious, and I don't think it is. It just means many right, Having many aspects or qualities. Multifarious.

2:38:09 - Jason Snell
Yeah, I approve.

2:38:09 - Leo Laporte
Thumbs up Multifarious. I don nefarious. Yeah, I approve thumbs up multifarious. I don't say plethora anymore, that's overused.

2:38:16 - Jason Snell
I like multifarious that's my new word. Thank you, I approve it. It does sound slightly nefarious, but I'll go with. It does like how british people say something's a scheme and they don't mean anything bad by it, but Americans are like, oh, a scheme, that's bad. It's like no, no, no, it's just a plan. We just call it a plan. So multifarious, not ne, not nefarious. He's diverse, he's a diverse. I'll take it. He's a diverse fellow Lots of podcasts.

2:38:35 - Leo Laporte
He's got a lot of them. Yeah, that's probably better to stick with. Stick with the Anglo-Saxon words. Well, not all of them, but those that one particularly. He's got a lot of them, Andy, and I go GBH, calling your name.

2:38:49 - Andy Ihnatko
Yes, yes, actually I just got an email that I've been bumped from Thursday because of the presidential debates. Once again, Donald Trump is always involved every time I get bumped, but at least he's not accused of something brand new right now. But I'm going to be on two weeks after that. Actually, the Boston Public Library Friday. I don't know what the date is, but I believe it's going to be the second Friday in July, like the single date, the ninth or something like that.

2:39:19 - Leo Laporte
Anyway, go to wgbhnews.org to stream that live or later, or stop by the Boston Public Library and I think if they go to wgbh.com they can find you right, You're there on the website wgbhnews.org.

2:39:29 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, exactly, Boston Public Radio is the name of the show and I believe they have my segments kind of cut up for you.

2:39:36 - Leo Laporte
Thank you, Andy. officehours.global is where you will find Alex Lindsay every morning. What are you up to?

2:39:44 - Alex Lindsay
Well, we didn't have enough shows, so we figured it was a moment.

Oh you started another one. We're doing one on Monday nights, and so this is so. Our very first test of this was last night. It was great. It was a little more conversational than our morning show. We're not going to do it next week, but then we'll do it the week after that and so, anyway, it's all in the cloud. So we're using VizVector to do the production and so we kind of got the first one off the ground and we'll start adding more features. So if you look on Monday nights after 4th of July, you'll start to see us slowly build that out and we've got a. Mr Scoble is going to be on a gray matter dot show this Friday, mr who, so Robert, robert Scoble, wow, he's going to come on. What's he up to these days? Oh, that'll be interesting. He talks a lot about AI. He's excited about AI.

2:40:33 - Leo Laporte
So there's always something for Robert. Can he get in the shower with it?

2:40:36 - Alex Lindsay
Probably I don't know. I think, yeah, yeah, maybe you know so, so you can think about it, but but anyway he's, so he's.

2:40:55 - Leo Laporte
M-A-T-T-E-Y, but both of them will get there because I was smart enough to register both of them and forward one to the other.

2:40:55 - Alex Lindsay
Very smart so, but EY gray matter with an E.

2:40:59 - Leo Laporte
I'm going to have to watch Maddie Dichtwald, because I do want to know why women are different than men. I'm baffled.

2:41:06 - Alex Lindsay
it was. A lot of stuff was about longevity and you know what you eat and what not to eat and like, basically, don't eat all the good stuff. I mean, get all the good stuff that's good for you, but you know you can't eat all the other stuff. But also just really talking about you know, if you want to live a long time, if you decide that that's important, these are the things you have to start paying attention to, and so it was a good conversation.

2:41:31 - Leo Laporte
Thank you, Alex. Thank you, Alex. Thank you everybody. I hope you have a wonderful week and I wish you will return next week to see Mac break weekly. But now I'm sorry to say I have to tell you I didn't want to. I tried not to, but it's time to go back to work because break time is over. We'll see you next time. Bye.