MacBreak Weekly 930 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, Jason Snell, Alex Lindsay and the public betas are here. The pros, the cons, the pluses, the minuses and, most importantly, should you install it Next on MacBreak Weekly.

00:00:16 - VO
Podcasts you love. From people you trust. This is TWiT.

00:00:26 - Leo Laporte
This is MacBreak Weekly, episode 930. Recorded on Tuesday July 16th, 2024: Enter Jiggle Mode.

It's time for MacBreak eekly, the show where we cover the latest Apple News. Jason Snell very kindly decided to come up and say it's me, it's a me. He's not on the green screen if he were.

0:00:51 - Jason Snell
Could I do this? Oh, he could not I'm. I'm here in the studio giving a one last ride.

0:00:56 - Leo Laporte
Also, my power is shut off at home and I and there's guys on my roof hammering and I I couldn't do it, but we're glad you're here and and it is as we have mentioned, and we'll probably be more public about it in days to come our last day in the studio will be August 8th and we have a big truck coming tomorrow to take stuff to my attic. Speaking of attics, here is Mr Andy Ihnatko. He's not in his attic, he's in his library. Hi, Andy.

0:01:27 - Andy Ihnatko
Yes, oh, my goodness, it is so. The great thing about the conference room today is that no one has used it all day, so it's been doing nothing but chilling since. No bodies in here to warm things up, no doors opening and closing. Honestly, I wish I had brought some like prosciutto, some salamis, to hang, because this is the perfect environment for both podcasting and the storage of deli meats.

0:01:50 - Leo Laporte
This is going to be a great show yeah, and it's fresh smelling like nobody's been in there, it's just clean not, not, not in two hours, but for now, yes, it's gonna to smell like Andy in two hours. Two hours. It will smell like Andy and you don't want to do that Also with us from his attic, Alex Lindsay.

0:02:12 - Alex Lindsay
His attic's a little fancier than most I was going to say I can stop whenever I want to. I can stop. I was thinking about a different attic that was drinking. He's a coffee addict Stop my coffee.

0:02:22 - Leo Laporte
Of course, Alex has office hours and he has been my ex-officio consigliere to help me build this attic studio that we're building. I'm excited. I am too. I'm sad. Mostly it's just the next I think about it like, oh, it'd be great to have a studio and then I go, I need one. It's really expensive, that's the problem, but it's a great luxury. I go, I need one. It's really expensive, that's the problem, but it's a great luxury. I mean, it's fun to come in here and there's people.

0:02:49 - Jason Snell
It is. It's a lot of fun, but I mean honestly. I mean I started doing my independent thing almost 10 years ago, exactly now.

0:02:58 - Leo Laporte
Wow congratulations.

0:02:59 - Jason Snell
Thank you, yeah, it's coming up. When's your anniversary, september?

0:03:03 - Leo Laporte
Nice, september 9th, when the Apple Watch was announced, from my attic to yours, your garage and we were all laid off the next day, oh geez.

0:03:09 - Jason Snell
And then I started Six Colors on September 16th, so it's going to be coming up 10 years. But you know what I'm saying is the technology has advanced so much yeah, it really has the internet connections that you can get the video and audio processing that you don't need a TV studio even to do.

0:03:24 - Leo Laporte
TV? No, you watch the news channels, you watch CNN.

0:03:27 - Jason Snell
People are in there, covid reset everything.

0:03:30 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, covid changed it.

0:03:31 - Andy Ihnatko
And this is. This is a great example. I've got stuff in a backpack and it's not even like necessarily the most compact stuff I could have taken with me, but I've got. I've got a 4k camera, I've got lighting, I've got a really good microphone, I've got a 4K camera, I've got lighting, I've got a really good microphone, I've got gigabit internet, I've got two screens in front of me, and I just remember what it was like the first time that MacBreak went to video. And after getting over the horror of, oh my God, I'm going to have to shave and put on a clean shirt once a week, how shall I ever survive? It's like how difficult it was to get anything going. And now it's like this is all consumer stuff you can just throw right together.

0:04:10 - Leo Laporte
so yeah, it's a transformation, but I still and I guess I guess it's because I come from old media right, you used to come over to tech tv, absolutely multi-million dollar, paul allen financed, you know, studio, and then I I kind of I kind of aped it a little bit in the brick house, which was really cool and was rather wonderful to have. I know I try not to think of the upwards of $20 million that I've sunk into studios over the last 20 years, but you know that's life. So, yeah's, it's a sad, uh in some ways sad, but it's also uh kind of reinventing to it. One of the things I told, I told everybody about a year ago, is let's rethink what we do, to do it in a more modern way, and you're not going to have to compromise on anything that I think people are used to.

0:04:58 - Jason Snell
That's the thing about what's happened in the last 10, 15 years in terms of the technology is I think you won't have to compromise because we've got these great you know, computers are so much more powerful and we've got the great software tools and the, and the rise of podcasting and video has meant that there's so much more video gear available and it's so much more affordable than it used to be. So there's. It's just it's the perfect time to recast and still keep the quality.

0:05:25 - Leo Laporte
And that was. You know, how do we do it less expensively with the support of our wonderful club members? Uh and uh, because advertisers are not, you know, going to pay for. In back of the day, the advertisers were able to pay for a million dollar studios, but not anymore. And so you know, I'm I'm a little sad because I love having, I love coming in and it's a luxury for me. I just sit down and talk and then leave. Now I'll have to push more buttons.

0:05:50 - John Ashley
And the one thing I'm going to be sad about having in studio is having moments like this.

0:05:56 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I won't be able to break the table anymore. That's the Harlem shuffle we're all doing and that's the one where I got up on that table this is in the brick house and broke it. Burke repaired it, but there it goes. Were you there, Jason? Yeah, it looks like that was me. That's you that I landed on the panda hat.

0:06:13 - Jason Snell
yeah, the Harlem shake. Harlem shake, that's a bad egg.

0:06:19 - Andy Ihnatko
It riles everybody up.

0:06:21 - Jason Snell
And we did. We broke the table.

0:06:25 - Leo Laporte
It only takes one. It's true, burke had to fix it, but we broke it. Um, yeah, that you won't see that anymore. Uh, you know, that's okay. And, John Ashley, if you get lonely, we figured out. The attic is big enough that I have my my like human real desk over in the corner. That's off camera and you could sit there and td the show like I could like, just right there. So if you get lonely, come over, leo.

0:06:47 - John Ashley
If you get lonely, I can, I might be more likely john, can you come td from here as long as there's uh, snacks, snacks and coffee, that's, that's all there's always snacks and coffee, and I'm making my own kabocha now, so everybody drink.

0:07:03 - Leo Laporte
I'm not a kombucha guy. I don't like kombucha. No, I don't blame you, especially homemade. Let's see. What should we talk about? Actually, the big news is the public beta for iOS 18 Mac OS. Sequoia, sequoia, sequoia. Do we say Sequoia, sequoia, sequoia, sequoia, sequoia or Quoia, quoia? Do we say Sequoia, sequoia, sequoia? Sequoia, sequoia, or Quoia, quoia.

0:07:28 - Andy Ihnatko
After the mountain range in Long Island, of course, sequoia you got your Sequoia there.

0:07:32 - Leo Laporte
It's next to Secaucus iOS 18, ipados 18, macos, sequoia, yep, WatchOS 11 and tvOS 18. Indeed, we are in public beta season now. Should we Is what I'm asking you, Jason Snell. Should we? We can, but just because you can doesn't mean you should.

0:07:49 - Jason Snell
So what I would say? Having written so many thousand words about this, now I really want to. It's in perfectly good shape, I think, especially Mac OS. You could run the beta and it would just be a little different, but you wouldn't. Really it's not a big deal, but that's because Apple has exited the era where they put everything in the OS and then some of it was broken, and now they just don't put it in there until it's ready to be mostly functional.

0:08:17 - Leo Laporte
So this is reliable enough that you could put it on a production phone you might be able to.

0:08:22 - Jason Snell
I mean phone is harder because the battery drain right can be serious because they don't necessarily optimize for battery. The advantage of something like the Mac is it's got a big battery and it's a little easier to plug it in wherever you're working Not always. But the downside of that is a lot of the features that you're thinking are going to be in there aren't in there because they've withheld them.

And this year more than ever, because Apple intelligence isn't going to be in there, and this year more than ever because Apple Intelligence isn't going to be in there. There will be some intelligence-related features that will probably be in by the end of the summer, some machine learning features but most of them won't be there until probably early next year. So, yes, it's safe, but don't get too excited, because a lot of the features that you may be thinking of aren't in there. But you know, I'm, I'm running, this is, uh, this mac that I have in front of me is running um sequoia and uh, you know it's, it's got some really nice little features in it. And then there's the stuff that isn't in it anymore. But there's, there's good stuff, there's good stuff in there sixcolorscom.

0:09:20 - Leo Laporte
You have an article. Dan morin has an article you talked about it on the six colors podcast we laid it all out there, spilled a lot of ink. I won't make you recur, you know, go through yesterday where's? Your handwriting being fixed yeah, on ipad os.

0:09:34 - Jason Snell
There are only three features on ipad os, but the handwriting stuff is one of them and handwriting, handwritten math notes it doesn't fix it much it doesn't, but it is kind of weird. Right to see it rewriting my handwriting as it goes, because my handwriting is not very good to begin with, and it seems to emulate that pretty well by fixing it, but still making it kind of unreadable. I find that hilarious. Um, on the mac, though, like iphone, mirroring is really great.

That's, that's I really want you need the betas of both ios and mac os in order to use iphoneing and there are a few things that are not quite hooked up yet, but it works and it really works well. It's a continuity feature, so it uses Bluetooth, I think, to make the connection and then Wi-Fi to do the data streaming. But you can be, your phone can even be 20, 30 feet away and you click iPhone mirroring and the way it's going to work is, if you get a notification from your phone on your Mac, you can literally just click that notification and it will launch the app in iPhone mirroring in a little window that looks like an iPhone but it's on your Mac. They did a really good job. It is extremely, extremely useful, and I'm somebody who parks my phone nowhere near my desk, so I'm really looking forward to this because I think, oh man, okay, I got to look at that on my phone and I got to get up and go over and do two things and then come back to my desk and I'm not going to have to do that.

It's a nice, just a nice little feature. It also rotates. It auto rotates. This is actually a thing that they need to do, is the problem is you can't manually rotate it and you need to be able to do that, because sometimes an app is much better when it's horizontal, and right now it only rotates when it is forced into horizontal. But it's summer. They could fix that. I hope they do.

0:11:11 - Leo Laporte
You're playing the train game on here.

0:11:13 - Jason Snell
Yeah, that's Mini Motorways, which is a fun little game, and it streams. The video is streaming at full quality and it's streaming audio along with it, and the audio there's no lag.

So it's like your phone is on your mac is basically what it is. It's a. You can't get enter jingle mode, which kind of bugs me, because you can't add a screen enter jingle, you can't enter jiggle mode, jiggle mode, jiggle mode, sequoia, sequoia. You can't do that. Uh. And then there's, you know, they put the tiling feature in, which is it's great. It's not going to satisfy people who are like super power user tilers, nor should it. It is for general people and it's like how do you want to tile and arrange your windows? You can do it with your keyboard, you can do it with a menu item, you can do it by clicking on the little blue dot, you can do it by dragging and dropping, like they covered it all.

0:12:00 - Leo Laporte
All it's a really good basic everybody who has a mac has swish or rectangle. I don't think so.

0:12:06 - Jason Snell
I I don't think so. A lot of people just don't bother, and that this might be enough. And for the people who care enough to have one of those third parties, all the third party apps will do more than this right like.

0:12:15 - Leo Laporte
This is basic cast.

0:12:17 - Jason Snell
I can type in center half and so forth yeah, but but now any stock mac you'll be able to do whatever. It is like globe control, right arrow and the window just goes to actually looks like a short version of the rectangle menu.

0:12:29 - Leo Laporte
I come to think of it, yeah yeah, that's exactly what it is.

0:12:31 - Jason Snell
So, yeah, I can. I can just sit here with my keyboard and and nice and kick the kick I wish you could see it.

0:12:36 - Leo Laporte
It's yeah, you can't see it but, just imagine you're just using the keyboard.

0:12:40 - Jason Snell
It's good. It's again like it should have been there a long time ago.

0:12:43 - Leo Laporte
It's been on windows for years. It's good.

0:12:45 - Jason Snell
Yeah, they built a passwords app that's across. Oh no, this is okay. Yeah, background replacement Wait a minute.

0:12:53 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, now you may say, Jason, you don't look so comfortable in your garage, but he's not in his garage.

0:12:58 - Jason Snell
I'm sitting in a camp chair under a redwood tree not a sequoia, a redwood tree in my backyard, but Apple's using all of their very good object detection, subject detection and video in their whole video pipeline. They've been playing with this for a couple of years. With a video pipeline, you know your cameras on the Mac no longer just go to software, they go through Apple's pipeline and then come out to your software and so they can do. They can now do background replacement, and it's better than the ones that are in other apps.

0:13:28 - Leo Laporte
It really is Question from Jeff Shapiro watching live on YouTube right now. Does Passwords? Is it available the new Passwords app?

0:13:36 - Jason Snell
Passwords app is available.

And does it replace Keychain or what exactly yeah it's basically Keychain access, I think is still there, but it's there for like encryption keys and stuff that are that are advanced, that almost no users are ever going to use. They move the wi-fi stuff from there into the passwords app and then everything else is coming from the settings password section and they poured it into the passwords app. It's a 1.0. I imported my passwords and it got real sluggish, like it was like 2000 passwords. I can't cope and they need to. I mean, again, it's beta. Perhaps it will be fixed. Perhaps I just needed to wait, but it was. It was. That's disappointing.

0:14:13 - Leo Laporte
So don't rush into that. Keep your.

0:14:15 - Jason Snell
Yeah, that's a that's a flag I've got for the end of the summer. Is on the password set, but it does work.

0:14:22 - Leo Laporte
And then my other complaint about it. This is to be expected. By the way, as you lose battery life on your phone, you also lose performance, because they're not yet optimizing.

0:14:30 - Jason Snell
Yeah, that's exactly it. That's some of the last screws to get tightened down, so I think that they will fix it. I hope that they will fix it, but I will say, because they built it in, presumably, swiftui. It runs on Mac and iPad and iPhone and Vision OS. It runs on all of them. However, I will say it seems to me that maybe it was not thought through on the Mac and the iPad, because each of the individual items in the Password Manager, you can click on them but you can't drag them. And the problem with that is you've got the little smart groups off on the left side. You can't like drag one out and assign it to a group.

And you really want to, and you really want to, and being able to drag something out to assign it isn't just a little ui thing, but they got it like it. That's one of those things really.

0:15:13 - John Ashley
Oh, this is an iphone app. This is why they do betas, but this is why it's a beta. They get feedback from people like Jason.

0:15:17 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I will judge them more harshly in september than I will right now, right, so don't judge them, but I'm you know now you've really uh, kind of tempted me. This seems like there's a lot of I don't know quality of life features, especially in sequoia, like this with safari, to be able to take embedded video and zoom it full screen even if it doesn't want.

0:15:35 - Jason Snell
Yeah, some websites are not going to like it, but they're basically detecting that, the playing video on the page and they're zooming it out to the full screen and dropping in a dark background and giving you standard mac os uh, video controls, including. I like I have a little bookmark lit in order to kick a video into picture and picture, but you don't need that anymore because if you put it in viewer mode, among the standard controls is picture and picture and you can take any video from any web page out into picture and picture as well. If you want to do that, it's uh, yeah, it's, it's very smart. I we'll see how, if there's, if websites try to fight it and try to break it, but uh, it's a good feature, inevitably, yeah, why I don't know, but they will yeah, and then you get your usuals.

The tap backs now cover all emojis and stickers and stuff and it all just works as a tap back. And uh again, you need the latest betas to have that. Old old people on the non-beta OSs will get a message that says Jason reacted to that message with sunglasses, smiling face. It's like, okay, less exciting, but this fall, when we're all on the current versions, it'll be great. It'll be a utopia of tap backs.

0:16:40 - Leo Laporte
Are you tempted, Andy?

0:16:43 - Andy Ihnatko
To install the beta.

0:16:45 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, definitely, I think I might.

0:16:47 - Andy Ihnatko
Apple's public betas have generally been pretty good. Like Jason said, they've stopped kind of treating it like a beta beta and started treating it more like a trial balloon, like let's have these features stable and let's see how people react to it and we'll get data on where we screwed up and where we need to put some more work in. That said, I still wouldn't put it on my one iPhone, one of the biggest things. Maybe Jason might have something to say about this.

But one of the things that doesn't get talked about a lot is that battery optimization is not often one of the earliest things to get locked down. So people might think oh, my god, this next verse is going to be a disaster because my battery went down like 20% in like one hour. It's like no, that's just because there's there's a, there's a whole bunch of fine tuning that goes on and they probably haven't bothered doing that yet until they get something sometimes close to golden master. And yeah, losing two, losing like an hour and a half or 45 minutes of battery life is very, very bad when you're 30 minutes short of having a full battery and you need to call an Uber.

0:17:55 - Jason Snell
That's the number one reason not to put your iPhone on the beta is that it may kill your battery. This effect where every time you do a new version and the betas are coming fast and furious in the summer there's a certain number of things on the system that need to be re-indexed and recalibrated and rebuilt, and it's just like when you get a new phone and you migrate. You're like oh, I can't believe it's so hot and the battery is so bad. This phone is a disaster. It's battery hot gate again, right. And it's like well, no, every iphone when. And it's like, well, no, every iPhone when and every Mac. They do a whole bunch of spotlight indexing. It's one of the reasons that when you've got all your data on device and not in the cloud, they have to reanalyze it and re-index it all the time. So every beta can do that too, depending on what they change. And so, yeah, battery life is not at its best in the summertime.

0:18:46 - Leo Laporte
So what do you do? If you want to do this, go to beta. What is it? Betaapplecom? I think so, and then you're going to get you know. You have to log in into your Apple account. You don't have to be a developer now, though right.

0:19:01 - Jason Snell
That's. The point is, this is a public beta. That's right. You sign up for the beta program and then basically it's much easier. Now, once you sign up with your Apple ID, I believe all you have to do is go to the software update pane in your device and you will be given a new option of what set of updates to receive. And it's public beta. And then you go there and press update and then you're on the public beta chain. It used to be.

You had to do a lot more weird stuff, like now I got a profile yeah, but now it's a lot easier to do and then, and then when you want to hop off, you literally just go back there and say, no, I just want to be on the release version and except on watch os, where you cannot hop off the bus.

0:19:39 - Leo Laporte
You are stuck on this bus.

0:19:41 - Jason Snell
You can't, you can't, you can't go backward off of you, can't revert, but like at the end of the summer, you'll get it. If you want to stop getting betas, you can say, just give me the final version and then it will just stay there so everything but the watch you can revert, you can go back to it's a lot harder on ios and ipad os than it is on mac os.

Mac os is the best because you could even literally install it on an external drive and boot to it right and and or or partition your disk and have like you have options on the mac that you don't have on an iphone or an ipad maybe I'm just gonna do this right now.

0:20:14 - Leo Laporte
Should I be crazy? Should I be wild?

oh, leo oh so, uh, please enroll your ios device, okay, archive, archive a backup. You'll report to Johnny Knoxville. I'm a crazy man. Stand back. You go to general and you go to software update. And then, oh, I've always seen this beta updates thing. I didn't realize that's all it is, and now I can choose. You could see the choices that I have. Can you see over my shoulder? Oh yeah, there you are the choices I have. Is the iOS 18 public beta developer? I don't want the developer beta.

0:20:57 - Jason Snell
What they do is the developer beta sort of comes out first, and if it's terrible and breaks things, then they don't release it as a public beta and so it's safer on the public beta.

0:21:10 - Leo Laporte
Or I can do the ios 17 public beta which yeah, 17.5 or whatever they're on now.

0:21:12 - Jason Snell
Oh, I guess so it is. There is a yeah, there's like bug fixes that come out, but it's really boring, don't do it, okay.

0:21:15 - Leo Laporte
So I've checked that box and, oh look, that wasn't long update now, right there now, all right, let's do it. Johnny knoxville. All right, don't look at my password, it's secret.

0:21:27 - Jason Snell
By the way, one, two, three, four, five, yeah, nine, eight, seven, six. What was kanye?

0:21:40 - Leo Laporte
sometimes you just want it to be easy. You know you don't want to have to remember. Alex, you are an interesting position because I know on the one hand you'd love to do the latest and you are easily a cutting edge guy, but the other hand you have work to do.

0:21:52 - Alex Lindsay
I have to admit, on my Macs I tend to hang back and I will probably put one of my Mac minis on the beta just so I can watch it and I can open it up and play with it On my, I have to admit, on my iOS devices I'm super aggressive, so I'm on I'm not quite on the developer, I'm not that aggressive. I guess when I say super aggressive I'm, I jump on the betas pretty quickly. I mean my, my iOS stuff lives in the beta all the time and when something doesn't work, I go how can Apple do this? And I go oh right.

I it's hard to remember sometimes, but I'm always on the beta, like you know, because you can just set it to be like I just changed it to 18, so it's in the process of doing stuff. I realized I was like why didn't I get that? And then I realized I hadn't updated it saying I want to jump to 18. So my ios devices are updating right now. But yeah, I'm on ios, I don't do a lot that I feel like is you know, that important? I mean it's important, but I've got also more than one phone. So I, you know, so I, I, if something goes wrong, I've usually got another phone that's sitting in my backpack.

0:22:50 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, this is my one and only iphone. I'm taking a little bit of a chance on this.

0:22:54 - Alex Lindsay
I have a two ipads, you'll be, okay, I'll be okay yeah, I've got a couple ipads and a couple phones and so for me I'm going to it goes crazy.

0:23:02 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, actually okay is sequoia, a spanish word? I think it's, I think it's probably indigenous I think, it's actually, I think it's from. It's an indigenous word, so that's why we don't really know how to pronounce it, because could be that's not how the indians, that's my guess. Sequoia sempervirens um. So it depends. Yeah, I mean that would.

0:23:26 - Jason Snell
It would depend the pronunciation of respect to you From Sequoia the name of the Cherokee Indian who invented the Cherokee syllabary.

0:23:32 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, oh, wow, chief Sequoia.

0:23:36 - Jason Snell
Yeah, there you go Huh.

0:23:39 - Leo Laporte
Let me pronounce, let me press the English pronunciation.

0:23:42 - Jason Snell
Sequoia Huh, sequoia, sequoia, sequoia. That is not right this is from dictionarycambridgeorg, so it's obviously a british person trying to sound american because they would sound probably extra use in there sequoia, sequoia, sequoia sequoia, sequoia, yeah, anyway, I've also just found a web page that says it wasn't actually named for sequoia, but regardless, I believe that it it's intended to be from a? Uh, a native american q u like seattle.

0:24:17 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, but see, this is the problem when you um romanize the uh exactly. Use a roman alphabet to represent sounds that aren't in the language. Yeah, is you get it happened in chinese too. You get weird pronunciations exactly. So I don't know how well q u is the weird like. Is that quoya or koya right? Who knows who cares, but at least you've heard it here first, unless you already did this science of quoya on the uh, on the six colors podcast I'm sure we did. I'm trying to find something you haven't done I.

0:24:47 - Jason Snell
I look, you know, outside of the three of the people on this show, most of the people I do podcasts with do not live in california and do not understand our strange ways, our weird ways I have to explain how california.

0:25:00 - Leo Laporte
It's pronounced like quinoa. No, it's not, not even close. Uh, John Ashley, uh, he's sitting right around the corner here in my. I wish that we could do that. You could.

0:25:16 - John Ashley
Really seriously, john, you should come up and I mean you kind of have to bribe me at this point.

0:25:21 - Leo Laporte
Oh oh, it's that way, it's. It's that way, is it? It's like that, making it that way where's my bribe report? Uh well, you're watching mac break weekly with uh mr Jason Snell in studios. Lovely to have you. We lit in the library. How hot is it now in Rhode Island? 94 today, yikes, and it's humid. It's not a dry heat.

0:25:53 - Andy Ihnatko
And it's humid. Actually, I read something yesterday that made me appreciate the humidity, because apparently one of the reasons why hikers keep dying is because not only are they dehydrated, but they don't appreciate that the dry heat means that when they sweat they lose it doesn't stick to them.

They lose that, they lose that stuff. So I'm going to take that as a positive, because I'm clinging to anything. I bought a pair of shorts today. You know, I went to Prime Day and even though I don't want to be the Kevin Smith sort of like middle-aged guy who's wearing shorts and looks like he just came out of karate practice in middle school but I'm tired of wearing long pants outside I bought a pair of shorts.

0:26:33 - Leo Laporte
Did you get a special Amazon Prime Day deal? Oh yeah, $33.99 for the Bellens Wrangler Authentics Twill Cargo. Oh, only $18.40.

0:26:49 - Andy Ihnatko
I mean Dockers for $19, 19 instead of 25. Oh, and I did check. You know I'm tempted that wasn't one of them scam thing. So I I did. I did draw the line of cargo shorts because I thought you were a cargo short kind of guy.

I like the tactical pants and I'll I'm not proud of this. Okay, it's just that I live at my, my, my building is in like a very, very touristy, like New England, like seashore. I get lots and lots of people like middle-aged people who are like just having a good weekend, and the people I see my age, wearing cargo shorts that I'm I'm not impressed with the look and I don't, and I and they're better looking people than I am and I figure that I will look even shabbier than that. So, for shorts, for tactical pants, yes, I will take all the pockets you want. For cargo shorts no, I will take something that looks like I actually want like golf pants, like Payne Stewart used to wear, you know, high socks, and just to say that, yes, I look goofy, but that was a tactical choice, that was not something that I just can't feel my full intent.

0:27:50 - Alex Lindsay
If I, if someone sees me in anything other than a tactical shorts or not tactical shorts, but but cargo shorts and a and a flannel and some version of a flannel shirt or or whatever and barefoot, I've chosen to dress up for you Like, you know, like, like, like that's. That's my natural state is like I got a flannel shirt, a t-shirt underneath it and a and a cargo shorts and that's like, and I'm bare. I'm usually barefoot, and so the if I have anything else on it means that I've decided that I need to like. Whatever I'm doing with you right now is conscious.

0:28:21 - Andy Ihnatko
Yes yes, because I took, I took off my uniform. They only go when I do it here at the studio. It streams to youtube and I'm not. I wasn't joking last time saying that. It's quite amusing to see, like, how I dress. When I'm trying to, I'm trying to create the impression that, yes, he dressed, he tried to make an impression, he tried to look like he made an effort and, unfortunately, this is the best that he could do, given that he did not want not wear a jacket and tie in this weather.

0:28:46 - Leo Laporte
Well, all right, I'm buying some Dockery shorts right now. That's for Amazon Prime Day. It's retail therapy. Retail therapy Because someday it'll be hot here too. All right, You're watching MacBreak Weekly. Oh, I forgot to mention. Alex Lindsay is also here. Office hoursglobal. I forgot to mention. Alex Lindsay is also here. Office hours.

0:29:05 - Alex Lindsay
That's global. It's great to have I ruined everything by jumping into the conversation. That never is true.

0:29:11 - Andy Ihnatko
I got the things all up, I got the you are the MSG of conversation. You make everything taste better. Nobody knows why.

0:29:20 - Leo Laporte
And then you get a headache and sweats later, right, okay, you are the umami of any podcast. He's the umami, you're my umami. Will you be my umami? I like it. Ios did add a new feature that no one thought about, apparently. Just seen Chance Miller writing a 9 to 5 Mac a new recovered album to the Photos app for finding lost or damaged content. That's a nice idea.

0:29:48 - Jason Snell
Yeah, I wonder if that also plays off on the idea that they had those issues with things coming back that people weren't happy about yeah. Because now, if they find something that they're not sure of its status, they can kick it into the recovered album. That's probably right.

0:30:02 - Leo Laporte
It exists alongside the already existing, recently deleted. When you update to iOS 18, ipados 18, macos Sequoia, your device will automatically scan recoverable photos and videos. Is it possible? They had this feature, not quite turned on, but had it, and that's why it happened.

0:30:23 - Jason Snell
It's possible or it's possible that this was in response we should put not put those in the actual library, but put them somewhere special If we don't know their status, so people can judge whether they need to keep it or delete it.

0:30:35 - Leo Laporte
This is that database corruption bug in iOS 17.5 that caused people to surprise, surprise, surprise Find some photos they had thought they had deleted on their phone. That could really be.

0:30:49 - Andy Ihnatko
That could be embarrassing oh no, absolutely there was a. There was a actually a lawsuit in england, uh, five million pounds because a man was cheating on his wife. Bad for him. Uh, he delete, he, he. Uh thought he deleted evidence of the affair. Unfortunately he did not realize that, uh, although he had deleted it, it had already been, like copied over to the iMac in the house. The wife found out about it, got a divorce and he's holding Apple responsible for like not under for not making it clear what deleting actually means. He thought it meant that he goes. It goes the land of ghosts and winds. He's off scott free. It actually meant that, no, you have to run around the house and make sure you're deleting things from other things it's going to be interesting to see how the court rules on that one.

0:31:37 - Leo Laporte
There may be a certain amount of well, there it is. In england they don't have puritans. They sent them all to us, but, uh, there might be some sort of moral objection to his suit. This news from tabula. Remember tabula? Tabula was the thing that was at the bottom of web pages. You may also like yep, and it was those awful like, uh, new, new garbage links. Garbage links. You could eat worms to lose weight.

0:32:02 - Jason Snell
I believe the way that they sold it to us because when I was working a decade ago at idg, they they came in for a presentation. The way they sold it was. Well, we're going to put four links at the bottom of the page and three of them, or two of them, are going to be links to your content that we're algorithmically generating and it's going to drive more traffic to your own site.

0:32:18 - Leo Laporte
I'll take that.

0:32:26 - Jason Snell
And the others will be garbage links that we sell and we get a and you get a cut of revenue. And of course our sales people said, well, great, I get paid if you give us more money. And, uh, the editorial people like me that was. That was why I hated my job is so much of my last couple of years.

0:32:35 - John Ashley
There was arguing yeah, did you win that one or lose that one?

0:32:40 - Jason Snell
you know, I lost some of them, I won some of them, but what? What I I take some strange, perverse pride in is within like a month after I left. All of that crap was just on the website.

0:32:50 - Leo Laporte
You were the last man standing the wall, the final wall, against the web.

0:32:54 - Jason Snell
I guess I was. Yeah, it's you know it's hard.

0:32:57 - Andy Ihnatko
The last honest cop in a deeply corrupt country. He was Serpico.

0:33:02 - Leo Laporte
Is that what you're saying? I mean I understand revenue.

0:33:06 - Jason Snell
You know if you works both sides editorial people, content people think of the content as everything, and it's not just the content. You do need to make money, but I do think that on the web especially, we saw it one more ad unit, one more link that goes somewhere funny, one more weird headline, one more, you know. And the whole thought was like, well, it's more money, why not? And the answer was, yeah, but you're making our product bad and people come for the product. They don't come for your ads, and if you make it too bad, they'll just stop coming.

0:33:55 - Leo Laporte
This is the nice thing about being independent, is you know? Yeah, you got to deal with the revenue issues, but at least you can make those decisions a.

0:34:02 - Jason Snell
A little more holistically and you know I don't want to paint with too broad a brush. I worked with a lot of people in my 15, 20 years in corporate media, especially when I was at a high level and when I was on that fence trying to fight those battles, and some of them got it and some of them didn't. And you know a tendency for a lot of media businesses to promote to positions of authority sales guys and the sales guys they're great at selling ads and they view the world a certain way. And some of those guys, when they got to the top and they were almost always guys, I have to say when they got to the top they said you know what? I need to look at the big picture here, and others didn't.

0:34:42 - Leo Laporte
So there you go. Well, the reason I bring this up is ad tech giant tabula has struck a deal with apple to power this from axios, to power native advertising within apple news and apple stocks. And this is not a new, reformed, better than ever tabula. This is the same same guy. The founder of tabula told axios, adam singola singolda. Uh, the deal provides new validation for tabula's business rights, axios, which has ballooned to over 1.4 billion dollars annual revenue as of last year. Tabula's effort to build trust with apple across its various teams and stakeholders was quote a multi-year process.

0:35:29 - Jason Snell
We wore them down, is what adam is saying we waited until j, Jason and all of Jason type people were gone. We wore them down.

0:35:36 - Leo Laporte
So, as an authorized advertising reseller for Apple News and Apple stocks, taboola will power native advertising placements within these two apps in every market available.

0:35:50 - Jason Snell
So native advertising is a keyword, right, leo? That's the idea of like that's. That's usually what it means, is ads that look like content. So. So it looks like it's a story, but it's actually not a story. It's an ad, and you don't know it. And maybe you don't know until you click, maybe you don't even know then. And so the way I read this is that they're going to be supplying units to Apple news that look like news stories but aren't.

0:36:16 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, Great, that rumor about the star of Punky Brewster. It's true?

0:36:22 - Jason Snell
No, the rumor about this 80s sitcom star we won't even tell you who it is.

0:36:26 - Leo Laporte
You won't believe what they look like now.

0:36:29 - Jason Snell
Oh man, you won't believe it. This is. You know, this is the dark side. They hired a guy. Apple hired a guy to be ahead of ad revenue, and I don't blame him for looking at the world this way, because that's his job. My question would be who is there to stop him and say you're adding more junk to Apple news and again you're making the product worse and maybe we need to draw a line somewhere? And so when people came to me, I wrote a column, like a year ago on Macworld, about how it was inevitable that, as Netflix and Disney and everybody else added cheaper ad versions of their streaming service, that it was inevitable that Apple would do the same. And everybody was like no, no, no, no, no, no. Apple TV Plus is never going to have ads. It's a premium service. Apple's better than that. And I look at a deal like this and say don't believe me, it's going to happen, because it's another rock that they can turn over to generate some more revenue to put under services. That's it.

0:37:25 - Leo Laporte
Taboola struck last year a 30-year deal with Yahoo 30 years talk about cockeyed optimism.

0:37:34 - Jason Snell
Yeah, 30 years, 30 years yahoo 30 years from now.

0:37:38 - Leo Laporte
You'll you. That's all you'll see is you won't believe how, how these podcast stars look today.

0:37:43 - Alex Lindsay
Oh my god well, the funny thing is is it only works when everybody does it, because, like, for instance, I, you know people, there's a certain group of people that are willing to pay to not not have any ads, and but they'll all go to somewhere. But as soon as they start showing ads and they're all the. You know people, there's a certain group of people that are willing to pay to not have any ads, and but they'll all go to somewhere, but as soon as they start showing ads and they're all the same again, you know, like with Flipboard, flipboard got to a point where it had so many ads. I was like, okay, I can't do the same. Like I just, you know, like I can't, do you do Apple News? Yeah?

0:38:08 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I use Apple News at some point where you just see all this content.

0:38:11 - Alex Lindsay
That's not well, if I start clicking on, the main thing is is that if I start I'm pretty good at like I go to a web page and I see promoted, you know, content across the bottom and I just go, okay, well, that's all junk, you know, and I just kind of ignore all that stuff that's down there, you know, and seeing nobody looks at the at the chum boxes anymore.

0:38:28 - Leo Laporte
We know enough not to scroll to the bottom of a page, theoretically so iically. So I imagine that's one of the reasons Taboola is being so aggressive in making new deals and there are new ad units.

0:38:36 - Jason Snell
I've noticed a new ad unit on a couple of sites that I go to that when you do a swipe back to go back out of the web view, they intercept the swipe back and put up a whole page of. Here are other things you could read that is full of that same lousy.

0:38:51 - Alex Lindsay
Well, and then and then you have the in in Apple news. You, you get into some and I'm I don't think this is delivered. I don't know who's delivering to what to where, but you open up some article and, man, I can see it's great to see eight ads of exactly the same thing as scrolling Like it's just kind of like okay, I got it.

0:39:18 - Andy Ihnatko
This is why ad blockers is such a complicated thing to talk about that.

If you're doing it because you kind of want to hose the creator out of ad revenue, that's bad. But the technologies that are used to put ads up can often, particularly on a phone, just render the content completely unreadable. There's a little tool accessibility tool in Android so that it will clear off everything but the content on the page that you're looking at, whether it's a web page or whatever, so that your e-reader, your voice, can read it out. And I've got that going 24-7, just because it's actually a floating button. And the number of times I have to tap that button to say get rid of everything but the text, because I can't read this, I mean again, I hate the idea. I'm glad that the ad's at least loaded in before I got rid of them all, but it's like you've got to meet the reader halfway. Like Jason said, there's a point at which you're basically you need money in order to create your content and host your content, but if you do it in such a way that you make your content an unpleasant experience for the reader.

0:40:27 - Alex Lindsay
They're either going to circumvent it or they're going to forget all about you. I think the hard part is that when you're paying for it, though, then you get into this little like I started paying for something that wasn't there, that didn't have that. So like the Amazon. I don't know what it was about the Amazon thing, because it's only $3 a month or whatever but Amazon started throwing ads into Amazon, and then they just said you can get rid of these ads with $3. And I don't know why that made me so angry, but it literally my relationship with Amazon, like in my head, changed overnight. Like I'm just like angry at that company, you know like, and I'm just, you know, like I, because I mean I buy a lot of stuff out of Amazon, and I'm now like I'm frustrated with Amazon. I'm frustrated with, like a lot of their different products.

I get angry about it because of this one weird little thing, but I just felt like, dude, like I already send you a bunch of money. Like I mean, I pay for Amazon prime. It's not like I'm not, you know and then I buy I don't know how much stuff on Amazon and I just felt, like you know, getting nickel and dime for another $3 a month to you know, as ransomware, essentially like it's, like you know, and, and so I think that the this advertising thing is really dangerous for Apple, just because it is so not Apple Like it's just I don't care what they think it's just this is a very un-Apple thing to do, you know, cause it's you know, and and I, and I think that they're going to have a hard time and I think that it's going to be harder. Like I don't even know how to fix the problem of rate audio and podcast, because you know, I was listening to Noah. I listened to Noah, a lot news over audio, and the very first it said this this, this um article was written by this person.

0:41:56 - Leo Laporte
Still, a person.

0:41:57 - Alex Lindsay
But it said but it's being narrated by an 11 labs you know voice, those voices are good and I was like, oh, it sounded great. No, no, it actually sounded better at speed than the human. Yeah, you know, like so, because I'm listening at 2x and so it's sound. It's actually easier for me to understand the machine than it should have actually ai voice.

0:42:11 - Leo Laporte
Side note ai voice is designed for listening at 2x. That'd be interesting.

0:42:17 - Jason Snell
Just a fast-talking voice. A fast-talking voice.

0:42:20 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, yeah, scorsese, you just say I just want the fast-talking voice, I just want it to go really fast.

0:42:26 - Leo Laporte
Because I don't like to listen at normal speed. Everybody sounds drunk when you listen at normal speed.

0:42:36 - Alex Lindsay
Well, it's so crazy when you go, when you slow it back down again. Yeah, but the um. But I realized that at this point, once that really rolls out, um, they, you know everything can be turned into audio immediately. But the problem is, how do you generate revenue against that? Because if you like a podcast, if a podcast reads an ad, like twit does, I have a tendency to just listen through it because it's just, it's just like while I'm walking I'm listening to it. If they cut an ad in, that's the last time I'll listen to that podcast like literally like this podcast has four ads cut into it.

I might just so you know no, you're reading no, sorry, I just. I just said something.

0:43:10 - Leo Laporte
You're not gonna have many podcasts to listen to in the future, Alex, because that is the future of podcast advertising. I'm sad to say it's depressing.

0:43:16 - Alex Lindsay
It's so hard to hear Nobody wants to pay for the host red ads.

0:43:19 - Leo Laporte
I agree, it's horrible. It's why we keep flogging the club because I don't want to do it, right, right, but we don't have a choice.

0:43:28 - Alex Lindsay
This show has zero ads, but if you pay for the club, you don't get it, you don't get it, you don't get anything.

0:43:36 - Leo Laporte
This show, for instance, we have no ads sold on it, which means we're running at a great deficit. It's costing us thousands of dollars to do this episode. I'll be honest with you. The direct ad insertion we do we use a company Lipset owns called AdvertiseCast doesn't't make up the difference. It's pennies on the dollar, but it's better than nothing. Maybe it's not, maybe I should be, maybe I should be Jason Snell here. The problem is I sleep with our ad sales director, so it makes it a difficult, you know if you had to go home with that person.

0:44:08 - Jason Snell
I never tried that one it wouldn't really it's hard. The argument continues look the the thing is it is a balance and it's a hard balance to strike. And it's hard to be that person who has to decide between product quality and revenue Because in the end you are running a business and I think it's interesting there's no product at all if you don't have enough revenue.

0:44:26 - Leo Laporte
Exactly.

0:44:27 - Jason Snell
But there's also how the web maybe broke us a little bit and then how netflix maybe broke us a little bit, because I totally get Alex point. Alex's point about prime video coming and saying we're going to stick ads in it now, and I know why they did that. Right they. If you had been able to opt down to a cheaper option with ads, very few people would have taken them up on it because netflix tried that and they want, and they and right and and it turns out actually they want the ad inventory.

that that's what they want.

0:44:53 - Leo Laporte
They want you to see the ads. You think they make more money on the ads, plus small subscription, than on the higher end subscription.

0:44:59 - Jason Snell
That's exactly right. So that's a challenge. And then we also have this whole idea I got this a lot when we were trying to do you know you pay for it but you still get some ads in it that a lot of people got trained in the digital era to think no, no. Got trained in the digital era to think no, no, paying means I never see any ads anymore. Right, and I had to explain like it doesn't necessarily mean that, because obviously, like a lot of these ad tiers netflix and disney and all that you're still paying and you're seeing ads.

You're just paying less and magazines back in the day magazines were free and they had ads in them and we made money from both the subscript.

0:45:30 - Leo Laporte
dvorak always told me the subscription price you paid for something like Macworld, only paid for the printing. It didn't pay for anything else. You know it's so expensive to make a magazine that the subscription pays maybe to print it, but you still have to pay staff to make the content Right.

0:45:46 - Jason Snell
right, there's this perception that it was free. But no, you lose a lot of money, but you make it up with the advertising or on the newsstand, where you paid a lot more for it.

0:45:54 - Alex Lindsay
Right. But I think the hard part is also the quality of the ads. You know, like that. I know, when I had with Macworld as a good example, that the ads are part of the show, like I'm sitting there reading the thing. But I'm looking at the new releases. Like new releases that aren't editorial are ads, and so I'm looking at new products.

0:46:13 - Leo Laporte
That's why we did the host red ads and we tried to pick stuff that our audience would be interested in. That was a virtuous I thought a fairly virtuous relationship for the first 19 years, but it just doesn't hold anymore because it's really, you know, it's on, it's on the advertisers and their agencies. They just don't want to pay for it. Yeah.

0:46:33 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, so it's. So it'll be interesting to see. I just feel like there's a growing number of people that are kind of holding up away from that process. Now, if they can get to every you know they're getting to Apple, so if they can get to everyone. But I think that there's a lot of people that you know I pay mostly to get out of ads.

0:46:49 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, well, well, but that's the thing. That's why we offer a $7 subscription.

0:46:52 - Alex Lindsay
that's got no ads, and I think that's worth it.

0:47:02 - Leo Laporte
And if everybody who listened paid the $7, it would be far more revenue than the ads. In fact, if 10% of the people who listen, we have what? 750,000 monthly listeners, so 75,000 subscribers, that'd be a good deal. We could expand. We could, you know, we'd go reopen the studio. I mean, no, I would never do that again, but we could do a lot more. The problem, of course, for us is that it's less than 2% subscribed, so I don't know what the answer is. I really don't. I'm, you know, I'm glad I'm an old man, not a young guy, trying to figure out how to do podcasting. You know, I look at my son. It's really interesting. As most of you know, he's Salt Hank. He's an influencer. Paris Martineau said she went to the beach with her 20-something friends and she said yeah, I do this podcast with Leo Laporte, and they didn't know who that was. She said Salt Hank's dad. They go oh hank's dad. They go oh salt hank's dad.

Well, I'm at this point. I'm paul mccartney's previous band. It's like, oh so, uh, he now has big. I mean he has stella artois. He has, uh, you know, big advertisers you have to make like native content. Basically it is native content with the ad in there. You know he had a Stella Artois party.

He told me that there's a problem because Stella Artois tries to do it on the up and up and bills it as adult only content, you know, because it's drinking age and, as a result, instagram immediately takes you don't, nobody sees it, they basically don't run it in their rotation drinking age and, as a result, instagram immediately takes you don't know, nobody sees it, they basically don't run it in their rotation. So the it's really crazy. So there. So now Instagram has incented alcohol companies not to label their content adult, which is an interesting is it unintended, consequence? I don't know, is it so? So ways to do it, but it's native content. Now, by the way, he has the same problem we used to have. You used to have to. Now, when companies say, take our computer or whatever for review, I always say yes when you send me a return, paid return mailer with it. Otherwise I don't want it Because you realize very quickly. First it seems like, oh look, everybody's gonna send me free gear. But it's pretty quickly seems like it's a bad idea.

He gets every food product ever. He has a whole room on his in his apartment dedicated to crap that's unsolicited, that just gets sent to him. Amazing. I said all those peanuts look good. He said don't eat those. They were like bacon, sour cream peanuts. Those are props. Don't eat those. No, they weren't props, they just were bad. But he gets everything he says go through it. Anything you want you can have. I took home some Clover Stornetta tea towels.

0:49:49 - Alex Lindsay
Food influencers is a lot of fun no-transcript.

0:50:26 - Leo Laporte
It's a different world the influencers live in. It's not like yours or mine. In any event, I don't know how we got into this. I was just saying the ad world has changed and I know people are mad that some guy saying you're not reopening the studio Well, goodbye Permanently. Says Minion Monkey in our Twitch stream. Goodbye Permanently. Like okay, fine. When you pay seven bucks a month, you can say that Join the club and you can yell at me Go ahead, eddie.

0:50:57 - Andy Ihnatko
Oh, I'm just yeah, but I mean getting back to like Taboola and Apple advertising. You know, I mean one of my trigger phrases when I see like either people online or even like people like who are commentators or reviewers, saying that, oh well, they react to something that Google or Samsung or any Microsoft, oh Apple, would never do that. Well, guess what? Apple would definitely do that. But the fact remains that they are still protective enough of the user experience to say that, okay, we want the money, we love the money, we like money in general. We're building a spaceship campus, khao's dough and the custom pencils you can only get in the special Apple store are not covering our money influx, but nonetheless, we're not going to make things outwardly terrible, like inserting ads into the Finder, into the operating system, like Microsoft has done.

But the thing is once Apple News a service that you pay for. If it should become a mixture of, oh well, if I have to do that horrible thing that I hate, which is I'm trying to evaluate which of these is an actual news story and which is something that was designed to, was either SEO, optimized AI generated, some sort of a trick to get me to click, even though this is extremely low value content. That is just something I don't even want to see, Even if it's extra duty cycles in my brain that I cannot afford to spare, particularly when there's so many things to panic about when I'm reading the actual news.

The problem is I hate the feeling I'm getting tricked.

0:52:30 - Leo Laporte
You're going to get, but yeah, so remember. Actually it's interesting because Forbes did that for a while, right, forbes had a lot of native content that the contributors paid for and you had to really become good adept at distinguishing the editorial content from Forbes writers and the and the third party stuff. That was just awful garbage and it bit them in the butt. I noticed Forbes has backed way off the course. They have a paywall now all of a sudden, but but that does not necessarily native content is not good for the brand, I think, in the long run. I really don't.

0:53:05 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, yeah yeah, and I think maybe it is on tiktok but not, it's not good for the brand.

0:53:07 - Leo Laporte
On other, no, it's not. I don't even know if it's that. I mean I think it's bad for tiktok. You don't't notice.

0:53:11 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, because you can get past it so fast. It's so funny. I realized that when I'm watching TikTok I can identify an ad in less than a second. It is amazing. It's just like it pops up and I immediately know it's an ad and I just go to the next one and I don't even know what it is in my lower brain, that. So I think that that is less of a problem there, because you can get past it so quickly and it's not confusing the content or whatever. And it happens every three or four.

At this point with TikTok it's like every three or four videos is promoted ad, you know, or some kind of promoted content. But even with the Apple News thing, when they, like you, block a content provider and then they still give you gray squares. So I just feel, you know, like I just feel like that team, I don't know just doesn't feel like they're from Apple, like it doesn't feel like they grew up there. You know, like you, just you feel like something's like kind of clumped onto Apple and it's kind of this, you know, yeah, it's just it's. I think I was excited about Apple News when it first started because it was really nice and every iteration makes me less excited.

0:54:18 - Leo Laporte
It's not getting better, it's getting worse, samsung is watching Apple closely and has decided to copy them in every possible way, not just with the phone, but now their Galaxy Watch is an Ultra. It's called Ultra, the Galaxy Watch Ultra. Actually an Ultra. Yeah, you know, you wanted an Ultra, you, you don't have an iphone here, get this one.

0:54:41 - Andy Ihnatko
It's round, but it's an ultra, yeah, and the styling is kind of like the ultra too. As much as you can, when you're starting with a round, watch face, because it still runs the same os. Uh, yeah, that was the samsung unpacked of it last week.

Not only that, but even the earbuds were like airpods yeah, everything now they, now they have like the set of beans that stick entirely inside your ear. Now it has like the, the drop down, what they call the blades. So now you just like with the, with the airpods, to uh they, they squeeze you, stroke them, you do that kind of thing. So, yeah, that's not a great look. I mean it's, it's, it's, uh, I'm glad that there is a rugged, uh, there's an, there's another ruggedized, like adventure. Hey, I'm going to jump off of cliffs and I'm going to be eaten by bears, but I want my body to be found. You know, I want my, my watch to survive so they can find my, my body and give my camera to people. Uh, watch.

Now it's good that there's one of those available for for android users as well as as iphone users. But, yeah, you get you start to wonder why, uh, why steve jobs would get so utterly non-linear in his reaction to samsung. Yeah, with the way that they would like, you know what. The lawsuits may be a bit much, but I understand how, institutionally, there is not a whole lot of like timidity about saying you know what, that's a good idea, we like the looks of those, we're just going to copy that.

0:56:02 - Leo Laporte
If you can't beat them, join them, and you know, it is completely possible that Apple has the best design and or the best. They did it right, and so it just turns out everybody's going to do it the same way.

0:56:14 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, I mean, I did think not to get back to like ancient history, but I thought that Apple was being a bit cheeky when they were saying that the idea of a rounded rectangle with a button at the bottom of it is no. No, this is an Apple innovation design. It's a signature of the iPhone. And like meanwhile, I'm like, well, I've got a kitchen scale signature of the iphone. And like I'm meanwhile, I'm like, well, I've got a kitchen scale. The predate predates the iphone by three years. That is a rounded rectangle with a button at the bottom of. It's a squircle. I've got a here's a palm, here's a palm device in my closet that predates the iphone. That is a rounded rectangle with a button.

0:56:45 - Leo Laporte
Okay, fine here's something apple did right they make it easier to switch from google photos to icloud. But can you go in the other direction? Yes, Okay. So this is that Google-Apple meta kind of consortium thing that they announced some months ago is finally bearing fruit, I guess. The data transfer project.

0:57:07 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, this is an organization that's like an independent organization that promotes cross-platform, uh situate cross-platform solutions. Um, they've uh apple, I think. I think the the apple delay was because of google, because, uh, it was possible to import iphotoh uh the icloud iphotoh libraries into google google photos, like a couple of years ago, as a matter of fact, and now if you go into the Apple support page for moving photos, it's always done.

0:57:39 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah.

0:57:39 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, there's not. But now it's just as easy to do it in the other direction, and the Apple support page just basically has a one one-on-one sort of list of here's if you want to move it from one phone to another. Here is going from Android to iPhone. Here's from going from iPhone to Android. It's a good thing. It's in the best interest of both. Why?

0:57:55 - Leo Laporte
did they do?

0:57:56 - Andy Ihnatko
this Is this a preemptory because of regulation or are they really being nice about it? I don't think, I don't. I think that at the end they realized that it does, both sides realized it doesn't cost us anything and it gives us something that we don't have. Like if you, it's a very, very big deal if someone switches phones and they've got, and they they lost, five years worth of photos, right, that's unsynced and that's, I guess I, I, I go back to the word churlish. If you're making it unnaturally difficult to make that kind of transfer a, you're being mean to your users, because if you're, whoever you, whoever you're preventing from switching to Android, you're also preventing an Android person from switching to iPhone. And, as you said, this is the sort of thing that it's easy for them to fix and also a very, very easy thing, if they don't fix it, for regulators to leap upon when they're really on your back about promoting lock-in.

0:58:53 - Leo Laporte
By the way, it does it cloud to cloud. You don't have to download Google takeout and import enough photos, which I've done and is a very painful process. The transfer does not delete the photos from Google photos. You keep those as well, apple. This is the Apple page. The Apple page says the transfer process might take between several hours and a few days, depending on how many photos and videos you have, and all you have to do to do it is go to Google's takeout page and, if you're assigned, I guess you have to be signed into your Apple account or it'll. It'll give you that as an option. Go to Google takeout, follow the instructions to start an export from Google Photos, choose Apple iCloud Photos I see as the destination and sign up with your Apple.

0:59:36 - Andy Ihnatko
ID Seems good. Congratulations to the Data Transfer Initiative. They were like remember when Sinatra finally got Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis get back together. The Data Transfer Initiative is the Frank Sinatra that got Apple and Google to get together, make up and give us a tool so we can actually enjoy our photos on both platforms.

0:59:56 - Leo Laporte
All right Moving right along. Apple has been caught up in this drag net.

1:00:08 - Jason Snell
We learned that Dun dun, dun, dun, Dun, dun dun dun.

1:00:13 - Leo Laporte
I was working the late shift on and I discovered that AI had been used, had been trained on Apple information. Alex Lindsay was the desk sergeant. Yes, creators claim their videos are used without their knowledge. That's what happens when you take drugs Apple and video you're drifting into Dan Aykroyd YouTube videos to train AI. Okay, this has been a problem with open AI and people have complained. Now, apparently, others are doing it.

1:00:48 - Andy Ihnatko
It's not necessarily that Apple has been venal and desperate. There's a corpus of, there's a data set called the pile that's been around for years and years and years. It's an 800 and something gigabyte pile of literal. Literal pile of sources of text that are kind of shockingly diverse, because includes things like GitHub, stack Exchange Project, gutenberg, wikipedia, but also open subtitles. Also Enron, the Enron email emails from Enron, the Enron case that were made public. These are it was an academic resource that was published like in 2012,. I think I've got it written down here, but I don't know what it is. But basically it was 800 gigs, gigs, gig of corpus of training materials that lots and lots and lots of different ai models are trained on. As a matter of fact, it used to include a whole bunch of like, actually copyrighted books that, uh, that was like swiped from a pirate book site until again, book publishers said, yeah, we don't want our books to be fed into this, you shouldn't have copies of this anyway.

1:01:53 - Leo Laporte
This was open. Ai anyway actually wrote a uh program which we use now called whisper, yes to to take transcribe youtube videos so they could import the text. Uh, they didn't want to use google's built-in subtitles, I guess whisper is much better than it's very, very good sometimes.

Yeah, you use it, yeah yeah, according to wired, our investigation found subtitles from 175,536 youtube videos siphoned for. More than 48,000 channels were used by anthropic nvidia, apple and salesforce. So what it is is a data set called youtube subtitles. Uh, educational videos from con academy mit harvard, the wall street journal, npr, bbc, also the late show with colbert last week, tonight with john, oliver and jimmy come alive. Gotta get that in your ai, especially if you want to tell jokes.

1:02:49 - Andy Ihnatko
Proof news found material from mr beast, marquez, brownlee, jack's septic eye and pewdiepie um wow, you know it's from 2020 and the and the youtube's the youtube subtitles are only one half of one percent of the entire pile, so it's not as though they were necessarily diving against this as a target. I don't. I read the article and I compared it against what I knew about the pile. I don't remember being right on what it was, of course, but I'm trying to figure out what is new stuff and what is just. Hey, there's this data set that everybody's been using, and it turns out that Apple and a whole bunch of high-profile users are using it too. People have a right to be angry about it anyway, because, once again, you a right to be angry about it anyway, because, once again, you create this content not to train other AI models. You create content for your own good and for the good of your listeners and your users, and even if it is just one half of 1% of this data, that's not a good look. I'm still kind of surprised that Apple didn't decide to do something that was closer to what Adobe was doing.

If they were able to set their own timeline for putting a large language model together, they could have just licensed everything. Is there a source of data? That is at least not necessarily creator-specific or source-specific. It's more like hey look, the entire Wikipedia is okay, we'll say that it's there for everybody to use everywhere. And are there other piles of data that they could have gotten that they could have actually licensed?

Again, adobe was in a different situation that they're creating creator tools that they then have to promise their users that, hey look, if you use our generative AI to create a logo for a product or a product label, we have to be able to guarantee you that you have the right to use that material. So the stakes for Adobe was way, way higher, but I'm sure that there was a lot of discussion inside of Apple of how is it going to bite us in the butt later on if it's found out that we too are just one and one other another ai company that used copyrighted original creative material to train an ai to create stuff that is going to put creators out of business. That's not a good look. It might be impossible to avoid, but I'm surprised that apple didn't get ahead of this a little bit.

1:05:10 - Leo Laporte
They should just put creators in that giant press that they use to create the ipad pro, and then it's all over. Andy, I think the answer is because they didn't get ahead of this a little bit. They should just put creators in that giant press that they use to create the iPad Pro, and then it's all over.

1:05:16 - Jason Snell
Andy, I think the answer is because they didn't have time, because they were behind and they were desperate.

1:05:21 - Leo Laporte
They may not even have known. They may not.

1:05:24 - Jason Snell
This is all a giant pile of they said on stage at their thing with iJustine after the announcement that they were using the open web.

1:05:38 - Leo Laporte
This is a common thing that these companies do is they say well, it's the open web. Microsoft's head of AI even said that means open, open, free free of wrong.

1:05:43 - Jason Snell
I get it to a point because this is the argument with something like like Google search that we're not really using your content as much as using our knowledge of what content. You have to generate a database that points to your content. But I think the AI training people took that and ran with it and I'm really sensitive to the idea that, without any consent, they took the content of the Internet and used it for their own purposes to build their own tools to get rich. Essentially, it's a business to make profits and that's what troubles me about this whole story is that you get executives coming out and saying, well, if it's on the internet, essentially you're giving it away, and that happened in the last couple of weeks. If it's on the internet.

1:06:30 - Alex Lindsay
You're giving it away.

1:06:32 - Jason Snell
And that's not true the last couple of weeks. If it's on the internet, you're giving it away, and and that's not true if it's on the internet, it is under copyright, unless explicitly licensed under something else. And I am I am deeply troubled when you start building ai tools to replace creators or to generate profits for yourself, but not point at the source material. That's where it gets really disturbing, because it is what google does with a search right. The difference is the quid pro quo right.

This is why I never really back to the I never really love the idea, like the google book search idea, which was which was you? We have the copyrights on books, so you can't index them. I always thought that was unfortunate because it wasn't trying to replace the book, it was trying to let people find what was in the book so they could go get the book. And but a line is crossed when you start building out ai summaries or building out knowledge bases that are based on the knowledge on the internet.

1:07:20 - Andy Ihnatko
But there's no copyrighted and there's no link and there's no quid pro quo, they're just taking it.

1:07:24 - Jason Snell
and likewise for artwork on the internet and videos on the internet, like all of those things are copyrighted. And there's a whole debate about robotstxt, which is, first off, apple didn't say they were crawling for an AI training purpose until after the fact. So they did it after the horse was out of the barn. And second, existence or not of robotstxt does not change my copyright on my work.

1:07:52 - Andy Ihnatko
It doesn't change it one bit does not change my copyright on my work. It doesn't change it one bit. Yeah, the arrogance of saying it sounds naive, but at least be a little bit aware that you're doing something. That's kind of sneaky, or at the very least, gray, is when you defiantly say that, oh no, well, you put it on the web and so therefore, you're giving away to everybody for free. You have no rights to this, you have no copyright to it. I can license it, I can commercialize this, I can turn this into a brand new product if I want to, because you gave what. You gave it away for free. It's too bad that you're not as smart as us, as Microsoft, who can actually monetize things better than you can. Oh well, good luck. Good luck working at Dairy Queen from now on. That's the sort of thing that makes me not want to see the other side of this argument. It's saying that there are we're starting to look at ways of.

There's always been this discussion about how we're running out of content to train AIs with, and this is one of the reasons why YouTube and other streaming services are kind of like this other hill that we can dig apart to find more stuff to train an AI with in terms of information and knowledge and language.

However, we're also past the early point of AI, where we're discovering how inefficient our model training is. Google had published a paper two weeks ago explaining a new method they're coming up with for training AIs, that basically they've trained an AI to take a look at incoming data and reject the data. That's not actually very, very valuable paper because it's doing a good job of saying actually high value content that is being used to train for a long period of time is better than the entire fire hose. From everything, this pile corpus goes back to 2004. That's how deeply it goes. Imagine if I really wish there had been a way for Apple to simply say we're going to figure out a way to do this so that we can have our hands not entirely clean, but at least have a single amount of pride and dignity about the way we do this. We're not just going to be another thief that is breaking into this abandoned house and ripping out the copper pipes.

1:10:07 - Leo Laporte
This was actually a story Wired republished from Proofnewsorg. I want to give Proofnews credit. They quote Dave Wiskus, who's the CEO of Nebula. That's the consortium. Rene Ritchie's part of right.

1:10:19 - Alex Lindsay
Who else uses Proof News?

1:10:21 - Leo Laporte
Before he went to YouTube. It's theft, says Dave Wiskus. It's disrespectful to use creators' works without their consent, especially since studios may use generative AI to replace as many of the artists along the way as they can. Will this be used to exploit and harm artists? Yes, absolutely, whiskas said.

The folks who made this data set they call it the pile did it because they wanted to lower the barriers to AI. They wanted to make this data available to nonprofits-profits, not as people besides big tech, and in fact, uh, it's used, uh by anybody with the power to access it, including academics and other uh developers outside of big tech. The problem is big tech also used it, uh, I guess. Um, so it includes, by the way, not just stuff from YouTube, but the European Parliament, english Wikipedia, even things like Enron Corporation's employee emails that was kind of on the public internet as released as part of a federal investigation in the firm. In other words, everything they could get they put in there. You know, I have mixed feelings because if you don't train AI on everything you possibly can, it's not going to be as good, it's going to be kind of dopey and, as Sam Allman said, if you only train AI on public domain materials. You're going to have a very limited AI.

1:11:50 - Alex Lindsay
And I think that there's a lot more of trying to try this in the court of public opinion because it's unclear whether the court, the United States, will side. And once this is decided legally you know we're at one-tenth the amount of money spent there's a lot of people holding back or going slower than they could go because they're afraid of the copyright issue. And once that's been sorted out, if it turns out that the copyright issue is a big deal, then they're saved their money. If it turns out that they, that copyright is going to not be something that is, that it that is supported by the courts, we haven't seen anything yet. You know like this is, you know like the amount of money that'll flow into the system. So the uncertainty of the copyright is is actually, you know, has held back, what could possibly happen, and I think that it is.

I do think we need to figure out. You know, again, we have been mechanizing the workforce for a long time. So this is a white collar problem instead of a blue collar problem. But I and I think that when we talk, I think a lot of times it's a little hyperbolic to for the people to think they're going to get replaced in Hollywood anytime soon, just because the AI stuff I mean, people talk about that, but when you see what's actually coming out even now and you know it's going to get better, it's hard for humans to write good TV shows, let alone a machine. It's going to take longer than I think people think, but I think that the real challenge is this is the retail solution, which is that people aren't searching or they're not looking. I know that my search habits have changed. You know 90% of the searching that I used to do I just use ChatGPT for you know like, and I know that I'm just, I'm totally like that I don't go to Google anymore. I go to Google after I've done searches on ChatGPT to check on.

1:13:32 - Leo Laporte
ChatGPT Like is this really the?

1:13:33 - Alex Lindsay
case. But but to think about things. You know, I'm using AI to do that and I think that that definitely affects all of those and I, and you know, I I don't know how I mean the problem is is that it's so much more efficient that it's hard not to do that. I, I build pipelines and I'm sitting there talking to it about Resolve and it just tells me it doesn't tell me kind of where to go in Resolve. It tells me exactly what to do. Like this is the step-by-step-by-step-by-step making it up. I don't have to watch someone's video that spends four minutes trying to set me up for what it was going to tell me. You know, like that's the problem also is that the content isn't as efficient utility of AI.

1:14:10 - Jason Snell
I think it's amazing. I use Whisper. It's amazing. I think we risk if we narrow our field a little bit. We risk buying into what some of the people, like Sam Altman, are trying to sell us. He, who has got a very successful company that's worth billions of dollars, he's doing okay, and I see this a lot of times talking to people about Apple, where if there's something Apple doesn't do, they say, oh's, it's too hard and it's like. But if you talk about other things, they're like well, apple's the greatest company in the world and they can do anything they want, but that's too hard, that's too hard. And I, I, just I.

I know that there are very difficult problems with ai and the pace of ai innovation might slow if there are limitations, but I would bet that there are ways to build systems like this that properly cite their sources. If they're an internet search engine like Google that they drive, they attempt to actually drive traffic back to the sources. Or you could create a licensing regime where money goes in a pool and, based on an analysis of how it's used, people who opt into the licensing regime get paid. Or there's a new law that suggests that for stuff like this copyright doesn't apply, but there's some sort of compensation that applies. Like that there are harder things to do that might be more expensive. That could be done, but the AI companies don't want to do them or it's too hard and it's a hard enough problem already, so why do we want it to make it harder? And I get it when you're on the frontier. But at the same time I don't think I buy their argument that it can't be done and people can't be treated fairly by this.

1:15:44 - Alex Lindsay
I think the challenge is what you know, the tragedy of the commons, which is that at this point, the cat's out of the bag and it's going to be very hard for one country to decide. It's almost something that has to be done globally, and that includes China and Russia, you know, and that's going to be very difficult, like, if you slow it down, you're just falling behind. You know, and I think that that's the. You know, I think that that's the hard part is that and again, I think that's part of why the AI companies made it more consumer based and made it more opened quickly is because they got it so embedded into what people are doing. It's hard to get the users to let go. Now, you know, and I think, and I and I do think that there is, you know, things become a lot more efficient. Like one thing that I've I've gone away from is buying pretty much any.

Like I think about this and you know, a lot of food processing is very efficient and it's and it and it. You know you can make meals very quickly, but it's really not very good for you. I've been, I've been thinking about that parallel to chat GPT while I use it Just because, like I buy almost nothing in a box at this point. Like we have these little grape leaves and I was going to, I was like I don't learn how to make grape leaves and I want. My daughter was like this is the last normal thing we have in the house, you know, like you know, like this is the last vestige, or these grape leaves, you know, and because everything else I just make from scratch and I do it and it takes a little bit more time and it's not as efficient as pulling out a box, but that's that food is poison and so that's. But what we're eating is what we're potentially about to start eating. A lot of it's highly processed information.

So I'm wrestling with it as I use it, but I do see both sides of that. I'm I'm wrestling with it as I use it, but I, so I do see both sides of that and I'm wrestling with it just by human beings. What's going to happen to them? But also, uh, you know what happens to the creators and so on and so forth. I don't have the answer yet, but I, I, you know, I think it's. It's going to be a complex problem. You know it's not. This isn't going to happen. There's no. There's no simple answer.

1:17:33 - Andy Ihnatko
I absolutely agree with that, and I think Jason had the point that I really really like, which is that just because something is hard doesn't mean that it is not the right thing to do. It doesn't mean it's not attainable, and it doesn't necessarily mean that you have to expect a company like Apple to do things the hard way and the way that will give you slower results and, in many ways, better results. But the thing is, you have to choose as a company and as a product manager. Where's the line you don't want to cross? What's going to be worthwhile for us? Do we want to be able to stand up at a media event and say that, yeah, you know what, we're going kind of slow. We don't have all the features that Microsoft has in Windows or that Google has on their apps. However, we do our very, very best to make sure that either everything that we're training from is either public domain or we have licensed it appropriately, because at some point you get to the OpenAI. They've actually struck a licensing deal with the New York Times and with the Wall Street Journal. It's not because they have seen God and they're trying to do the right thing. It's because these are huge, huge, huge media organizations that can put the hurt on them and sue them and give them a lot of trouble and prevent them from being able to release things because of, as Alex said, the lack of clarity on what copyright allows a company to do and training stuff.

When it comes to people like Jason and myself and the shows that we do here and YouTube creators and people who have just been blogging for the love of it or for probably not enough money for the past 10 years, it's not okay to steal from them because they don't have the ability to fight back, because it's a crime that you're definitely going to get away with and you're not going to be paying a large penalty for. And this is again. This is not an arrow directed at apple's heart or microsoft or anybody, but there's a point at which you're going to have to step up, even if it's just to yourself shaving yourself in the mirror or doing your hair or whatever and say this is not the way that a young me would have. A young, more idealistic me would have done this. We would have found a way to make things more fair, to basically get our hands as clean as we can possibly get, even if we have to do some kind of corporate things in order to make things happen in order to succeed as a company. Things in order to make things happen in order to succeed as a company.

I just don't think that. All it means to me is that Apple can't present themselves as the shining beacon on the hill that they often like to present themselves as if they're not willing to do the work and make the sacrifices and go slow and not be the number one company and not advance as quickly as analysts want you to advance. If you do want to present yourself as the company that's different from all the other companies ethically responsibly being a good corporate citizen, a good society citizen, a good planetary citizen you have to do that work, and sometimes Apple disappoints because they don't do that work. They have to be what they are, which is a $2 trillion company.

1:20:42 - Jason Snell
I mean just to underline a point of yours. I mentioned the expediency earlier, this idea that they were behind and they had to catch up and they felt like they needed to cut corners in order to get something out there. I think their licensing all that other content shows you that internally they know that there are issues with just scraping everything, but in the end they felt like it was an existential threat to be behind on ai.

1:21:09 - Leo Laporte
So here we are move fast and break things in the eye, and apple, which hasn't traditionally followed that pattern, had to here I think the good news for apple is, if it's ruled that all the way these things are trained is illegal, it it doesn't put them everybody's a level playing field. Everybody gets knocked down a notch. A sinking tide lowers all boats. Yeah, I believe.

I think is the adage technically yes as long as you have a boat uh, apple for a long time required that if you were a browser on ios, you had to use WebKit. They stopped that. I didn't know this, but they stopped saying that in January. Didn't matter to three California residents who sued Apple over App Store practices, including requiring the use of WebKit. They wanted a class action suit against Apple. A class action suit against Apple. They just lost. The California federal court has ruled against the proposed class action suit. Maybe it's moot, since Apple is allowing it.

1:22:07 - Jason Snell
I think it's in the EU only.

1:22:10 - Leo Laporte
I think that's an EU rule, but this was a lawsuit in California though.

1:22:13 - Jason Snell
Because they aren't letting them. Oh, I think that's how that works.

1:22:16 - Leo Laporte
Oh, so in January? Oh yes, yes, in the eu, only for the record, okay nobody's done it in the eu yet.

1:22:24 - Jason Snell
Well, because it's not easy, it's so onerous.

1:22:26 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, exactly yeah the web browser kit. Firefox said that they said. Well, basically, all apple's allowing us to do is develop twice as many browsers, and just limit it to the eu, oh yeah.

It's not a good, it's not a financially sound proposal. The suit also claimed and I'm a little bit kind of also behind this that Apple acted to block the use of progressive web apps, so that you can't replace native App Store apps with a web page. I don't know if they blocked it, but they sure didn't make it easy. They didn't throw all their weight behind PWAs For sure. In February Apple did say PWAs wouldn't be allowed in the EU. Then it changed its mind a month later because I think Marguerite Vestager looked at them with scary eyes. This guy, she's got the real. She could do that too. Boy, she's got the real. She could do that too. Boy.

Judge Richard Seaborg, the US District Court in San Francisco, says for this specific case they don't have legal standing. Okay, so I guess he threw it out only because he don't have standing. He said that Apple's argument for dismissal of the case cast doubt on whether the plaintiffs are the correct class of harmed individuals to bring this case. Plaintiffs can amend. However, they have 30 days to do so. Neither they nor Apple have commented. So the battle I won't use the word rages on it kind of trickles on You're the writer, it rolls on it, justages on. It kind of trickles on, You're the writer, it rolls on, it just rolls on, it rolls the story rolls on, it's rolling.

1:24:05 - Jason Snell
Stay tuned to the MacBreak Weekly for updates.

1:24:07 - Andy Ihnatko
For updates. For updates.

1:24:08 - Leo Laporte
For updates, a show that never ends. Apple did settle the EU case by opening iPhone payment systems to rivals. See, there is. If you didn't believe me, there is Margaret Vestager going. Huh, you will allow it. Who did it? She's the EC's executive vice president, but formerly director of competition, and she has been really a pit bull in requiring companies to be more competitive.

1:24:40 - Jason Snell
Pretty measured settlement, in the sense that it's not saying that Apple should never have invented Apple Pay, but it's saying, now that Apple has invented Apple Pay and has NFC readers on its devices, it needs to allow third parties to find a way to become the default on the NFC reader and have access to it from their apps and all of these things without going through wallet. And it's not unreasonable. I think when I find it dangerous is when Apple tries to invent something and then after the fact they say, ah, they should have had this be open all along. But early days, when you're trying to build something, it's not necessarily even going to happen. If it has to be an open API. They're trying to build a feature and get it to function, but it's been around for so long now that Apple agreed that it will open this up so that third parties will have access.

1:25:29 - Leo Laporte
So you would say this is a happy resolution for both sides, that Apple got a monopoly for as long as they. That's kind of the patent system, isn't it? You get a monopoly for a limited period of time so you can recoup the investment, and then you have to open it to the rest of the world.

1:25:45 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, but this is one of the areas of antitrust where Apple, I think, has a really hard time making a defense when they say that anytime someone uses any NFC to buy anything through our phone, we get a you because you have to use our system. That's kind of that's. That's neon flashing, neon saying sue me, sue me, sue me, sue me, and it's hard for them to win and that's probably where they're going to be.

1:26:06 - Leo Laporte
It's also where the doj is hitting them is apple suitably chastened by this, uh, so that going forward they will consider these kinds of things, or or they're going to fight it to the death every single time I, I would say fight it to the death yeah yeah, fight it to the death okay, they're definitely or to the pain.

1:26:26 - Alex Lindsay
This is just, this is just. Yeah, yeah, I mean yeah and the and the.

1:26:31 - Andy Ihnatko
The question is, what are they going to decide? To do things worldwide, or are they going to decide to have an eu apple and a non-EU Apple? Because the EU has demonstrated that they have the ability to pass laws that make sense and also enforce the law.

1:26:43 - Leo Laporte
India now would not be negotiating. The Competition Commission of India, cci, has been investigating Apple since 2021 for abusing its possibly abusing its dominant position in the apps market. Apple has denied wrongdoingdoing, says we're a small player in india. Android's dominant there. But that is not what the cci says. Apple's app store is an unavoidable trading partner trading partner for app developers and, resultantly, app developers have no choice but to adhere to apple's unfair terms, including the mandatory use of Apple's proprietary billing and paying system.

1:27:22 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, Again the billing and payment system.

1:27:24 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yep, yep.

1:27:25 - Andy Ihnatko
Yep, so same thing. They're going to keep fighting, and fighting, and fighting this, every single district they have to fight in. I'm starting to feel a little bit for them because, that's tough, you know.

1:27:34 - Leo Laporte
You've got I mean you've got 200 countries, 200 plus countries, not to mention every state in the union.

1:27:43 - Alex Lindsay
That's a lot of battles.

And there probably is no one thing you could do as a company to make everybody happy, right? No, I think that you know, I think Apple will, though I mean, india is still a pretty small market for Apple and Apple is a pretty small player in India. It's 6% of the market. So so it's it's not like Android is not the biggest market either. No, it's, it's not.

And I think that you know Apple will see how long it takes for all these other things. I don't think there's any reason. There's just too much revenue for them to change voluntarily. So they're going to keep on, and I don't think that they think they're wrong. So I think that if they, you know, so I think that they're going to keep on. You know, seeing how long this drags out, you know, and not necessarily make it a clean, you know, and again, the they're going to in the United States, the chances of anything happening significantly, uh, are not, probably not not super high in the near term, you know, and will be zero, you know, if anything changes in in in November, you know, and so so that'll be, you know, so it's like. So I think there, I think you know they're probably what's interesting is culturally, I'm sure Apple wants one side to win in November. The business side of Apple probably wants the other side to win. So so it's a really complicated.

1:28:52 - Andy Ihnatko
You know, look at the, you know at the in the election coming up, because all of this will just disappear if, if, if, the uh, if the biden administration doesn't continue and in the fall, yeah, most, almost all the trouble is from the department of justice, and if we have an administration that basically decides the department of justice exists solely to execute the whims and policies of the executive branch of the president, then that could be really all that clear.

1:29:17 - Leo Laporte
Many of my former friends in Silicon Valley are celebrating the choice of JD Vance as vice president, because he loves Lena Kahn. He has said how great the FTC is and that the FTC should go after big tech so that little tech can thrive. And he, as a former venture capitalist he was at Mithril.

1:29:37 - Jason Snell
Yeah, anderson Horowitz loves him and he, as a former venture capitalist, he was at Mithril. Yeah, anderson Horowitz loves him. Ben Horowitz thinks he's great. Yeah, there, I will just say he, jd Vance, has said those things. Jd Vance says a lot of things. He said many things. Including calling Trump the American Hitler but you know, he changed his mind. He changed his mind.

1:29:53 - Leo Laporte
And also remember the vice president probably does not have a lot of policy on the administration.

1:30:01 - Jason Snell
Yeah, yeah, I'm just saying politicians say lots of things. Jd Vance has got a recent track record for saying lots of things, but it is an interesting dynamic right the let's not regulate anything versus this nuanced thing which is big tech. Like it gives lots of politicians exactly what they want, which is beating down on big tech, which is perceived as being bad. Republicans feel that way too right. They feel like they're you know they're moderating things and they're influencing people and they've got too much power. But this is like a nuanced take where it's sort of like let the startups flourish but and then, I guess, reach the point where they can still get bought by big tech. Right, like there's a, there's a question mark in the middle there before step three profit, but there it's. It's different, it's a different take on it.

1:30:46 - Leo Laporte
I wouldn't expect a lot of consistency in the overall. Probably, not probably. Uh, it's, it's politics and whatever, uh, whatever works, uh, but and he's right.

1:30:57 - Jason Snell
I think that there's a lot of that going on in Silicon Valley right now, which is Apple's business side, realizes that they would benefit probably tremendously from a second Trump administration. But I'm sure that on the social side that Apple as a whole would not like that to happen. But you saw it when Tim Cook played ball with Donald Trump the last time, so that's one of the great. I'm glad I'm not in tim cook's job.

1:31:22 - Leo Laporte
It pays really well, but to be able to try to square the difference there I think that's the hardest thing he has to do is politics is deal with, uh with with nation states.

1:31:30 - Jason Snell
Yes, yes, because they're. They're so powerful that they are almost like a nation state at the table, at the mercy of all the other nation states. And so, yeah, between China and volatile us administrations and European regulations that's a big job, that's a big job yeah.

1:31:47 - Leo Laporte
I wonder how the vision pro is doing in China. It's now on sale in China. Who could tell? So, Alex, you're going to do a vision pro stream of the Sunday show. Twit Yep. So the last Sunday show in the studio will be August 4th. We're shutting the studio after the show on the 7th.

1:32:12 - Alex Lindsay
So go ahead. We're going to trade some emails about doing it on the 28th.

1:32:14 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, we can either do the 28th or the 4th, so it's up to you. And you said maybe you want to practice on the 28th. Oh, we can either do the 28th or the 4th, so it's up to you. And you said maybe you want to practice on the 28th.

1:32:21 - Alex Lindsay
I think at the 28th. Yeah, we might. It depends on when you have people in the studio. So if you have people in the studio both of those days, I'll talk to.

1:32:27 - Leo Laporte
Benito. Yeah, I think we're going to try to get Jason to come up, trying to get you to come. Well, you'll be here anyway, so you should do twit. I think we can make it, uh, live I can do the fourth.

1:32:38 - Jason Snell
Yeah, can you do the?

1:32:38 - Leo Laporte
fourth, yeah, so well, you know what? Let's talk to, uh, our producer benito gonzalez, and find out what he has.

1:32:44 - Alex Lindsay
What I think I might do is that on the what'd be nice on the 28th is for me to do some test streaming to make sure that I understand, like, where the camera has to be and if there's any changes we have to make to get everybody in the frame and all that stuff. So let's make august.

1:32:54 - Leo Laporte
Make August 4th Zen a Vision Pro version. Get your dust off your Vision Pros kids.

1:33:04 - Andy Ihnatko
Try to remember what drawer you put it in in May.

1:33:06 - Leo Laporte
No that's mean. That's just mean, that's mean, I'm sorry, that's mean.

1:33:12 - Andy Ihnatko
That's jealousy coming out.

1:33:13 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, we all wish we had one to keep in a drawer ourselves. Apple seeks killer apps, says the Financial Times, for its $3,500 Vision Pro headset. I wonder if they had a whole team of journalists assigned to this story. Is this from last year, like what Okay, yeah, well, there isn't. Oh, I know why? Because it goes on sale in Europe. That's why, yeah, it just went on sale there. An English newspaper has something to say about that.

1:33:41 - Jason Snell
I think, of all of the arguments I hear a lot of arguments about oh, apple doesn't treat its developers very well and thinks that developers are making their livings based on the greatness of Apple and Apple's products, which is an attitude that Apple definitely has, which is an attitude that Apple definitely has. I am sympathetic to the idea that the Vision Pro is a product that needs, in addition to content, which Apple should be more active in providing. It needs killer apps. It needs software beyond, because I think the killer app is probably not necessarily a 3D theater stream or a 3D sports stream Maybe it is an immersive sports thing but app development like there are so few vision pros out there, and even if you believe Apple that they're committed to the longterm and that this is a platform that's building, what is the incentive for developers to be experimenting with it and finding that killer app and finding that thing that everybody goes, oh my God, have you seen this?

This is going to catch fire, and I think that Apple took it for granted that the developers would be there, and I think that there are lots of things they could do, like make developer kits available, actually, literally go to key developers and say we will let you have a Vision Pro on loan for a year to experiment, or you could pay them or you could commission something like they do with some Apple arcade stuff.

That, to me, is one of those rocks that they need to not leave unturned in terms of seeking a killer app. Because if developers look at the platform and say like I know developers who've got apps on this platform from basically day one and they say we have maybe dozens of users, like nobody is using third-party apps, even if there are Vision Pro users, I wonder how many of them are doing anything beyond the video stuff at this point? And so you've got to provide an incentive. Because no developer? Because no developer. One of my friends said, based on user base, in a year I should spend half a day on Vision Pro. Right, like it just doesn't make sense. So Apple needs to figure out how to make an incentive for them to find the killer app.

1:35:58 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, I think if they're wise, they're spending this year saying whoever we sold, we sold it. It's clear from a lot of the data that IDC came up with just last week that the people who wanted a Vision Pro bought one and then that was pretty much it. The presence of them out there has not caused other people to get on the bandwagon. I feel as though Apple is going to be spending 2024 setting things up for the less expensive model coming up next year, that if they can say, look, all the developers that we're going to need they have one. If, as Jason said, we're going to encourage developers to get their hands on one, just to figure out what they could do with it. Because at some point be it next year or be it 2026, there is going to be an affordable version of this that's going to be as attractive as a MetaQuest. There is going to be an affordable version of this that's going to be as attractive as a MetaQuest in that it's going to be affordable enough that, even if you can sort of justify that, hey look, even just as a mobile monitor and as a way of watching really cool videos and playing some games, I can justify five, six, seven hundred dollars on a MetaQuest no-transcript and transform the entire world into 2024 with its first release. This is always going to be a. I don't know why they're making it. They're going to make a good version of it, but I don't know. Maybe I'll learn something about the market I didn't know before. Turns out that, no, there isn't a big groundswell of support for $3,500 virtual reality whatever. But again, in two years time they're going to have better hardware and they have to make sure that if this thing is going to be a permanent thing and not just a transition towards wearable eyeglasses, they're going to have to make sure that they've got five years worth of content worth coming and they have to be able to make more than just games and interactive video experiences.

1:37:45 - Jason Snell
They have to create the oh killer app as good as word is, anyway, I I forgot we're in the vision pro segment. I guess we are. We stumbled into it fell into it. Let's do it.

1:37:51 - Leo Laporte
Do you have it uh? One minute, you still, you just it's it's been a busy. It's been a busy week yeah I understand. Well, anyway, what do you think it will be the killer? Maybe it won't be an app, maybe it'll be killer content I, I think both.

1:38:16 - Jason Snell
I think it's worth in investigating whether there's killer apps there, because I think there probably would be. But I, my gut feeling, having used it for all these months, is the content is so compelling, so compelling, and it's so frustrating that they've shot stuff that they've shown in sizzle reels and nowhere else. The idea of doing live, con live, or even recorded immersive concerts, immersive sports, um it, there's something there that's really powerful and I know that a lot of things.

1:38:47 - Leo Laporte
That, what, that, that that already is. The killer app is watching video, I think it is, at least so far, part of it yeah, I mean it, there's.

1:38:55 - Alex Lindsay
There's things that you can see, so so I mean there are, and it just depends on where Apple goes with it and I feel like there's. So the immersive, you know, once we get to a higher frame rate and a better quality, you know. So part of it is is that, you know, getting to these 8K per eye, you know, 90 frames a second, it's a different kind of experience. It's not the same as watching like, oh, it's 3D or it's a little like we're going to do some 3D streaming. But we know that somewhere in the future, as that Blackmagic camera eventually comes out as other one, no one's had a camera that that did 90 frames a second, 8k per eye, that wasn't an art project before. So that's the big thing. If it comes out, I can actually perform at that. That level. We've never, no one's ever, seen anybody who has readily has that camera. And that's going to change a lot of, a lot of the kind of content in the and the, the amount of content that's available out there. It would be amazing if you could like.

1:39:45 - Leo Laporte
You would be in the movie, and it would be even more amazing if games could be that good.

1:39:49 - Alex Lindsay
I mean, you're in the game, the the it can be, but the, the, the. The main thing is is that the, the just watching it, just sitting there and watching a concert. The big thing is, you don't need a bunch of cameras, you need one camera Like this is where I'm sitting, because you have one pair of eyes and one pair of ears, that's all you need.

And so the thing is is the ability to do and at first, right now, like right now, when we see concert videos, half the time you're watching, you know, we put the cameras where we could put them because there was an audience there Right, and, and this is, we're going to put the camera exactly where we want it. It's going to be a singular experience and people are going to and that that camera is the perfect place to watch that concert. And at 4k per eye, it's not enough. At 8k per eye, at a higher frame rate, it starts to become an. At 128, you know the, you know what eventually will probably become 120 per, you know, with 10K per hour, 12k per hour, whatever you will, you know, you will feel like you're really there, you know, and it'll be a much different experience.

The other side of that is all the interactivity. So, again, I keep on pointing to, not what it is now, but if you look at the app that points towards it as much as any other, is JigSpace. The problem is their business model, I think, doesn't really work. You know, like it's anytime they tell you to contact us when you want to know how much it costs.

1:41:04 - Leo Laporte
You know you're in trouble, it's expensive, it's going to be expensive. And so you said, Jason, you like to write in it.

1:41:07 - Jason Snell
That's like it's a peaceful, I do Somebody in the Discord said that focus is another feature of it. It is putting in the AirPods, dialing up Joshua Tree, I think and using Runestone, which is a Vision Pro.

1:41:21 - Alex Lindsay
Text editor.

1:41:22 - Jason Snell
How peaceful. And just to block out the world and not have anything but my focus on my writing, and it can work for that.

1:41:32 - Leo Laporte
It really can. So the Financial Times quotes Anthony Geffen, who won the first ever BAFTA award for virtual reality storytelling. I don't know if he's a creative director and chief executive of something called Atlantic Productions. I don't know if he's related to Geffen. Maybe right Well, but maybe adopted, I don't know, nephew or something. I've been through all the false dawns of VR. He said I think in the next two or three years we will genuinely have devices that will be mass market. The Vision Pro has arrived at a very important time. It would be really. I mean, he does, he's done Everest, he's done I mean he's done some really interesting stuff. I mean imagine climbing Everest in Vision Pro, you know, and actually having that experience. Yeah, it'd be kind of amazing.

1:42:19 - Andy Ihnatko
But it's hard. Remember that there's a reason why Cinerama never really took off like when it needed to in the 60s. There's a reason why all these other immense immersive sort of experiences for the movies. When the movie industry tried to respond to the incoming threat of television, they said, well, what if we give them a more present experience? What if they give them better sound? What if we give them this again, this screen that goes all the way around? And it really that wasn't the feature that people were looking for. It was great, it was a wonderful experience and people enjoyed it, but it wasn't the sort of thing that got people to not want to watch television anymore. And it's possible I'm not saying probable, but it's possible that as wonderful as the immersive experiences can be, the idea of strapping something to your face and experiencing something that way is not going to be enjoyed more than experiencing it on a nice 60-inch TV that they spent half the amount of money for.

It's hard to get around the idea that everybody in this experience has to have a compatible headset and they have to be all wearing it at the same time. I don't. I'm not criticizing it, I'm just saying that I don't know how they get around. That. It's great for individual experiences. It's great for I want to have a big monitor with me no matter where I go, whether I'm in the bedroom, whether I'm in the den, whether I'm on an airline seat. Virtual displays, virtual workspaces, are amazing, but that's still conventional apps operating inside of windows, inside of displays. I'm still baffled as to what the right answer is and I'm still more locked into the idea of something cheap, that's good enough, that's very, very accessible, over something that is next generation, that gets the next level of immersion, the next level of participation. Because, barring something that makes that as compelling as sitting on a sofa with three friends watching something on TV or with game controls in your hands, watching the same screen and playing the same game, I'm not sure that that work is really going to pay off.

1:44:17 - Alex Lindsay
I just don't know. I mean, I get that there's a lot of us, though that don't necessarily watch all the things with everybody else. I mean, I watch a lot of things with my family and that's probably the primary way I watch it. But I have to admit, the Vision Pro is so good that if I'm not watching with my family, I'm often times putting the Vision Pro on. I like, if I'm going to watch a movie and I'm not going to watch it with my family, I'm going to watch it on the Vision Pro because it's so much better experience. And so the thing is, is that it's so, you know, I don't necessarily. You know, I think that there's, there is a place that a lot of people are in where they're not necessarily trying to do it with a bunch of other people, and I think that there's also.

I just I've talked to a lot of people with the Vision Pro that when even just the what I would call crude examples that have come out so far of the of the immersive video, you know, they're just kind of like, oh well, if there was a lot of things like that, I'd be using the Vision Pro a lot. And I also think that you know again, you know the the exciting thing about what Apple's done is, you know most of these other, most of the other products, by trying to keep the price down, are kind of half-baked. You know they're. You don't see what's possible, you know, like if you don't see 8K per eye, you're watching it half-baked, like it's half-baked, and half-baked bread is still dough, you know.

So the thing is is that is that until you see it, no one's going to say, oh, this is going to be the future and maybe Apple will, you know, swing and miss. But I think that that is a you know, I think that Apple, very much, you know, needs to prove this far end. They can pull back, but proving and seeing it, I don't think we've seen anything yet. By the way, I mean, I think that the headset was way overbuilt for where everything is right now, but probably a little underbuilt for where it'll be when the next version comes out in, let's say, 2026. So the you know, I think there's a lot still. I think there's probably still a lot of dry powder that Apple 3.

I think that you know, we said, oh, they can't, they're not going to be able to sell more than 400,000 because there won't be enough supply. Now we're saying, oh, they're not going to sell more than 500,000. You know, this is all. You know. All ruined, you know, and so I think that I don't think Apple had an expectation of selling more than 500,000 this year. You know, like, I don't think that that was in the cards, and so I think that you know, I think that we're in most likely.

1:46:38 - Leo Laporte
All right, let's play the closing theme for the vision pro segment, cause we're done. Now you know we're done talking the vision pro. And we're doing that. And if you didn't see that in vision pro surround 3d, you're missing out. You're missing out.

1:46:59 - Jason Snell
You're missing out because that was Letters were flying at your head. It was amazing.

1:47:03 - Leo Laporte
Amazing. All right, you're watching Mac Break Weekly. That's Alex Lindsay. That's Andy Anaco. That's Jason Snell. I'm Leo Laporte. Time for our picks of the week on Mac Break Weekly. Jason Snell what do you got?

1:47:22 - Jason Snell
just a little gadget. It's a 30 anchor surge protector that I got from amazoncom and it's really good. It's a. I wanted something for a tabletop, and so many of these surge protectors are things you plug into a wall or they're a big long power I like this and this is little. It's a little. Square it's a little big thing it's got.

It's got four plugs on the top, it's got some usbc and some usba on the side. It's got some more plugs on the side, but it's a, it's a little, uh, you know how many plugs?

eight outlet, ac outlets, yeah, wow yeah, it's got a bunch of side outlets and top outlets, but what I need to do is I have a tabletop in my office where I want to plug a fan or maybe a charger for a laptop that I'm reviewing or whatever it is, and I got tired of having like this big, long thing that was too big for the desk and it would fall behind because it was long. It would end up right on the back and then it would fall off and go way down into the crack down there and I'm like now I got to get it out of there.

How many times has that happened to me? And this thing it's got little feet, so you just sit it on the desk and it stays there and it's $30, and I like it and you can get it round or flat.

Your choice, yeah, but I really like the idea that you've got plugs on the side and the top and then you've got some usb as well. I I struggle to find good, ergonomically good, like ones I want around me. You can get a power strip or a usb charger anywhere, but like something that I don't have to go down to the outlet and I also don't have a big long power strip and this does it for me.

1:48:52 - Leo Laporte
So it's a winner. It's on prime day special. Yeah, 1999 normally 3019.99.

1:48:57 - Jason Snell
Yeah, normally $30, $20 today. I really like it.

1:49:00 - Leo Laporte
Weird pricing. So it's $19.99. For the white round extension cord it's $21.99, two bucks more for the white flat extension cord. Oh, you want it in black? That'll be another two bucks.

1:49:11 - Jason Snell
Well, Apple users are no stranger to playing more for the black version. I guess Black paint must be so expensive.

1:49:18 - Leo Laporte
Indeed, Indeed Anyway it's good, I'm going to buy a bunch of them.

1:49:21 - Jason Snell
A little thing, but it's nice for a tabletop or a desktop.

1:49:25 - Leo Laporte
And it has search suppression.

1:49:27 - Jason Snell
Yeah, I mean, it's not necessarily going to fuse, but it says 2,000 jewels.

1:49:32 - Leo Laporte
That's a lot of jewels. Yeah, I once had a 21 watch and that was thousands of dollars, just 2 000 jewels bargain.

1:49:41 - Andy Ihnatko
That's a deal andy and not go pick of the week. I bought something very much like that this morning Jason, the, the. What I was saving for amazon prime day was things I was going to be buying for the past couple months. I decided that I've had it with having some modern chargers and some that are like, not not high capacity and only have like one whatever upgraded.

All of those bought a new power strip, that sort of stuff, and what I used before clicking the buy it now button, including on those shorts, was camel, camel camel, which is something that's we've recommended before, but it's very, very timely during prime, during prime days and during black Friday. It's a price tracker that goes back for years on amazon prices, so it's very, very easy to check to see, okay, this is I'm being promoted this on prime day, and says, oh, wow, what a great deal is it. Wow, wow is it? It's normally, normally 99, it says, and now it's 43, yeah, but camel, camel camel will tell you that it is routinely sold for like 53 and the sale price is not even the cheapest sale price that it's seen in the past three or four months. So it's very the thing.

So I'm glad that the things that I actually bought were things that were actually good deals, that were like the cheapest prices in the past year or two. And it's also good because it will also give you like alerts, so that there's a display that I was kind of interested in having, but not for like the $530 that it costs. I've kind of wanted to get it at a sale price that occasionally hits so you can set up a price alert, say, hey, send me an email anytime this specific product at Amazon either hits a certain price or is a good deal, or is at the lowest price it's ever been, or simply goes down by 10%. It's a super, super useful tool and doesn't cost anything.

1:51:20 - Leo Laporte
Camel, camel, camelcom very nice, and you know why it doesn't cost anything?

1:51:26 - Andy Ihnatko
because they're following you, everywhere you go on the internet but that's see that that's a transaction. It's it say it saves me money, it gives me something. I'm saying, okay, I will, I will. It's. That's a fair transaction as far as I'm concerned. If you don don't like the transaction, don't accept it.

1:51:39 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, you know what you're getting. My wife loves Rakuten and Honey and she runs all those things and I say but Honey, you know you're being followed around. She said, yes, I do and see this check. Every time the gosh darn Rakuten check comes, she goes $53.12. Okay, is he getting followed around for free on the internet all the time? Anyway, you might as well get paid for it. Get something.

1:52:03 - Jason Snell
This is like with getting scraped by AI. It's the same idea, right? It's like look, pay me, pay me, that's all.

1:52:09 - Leo Laporte
I know you got to scrape me, but if you're going to scrape me, pay me. Alex had to run. He had a meeting at one, and so we let him go, but he did leave us with this thought his pick of the week is toad the wet sprocket a band from the 90s still touring.

1:52:24 - Jason Snell
They got like some videos posted. I go to their concerts. I know you're a toad fan yeah yeah, so you can check it out. They've got. They got some videos that they've been doing, like talking about their albums uh, on the anniversaries and uh, toad the wet sprocketcom. I'm sure Alex would have much more to say about it, but that's all I put in the mystery.

1:52:40 - Leo Laporte
That's all he did. Is he just put the link? I think he knew that you would uh.

1:52:44 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, fulfill the uh anyway, yeah they're really named after a joke on a monty python album. Indeed, monty python sketch I gotta be.

1:52:53 - Leo Laporte
I gotta be a fan, just for that reason. What was the joke?

1:52:55 - Jason Snell
it was just a silly name right, wasn't it?

1:52:57 - Andy Ihnatko
eric? Eric idol was, uh, like it was doing like a, as a music news reporter, saying all the bands that were performing and toad the red sprocket, sprocket, who, who had their, who had their drummer and that's the size, and so a silly band name that turned out to have legs, and because eric idol didn't patent it or trademark and apparently heard them.

1:53:18 - Jason Snell
Heard them named on the radio when he was in a cab in la and almost like fell over because he couldn't believe that what he was hearing toad the wet sprocket yeah very good, what's that toad doing on the tv?

1:53:29 - Leo Laporte
uh, okay, I think we're done. I think so with that on that note. What note was that? High c, I believe. Uh, thank you very much. Alex lindsey would be telling you right now that he does office hours dot global every morning. Uh, you can find out more at office hours dot global. You can watch it on streaming on youtube. You can even join the zoom call and be part of it. Um, and he also works for a living. And if you want to hire a Alex as the best studio designer streaming guru ever, 090.media Plus, he does that show with Michael Krasny. It's so good Graymattershow. Andy Inako, what is in your future?

1:54:12 - Andy Ihnatko
Actually quickly. What's in my past is I was just on NPR in Boston just a few days ago doing my usual high-tech hidey-ho. I go to wgbhnewsorg to stream that. Actually it's on video, so once again you get to see me. I decided that last week that wearing a casual shirt over a dress shirt was the way to go. Okay, you can agree or disagree and you can check me out at Anotko on most social medias and I hope to have another husband in three weeks time.

1:54:39 - Leo Laporte
Three weeks time, ladies and gentlemen, three weeks time, he is going to come here and rent the studio for us and keep it all going.

1:54:48 - Jason Snell
This will be the hub of Anotcocom, right here. This is it I'm going to need office space.

1:54:52 - Andy Ihnatko
I'm going to need a merchandise fulfillment center, a testing center you need it.

1:54:57 - Leo Laporte
We got it fulfillment center, a testing center.

1:54:58 - Andy Ihnatko
you need it and I'll throw in the gear for free by gear I don't mean like all the gear, I mean the actual.

1:55:03 - Leo Laporte
I understand the giant styrofoam gear on. By the way, I just texted my daughter who is on android, and it was rcs uh-huh, nice, nice and then sweet. I texted my wife and sent her a black cat emoji reaction, which she said what is that? It says, leo reacted with a black cat.

1:55:24 - Jason Snell
Yep, gotta get her on the ios beta as well Jason Snell, what are you up to this summer? I'm going on uh, I'm going on vacation. I'm going to the uk, going to scotland, going to london. Uh. Relay fm, the podcast network that I do upgrade on, is having its 10th anniversary as well. Lots of 10th anniversaries. Nice happening this year, so that we were doing a live show in london at the hackney empire theater tickets still available a few fancy pretty nice.

Yeah, this is mike hurley's dream to do a show in london. So we're going to be there and I'm going to be a game show. Host is the short version of it so much fun it's my, my, my own calling to be a game show host, so I will not be here next week.

1:56:02 - Leo Laporte
You know why he's doing so well and has so much money? Because he never built a studio he did.

1:56:07 - Jason Snell
But he did rent out a theater just for one night.

1:56:09 - Leo Laporte
Only he could afford it I could have rented out a theater, too, if I'd never built a studio anyway, people should go to sixcolorscom and check out.

1:56:15 - Jason Snell
uh, dan moran did an ios uh beta preview and I did a mac os beta preview and a little teeny tiny one about the ipad, because almost nothing happened in the ipad and uh, yeah, check that stuff out and then your last summer, a version of the uh six colors podcast. Yeah, then we're taking, I mean we're we're traveling both of us separately, yeah, so, uh, well, glad you clarified well, we're both going to scotland, but we're we're going to different parts and with our individual partners and not each other.

Oh, he took the high road and I took the low road, but we'll be at the Hackney Empire together for Relay Time.

1:56:46 - Leo Laporte
We'll be in Scotland for a year.

1:56:49 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, cupertino, cupertino. A version of Apple comes out of the mists every 20 years. They're still running. I'll be. Version of apple comes out of the mists every 20 years.

1:57:01 - Jason Snell
yes, they're still running 9.2.1 for one day, only then they go back into the mists.

1:57:03 - Andy Ihnatko
Think of me work on cyber.

1:57:03 - Jason Snell
Yes, think of me. Next tuesday, I will be wandering the islands of the highlands wonderful time.

1:57:09 - Leo Laporte
So yes, oh, that sounds it'll be great. And drinks a wee dram of whiskey indeed, and it'll be.

1:57:15 - Jason Snell
Uh, it'll be cold and rainy, but that's okay it's got.

1:57:17 - Leo Laporte
It always is. It's always cold and rainy. So my people's okay. It always is. It's always cold and rainy. That's where my people are from. That's why I always have an umbrella. Thank you Jason, thank you Andy, thank you Alex, thanks to all of you, thanks especially to our lovely Club TWiT members who literally made this show possible.

If you're not yet a member of Club TWiT and you want to see us survive and thrive, it's easy. It's easy. It's just seven bucks a month. You get all of our shows ad free, get video for shows we only put out in audio. You also get bonus content like Stacy's Book Club, Mikah's Crafting Corner and as soon as we set up the Attic Studio, I'm going to start doing office hours. We'll have some fun, maybe have people come in and visit and things like that. Maybe we'll even cook all of this for the club. You also get access to the Club TWiT Discord, which gives you access to a community of really smart, fun, interesting people. Seven bucks a month. We should charge more, but we don't. You can pay more If you want. Go to twit.tv/clubtwit, and thank you in advance for your support. We really, really appreciate it. Uh, all right, that's about it for the show. We'll see you next week. We won't see you next week. Are you going to go on for two weeks? One week?

1:58:29 - Jason Snell
I will be back for the 30th.

1:58:32 - Leo Laporte
I will be back you'll get me jet lagged. Good, John Ashley, we gotta. We gotta somebody to put in that chair he knows already oh, of course he knows, he knew we decided this yes, we've already even decided who's going in that chair. Yeah, amazing, who is it, leo? I don't know. Should I know? Yeah, is it Howard Cosell? No, is it? Is it, is it? Is it? Uh, Doc Rock?

1:58:55 - John Ashley
N.

1:58:56 - Leo Laporte
Is it Mikah Sargent? Oh, Mikah Sargent I love him.

He's the cutest, he'd be great. Yeah, we think the world of Mikah. And with your help, club Twit members, we can keep paying Mikah, and so we want to make sure we use him as much as we possibly can. He'll be here next Tuesday. That's fun, that'll be great. Thanks everybody for joining us now. As I have said for some time now, this is episode what 900-something, 930. That's a lot For 930 times. I've said this now and I'm not tired of it yet. Get back to work, because break time is over. Bye-bye.