MacBreak Weekly 937 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, the last week before the new iPhones are here. We'll talk about all the rumors. There's an interesting thought about a capacitive button that might make it very difficult for case makers We'll talk about that. We'll talk about why villains don't carry iPhones or maybe they do and who's going to take over for Tim Cook? Mark Gurman has an idea. All of that and more coming up next on MacBreak Weekly.

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

00:00:40 - Leo Laporte / Jason Snell / Alex Lindsay
This is MacBreak Weekly, episode 937. Recorded Tuesday, September 3rd 2024: Quid-Pro Ming-Chi Kuo. It's time for MacBreak Weekly, the show we get together to talk about the latest news from Apple. And this is an interesting MacBreak Weekly because we're six days away from actual news from Apple. But we will talk about it with Jason Snell from sixcolors.com. Hello Jason. Good to be here. And Mr Alex Lindsay from officehours.global Hello, hello, the inventor of MacBreak Weekly, the godfather of MacBreak Weekly.

0:01:14 - Alex Lindsay
I hold a patent actually that.

0:01:16 - Jason Snell
I-. You probably do yeah you probably do. Wow, godfather, I hope we don't go to the mattresses.

0:01:26 - Alex Lindsay
Let's go to the mattresses.

0:01:26 - Leo Laporte
This guy makes a thunderbolt, you know. You know we're waiting for Andy to get his thing together. Uh, he's gotten some usb issues, but that's all right, we'll do. Uh, we'll do, uh, do what we can do right now and we'll get Andy in the minute uh, he's available. So first question, of course, is to you, Jason did you get an invite?

0:01:41 - Jason Snell
uh, of a sort I'm working on it. Uh, I may or may not be there next week. I'm working it. I'm working the refs right now too. It's a tough ticket. So here's the thing. The iPhone event. Those of us in the tech sphere think about Apple events and they're like they're all the same and they're not. They're not all the same Apple events.

0:02:01 - Leo Laporte
No, we got you, Andy. We hear you. We started without you, but just hang on, we'll get to you in a second. Andy naka's also here from wg bh in boston. We're going to catch you up, Andy. And then what I did just now was ask Jason if he got an invite yet, and he's explaining yeah, this quasi invite.

0:02:19 - Jason Snell
Yeah, I've never missed it, I got invited to watch a streaming video on the internet but I get that invite this is not the first time that it's been like this.

We we in the tech industry think about Apple events as kind of being all the same, and the truth is the intense interest from global media for the iPhone event is not like any other Apple event. It is a tough ticket. There are broadcast and influencers and all that from all over the world, and that broadcast means that it's multiple people. It's a really hard ticket and for the last couple I've had to tap my PR sources and be like hey, I'm local, I'm just one person, can you get me in? And so far that's worked. So hopefully I'll be there on Monday, but the fact is these days it's a video. I mostly wanna go so I can get my hands on the products afterward, because that's probably more than a week before anybody else gets to touch them. So we'll see. But it's a very different situation. And the eyes of the world I mean, that's the other thing, the eyes of the world are on the iPhone.

0:03:17 - Leo Laporte
Can you mute Andy until he figures out how the sound works? Okay, Sorry.

0:03:20 - Andy Ihnatko
I got it.

0:03:21 - Jason Snell
Okay got it okay. So the the eyes of the world are on this event like no other too. So, like we, we all watch all the apple events, right, but like there are people for whom this is it that these, this hour and a half, is the entire message that they'll get straight from apple for the whole year. It's a big deal. So it's uh, it'll be worth watching. But, like people way beyond us have been, you know, are going to be watching, really you know why it's a Youtube streamer's paradise.

0:03:44 - Leo Laporte
It's how they get all the hits and the click the iPhone is what people care.

0:03:47 - Jason Snell
I mean again, you know, our audience here cares about the iPhone and the mac and the ipod and maybe the, the ipad, the ipod, the, the, you know all the eyes yeah, all the, all the things. And the world cares a lot about the iPhone and a very little about all the rest of it. That's just the truth of it I'm sorry, I'm done I yield the rest of my time senior time.

0:04:11 - Leo Laporte
Sorry, just starting, it's going great it's going great today um, where are we? Oh yeah, so uh, will you be here for? More importantly from my point of view, will you be here here next Tuesday for MacBreak?

0:04:25 - Jason Snell
Weekly. I love this. They very kindly didn't have their event during our airtime. Yeah, and therefore, I will be able to be here, the next day for MacBreak Weekly, which is very exciting.

0:04:35 - Leo Laporte
So you'll be hosting.

0:04:36 - Jason Snell
They usually block it and I'm like off somewhere and I can't do it. And yeah, I think I'm filling in for you. So yes, I'm very happy for that.

0:04:45 - Leo Laporte
There will be lots to talk about so much, but the stuff we're talking about now is the next event. Hey Andy, sorry, glad we could get you in there. Sorry, we started without you. I was just concerned.

0:04:59 - Andy Ihnatko
I don't know how, but I fried my USB hub. Oh, that's too bad. Smells like bacon. So if you can recommend a USB hub, don't cook bacon on your USB hub.

0:05:11 - Jason Snell
Come on Well so sue me.

0:05:13 - Andy Ihnatko
I like to have a little hit of protein and salt right before the show. It keeps me more alert. I don't know what happened.

0:05:22 - Alex Lindsay
What brand?

0:05:23 - Andy Ihnatko
It's an Anker. I've had it for a while.

0:05:27 - Leo Laporte
I've fried many a USB device. There's something, it's how much power you pull it.

0:05:32 - Andy Ihnatko
It's been so useful that, like it's so reliable that it took me like a lot of cable swapping and diagnosing before I thought maybe I should smell it to see if it's fried, and it yeah. So I'm sorry. So, as a result, I'm off of ethernet, I'm on wi-fi, uh, and because my m1 macbook pro only has two usbc ports, it's I'm using my uh, my uh facetime camera, uh, and you actually look fine and we can see more of the outside world too, which is kind of nice usually that's more environment

0:06:08 - Leo Laporte
yeah, it's pretty, it's very pretty. It's a pretty day in new england, which is good. I didn't hear it.

0:06:12 - Andy Ihnatko
I didn't hear anything ironically, I was singing I'm still here when I disconnected and I had to leave right, no, he's not.

0:06:22 - Leo Laporte
No, he's not here, I'm not still here, I'm still here so, uh, I will be out of pocket, for I don't know why, a year ago, we planned this trip and why didn't? I think, oh, september, that's probably when the new iPhones come out. So, uh, I will have to let you. I will cede my uh time to you. Mr Jason snell, thank you for filling in, sure, um, what do we expect anything? I mean, actually that's a silly question because everybody's watching everybody knows what to expect.

What do you? Sometimes, though, there's something that the leaks didn't tell us about. Do you think there'll be anything like that?

0:07:01 - Jason Snell
well, okay, so the the big things are um, lots of leaks are from the supply chain, um, not a lot of leaks from marketing. So the places that you'll see stuff that might be surprising are some details about the hardware works with software, where the software hasn't leaked or hasn't leaked in very particular ways. Uh, like, for example, there's a supposedly a capacitive button on the new iPhone that is tied to the camera and it's probably got multi multifunction, so it doesn't just like activate the camera, but it lets you focus or zoom, or you know who knows what the details are. And that's one of those cases where everybody seems to know from the supply chain that that button's there, but the software and what exactly?

0:07:44 - Leo Laporte
it does.

0:07:45 - Jason Snell
Nobody knows so product.

0:07:47 - Leo Laporte
Explain to me a little bit what you mean by capacitive. So I'm looking at my iPhone 15. I've got a the screen on off switch. I've got that new action button.

0:07:56 - Jason Snell
You got the action you got the action button right. The action button is a physical button that you can push. This is going to be like a virtual button where it's got probably a haptic under it.

So you just you'll, you'll touch it kind of like a little trackpad yeah, oh, like a little trackpad and the idea there at least people are thinking is is it going to be sort of like you press a little bit and then press harder to take the shot? Are you going to be able to swipe on it? And this is one of those cases where because we don't know that detail of the rumor, it's a little more mysterious product names, prices and and saw other software features that apple has withheld from the betas because they they don't want it out there, because it's going to reveal a special piece of software that they've built just for the new models.

0:08:39 - Alex Lindsay
That those will all be the surprises, and you know it'd be interesting to see if we get a um, if we get some kind of interactive zoom. You know that that's one potential thing that we could see. You know, with the capacitance being able to move back and forth, because right now it's a little bit of a kludge, you know when you want to zoom in. I mean people. You know Youtubers have gotten really good at it or tiktokers have gotten good at it, but it'd be nice to have something that gave you a little bit more control over zooming in and out, and having something on the top that you can move in and out would be useful for a lot of people where do you think this?

0:09:08 - Leo Laporte
but do we know where this button will be?

0:09:09 - Jason Snell
is at the top that's going to be on one of the sides, it's going to be on the other side of the one side that is not already got right like it's going to be and you're thinking how will I?

like, clip that in, but it's capacitive, it'll be touch based, so you won't have to worry about it. So, yeah, presumably you'll hold your phone and you'll be able to have this thing here. And I like, just like with the action button. I really love the idea of having tying software to a physical action because, you know, even tech nerds have that moment where it's like oh, I got to swipe to this mode and I'll do all of that. And for regular people like being able to just take out your phone and press a button and take a picture instead of having to do I unlock, do I swipe? What mode am I in? Do I tap? I'm holding it, but now I have to move my finger and it shakes the camera. Like. The more you can tie physical controls to software in friendly ways, I think the better it is for a regular user of a phone 100 I've.

0:10:04 - Andy Ihnatko
At the end of summer I've been spending a lot of time just walking around, like when I'm taking a walk.

I will have, like my good camera, like in my right hand, and it has a really it has a really nice grip on it and I find them taking a lot more pictures that way, because all I have to do is raise it to my face and press a button that's already under my finger and the picture gets taken, as opposed to, as you say, unlock, tap the phone, tap the camera button, maybe align yourself with your thumb with a piece of glass that represents the shutter button.

Yeah, I think that the move towards enhancing the number of actual I guess we can't call buttons so much as tappable haptic surfaces on the edge of the phone is a really, really good step forward. And, as I said, we talked about last week the idea of having like a dedicated edge, a dedicated button, actual physical area that you hold this down and now you're activating Shlomo and the ability to talk to the AI and say can you identify this thing I'm looking at right now or could you add this to my calendar, or anything like that. I think that that's going to be one of the biggest changes and enhancements to the iPhone interface since iOS 7.

0:11:15 - Leo Laporte
One other thing that's interesting. We've heard all these rumors that Apple wants a buttonless iPhone, a portless iPhone. If you had a capacitive button, it might be getting people used to that. That's kind of buttonless it still seals it, right you?

0:11:30 - Jason Snell
know, it doesn't make cases more complicated you know, this is the real.

Oh, good point, yeah you have to have a hole in your case, otherwise remember the rumor last year that the action button was supposed to be capacitive and it didn't work and so they had to swap at the last minute. Relatively speaking, they had to swap it out for a physical button, so maybe a year on they've got it working with more confidence. But yeah, cases is a real question about. Do you leave a a cut out for this at what point? Is a case like a very thin frame around the edges of where all the buttons are, or something like this? But yeah, you need to, presumably you. A human being's finger needs to be able to touch this thing for it to work.

0:12:08 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, and also there's such a big user interface bonus to having something that tactilely, in a tactile way, feels different from the rest of the surface. I'm not so much opposed to capacitive buttons with haptics, so long as they put some sort of a texture or a treatment to the side so that in the middle of the night, if I just want to record a note or do something, I can pick my phone off the nightstand, feel that, okay, there's the action button, the thing you want to take a picture of, to make sure that you're lining up your fingertip with that on the undifferentiated section of the frame that represents a touch button.

0:12:53 - Leo Laporte
That's not really prosecuting this idea to its fullest it's also different from what you already have, because we already think they're talking about it in the Youtube, in the discord chat. You already have the. The volume up button is a camera button.

0:13:06 - Jason Snell
It is a shutter and you could make the action button a camera button, although I wonder if, if this will be on the base model phones and the action button will not be right, because the action button, I think, is a pro phone feature and I wonder if they might do this everywhere as a sort of interest. You know, everybody learns the new muscle memory but, yeah, there are already shortcuts to do it, which is why I and this is again back to what we don't know we don't know the narrative, we don't know the storytelling about why apple did this and why it's different, and there's going to be a spin right. If the answer is well, the action button and the volume buttons already do this, so who cares? They wouldn't have done it. They've got a reason and we can speculate about it, which is fun. But like that's going to be interesting to hear them say like, why this and not the existing things?

although people are saying like, when you press a hardware button, it moves the phone physically and you can hear it and it shakes the the phone it's not good something capacitive, where it's already sort of you're just sort of slightly adjusting the pressure of your grip, might actually be better oh, you got a tidbit, I just saw it.

0:14:05 - Leo Laporte
You got the little uh, or the elementary, you got one. Yeah, I put a limetric time behind me yeah, I was going to give you my old one, but as it turned out, it wasn't working oh, that's too bad.

0:14:14 - Jason Snell
Well, I I got a deal on one, so I decided to, because I, the old model and this is people who aren't list aren't viewing the podcast, won't know, but the limetric time is a fun clock that I learned about from you and I have it wired up so it shows the time and the temperature for my weather station I do like that and as we're going to watch it carefully because it's supposed to get, to the end of the show, so we'll talk about why I'm not wearing a blazer, I am wearing just a t-shirt, practically because it's going to get it's getting hot in here, so I replaced my um.

0:14:44 - Leo Laporte
I put my this is the tidbit up here, but you like your Lumetrix better than the tidbit. I'm sorry, this is a digression.

0:14:51 - Jason Snell
Yeah, no, these are all fun and we can talk about it more in picks, because I will make it my pick. But the great thing about actually it's funny I had to hack Lumetrix's old version of the Lumetrix Time to display stuff for my server. Old version of the lunatic time to display stuff for my server, and it turns out their new version actually has an app that literally you point at a Jason on a server and it processes it, which is what I had to do all along, but now I don't have to worry about it, which is pretty great.

But yeah, it's just. I'm a fan of those kind of. I've got one under our TV and it's just so great, it's so nice.

0:15:30 - Leo Laporte
Glanceable and it's just so great, it's so nice, glanceable, a smart device, that's just things you see at a glance and they just are ambient information.

0:15:32 - Andy Ihnatko
Okay, sorry about the digression, we'll be back. I am going to put the rat hole sound on my sound board. It's the week before an iPhone event.

0:15:36 - Leo Laporte
We really don't have a lot more than you would think. Mark german dropped a bomb on everybody.

0:15:44 - Alex Lindsay
Thank you thank you, and I think I think that the big thing with the buttons is that is that bomb on everybody, 18 different. Thank you, thank you. And I think that the big thing with the buttons is that the phone is a camera that does other things. I think that a vast majority of people are looking at the camera.

It's a camera that also answers calls and lets you do other things. But when you look at the, the use, and when people make decisions about when to get a new, like, every person I talk to is like oh, I gotta get a new phone. It's because they need to get a new camera, because they the low light isn't good enough for the whatever, there's some new feature that they want and so that's the. You know, and so I think apple just keeps on. You know, adding, like if we get this new sensor, the new 48 megapixel sensor in the ultra wide? You know that.

0:16:28 - Jason Snell
And the non, the non max phone may get the Tetra prism, the five X zoom and, like Alex, you're absolutely right, like cameras are a huge driver in phone sales because we use them Right, I was thinking the other day about and trying to explain to my son actually about life before smartphone cameras in the old days and I I mean, like when I was a kid I had a little 110 kodak camera, oh yeah, and like the flash was temporary, it like burned out and you had to replace it right like after one shot you had to get a new you'd get a whole, you get a whole thing of flashes, right?

0:17:04 - Leo Laporte
yeah, yeah.

0:17:05 - Jason Snell
And this is and and so, like it is. It is one of the ways that we don't think about as much that is so transformational and, as a result, people like if the camera is better, if the output is better, all if it's easier to use all of those things are reasons to get a new phone I mean and you know that apple knows this, because the last thing they talk about on every iPhone announcement is the camera, like everything else, we'll give you all the other stuff, because they know that we're just sitting there waiting.

0:17:29 - Alex Lindsay
We're patiently waiting, like just nodding our head.

0:17:32 - Jason Snell
You can. And they have had a super boring phone update with very little interesting in it except the camera got better. And they know, they know that that is actually enough to clear the bar for a lot of people.

0:17:43 - Alex Lindsay
And I don't know what the number is. I went in 60 minutes, did their thing, I think 10 years ago. They said that in the interview. They said that 200 engineers work on the camera. You know, like you know, and now I'm sure it's a thousand, you know like that, are just that, are all working on that technology to make that work.

0:17:57 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, I mean honestly, that's one of the reasons why when I got my last like top tier phone a few years ago, it was like this one has like a pentaprism, like really good zoom. The new iPhone does not. That was like one of the real like slam dunks of no, I don't want to switch back to iPhone if it doesn't have, like this, really cool lens but this now this is something just occurred to me and I'd like to see particularly what Alex's like response to this would, be given that Apple is justifiably very, very proud of being one of the best cameras not just the best camera phones, but one of the best and most popular cameras in the world. What if Apple were to create a hardware API to say that to facilitate the creation of third-party grips that make it more operable as sort of a camera? So they're not so what meaning? What they would do is like here is if you want to control the camera app, here is this is a a hard.

A hardware controller whether it's a hand grip or an external controller can have a shutter button. It can have a top scroll wheel that will, by default, do this. It can have a bottom scroll wheel that will, by default do this. It can have a bottom scroll wheel that will, by default, do that. The shutter button can have a half depress in which it will do this, and so the built-in camera app will support any third party device that uses this API, and that API would be open both to developers of photography apps and to hardware makers who want to do something as simple as just just give me a, give me a walk around grip that gives the user that same feel of a real camera, where you just hold it up, you press a button, it takes a picture all the way to professional videographers who might want to have something inside a frame yeah, what would you think about that?

0:19:41 - Alex Lindsay
I was trying to find an example of that actually working.

0:19:44 - Andy Ihnatko
I have, I have, I've had a few of those and they're like they're okay, but they don't really work well, yeah, I mean.

0:19:49 - Alex Lindsay
So tilta makes one that that that is a it'll do zoom and focus on the black magic camera. So it ties into the black and apple showed it in their keynote. That's why I have one um and it. I've had trouble getting it to pair up to your point um, but when it pairs up it's nice soft controls. You can zoom, you can just tap on it zoom, tap on it do focus, and so it will. And what you do is you end up with an iPhone rig and then you put it on there with a NATO mount and you just kind of pop it on and now you can turn it.

And you know we've been building a lot of these controls, so a lot of that stuff is available. It's not available to the apple photo app, but it is available like the. The one that is kind of the ties into everything out there right now is the blackmagic app, and so so the blackmagic app is really designed around this professional videography kind of thing, but it's not really a still app to your point um, where you could do those. But I do think that I think that there's a strong demand for those and I think that because I put things in rigs all the time, and I think that I think that there is something there. I think you know people want to lean on software, but there is something about being able to just grab onto something and move it, especially when you're talking about little zooms and little focus and you know those kinds kinds of things.

0:21:03 - Andy Ihnatko
You really want to have something tactile, uh to do that, and so I think that those yeah and and my and my and my problem, like when I'm trying to do real photography with my iPhone, is that I'm holding this thousand dollar thing with the corners and if, the more I, the more I take a thumb off to like do the zoom or do a pinch, the less stable my hold is. And just to be clear, I'm thinking about something along the lines of you know, those game controllers. You can get the plug in through USB and they put like grips on one side or another. That's the sort of thing I'm looking at. So it would be a hard connection. It wouldn't be like a Bluetooth connection.

And, once again, if all you wanted to do is, here's something that you would snap into the, snap into the iPhone, because you're walking around uh, you're walking around disney world. It has a tripod mount. It has a, has a a little bolter so you can put your, your wrist strap on it all the way to. Yeah, I actually want something that will actually also like you can mount. Third part you can mount lenses to it and you can control the zoom, you control the exposure, control that kind of stuff. That's that kind of thing I would. I would spend 100 bucks for we.

0:22:06 - Alex Lindsay
We talked about I don't know I think I started talking about it on on on this week in photo, maybe 15 years ago, about wanting to have a case that you just slide your iPhone into and the case has got all the hardware and the lensing and everything else that you'd want. You know, a lot of what I wanted was a larger sensor. Now the sensor is getting larger and larger. I mean I think that they're looking at getting very close to a one inch sensor for the next um pro max, I guess is the rumor, and it's not even that far away now. I think it's one and one and a half um, or one and 1.44 or something like that. So, um, so those sensors are getting bigger. Um, that's part of what makes that work, but I think that do agree with you, though, having hardware around it, the problem I have now is that I take my still camera out and I have used it so little compared to my phone that I take a couple of photos with it and I realize I don't remember. I don't remember where these, where all the menus, are anymore.

Number one and number two is it's not capturing a GPS, which is just devastating to me, like I, just I, I so often I search by location. You know, I, just I go into photos, show me a bunch of photos in in um uh, from Washington DC or or Delhi or wherever I've been, and and I and I can just go find the photos. I don't have to figure out when that was or whether they're in a folder or anything else, and so shooting anything without like for me, I can't believe that. I mean they make attachments. Every time I say this, people say, well then they have attachments for it. Not selling. I mean having a DSLR without GPS built in, like just it's going to do it all the time devastate sales. I just I promise that more people would use them. I can't, like, I don't want to have some extra add-on to do it. It should be built into every camera, every DSLR. Just adding that GPS functionality makes a big difference, because my Leicas do an interesting thing.

0:23:55 - Leo Laporte
I think the Olympus might too. They pair to the iPhone and it keeps them there and it does a great job. In fact, it's paired right now to the iPhone.

0:24:10 - Alex Lindsay
So every time I take a picture, it gets the gps from the iPhone. Yeah, that's to keep it smaller, right simply. Yeah, yeah, I just feel like it's. It's. Gps is a pretty well-known technology at this point and it's not a very big chip like like no, I remember carrying a standalone gps tracker that you paired with your phone.

0:24:21 - Leo Laporte
After the, I was in china and I dropped it and it's gone.

0:24:25 - Alex Lindsay
You know, I was on one of those and that's exactly I lost one somewhere, yeah, but but like I look at like this, this is a I was. I was. I heard this noise that I hadn't heard before in the middle of the night and I go out and I take a photo of it. I couldn't see what I was looking at and I took a photo and I got this oh, that's incredible like I was like it's, like I couldn't see it and I just that was.

With what? The iPhone? That was with the iPhone like that's amazing you know, and it's just, that's just like ambient light from you know, from stuff around. That's a gorgeous photo, yeah, and but it's just looking straight at me like hello, great horde owl, and I was just but, but it was. I was just kind of amazed that that I took that picture with her yeah, no kidding, you know.

0:25:06 - Leo Laporte
So two questions. One somebody in the uh discord asked why don't we just, can't we just tell uh, shlomo, uh, what settings we want? Wouldn't it be nice here and you say, uh, add a, add a, add a. Stop to that shot? Uh, as I'm taking it, it's do we want that?

0:25:23 - Alex Lindsay
the problem is you're talking to your camera while you're hanging out with people.

0:25:25 - Leo Laporte
You look like an idiot, but hey, people with Bluetooth headsets look like idiots for years.

0:25:30 - Alex Lindsay
So there's a skillset there too. I mean like just like anything else, like knife skill, you know, like cutting skills or or doing all these other things. You look at someone who does Tik TOK the speed at which they can. You know like I complain about not having the controls that I want, but you just watch them. Grab onto my, my daughter. If you set the phone down, she'll pick it up and she does this like 0.5 thing over her head and she does it so fast that I barely even noticed she does it, she just does it, and so like it's goofy, it's a photo that she knows how to do Um and but the the my kids know you know.

And again, when you hang out with like I mean someone like Justine Ezerick, you hang out with Justine and you ever see her take pictures and her understanding of how to control that phone is at a whole nother level. And so I think that there's, I think that that is a, it is, there is a skill there that just using the screen, I still think that I agree that I think having more buttons around the outside edge and really turn it into a phone. It's a phone that you answer, that answers calls sometimes when we the funny thing is is that most of us turn everything. I don't know how everybody else is.

I'm always in do not disturb, I'm in do not disturb, or in some super restricted access control that, like eight people can get ahold of me all the time, a hundred percent of the time. So I think that that's why it's not even a phone anymore is because scam, scam calls and and all these telemarketers, yeah, made it so that, like I don't need to have my phone.

0:26:54 - Leo Laporte
It's two things, and I bet this Jason will agree with me. This is, it's a phone, I mean a camera, and it is how you control your house it's your house remote if? You're lucky, I can turn my lights on and off.

0:27:07 - Alex Lindsay
That's about well, and then it's also your jukebox. I mean at this point you know, you sit there and I'm like, I'm just amazed, like I don't I just keep on, my headphones are on, or in my car or in the whatever you're just kind of like. It just kind of moves along with you, um uh, without you know, and I think, but it's not a phone anymore. Like I, I'm going to call it a phone, but it's I barely ever call anybody.

0:27:27 - Leo Laporte
It's your little pocket pal that's fun to be with. What do the case makers get advanced notice now? Because that is if they do put a capacitive touch thing on this thing that's going to change.

0:27:51 - Jason Snell
Everythingphone is going to be right, like some of the first things we know about an iPhone are from the shape of the cutouts and all of that. And there are leaks from the case makers and you might say, well, that's because apple talks to them. I don't think so. I think and this is just based on what we've seen I think there is a real serious quid pro quo slash bribery trail that happens, slash Ming-Chi-Quo, it's a quid pro Ming-Chi-Quo I mean, but it is that it's like I think the supply chain leaks a lot.

But the case makers I think they know that their livelihood is such that they have to be there on day one with iPhone cases and I think that they are happy to pay people involved with manufacturing the exterior of the iPhone to get the specs as close as possible to reality. And every now and then you see something where you're like this is not quite right, but I think most of the iPhone to get the specs as close as possible to reality. And every now and then you see something where you're like ah, this is not quite right, but I think most of the time that's what's going on is that the case makers just have to get that information and they know they have to get it.

0:28:55 - Leo Laporte
Peak Design is a good example. I think a few others fell for this. Didn't have the right cutout for the action button on their first version of this.

0:29:05 - Jason Snell
So, this is version two, two which actually they put a button in like what I said earlier, though keep in mind, remember, it seems like that wasn't going to be there originally. They were going to do a capacitive button and I wonder if they were basing it on on some prototype.

0:29:18 - Leo Laporte
That was a cutout.

0:29:19 - Jason Snell
Yeah, exactly that that they did because they felt like they needed to have it there for capacitive reasons. And then Apple changed it and you're like oh no, we, we, we messed this one up. We're sorry, it's a tough. I mean, also that's part of their game. Is risk, to quote Star Trek? Risk is their business they have to take. They have to be there on day one, and if that means a certain percentage risk that they're going to have to junk a bunch of cases because it didn't fit, they know that they they have to do it because otherwise they won't be there on day one and people are going to want to order that case right then, especially when we don't know talk about mysteries of next week what's apple's case story going to be? Because by all accounts, uh, it seems like out in the real world people don't like fine woven and can hardly get fine woven now and so what's going to happen there we don't know.

But that's an opportunity. Like I bought my wife uh, she battered her fine woven case and it was awful, and I bought her a leather case yeah, from a non-apple supplier, that's very back to dead cows yeah so so that's my guess is. That is, that there's money changing hands and they're paying up to get the details.

0:30:21 - Leo Laporte
You inspired me, alex, because I I got the peak case because you reminded me of all. I have all the accessories, and so every time I get a new phone now, whether it's a pixel or an iPhone I just get a peak case because but I'm going to wait because of the last time they got it wrong, so this time I'm going to wait till they get it right.

0:30:38 - Alex Lindsay
And I talked to someone at CES years ago and they talked about the fact that they had to. They were watching all the rumor sites. They didn't really dig into that they had to. They were watching all the rumor sites. They didn't really dig into what they had to do to do it and they said sometimes the first, you know the first version of it, doesn't fit as perfectly because but they get printout. I mean, they print them and they're figuring it all out and they're using all the data that they have there and everything else to to try to get it just right. Because, yeah, the point is, everyone buys the case. Your decision about what you're going to put that phone into happens for many people in the first two weeks of the launch.

0:31:09 - Jason Snell
It's going to be like 90, 95% of the cases sold are sold in the first month that the phone is out.

0:31:15 - Andy Ihnatko
I've actually read from suppliers that it's actually worth it to spread your bet because the first two weeks are so lucrative. It's okay to have a couple of different bets in the warehouse and junk an entire run if it doesn't seem to work, or just simply say we've got the 28144A, which will be available at launch, and a month and a half later you will have the Model B without any change in packaging.

0:31:43 - Leo Laporte
It's kind of a testament to how little these cost compared to how much they sell for. I mean, it's all profit, I'm sure. And by the way, Peak got double the money because I bought the original one and then I bought the replacement one. So I don't know how much risk there is in all of this for them. I mean those cases probably cost a couple of bucks and they sell them for $60.

0:31:59 - Jason Snell
It seems wasteful, but it's good business if you do. The math is the right.

0:32:03 - Alex Lindsay
The person I talked to ces. They said that they, they just they'd rather return them like they just rather, you know, have them returned, like you just push them out into the system.

0:32:10 - Jason Snell
So when you buy it, what happens with those apple?

0:32:13 - Leo Laporte
wants us not to have cases at all, though I mean that's, you know. I mean when they're looking at a capacity like I get it, it's expensive.

0:32:20 - Alex Lindsay
It's expensive. I spend two thousand dollars with the apple care and everything else. It's like $2,000 for the phone. Right, and I'm going to put it in a case. I drop mine all the time, yeah.

0:32:32 - Jason Snell
I do too. I don't use a case, and I think Apple would love it.

0:32:38 - Leo Laporte
You raw dog. It Is that what we're calling it. I am caseless. Yes.

0:32:42 - Jason Snell
That's what the kids are calling it. Now. That's not what they're calling it, leo. Um, so I, uh, I don't use a case. Uh, I haven't had a problem with it.

Now, you know, I'm not gonna knock on the wood of my desk now, but what I would say is I think the people who design apple's phone fundamentally don't think of cases when they design it, because they want it to be a beautiful object, and I think that maybe are they. Are they lying to themselves? I do think they are, but I think that they've just decided that they want that core product to be beautiful and that if people want to put a case on it and dress it up in some way, they'll let them. I do think it was interesting. Um, my daughter has a clear case.

They make a clear case for the iPhone and, um, there's something to be said for that, because then you get to see the iPhone and the color and all of that. But you know, I think that's the beauty of it is you can. There are good cases out there and and people like them and use them. Um, there was a time when the phone was so slippery that I felt like you had to have a case on it and it is. It is better designed now, where it doesn't feel that slippery, so I don't use them.

0:33:39 - Andy Ihnatko
I? I think that I'm absolutely with alex that I take really good care of my phones, but accidents happen, they get dropped, they fall out of pockets and just like I talked about, I think, a couple of weeks ago, how I scratched the glass on my Pixel phone First time in my entire history of using phones that I've scratched the glass, and that has turned me into okay. The next time I buy a phone, I'm going to have a screen protector on it for the very first time. That's the thing that you do. I'm going to have a screen protector on it for the very first time. That's the thing that you do. All you have to do is break one phone to realize that $30 is not a whole lot of money to spend for that sort of thing. On an iPhone, though, it has the extra advantage that, because the trade-in value is so great on an iPhone, you absolutely want to be able to hand it in. Whether you're handing it over to a partner or a kid or just trying to get a get a rebate on it. You want that to be as pristine as possible, and that means putting it in a case.

Jason, remember, do you remember during antenna gate, when apple and steve jobs had that really like kind of embarrassing circus about oh, come on, it's not a problem. I can't believe that people are thinking it's a problem. It's not a problem. And they've invited like a whole bunch of like uh, a whole bunch of like commentators and reporters not everybody but a certain into town hall and uh, john gruber, during the q a afterwards, after after steve jobs. Oh, we'll give you these bumper cases if you really think that this imaginary problem is a real problem. I've I liked how uh gruber has just basically asked like the five executives, do any of you like actually carry like your iPhones in a case? And they, of course they whipped out their phones and said, oh no, look, I've got no case on it because they get a free one if they drop it.

0:35:14 - Jason Snell
That was that was steven phil and um, and tim cook actually was at the antenna game press conference and yeah, no, I think I, I, yeah, you're right, leo, right, they work at Apple. Getting a replacement phone is cheap and also Apple Park is a magical place where phones lots of physics are slightly different than the phones. Just there's a blast of air right at floor level that cushions any dropped phones, so that it's fine.

0:35:39 - Andy Ihnatko
That's actually where, like Gurman's getting wrong on all those robot rumors. It's actually these little tiny, little like Star wars robots that just scurry around with pillows just to make sure that if a, if a phone drops, it will be there and I'll catch it I want to invite you all to bring your camera phones or your or your cameras or whatever it is uh you want to take pictures with, because we're doing a photo walk in new york city on saturday.

0:36:00 - Leo Laporte
Uh, everybody is invited. We're gonna have a meetup. So there's 40 chance of rain right now, but I don't care, we're gonna have a meetup in bryant park yeah, I'll have a umbrella. Bring your umbrellas in case. I don't think it'll be a hard rain, it's.

0:36:16 - Andy Ihnatko
It's also going to be a welcome cooling rain if, and it'll do something about that pea smell on the sidewalk. Yes, silver line.

0:36:23 - Leo Laporte
It actually accentuates it because, uh, it rehydrates it. And so there you go. Always fun in new york city when it rains, but anyway, I love new york city. I was born there. It smells like home to me, uh, which is not a commentary on how my house smells. Oh god, never mind, forget I said anything.

Bryant park 3 to 5 pm. Saturday, the september 7th. Come on on out, say hi, it's a no host, no, nothing, because there's no bar. That's another reason it's in Bryant Park. It's up to you to bring your own hot dogs. And then at 5 pm, joe, who's in our club and is a very accomplished street photographer, is going to take us on a wonderful, magical mystery tour through Manhattan, starting with Grand Central Station, ending, time permitting, with the Oculus. There's a subway ride in the middle taking us down to Washington Square Park. It's all going to be.

The reason I wanted to do it at five is I want to do it in the golden hour. So we're going to get some beautiful shots and our guide will be a guy who shoots New York City every single day. So I cannot wait for that. I hope I'll see you Saturday at Bryant Park, and that means that's the beginning of my vacation, which means I won't be here Sunday for Twit. Jason is going to take over MacBreak Weekly on Tuesday. I've got a bunch of co-hosts Micah Jason, Devindra is going to do the first, or is it the second? I think Ian Thompson is doing the first TWiT, Devindra Hardawar doing the second tweet and then I'll be back on the 22nd for a tweet. If all goes well, my flight arrives at noon. I think I can get home by two. We shall see.

I might be a little raggedy when I get home after the vacation. Looking forward to that.

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Uh, everybody's left except thank you for not leaving Andy.

0:39:50 - Andy Ihnatko
I'm always going to be there for you. I don't I. I don't have an active family life. I'm just here, I'm just glad to be talking to somebody everybody just ran out the door.

0:40:04 - Leo Laporte
Oh, now we've lost landing. No, no, that's them fooling around. Did you turn off your picture? Oh, there we go. Okay, Jason has come back.

0:40:13 - Jason Snell
It's good to have you, Jason oh, was that ad uh short, it was short.

0:40:17 - Leo Laporte
I'm jealous because everybody gets to leave during the ads, except me. I'm stuck here the whole show. I can't go anywhere that's not true.

0:40:24 - Jason Snell
You can disappear, and then we all just talk a long time.

0:40:27 - Leo Laporte
I always, yeah, okay now you've told us the secret, pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. It's true. I will start a contentious subject or a vision pro segment, or a vision pro segment and then leave fair well, I'm, I'm looking at a Moken.

0:40:43 - Andy Ihnatko
I've never heard of the brand for m-o-k-i-n lowercase I. 10 gigabits per second. Usb-c hub Ethernet.

0:40:50 - Leo Laporte
7-in-1 USB-C adapter 26.99 there's only one to get. It's the one I'm using right now, which is I? Really? I don't, actually it's all wired in so I can't, uh, take it out, but it's the um, oh, what's the name of it? I forgot you know. You know what I'm talking about? The expensive one, oh, are you?

0:41:09 - Andy Ihnatko
talking about yes the cal digit. I'm looking. I'm looking for a portable one, something like yeah, it's not affordable it's hundreds of dollars like this. No, I have that on my desk at home but I comment oh okay, so there you go.

0:41:20 - Leo Laporte
You just don't want to carry that around.

0:41:21 - Andy Ihnatko
I don't know exactly. This is the mobile pod, the mobile skywatch 3000.

0:41:25 - Leo Laporte
Mobile podcast unit there are a couple that I've used for a long time that I really like, but again, I unlike like the cal digit. I can't remember the name. I did buy an anchor, which I've retired. I wasn't uh real happy about that one. Uh, I should start a vision pro segment and leave, but I'm not so there because we have not yet even touched, scratched the surface of what mark german said on on sunday. Boy, he loaded us up.

0:41:52 - Alex Lindsay
Let's start with no usb ports, usb a ports on the m4 mac pro mini mini, yeah, mini m at some point at some point we we lost the firewire 800 and the firewire 400 and the a is. I mean, I have so few cables now that I guess it makes sense yeah, everything could be. It's kind of time and and also his the, the.

0:42:16 - Andy Ihnatko
He goes on to say that he also believes that it's, instead of having usb a's, it's going to have five usb c's. Great, more is better. Not only that, but three in the back, two in the front, which I insist that we start calling the mullet configuration.

Yeah, I was going to say there's a joke there somewhere but the idea of having like ports in the front for accessibility, I'm glad that if they had some sort of a dogma about, I know we won't blemish it with any sort of a cutout. Facing the user and facing the world Like no, that's actually very useful.

0:42:46 - Jason Snell
The Mac Studio showed that they had given up on that, but I think he said that there'll be five ports on the M4 Pro model. I'm not sure if the M4 base will have that many. It probably will not. But yeah, I mean it's very funny because he gives these reports that are sort of vague, the good information, but vague and very clearly. His listeners were like no, no, no, no, you need to talk about ports and you need to talk about the power supply. Tell us, tell us now. And the answer is no, external power supply.

0:43:13 - Leo Laporte
It's going to be like all these other things. That's wild. It'll be like the apple tv like the apple tv or the mac mini or the current mac mini.

0:43:20 - Jason Snell
Right they're, they can do good internal power supplies and so it'll be no external power supply and a bunch of USB-C and that's USB-A ports are big and you've got a teeny tiny thing.

So I think it makes sense and they're slow they're big and slow yeah, one of the big reasons they use them is because you can, when you're branching off of a Thunderbolt bus, you can stick a bunch of USB-As in there for free, basically. And so they were kind of saying Thunderbolt bus, you can stick a bunch of USB-As in there for free, basically.

0:43:46 - Leo Laporte
And so they were kind of saying, oh yeah, more ports when they didn't have a lot of lanes, and I think this time they're just going to embrace being that's actually more germane, I don't think it's often covered, but you could have five ports that all come off the same chip, or you could have five ports that come off five chips or any other combination thereof, and that makes a big difference, right yeah, I mean it, it can and, and in some cases, like the mac studio, I believe the, the ultra configuration, the front ports are thunderbolt no, the front ports on this mac studio are usbc and the back ports are thunderbolt, I believe no, but I think on the, on the ultra configuration, I believe the front ports are thunderbolt.

0:44:25 - Alex Lindsay
but on believe, no, but I think on the Ultra configuration.

0:44:26 - Jason Snell
I believe the front ports are Thunderbolt but on the Mac's configuration they're not, and that's one example where, like, we don't have enough Thunderbolt lanes to do that, so it's just USB on the front and it's Thunderbolt on the back and you can kind of mix and match. And the USB-A is even cheaper to branch off, which is why they did that with the mac mini on the base configs. But, um, you know, again, usba, it's. It's time. I mean, if you think about it, apple introduced usba to the mac with the imac in 1998.

0:44:55 - Leo Laporte
It's had a good run, right yeah, that was the big deal, though, on that first time, mac was, uh, no floppy drive or no, it was the second one that had no floppy drive no, no, no floppy drive, ever everything.

0:45:04 - Andy Ihnatko
No floppy drive or no. It was the second one that had no floppy drive.

0:45:06 - Leo Laporte
No, no floppy drive ever Ever.

0:45:07 - Andy Ihnatko
No floppy drive.

0:45:08 - Leo Laporte
Instead they said no, don't worry about it, You've got USB-A ports.

0:45:12 - Alex Lindsay
And I think that you could argue that. I think USB-A is the connector that's probably lasted longer than any other connector.

0:45:18 - Leo Laporte
It's the Sony mini disk of connectors.

0:45:20 - Alex Lindsay
But, no, I think longer than a mini disk. I think longer than a mini disk. I think, literally. I think it's, it is. I think that the if I think back on it, I can't think of any connector that lasted 25 years. You know like that, that, that we use it's staggering?

0:45:35 - Jason Snell
Yeah, it really is, and it's evolved. The connector has evolved or the format's evolved over time. But that I I. When I was writing about the anniversary of the G3 iMac, one of the things I did is I got a little USB plug adapter for USB A to C and I plugged that terrible mouse from the original iMac into my modern Mac studio running Apple Silicon. And you know what? It just works. It's bad, but it just works.

0:46:01 - Andy Ihnatko
It works no worse than it did when it was new.

0:46:04 - Jason Snell
And on my Mac studio I can plug it in without an adapter and it works and that, and it's been so long, it's really kind of amazing.

0:46:11 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, and also the. I'm so glad that they, that the world seems to have divorced itself from. Let's have a standard connector. We can have lots of different kinds of traffic through that connector, but let's at least say that here is this connector that we are going to transact everything on, and I don't mind that. Sometimes it's power, sometimes it might be low-speed USB, sometimes it might be high-speed USB, sometimes it might be lightning, sometimes it might be DisplayPort, but the fact that at the end of the day, I have one set of cables for 90% of what I have to do and I don't have to worry about what I pack, that is such an advance forward.

0:46:51 - Leo Laporte
I mean, basically, I use these like crazy. Is it okay to use these? I mean, that's just a USB A to C adapter, yeah, yeah, so it's not like we're going to lose Pin to pin A lot of my keyboards. Somebody's pointing out that most of the older Keycrons use A, but I would just put this at the end of it.

0:47:11 - Jason Snell
Or you buy a new cable, depending yeah sometimes they're removable, yeah.

0:47:19 - Andy Ihnatko
It's not a big deal to like. At some point, I think, people are just in the process of transitioning their bag of cables from A to C to C to C and this will just say, oh, I've already. Instead of I can leave at home, just like I started leaving at home the micro USB cables that I had inside the mix in my travel bag. Those will get weaned away. This is nothing like when they announced the iMac and suddenly, yes, no, the USB is the wave of the future. Someday you'll find out that we're right about predicting this. Yeah, but right now I have nothing that connects to this and I have to not only buy new, not just buy new cables. I have to buy new accessories if I just want to connect this thing to a printer.

0:47:56 - Leo Laporte
I have a bunch of Anker plugs that have type A on them.

0:48:01 - Andy Ihnatko
So this is nothing like that.

0:48:03 - Leo Laporte
So that's fine. Yeah, I mean, have we have adapters? So just to be clear, the m4 he's talking about the mac mini and and, by the way, these are probably not out till october. Right, the m4 pro version will have five ports, all c, three on the back and two in the front, like the mac studio and ethernet and ethernet hdmi and headphone. Woohoo, yep, that's pretty awesome. But, as you said, that's the mac mini pro. There'll be a mac mini, you think none?

0:48:31 - Jason Snell
there'll be, yeah, there'll be a base m4 model and that is going to be interesting, right, like, do they omit ethernet? Do they omit hdmi? Do they omit what? What doesn't fit on there? What is the m4 incapable of providing that they do to differentiate with it? I hope they don't get rid of Ethernet, because they did that on the Apple TV, but like I feel, like the Mac Mini use case, so many of them you want it to be wired somewhere. Yeah, so we'll see, but my guess is it'll be.

0:48:56 - Alex Lindsay
it'll still have that, but it'll just have almost anything else on the back, you know the power, the ethernet, the hdmi, and maybe they could go down to two ports of. But two ports get pretty complicated. If you have a keyboard that you want, that you want to tie in, you're going to get a dongle.

0:49:21 - Leo Laporte
But, uh, but, but they do that with the air, why wouldn't they do that with the mini?

0:49:25 - Alex Lindsay
yeah, and it could be. I mean, especially if they can get, if if giving those things up even if it went down to one usb and you have to get a dongle, if giving those up got us to 399 or 299, it would be like it would be other world like it. You know, getting it, getting a, I mean it'd be devastating. I mean 299 for a Mac mini M4, which is almost impossible. I give it one percent chance it's not gonna happen. But I think 399 starts to get you, don't think so?

0:49:50 - Jason Snell
I'd be. I'd be amazed if it's 499 uh, which was the original mac mini price which would actually be a sub 500 would be really great.

but I think what will gate the features is just is literally the capabilities of the m4. Right, we we know that with the m1 and m2 um, there were limitations in terms of thunderbolt, there were limitations in turn of in terms of external display support, right, where you could have like a Thunderbolt and an HDMI, and that was it. But we've seen with the M3 that they've unlocked some of that and we don't know about the M4 because it's just in the iPad, so we don't really know what its capabilities are. But I'm sure that that's what will constrain it, that you know the number of ports it'll have will be and its video capabilities will entirely be based on whatever they built into that m4 what will we get in the m4?

0:50:36 - Leo Laporte
I mean, all I have is an m4 ipad which I'm looking at right. What will we? What will be new and different from the existing m3s?

0:50:44 - Jason Snell
well, it's just so it'll be on the we'll. We'll finally be able to do a an apples to apples comparison of m3 to m4, which we can't do with the ipad because it went into m4, so it's off of that old three nanometer process. On the new one, they say that there are some improved stuff in it. I, I would imagine that it will not be dramatically faster and better than the m3 when you compare them directly. But, um, you know it's it. It's that iterative thing. And and for apple, they just want to get off of that, that three nanometer process, and get everything up to, because there's a bunch of stuff that's still on m2 and then there's some stuff that's on m3 and they want to get everything to m4. So this is the start of that process too.

0:51:23 - Leo Laporte
Uh, german says suppliers are scheduled to begin shipping mac mini units from china with a standard m4 chip to warehouses. Uh, now, early september. The higher end version with an m4 pro won't begin shipping until october, that's the new new chip that hasn't doesn't exist yet, right, doesn't exist.

0:51:41 - Jason Snell
That's a new chip uh, that probably means neither will be announced until about a month after the iPhone unveiling, which is monday and I should say, just like the ipad, that mac mini never got an m3 update, so it's going to be coming from him too, and it gets all of those kind of improvements over two generations of of honestly, I'm running this whole show from here on a but a couple of M one man that many is that are great.

That Mac mini pro configuration, m four pro, like I've definitely had friends of mine say, I'm not sure I even need to buy wait for a mac studio at this point?

0:52:15 - Leo Laporte
yeah, in fact, one of them's an eight gigabyte ram. That was the one we ran zoom iso on for a year and with a lot of production.

0:52:23 - Alex Lindsay
Again, I I have a mac studio, but I have a bunch of mac minis. I'd rather buy more mac minis than buy other big computers, like each one of them has their own role in what they're doing in production and I just I just use them for everything right and and and. It really changed with the m1 I mean the m1 mac mini. The performance jumped so high compared to the last version of the mac mini. It went from being glued to a production device overnight. The mac.

0:52:50 - Leo Laporte
uh, starting around this is german again starting around the end of this year, transitioning to M4, extending it into the first half or so of 2025. Yeah, next month, the new Mac Mini, imac and MacBook Pro, all M4. Will it be an M4 Ultra? Will it just be M4 and M4 Pro?

0:53:10 - Jason Snell
That's the mystery. My guess is yes, because mark said that they're going to turn over everything, and that means that the pro and the studio will presumably happen next year and that will be the m4 ultra, and then they'll be entirely on m4. For the mac they're going to turn. You know, according to him, the entire product line is going to turn over, which is exciting, because that hasn't happened since m1. I, I think. So it's good. It's a good thing.

0:53:37 - Leo Laporte
He also talks a lot about the succession, because one of the big stories this week is Luca Mastri, cfo at Apple, is transitioning out at the end of this year. But like others before him I'm thinking Schiller, johnny Ive, many others he's going to kind of keep a foot in the door, not doing his original job but keeping a few other things. There'll be a new CFO will take over January 1st. How do you pronounce that? Is it Kevin Parek, parek? Anyway, Parek.

0:54:11 - Jason Snell
Maybe, I mean, we'll find out on the on the next call, probably. Yeah, I'll miss luca and his italian accent. That was, uh, increasingly better transcribed by ai transcription engine over his uh tenure. I was it got better and better and better at that and uh. But this is yeah, they don't, they don't. Executives at Apple don't leave, they ascend to, they try to leave. Remember.

0:54:36 - Leo Laporte
Bob Mansfield quitting Yep. And then we just imagine this boardroom meeting where they said here is a bag of money, bob yeah please come back, bob, you don't have to do anything, just take the money.

0:54:47 - Jason Snell
And Gurman's report really nailed it, especially about Johnny Ive but in general, the idea that they were so vulnerable at that time, after Steve Jobs died, that they would pay any price to make it seem that Johnny Ive wasn't leaving, even if he was disconnected from a lot of design responsibilities, because they didn't want the market to think that Apple was rudderless, and I do think that that is one of these things.

I think also, though it's just a retention issue you have given so many stock options to these people that none of them need to work anymore, and so how do you get them from completely retiring? And the answer is you give them some sort of new title with with phil schiller, did he write his own title to be an apple fellow, because luca has a different title, apparently, but it's very much the same thing, which is we're going to take a lot of your burden away, but keep you around to watch your lieutenant as they do that job, just in case, and then you'll have some stuff. So, with phil, it's events and the app store, and you know he's no longer in charge of marketing. He's got greg jaswiak to do that job for him, but like he's still there though I don't feel like phil is running around right now going.

0:55:53 - Leo Laporte
You got to finish the edit. You got to finish the edit we got money. Oh my god it's. I feel like sitting back it's one.

0:55:59 - Jason Snell
It's one layer less, so it's less stressful. But it's also the answer to the question how do I get you who has enough money that you never need to work again, right to stay involved at apple or money at some point? And the answer is you offer them more money to do less and only do the things that they love to do.

0:56:16 - Alex Lindsay
Like, here's the deal you pick what you want and you get to do whatever you want.

0:56:20 - Leo Laporte
and we'll pay you what you'll be able to pay before Pick the car project, which might be the mistake.

0:56:26 - Jason Snell
Alex. But German said this about Eddie Q. He's like Eddie Q will probably transition at some point. Right, and you know Eddie Q is going to be like, what can I do?

0:56:33 - Leo Laporte
I know probably transition at some point right, and you know eddie q is going to be like what can I do with? It's like about I know what he's going to make the sunday gravy every sunday and yeah, yeah like he'll.

0:56:38 - Jason Snell
He'll pick the fun stuff and then leave. Go, leave the crappy stuff to his successor.

0:56:42 - Leo Laporte
Yeah yeah, so that makes sense too, though, from a transition thinking about running a company. You ideal would be that the person leaving is there to advise the person who took the position, if you have, oh yeah, you don't want to do it that way. We did it this way, that if you have the money and the means.

0:56:57 - Jason Snell
This is absolutely what you should do is keep them in the family. Don't let them go somewhere else, don't let them consult somewhere else, let them feel free and semi-retired, but keep them close and then if there's a fire, they can come and help you put it out and you can tap their wisdom. Like this. I really do think this is the way you do it, if you can afford it and if there aren't like personality clashes. And just from my own personal life, my uncle was the chief negotiator for the union for a big glass and plastic company and he retired and like a year later they called him and said we're gonna, can we put you on a consulting contract to negotiate all our contracts, because nobody here knows how to do that and we need to get up to speed and all that. And I always thought like that's kind of smart. Keep your guy close, because you may need to ask him for advice later.

0:57:46 - Alex Lindsay
And not many companies can afford.

0:57:48 - Leo Laporte
And your enemy's close.

0:57:50 - Alex Lindsay
Well, the funny thing is is that it's not that many companies that can afford to say you know what? We're just going to keep an extra person on for each one of these positions. But it creates so much continuity, yeah, and, and it creates so much continuity and it means that you're giving the new person all the responsibility of doing it, without putting them out into the never, never land of just having to figure it out, and it's just. It is a perfect way to do transitions.

0:58:12 - Leo Laporte
It's just very expensive so the paragraph that caught my eye uh again, this is from kermit's newsletter, sunday. Three of the biggest transitions will involve coo jeff williams, services head eddie q and, of course, cook himself. Cook will probably become apple's executive chairman when he hands off the ceo job, and this is the thing that raised my eyebrows to who should be, should be to whom, I believe. Just a note there mark whom to whom? I believe will be hardware and engineering chief john turnus. That's a little bit out of left field did you see that he's reported.

0:58:51 - Jason Snell
Mark german's reported that before. That's actually not new everybody's, I. I think what's new is that he just said it right, like he just put it out there, yeah, and that it's gonna, and that cook is gonna be like a chairman or something, and then that's how they'll do the transition. So he might have a little more detail, but I think really the story is just that he feels confident that that is still the case because he has reported that turn.

0:59:12 - Leo Laporte
This is the case right now and you see him on the events. You'll see him probably on uh on monday. He's the senior vice president for hardware engineering.

0:59:19 - Jason Snell
I think what marcus said before is that if something happened to cook like right now, jeff williams might be the ceo, but the long-term plan is for turnus to take the job see, that's what I thought, because cook was the coo who then replaced steve the COO.

0:59:34 - Leo Laporte
The operating chief operating officer knows, you know where the bodies are buried.

0:59:38 - Jason Snell
But Williams is not, is not much younger than Cook.

I think as part of the issue there and and you know, we'll see I think the idea here is this is not for Cook, at least it's not imminent, and probably not for Jeff Williams, eddie Q, I wonder sometimes. Like he, he seems to be loving life I mean every time I interviewed him earlier this year and he's just the lord of his domain and having a great time and meeting famous people and hanging out and making money. So he might do it forever, but I do feel like Cook probably got a good five years in him easy right, but at some point you do need to do succession planning. And points at disney and what a dreadful job bob eicher has done, grooming people who then he kicks out and it ends up with no ceo that will stick with a company. So I think apple and apple knows and this is mark really went to town on this story. He mentions john browett, who they hired to do retail and was a disaster and was fired after six months, ang Angela Ahrens, who was never seen as a good fit.

She stayed for five years and I think she had some good ideas. But the bigger point there is you can't hire at this level outside Apple. You can hire at a lower level and bring them along, but culturally you have to hire and let them percolate a long time. So having a long-term succession plan for them is real smart.

1:00:55 - Leo Laporte
Ternus will have been there 25 years before he gets a chance at the big chair.

1:00:59 - Alex Lindsay
And pretty much all of them have been there pretty much since the near-death experience, Like you know, like that, that I think that, so I think that that's, and I think that definitely.

1:01:06 - Andy Ihnatko
Ternus is 2001,.

1:01:07 - Jason Snell
I think, yeah, that generation is the one that's retiring right Is the one that's retiring right Is the one that was actually there in those late 90s times and the next it will be interesting, right the quote unquote depression, the depression.

1:01:19 - Alex Lindsay
The greatest generation you know.

1:01:22 - Jason Snell
You need people at.

1:01:23 - Andy Ihnatko
Apple, who are still like taking extra sweet and lows from the diner because they remember when they couldn't afford to buy them.

1:01:29 - Jason Snell
So here's the thing is. I mean, my dad was born during the depression and he always like fix things with bits of wire from a wire hanger and stuff like it was. It was, it was serious. I would argue that maybe you need some people who are not in that mentality so that they can do something like not try to catch every dollar they can out of the app.

1:01:48 - Leo Laporte
Well, you can already see the change happening. We went from no buttons to eight buttons on the iPhone, I mean well, the war on buttons is over.

1:01:57 - Jason Snell
Yeah, the war on buttons.

1:01:58 - Leo Laporte
And it's sort of the war the butterfly keyboard there's a lot of things that we never thought would change have changed in fact. There is a rumor that apple's looking or maybe it's just a patent at a touch screen for the laptop oh yeah, I, I, you know, I I still my apple tv controller.

1:02:12 - Alex Lindsay
I was fine with them adding all the buttons. What makes me upset is that I have to use them. You know, like I like the like I, for I still use the older iPhone. A couple generations back and I was able to ignore I was able to ignore the buttons for until like the last update, and now they're like they pause. You can't just push the, because I just never needed the buttons and now I'm stuck with that.

1:02:44 - Andy Ihnatko
So the only concern I have about them adding buttons is like oh, they're going to make us actually use them to do things. But that is a legitimate question house effect, where this came from the guy on Project Runway saying that you work in the monkey house for long enough, you get blind to how much it stinks, and it takes someone brand new to come in to say, oh my God, what is this rank?

And so I mean one of Apple's greatest assets as a corporation is that it is a culture and it is a monoculture which means that you have everybody who's basically working together and working towards the same goal, but there needs to be somebody who really says points at a couple of different things which I won't mention but they're just like peculiar to my perspective saying that's messed up, man, we got to stop doing that.

1:03:32 - Alex Lindsay
I think that what's interesting is is that a lot of I still think that a lot of Apple's production process is built around the fact that Steve could only pay attention to so many things at the same time. And so there were. They do one product or a handful of products and they and they and they. They kind of you know there's like the Steve eye that was always paying attention to one thing at a time. And I think they do give up a lot. You know, I still think that they could do their own home devices and it would do really well. You know, again, $3 to $5 billion a year Like it wouldn't be the iPhone money but it would be, you know, like real money for most companies. They could, you know they could do a lot of that type of thing. I think that they really underinvest in support for a lot of their products. Training support answer Q&As.

1:04:20 - Jason Snell
I think that's the depression mentality that we're talking about, which it's hard though it's hard to say you got to throw some of your playbook out, because the playbook is what got them to be one of the most valuable companies in the world and be on top of the world when they were about to go bankrupt, and that's the Steve Jobs playbook, and it has worked. And so it's easy for us to roll in and say you need to change your playbook a little bit and I think they do, because so many aspects of what they do have worked so well. But you're absolutely right, alex, that there are missed opportunities that they just won't go for. And then there are other ones they choose to go in and then not invest properly for it to be a success. And I think those are also kind of like side effects of that mentality that brought them back from the brink to be incredibly successful, but maybe have led to little quirks in their personality where they're not as efficient.

1:05:10 - Leo Laporte
And I do want to know who's responsible for slow fees, though.

1:05:20 - Alex Lindsay
Whoever that is, I hope he's gone well and and I I think the the the issue is is also that they, that they um did that go anywhere.

1:05:25 - Andy Ihnatko
No, that did not go. You know how to do it. That sounds like that sounds like slang for something that parents don't want their kids involved it's a finsta, you mean.

1:05:33 - Alex Lindsay
You know, I think that there's something like what's funny is that I was like, well, it'd be really great Like Google experiments with all these things, but the reality is Google AdWords pay for AdWords and display ads pay for everything at Google, and they keep on experimenting with all these other devices, but nothing ever works. Nothing else does anything.

No, but there is an energy and a funness to what they're doing and same thing with Facebook. They have a lot of experimentation, but they're really, you know, they just sell ads, you know, and and uh, and I think that they have, you know, and I think. But I feel like there's a certain energy to experimenting with those things and I think that the headset is an experimentation. We'll see how that goes, but, um, but I think that that's a game that you can play.

I still think that the big thing with Apple, I think, is that they do. I think that they are a little slow at stuff, but when you look at the other companies, when Apple starts rolling down a path, you have a fair idea. Like I don't know initially how successful the headset will be, but I know that Apple will do it for the next five years, you know like. You know like it's, you know there'll be, there'll be two more versions of this before they decide they're not going to do that, because once that gets out of the gate, like they canceled I don't know how tens of billions of dollars they spent on the car and they canceled it without didn't feel like they had to release it, like it.

1:06:58 - Andy Ihnatko
You know, like it's just decided, man, market's not big enough. But just wrapping up on the playbook, as we're talking about that, that is absolutely true. Shareholders are not going to tell you that well, this plan that you've been following for the past 10 years, that's made you grow into a three trillion dollar company. We're scared that you're sticking to it. That's never going to happen, but nonetheless, polaroid stuck to a successful playbook. Sears roebuck stuck to a very successful playbook.

1:07:24 - Leo Laporte
They didn't, they didn't use lobster, don't forget red lobster stuck to a very rip cheddar biscuits I mean

1:07:31 - Andy Ihnatko
at some at some point, and and you could say that part of their trying to avoid getting blockbustered is their move into services. But there is also the idea of again someone who is outside the monkey house can say why aren't we doing this? We have all the components to move into this direction. In addition to the stuff that we're doing, we have the capability to do it, we the resources. It's a good experiment, it's a good gamble. Why don't we have another in the category of other bets? Why don't we try doing this?

1:08:01 - Alex Lindsay
and I and I think that what they why they keep winning also is just that, you know, I I think I mentioned this before, but we're watching this Billy Joel thing when he just said you know I'm not. He said I'm just good at doing the thing. You know, he was a 60-minute interview and he just goes, you know, and he goes. You're surrounded by people who are not very good at doing the thing. You look extraordinary and he goes. I'm not extraordinary.

He said I just I just know how to write song, basically good songs, and basically you know, I mean obviously billy joel's incredible performer, but the uh, but what I think about is that with apple is a lot of times, what you see that you don't see in a lot of other companies is logistics like this heavy. Just they're going to, they're going to think about it and they're going to think about they have the, they have the ability, they have the money, they have all the things to go. You know, if we're going to do this the right way, what would it look like? You know, and?

1:08:46 - Jason Snell
that's the Tim Cook. We don't talk about jobs. It's all the credit, but jobs brought tim in and apple was in dire straits, logistically right. They had huge amounts of uh, of excess inventory that they had to move and take charges against and all that and that's what cook, um, you know, made his name at and is great at, and and and he doesn't get enough credit for. Because you're exactly right, the to work at the scale that they do and be as efficient as they are and take stuff off the table that competitors want, and then the competitors turn around and can't get it because apple already bought it like that is a huge part of their game that is completely invisible to the consumer we're gonna.

1:09:23 - Andy Ihnatko
We're gonna need a buttload of this type of ram in four years. Let's get. Let's lock that up right now. We're gonna. We don't know exactly how we're gonna need this kind of manufacturing manufacturing in five years, but we know we're going to need it, so let's start the ball rolling on that too.

1:09:37 - Alex Lindsay
And even down to the events. I mean you can decide whether you agree or don't agree on whether they should do them live or not. I think they're much better now than they were before is that they keep on turning the dial up on that event, like the hard part is they just keep on on. The iPhone event is usually the biggest one and you know the half the fun of watching the event. Next week we'll be watching the production value for me, for me, you know, like it's like they just keep, but they're they're willing to spend into that and they're willing to. You know they just keep bringing the best teams, the best you know processes forward to to do that in a way that you don't see. I mean, uh, I don't know if you see anybody else doing it at that level.

1:10:17 - Andy Ihnatko
You know, as you know as a, as a corporation, I mean the fact, the fact that, uh, during the last event, we were actually discussing when, when, uh, when, when the hair, when the haircut like, dropped uh, dropped his uh, uh, his uh, skydiving jumpsuit Was that a real jumpsuit or did they decide to CG it? Because the fact that we acknowledge that, a, they would absolutely be thinking about that, about the effect they want to get, and, b, they would have the resources to apply on something that lasts all of 1.8 seconds in a video, in a moving camera shot that shows you how much faith we have and how much is that jumpsuit a practical or a cgi effect?

when federighi like does this.

1:11:02 - Leo Laporte
Well, we'll be watching and, of course, tuesday next tuesday, uh we will get Alex Lindsay's professional opinion on all the special, or are?

1:11:10 - Alex Lindsay
you not going to be here next tuesday? I'm actually working somewhere else. Uh, on something else next Tuesday.

1:11:15 - Leo Laporte
It's killing me. Well then, you're going to have to watch Office Hours Exciting special guests.

1:11:20 - Alex Lindsay
We have a new show called Extra Hours, because we didn't have enough shows. So Monday night oh perfect, monday night at 6, we'll do Extra Hours.

1:11:28 - Andy Ihnatko
Instant analysis.

1:11:29 - Jason Snell
We'll discuss it.

1:11:30 - Leo Laporte
It won'll be quite instant, it'll give us a little time to think about it, do you?

1:11:33 - Alex Lindsay
will you put that up on YouTube, or is it streams?

1:11:35 - Jason Snell
on.

1:11:35 - Alex Lindsay
YouTube. It's six o'clock every but you have to watch live 11 episodes in.

I don't know it's, it's, it's, it's recorded. If you look at, if you look at extra hours, we've done 10 episodes so far. It's watched it during right in the morning and also it's a little slower, it's more conversational than the morning show as well. As we're doing it all on the cloud, so we're using um viz, viz vector and and, uh, you know, cloud tools to do the whole thing, so you're doing it the way you told us to do it, which we thought, well, we're gonna let alex do it that way first and see how it works.

1:12:09 - Leo Laporte
We're actually this is working all right. We're using uh, still using Zoom ISO for the big shows. Yeah, ecamm in the cloud running on a Mac studio up at Mac Stadium. Yep, it has. What does it have? It's like a 100 gigabit connection. It's got a very fast connection. Yeah, so, and then our editors, john Ashley, our TD, benito, our TD, kevin King, our TDs, they use Splasht top to log into the Mac Stadium to run e-cam, to do the switching instead of the track. Ester, that's working all right.

1:12:39 - Alex Lindsay
Our, our commitment was that we want to be able to get to a point where we can push a button and it builds all the instances and all the infrastructure and everything else, and so we wanted to make sure it was all sitting inside of AWS. So it was just that there of aws, so it was like it was just that there was no who's paying that bill?

1:12:56 - Leo Laporte
are you just paying for that in a pocket?

1:12:58 - Alex Lindsay
uh, we uh, yes, so so, but the uh, but it's not that much. I don't do it every day like you do so, and we're only doing that cloud version uh, once a week. Um, and we've had we, we have donors, uh people who are 501c3s, so some of our members have been very have supported us. It's not all my money, so it's it's the. We get donations that cover most of the most of the costs and so the we're kind of in the same boat actually. Yeah, yeah, yeah, so, but but I think that, so, so we only do it once a week and it's only it's like 12 or 15 bucks an hour. Oh, that's not bad. You know to run. So it costs us. You know a show costs us 50 bucks or whatever.

1:13:35 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, we're also using Restream for some of the shows, like Security Now and Windows Weekly, right and you know offhand shows, and we also use Restream to stream. We're streaming to seven different platforms now thanks to Restream. That's great, um, and I think we're gonna trade we were discussing that before the show maybe trade kick for a telegram, because we like to follow the biggest crooks to whatever platform they go to. No, I'm just teasing. Uh, we are. But speaking of which, we are on x, we're on Youtube, we're on twitch, we're on LinkedIn, we're on Facebook, we're on x and we're on YouTube, we're on Twitch, we're on LinkedIn, we're on Facebook, we're on X and we're on Discord for the club members. That's really. I love it. I think it brings us a new audience. Hello to all of you watching on those various platforms. We're going to take a little break when we come back. Why did Apple nix? Part of a child safety bill? Hmm, and a lot more rumors. You're watching MacBreak Weekly with Alex Lindsay, officehours.global, Andy Ihnatko, WGBH in Boston and Jason Snell from sixcolors.om.

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Andy, you put this story in from the wall street journal. Uh, I don't. It's kind of a shocker, uh.

1:19:35 - Andy Ihnatko
So tell me about, tell me what's what happened here so this is a story about Apple lobbyists, uh, operating in specifically in the state of Louisiana, uh, and the kind of like the real hardball, hardball tactics they've been, they've been, they've been playing against, uh. They're talking about two different incidents. According to lawmakers who work with them. On the story, there was one lawmaker who, after believing for himself, after trying to set up his kid's iPhone for parental controls, he thought that, oh geez, but these parental controls, they're not good, they don't get the job done. Try to add an amendment to an upcoming state child safety bill that basically said that Google and Apple would have to help tools figure out that, okay, the person operating this phone is a child. They don't have to provide personal information. The person operating this phone is a child, no-transcript. Is this person under the age of 18?

So this lawmaker decided to put this amendment to the bill and, before he says, before he even left the floor, he was getting a flurry of texts from Apple lobbyists that are basically telling him to reconsider. This is bad, you're a dupe of Facebook. Facebook wants to put all this responsibility on us. That's terrible. And he went from being told, before he introduced the amendment, that, oh yeah, there's a. This is not gonna this.

This amendment has a really good chance of passing through. Shouldn't be a problem to suddenly, I guess the other senior lawmakers were putting pressure on him to via lobbyists, that, yeah, maybe you want to get rid of this, and so he was kind of forced to remove it. The but another story, which is a little bit more, uh goodness, a little bit more racketeer-ish uh, so this was from 2021 and again, this is a louisiana state lawmaker who was talking to wall street journal about this uh, wanted to uh start to want, wanted to basically wanted to start to want, wanted to basically Import and put regulations on how Apple runs the app store, not knowing that.

That's how you get, that's how you get hammered really quickly by good luck with that, so so he got a call from a lobbyist who said yeah, you know that movie Emancipation, big budget, apple TV Plus movie with Will Smith that's going to be filming in your state and bringing all those millions of dollars. If you don't drop this, we're going to pull all filming activity from the state of Louisiana and we're going to we're going to induce a, a, a fiscal crisis. And Apple says no, no, no, we would never have done this. This is ridiculous that we have done this, but that's what the lawmaker says and that's consistent with Apple's, I think, tactics, particularly in the, in the lobbying on anything regarding child safety bills.

1:22:39 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, I believe that. Uh, looking at that article I think they, the lobbyists, intimated it. I don't think it was quite as explicit as as the never they were gonna do it and the chances of them doing it would be almost zero Like it because they, because they it's such a huge logistical change for a film it would they would never actually take a film out of a state over this because they just can't, they just couldn't turn the corner. You know, they made it choose to not shoot there anymore, which would be probably as damaging but it, you know, oftentimes, I mean, I don't know. I spent a lot of time in DCC. Lobbyists say a lot of things.

Yeah, they get paid to say it. Their job is to turn the corner and they'll say just about anything they can say to move something. I doubt Apple explicitly told them to say that it's, you know, probably unlikely.

1:23:25 - Andy Ihnatko
But that's well, ok. One. This is. This is the lawmaker speaking. So again we have the word of this one person.

1:23:31 - Alex Lindsay
The word. However, we have the word of this one person, the word of a representative, and we know that all of our representatives, everything they say is fact.

1:23:38 - Andy Ihnatko
And we also know that everything that Apple does through lobbyists is oh no, the lobbyists are lone wolves. They're not doing things on the team like that. I know he threatened that, I know you made. He made you feel as though your life and your property were in danger, and he was wild out. He seemed really interested, but let me assure you he would never do that. That's intimidation is in itself, its own, is and it's is a crime in and of itself, and again.

1:24:19 - Leo Laporte
I also should point out that the wall street journal doesn't have a lot of love for big tech and is notorious for going after big tech but regardless of the truth of it and I think it feels like it's probably happened I don't disagree with apple's position, which is age verification is a terrible idea well, I mean it's giving up privacy.

1:24:41 - Alex Lindsay
I would give that. It's always going to run, I would give it's up to parents to do that not apple.

Yeah, as a parent, I don't want apple giving that information over. I want I control. My kids have to ask for permission. I wish it worked better, but they have to ask for permission to put anything on their phone. You know, and it's not, and I'm not. You know, it's not an age verification thing, but I do think that as a parental domain, as a parent, I think that that belongs to me, not to Apple to start doing that.

1:25:09 - Andy Ihnatko
Okay, but there's this can be a nuanced sort of discussion. I don't think that necessarily what this amendment was proposing to do is necessarily the right thing to do. However, as a principal, I have a problem with trillion-dollar companies saying trust us, we're not going to abuse your kids. Trust us, we are not going to let something happen on our platform that makes us an I'm more smart of money, but it exposes your child to ideas of self-harm, poor body image, bad, bad mental habits. We would never do that, trust us. You don't need to pass any laws that make us responsible if such an outcome were to occur. So that's my. So establish that. Establish that.

Number two, the question becomes if we pass laws protecting children who use social media networks and other services, how do we separate children who are affected, who come under this law, from people who do not? I feel as though part of the. I think there's an. There's a reasonable discussion to be had if it is possible for Google and Apple not to say here is the identity of the person using this phone. Here is their birth date. Here is this other information Simple yes, no. Is this person under 18 or are they not? If they are not under 18, then they can sign up for this new account. If they are under 18, they need to get approval through whatever parental controls you have.

1:26:41 - Alex Lindsay
Is it 18, or is it 16 or 15?

1:26:45 - Andy Ihnatko
There are a couple of different laws that are making their way through the federal Senate right now, the, the, the, the federal senate right now, uh, for instance, to change copa so that, uh, marketing to children and uh, tracking children that way, just simply raising the age from 12 to 16, I think it is uh. The other, the revised kappa, is 18. Okay, 18, I'm sorry. Uh, and other bills are that are being discussed now. Set the bar at 18. And no, and, and I do agree with you that this is something that parents should be primarily responsible for. However, again, my fail here is I don't like the idea of simply saying you can trust us, we're a trillion dollar company. We got this way by making sure that we do things that are ethically completely pure and that all of our employees are absolutely proud of. So that's why I'm saying that I'm not necessarily closing the door on that kind of use of technology or that kind of responsibility of Apple and Google. Again, not to necessarily police things, but to simply say thumbs up, thumbs down, child or not, child.

1:27:51 - Leo Laporte
There is no private way to do age verification, and we've had shoshana weissman on twit many times. She wrote a very good piece at her uh, her organization, rstreetorg, about why age verification is always a impossible thing to do, whether it's apple or an app company or a social media company. So and and I I should say if apple were caught doing this, quid pro quo, it would be as they, maybe they were it's a black mark on apple. It seems like a big risk to do. Jason, you made a very interesting point, though in our discord, do you want to? Do you want to say that?

1:28:28 - Jason Snell
I just wanted to say to that, to that other story about oh apple was threatening to pull out of lou and put pressure on a politician. I just wanted to point out that the entire process of making movies in locations is politics, because the only reason they were making that movie there is they got a 40% tax credit from the state of Louisiana, right? So you know, leaving the rest of this discussion aside for a minute, just to say that the entire decision about when movies get made or not is political. It has to do with kickbacks from the state government and then going to a politician in the state and saying I thought we had a, you know, we a relationship. They literally have an existing financial relationship with the kickbacks and therefore, you know it's, it's all it's ugly.

And Louisiana politics you know it's, it's all it's ugly. And louisiana politics my understanding is super corrupt, uh, historically anyway. Uh, the indictments flow. Maybe that's just me as a 49er fan saying that it's very clear that there's a lot of bribery that has happened in the past in louisiana, uh, and yeah, the whole. I'm just saying basically, where you shoot a movie and where you produce the vfx, where you do all of that is, uh, a wretched hive of scum and villainy well, and it's, it's.

1:29:40 - Alex Lindsay
It's so complicated and you're talking about a lobbyist who probably doesn't even know the person that would make a decision on the movies.

1:29:46 - Jason Snell
Yeah, you know, like it's you know, so it's just someone.

1:29:48 - Alex Lindsay
It's someone pulling something out of a dark place and making stuff up you. It's not like they're, and that happens all the time with lobbyists.

1:29:57 - Andy Ihnatko
It's kind of their job. Oliver doesn't even know where he would get a gun, so I don't know why you're, I'm just saying. It's the threat that is the problem. I agree with you, but we don't have any evidence.

1:30:11 - Leo Laporte
It's just this one guy who says it. Apple denies it. Furthermore, if Apple's fighting against age verification schemes, they're fighting a good fight. That's an important fight. I wouldn't want them to threaten pulling productions from a state, but this is an important fight that all the tech companies should fight, and legislators need to hear what a bad idea age verification is.

1:30:34 - Alex Lindsay
It's just not doable, and I think that apple's very binary in the sense that they just don't want to give information to anybody about, about their users, you know. So the thing is, is that anything that says they're going to fight everything tooth and nail if it says I have to give information of any kind to a third party because they think they basically have a very low opinion of everybody and how they use their data, and their opinion is not necessarily inaccurate that everybody wants that data. I mean basically that check of are you over 18 or under 18, or over 16 or under 16, whatever that number is?

1:31:06 - Leo Laporte
uh, facebook would be able to develop your your birthday like that because they're going to ask yeah, but it's up to parents, it's up to parents. Would you have a?

1:31:15 - Andy Ihnatko
would you have a problem with the, with the, when the parent sets up parental controls, if there were simply a toggle to say I it is okay not to not to give my child's identity, not my birth date or birth year, but simply to acknowledge, to say that if, if, if a app or service wants to ask is this user of this phone underage or subject to parental controls on the phone? I understand what you're saying, but here's the other issues.

1:31:42 - Leo Laporte
If a kid is gay and his parents don't like that and he's 16 and he wants to set up a Gmail account so that there are legitimate reasons or he wants to go browse the web to find out information about how he's feeling inside, there are legitimate reasons why it shouldn't be the parents choice. So this is a very complicated issue, ok, and I think that to say, oh, make Apple do it or make Facebook do it, or make an app do it, is a terrible, terrible solution. I understand that there are legislators and their parents who are desperate to protect kids. I support that. I think that's great. I understand your feelings, but you need to also understand technologically, what you're proposing is a very bad idea. Okay.

1:32:30 - Andy Ihnatko
I totally understand all of that, but the thing, what I'm saying, the thing is I don't tie in that one idea a binary setting, a binary disclosure with everything else. Cosa, for instance, the it was very, very bad when it was first introduced in 2022. But since then it's been rewritten, it's been amended and it says things like this law is not meant to, should not be construed as a reason to prevent any child from finding information on the internet that they go out and seek, or essentially. You can have these kinds of controls, you can have these kinds of laws that are designed to protect children, that don't do the sort of collateral damage that a lot of people seem to think is absolutely intrinsic and endemic. I don't think that that's true. That doesn't mean that I agree and I support any given law that's being put out there. I'm saying that.

I think that we're at a state where, if we believe that trillion dollar companies can abuse children and cause them to come to harm, if we believe whistleblowers inside of Facebook that have disclosed internal secret reports that say that, yeah, we decided to do a study on how teenage girls respond to their use of Facebook and we find out that, no, we are absolutely causing harm to these girls and they said, okay, well, what are you going to do? And decided to ignore that report. I'm saying that it a it is legitimate to ask the question can we craft a safe piece of legislation that holds these companies responsible for the damage that they might be doing to children? Is that possible? We can ask that. Question number two is it possible to convey to a provider of internet services that this person is a child and therefore would be subject to such a law?

These are two questions that I think are worth discussing, and the fact that I think that laws are possible doesn't mean that I'm blind to the idea that a lot of children are not living in places of safety physical or mental safety and that these laws have to be crafted to protect these people and allow them to find their communities, find their health care that they need for whatever they are going through, be it pregnancy, being transitioning, being any or that sort of stuff. Don't like that. If you suggest either of these things, sometimes it becomes oh well, this is a nightmare of privacy, it cannot be solved. This is exactly the statement that Apple, for instance, tends to make that there is no compromise on a, b or C, because it will cause the entire world to come to an end and also make it harder for us to run our business. But we are really promising that's going to cause the world to come to an end.

You want Apple to be in charge of age for reputation. No, I didn't say that. What I'm saying is that if we are going to have a law like that and again I'm arguing that it's possible that could be a good result, but that's something we need to discuss. How do you verify an age in a way where you're not forcing every user of every part of the internet to have to subject to an identity check to prove who they are? Anonymity and privacy are paramount to free use of the internet and have to be protected.

1:36:10 - Leo Laporte
Nate Hagenshaw. How do you propose that? The only way I could think of it is if the parent does it. How do you age? Verify only some people.

1:36:16 - Andy Ihnatko
If you have. I'm saying my idea off the top of my head is you have, we have parental controls. Okay, you can choose to turn them on, you can choose to turn them off. Okay, if you have them turned off, then you are implicitly saying that I don't really care what my kid does on the internet. Okay, that's great. If you have them turned on, that means that I want my kid to be protected from certain materials, that if there is a law in place that says that they need to be protected from predatory behavior from certain corporations and individuals, I want them to benefit from those tools. So, therefore, if there is a flag on the system, that's a flag on the device that says, well, that's, this person is under the age of 18, yes or no?

1:37:04 - Alex Lindsay
not, here's the identity, here's the social security number and then you want apps to respect it is that not the situation now, I mean well, right now, you just can't, you just don't let them, uh, download the app like, and that's exactly which is what parents should do. By the way, like I speak from experience, like you know, I, I just didn't let my kid, my kids now know how. They just think their friends are crazy, you know so, um, you know the, uh, you know, but they, they got through the, whatever the push was. But I think that, again, I don't think you can. I think the problem is laws are very blunt instruments and, um, slippery slopes happen, you know. So, once someone gets a little wedge in there, they just want to keep opening. That's why apple's not let we'll do everything they can in theory allow a crack.

1:37:48 - Leo Laporte
I mean, there are laws that say always their motivation information of of kids under 13? Um, is there just no mechanism to enforce that? What is the issue, Andy? Is it is there no setting. Is there no setting on the iPhone that says my kid's underage?

1:38:06 - Alex Lindsay
I have to double check. But when you go into 13, the thing is is that they can do that, like, for instance, on TikTok. If you post videos of kids by themselves under 13, it will not get promoted. It won't keep you from doing it, right, but it won't promote them, because it can see from the physical structure of their face that they are not 16 years old. You know, and and it and it will.

1:38:26 - Leo Laporte
Just it will just not spread them anywhere, you know, and so I think what Andy's saying which I think is not unreasonable is and I just really we need to check to see if it's doable at all but there's a setting in parental controls that says the user of this phone is under x, age x, and that setting, just like do not track, should be which is not respected but should be respected by apps. And they say, oh, there's a setting on here the person's under 13. Even if they surreptitiously downloaded it under the covers with a flashlight at night and Alex didn't know, they still wouldn't be able to do it. I think that's not unreasonable, Andy.

1:39:03 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, that's what I'm saying.

1:39:05 - Leo Laporte
Lou MM says my kids have a kid's account on iOS. It blocks a lot of things and requires permission for everything, which I think is another way of doing that. Right, you could say no facebook for you. I like the idea, though, of having a setting saying uh, this phone is used by somebody under whatever the. I guess that's part of the problem is there is no set age. It was 13 under kappa. In some states it's 16, in some places it's 18. So I don't even know, oh, what keeps the kids from changing that setting? Well, that's obvious. That's a pin right yeah, parental controls you should be able to.

1:39:41 - Andy Ihnatko
Kids shouldn't be able to change anything.

1:39:44 - Leo Laporte
I feel like the way it works now it just isn't age specific, it's parent specific. So the parent gets that phone, sets it says you can't do this, this and this, and gives the phone to the kid, sets it says you can't do this, this and this, and gives the phone of the kid that seems like that's. Is that not acceptable?

1:40:00 - Andy Ihnatko
and he's that not enough. That's a good step. I'm saying is that it's not unreasonable, in my opinion, to basically say we're not going to take your word for it, that you're not, that anything you do is when you operate your service is not going to harm children. We're just, we're gonna, we're not going to tell you what to do and what not to do. We're simply. Kosa simply says that if you actually do damage to a child and they, as again, these are part of the rewriting of the laws specific about what that damage is right.

1:40:31 - Leo Laporte
Well, no it, it.

1:40:33 - Andy Ihnatko
It is pretty specific in certain they're basically they're basically not talking about. Oh well, he gave, gave the kid the heebie-jeebies give me $50,000 to anti-heebie-jeebie them. But it does outline some specific examples, like In some states, by the way, you can do that.

1:40:49 - Leo Laporte
They have a right to sue private lawsuits. In some states you can, as a parent, say heebie-jeebies.

1:40:56 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, and this is why the difference between I've I. I know that the reason why, uh, all these, all the large tech companies want federal privacy laws and federal laws on this way is because, of course, it's easier to lobby like one legislative body, but nonetheless, it's the state legislator latures that are making these blunt instruments, sort of laws, where it is not designed to protect kids. It is designed to give parents the ability to have total control over their child. Uh, it's to make sure that you know that we don't. We don't want my, my, my child isn't gay.

I don't want them to be. I don't want them to be led into the gay lifestyle, so we want to make sure we can punish facebook for turning my child gay. The state legislate. These state laws tend to be a real mass of terribleness you and I are in a kind of an awkward position.

1:41:45 - Leo Laporte
I don't have kids young enough to be doing this. You don't have kids at all. In fact, the only person and same with you, Jason, your kids are grown right the only person I know in this panel who has kids young enough to do this is is alex. Do you use parental controls?

1:42:00 - Alex Lindsay
or what do you do?

1:42:01 - Leo Laporte
I mean, I don't do a ton of parental controls, but I do control all the apps, like so yeah, you say you can't have those things and your kids are good enough not to do it, even around behind your back no, I don't.

1:42:12 - Alex Lindsay
I don't get the impression that they're using any of those, any of the apps. I think that what happened was. I think that what happened was they got through the push of where their friends were doing it and I think what they saw was that they I mean talking to them they just saw their friends obsessively being part of some of these social networks and just thought wow, I don't want to spend time doing that.

1:42:30 - Leo Laporte
You did the parenting thing. You propagandized them. I did. You don't want to do that.

1:42:35 - Alex Lindsay
Well, well, no, I didn't even say much about it, it just you know it, it and I think that.

But I think all they had to see is they were behind and they got to watch the right thing you communicated your values to the kids and the kids now have internalized that and they continue to live it and you don't have to be draconian about it and say, oh you know, I'm gonna whip you if you don't do it, yeah, and it and it's not that that they don't get access to anything, I don't, I'm pretty laissez-faire in a lot of ways, but it but on their phone, um, I've been a little bit more restrictive because, you know, and I think that it's, it's paid off I mean they, but I don't know I, there was never any big fight over it. They just felt like their friends are obsessively looking at their phones all the time and my kids don't have that same, which is, my kids reach them there was, and I think it's still the case.

1:43:19 - Leo Laporte
There was a brisk business in parental control software. I think it's still the case, right. And there was an equally brisk business for kids and how to get around parental control software, right, uh it, I don't think it worked. I was completely laissez-faire with my kids and, uh, you know, they turned out okay. Okay, I guess, I mean, one's an influencer, the other's a stand-up comic. Maybe they didn't. I take it back. I should have done what you did. I think the ideal situation would be a parent with good values raises their child with those values. And, uh, and I think you did that, Jason, with your kids. Your kids have done I hope so, yeah, I hope so, but every kid's different too every kid's different, every parent's different parents and kids.

Yeah, every situation is different and I don't think big tech should be responsible for doing that job.

1:44:18 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, and I think that I mean I'm surprised that I survived you know like right. And so.

So I think that's the other side of that is that I'm just like, oh, you know, like there's a lot of yeah, we need to. I mean, you know like I, you know there's so many I, I, I tell you know I try not to tell my kids too many stories, but if I say something I look back on them like how was that okay? I mean I grew up in the country, right, you had fireworks, shotguns. I mean I was 12 years old, I was out shooting stuff with shotguns.

1:44:50 - Leo Laporte
And, by the way, both my kids. I'm very proud of them. I'm just joking. They turned out fine.

1:45:03 - Alex Lindsay
I mean, I got a flintlock for my birthday when I was. I don't mean like. I don't mean like when you put on the wall.

1:45:05 - Leo Laporte
I mean, it was a muzzle loader and I wasn't real happy, uh, when, uh, michael's grandparents kept giving him long knives like sharp too, he collected them okay, now here, but here's the right here's the operative question was it like your parents or was it like your in-laws?

1:45:23 - Andy Ihnatko
no, because if it was the, in-laws, they might have been not a great having a great relationship with you at that time yeah, uh, well, no one got stabbed there you go. Sounds like a big deal, but really it isn't so, and I just says in our discord.

1:45:37 - Leo Laporte
I'm surprised anybody survived the lawn dart era.

1:45:40 - Alex Lindsay
Oh man, yeah, those are fun and I think that I think that the thing is is that we just a lot? I think that there, there sometimes is this thing like we have to make a law for everything that's wrong, and I think there's just a lot of things we can't make laws for, and I just think it's really, you know, I know that that's their representatives there to make laws, but we don't have to make everything a law.

Sometimes it just has. Sometimes it's just people are going to have to figure out how to manage it at an at their own house level. Um, I think that I mean, when you open up parental controls, I don't use most of them, I use some parental controls.

1:46:10 - Leo Laporte
There's an enormous amount of micromanagement that is available right now that's the point is to give you that choice and then it's up to you and I know I'm not against Andy's idea of there being an age switch that apps are required to adhere to. Uh, you know that's that's not a bad idea. That's just one more parental control. All right, we have to take a little break. You are watching MacBreak Weekly. This is actually a topic we discuss a lot in all the shows because right now there is quite a bit of a move to legislate this, not to mention the move against end-to-end encryption, which feels related to me, you know.

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1:48:03 - Andy Ihnatko
yeah, okay, yeah, yeah, nikkei news broke the story this morning. Yeah, that's us. This. That was another advantage, or advantage or, excuse me, a difference between, like the android world and the iPhone world, the o OLED screens. In the early days, people would complain, very rightly, that oh my God, the colors are just so cartoonish, they're not realistic. But the technology has moved way, way forward and now it's just simply a nicer display with better blacks, and when the colors need to be intense, deep, like in a user interface, they're so much more satisfying. So, yeah, this is going to be great it would be the.

1:48:38 - Leo Laporte
I mean, the iPhone se is the last uh apple phone to have an lcd, so yeah, it would make sense time to do it nice of the budget phone.

1:48:46 - Andy Ihnatko
Gets the nice display too.

1:48:47 - Leo Laporte
Yeah from o'grady's power page apple developing updated magic keyboard for entry-level ipad and ipad air units. Actually this from mark german, but I'm gonna give like o'grady, I'm gonna give uh o'grady a little, a little plug there. Um, have we got to get him on the show? Uh, yeah, I feel like although I notice this isn't written by uh, is it dan? Dan o'grady, Jason, Jason o'grady. Too many Jasons, he can't be on the show.

1:49:17 - Alex Lindsay
Sorry, can't be on Nope.

1:49:18 - Leo Laporte
And then I love this Guardian story I don't know if you guys saw this about Jennifer in Paradise, the first Photoshopped image. Yeah, I saw that one. Isn't this great John Knoll? It was his future wife, jennifer, and she's sitting on the beach in Bora Bora. Beautiful photo taken in 1987. The Guardian says it could be central to the modern visual vernacular, as Edward Muybridge's shot of galloping horses, he says. Looking back, jennifer says it was truly a magical time for us. My husband actually proposed to me later on in the day, probably just after that photo, but noel used it to demonstrate the pixar image computer, which was in effect a early version of photoshop, which he wrote later. Um, I think a very good story. If you haven't read it yet, uh, it goes.

1:50:14 - Andy Ihnatko
It goes with the video that, uh, noel posted on Youtube photoshop, the first demo especially, especially how, like these days, any sample image is so carefully stage, managed and created. This was just a vacation photo. They were. They were just finished like crunch mode on it. What was it? Who? Who framed roger and?

1:50:35 - Leo Laporte
like they just finished two frame, roger and they were just taking a vacation.

1:50:39 - Andy Ihnatko
This was just a holiday snap that they made look at this.

1:50:42 - Leo Laporte
Here's the early. Is this Photoshop? What is he using? I don't even know. I think that's the early Photoshop. Wow, he's moving the mountain around.

1:50:49 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, duplicated, jennifer, right, we're forgetting how much this blew people's minds.

I remember that I was teaching at a summer, my break between high school and college a summer computer institute for the Boston Computer Society where people in businesses would be sent here for a week or two of computer training.

And when the first versions of Photoshop came out and the fact that I was just casually, I remember specifically like just oh and see, because it's not just the, you can actually do anything you want with these photos. And I just circled, like someone's nose in a picture and like moved it to the middle of the forehead and the person I was like showing this to was like that's horrifying, horrifying. Like what would you ever want? Like okay, it's just a picture, it's not like I haven't stolen his soul, it's not actually happening to him. It was just such a freaky thing to for people to see people actually like modifying the content of, not a bitmap illustration that might be on a new, on a, on a on a print shop news dot matrix print newsletter. But here is something that looks like a photo and I've changed the reality of that photo by just on a whim in five seconds.

1:52:03 - Alex Lindsay
That blew a lot of people's minds and that was, that was the first generation of people going. You can't trust anything. You look at it before right I feel like I've heard that story, probably not the first generation.

1:52:12 - Leo Laporte
But it was certainly caused another wave of that, another david hoockney in the early days, the great painter was invited to test the program soon after it's released and predicted would spell the end of film photography, and I don't think that's what killed film photography.

1:52:26 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, also when, when, uh, when, when Jennifer, his wife, was asked if she would go to Bora Bora with with John to recreate the photo, she said oh, no, no, no, no, that's not okay, I want yeah, I did the article say like whether or not, like he asked permission to her hi, I'd like to make like this vacation photo of you when you're at, you're completely at, relaxed and comfortable, because you're in the presence of someone you trusted. Is it okay if I kind of share this with kind of the world?

1:52:58 - Leo Laporte
yeah, well, fortunately they're still married, so I think they probably worked out okay.

Yeah, they had a conversation, I'm sure uh, john, I'm not wearing any top in that photo, do you mind? Uh, let's see what else, uh, before we uh get to our picks of the week. Apple and nvidia in talks to invest in open ai. Apple's using open ai as part of its apple intelligence uh launch. But but is it using open ai? We found out this weekend that amazon is going to use anthropic to power the new amazon echo. The remarkable a word. They're calling it $10 a month. Maybe five Is Apple. They're using their own models, right, they're not using open AI models.

1:53:46 - Jason Snell
They warn you, what they're using is their own models, except if you want to search for what Apple is calling world knowledge, which is to use it as a search engine essentially, at which point they will kick you optionally to a third party AI model and I think one of our going back to the what's going to happen next Monday, I think, place your bets would not surprise me if Apple mentions another provider in addition to chat GPT. They threw around Google gemini at the developer conference, not in the main presentation, but afterward. They were saying like, for example, google gemini, and said the name, which struck me as being awfully confident that something will be worked out there. And then there is claude. You know as well I would be.

I would actually not be surprised at all if apple didn't say look, if, if you want world knowledge, pick your poison. You know you can say no to chatbots, or you could say give me GPT, or you could say give me, you know, gemini, or others too, and they've been open about that from the beginning. So I wonder if they'll have more of a story for that on Monday, because obviously they're going to spend a lot of time talking about Apple intelligence, but beyond that world, knowledge stuff, everything else is running on Apple's own models, not anybody else's models, models that Apple built that are trained and are using your personal information kept locally to intuit things and help you with stuff. That's the idea, yeah.

1:55:12 - Andy Ihnatko
And since that event, they've released a whole bunch of papers documenting exactly how their in-house models work and a lot of people have been giving it strong thumbs up. Obviously, it's not the same level of sophistication as people who have been investing billions of dollars in this for the past 10 years, but they're not just like also ran, hey look, it can capitalize things. Oh look, it's kind of a super powerful search. It's like no, it's a formidable, like a LLM in and of itself and what it's just still like. Just a brilliant move of saying we know that.

We know that we can't be as good as what Anthropic and OpenAI and Google can do today. Why would we shut them out for any reason? We just all we care about is making sure that things that the user, our users, do, that where they should expect privacy on an Apple device, they will have privacy and, as you say, Jason, like if they want to leave that safe, warm hug of Apple's privacy bubble, we're not going to stop them from doing that, because that's something that they clearly want to do Well, and I believe that that delivers that feature back to the developers as well.

1:56:13 - Alex Lindsay
So the developers don't have to figure out how to integrate all of these things, all of these tools. They're able to just make the call. You know, like, this is what. This is what we're going to. I mean, it's not as simple as that, but but the idea is is that they're making this easy for developers to add AI. And again they have, and I think that that bubble, that bigger, the bubble in their private, you know, cloud infrastructure will get bigger to a point where my guess is 90% of what you're asking for. They're going to answer in the bubble and you know, right now it's probably 10% of what you're asking or 20%, but I think that they can keep on growing that out. But they built this three layer tier where that outer layer is really big and will become thinner and thinner and thinner as they build into it, and that's just such a. It's going to be a. That's a moat Like that's a really complicated moat for other people to wrestle with.

1:57:04 - Andy Ihnatko
So One other thing about this story, though, is that investors are getting more and more twitchy about putting more money into AI companies, because, where they're at the, these companies are have to spend so much freaking money to get these services up and running and develop the next model and to operate the services they've got on their current models, and it's not necessarily open taps on the profitability right yet, and so this is why, for Google and for other companies, a lot of the question is what are your capital expenses and how much more money are you going to have to spend to basically become an AI company and continue to provide AI services? I've been reading some coverage regarding this rumor, which I think the Wall Street Journal broke. I might be wrong, basically saying that OpenAI needs infusions of money and they're not getting oh yeah, getting a water.

1:58:02 - Leo Laporte
They're not getting waterfalls going back to the well for more investors.

1:58:05 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, yeah, and investors are again getting more and more twitchy about how much more money do we have?

to put in just before you start like actually becoming a hugely profitable and like didn't we want to say we want a unicorn, yeah, trillions of dollars is closed so I I I read some someone who who described this as a bailout, but I don't think that sounds that doesn't seem to be a majority opinion, but nonetheless, it is true that it's going to be a limiting factor of companies like companies like apple are and google are in great positions because they have all that ad money, they have all that iPhone, they have all that iPhone money they can build and they can continue to invest in their own services. However, at some point, even they are going to have to figure out how much money do we have to put in and when can we expect the differential in our products to be paying for all this money we're putting in?

1:58:52 - Alex Lindsay
It's not a linear question. And I think that the more you put on the phone, the more cost effective it is for them. So it's really an interesting puzzle of when you build the hardware. You can build the hardware so that it is more and more tuned to make that happen.

1:59:06 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, that's exactly why Google was from the outset. They were very, very clear when they took the wraps off of Gemini say no, no, this isn't just a server-based thing, this is like there are three levels of this. So when you need, like the supercomputer sort of performance, yes, you're going to push this off on a server, but we also have the nano version, which lives entirely on device, and I'm sure that it pleased them that they could, like, start to address some of their future plans and, oh look, and it's more private. It doesn't leave the sanctity of your device, but as future plans. And oh look, and, and it's more private, it doesn't leave the sanctity of your device, but, as you say, it's like we would much rather have you pay for the electricity and the compute cores to actually do most of this stuff, if we can possibly make that happen. This is like.

This is why, like I, I don't think we need legislation to force, force, uh, google and Apple and other companies to do things like that, because they are going to be underwater so quickly if they don't start to produce economically and ecologically positive versions of these models and figure out how to ways to run them that don't require them to build yet another computing center tears up the local power grid and consumes like most of the fresh water in the district, that now they're financially motivated to actually do the right thing, and that's that's when. That's when business, industry and society work hand in hand, when they're both equally screwed if they, if any one of them, screws up we go to people magazine for the hard-hitting breaking news that we care about.

2:00:38 - Leo Laporte
Finally finally, look at the people and people is apple's no villain clause for iPhones on screen real? The truth about apple's rule for movie and tv shows, uh, so, you've probably heard it, we've even talked about it. I guess it started with ryan johnson, director of knives out. There was a character in knives out who was a bad guy who had an iPhone and they had to re-edit it to get the iPhone out. Ryan says uh, there she is. What is she holding? We don't know, but it anyway. Um, ryan says that apple doesn't allow villains or bad guys to use an iPhone. Apple says there's no villain clause. It is not explicit in Apple's guidelines for using Apple trademarks and copyrights.

However, there is another story that may be important, coming coming from a prop master, heidi caledo, uh, who discussed this, uh on an episode of the rap drinks podcast, which I've really got to start listening to. Uh, apple is very specific. Caledo said I got a script once where an actress is supposed to be looking at her phone while she's driving drunk and crashes her car. They wanted to see a text message pop up and I had to be like well, we can't do that. We've established this character with an apple iPhone. We can't have her driving drunk and crashing while looking at an iPhone. They will never work with me again.

2:02:08 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, that's probably the important quote they will never work with me again yeah, and it's important to note that this is for like it also it's it's a nice. It's a nice article because it really rounds up all the quotes that have been said, like in interviews and podcasts, over like five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten years of different filmmakers experiences of working with apple, and the key phrase is working with apple. If you want apple to just to give you like fifty thousand dollars worth of assorted hardware to use as props on the set, yeah, they're going to expect that A they're going to expect that it's being used in a certain way that's positive to the brand. And if they do something that is not positive to the brand, again they're not going to sue you and they're not going to put you in a position where you can't release the movie.

2:02:54 - Alex Lindsay
But that means that, hello, prop master, the next movie you're on you're not going to be able to get, you're going to have to buy your own damn iPhones, and I'm not sure what brand is different than that. I mean, you know it's most of the time product placement comes with a bunch of. You know like the military gives you access to aircraft carriers because they want to control the, the uh, the narrative, you know like so. So like you know it's, it's a, I think that kind of comes with does bring up the counter examples.

2:03:20 - Leo Laporte
In john wick, the guy who kills john's dog and sets that whole thing off on an iPhone is seen using an iPhone. Josh hartnett's serial killer and trap this new movie trap, a pair appears to be using an apple device and an iPhone appears in the villain's briefcase. An ant-man those prop masters will be buying their phones from now on. Yeah, if I, now you, you you've talked about what do they call it? Greeking labels and stuff. Alex, yeah, if, if you wanted to have a cell phone and a text message on a cell phone and a car crash how?

2:03:59 - Alex Lindsay
I think you can do it as long as you don't. I don't think, I think you may have trouble with the logo, you know cover over the jim ladder back.

2:04:06 - Leo Laporte
Cover the cover.

2:04:07 - Alex Lindsay
I don't think that all the logos in the studio a case without a logo solves that problem, and then they often will composite in a fake ui that looks right they call that playback yeah, the playback makes up a ui and oftentimes you know you see macbook pros or MacBooks with just all smooth gray and that's either done with a sticker or oftentimes it's done in post.

2:04:29 - Leo Laporte
You always know, though, it's a Mac or an iMac. You can't miss it. It's like a MacBook Pretty much.

2:04:36 - Jason Snell
And then, if you do see the logo, that means that either Apple paid or, yes, apple furnished product for them to use. And it'll be in the credits It'll actually be in the credits if that happens, if there's a business but apple does not typically pay for placement, but they will provide right, that's.

That's what it says. I I'm not sure I believe that 100. I think that they've. Probably. It wouldn't surprise me if they do pay occasionally, but I think they generally pay in kind right, which is we will send you a bunch of laptops and imax and whatever, and you can put them everywhere.

2:05:05 - Leo Laporte
And yeah, they'll do that, and so if you see the Apple logo, apple has participated, otherwise they're not going to let you see the Apple logo, like in this shot from 24, where Keith or Sutherland is clearly looking at titanium MacBook. Yeah.

2:05:19 - Jason Snell
It also goes it goes both ways too that a lot of these studios have a policy where, unless they have a business relationship, they're not going to show a corporate logo because it's advertising and so you'll get the great out apple logo because there's no business relationship there. But usually that's if you're thinking like, oh, that apple logo, that's a real ad for apple. It kind of is, and that's why apple let them have as many imax as they wanted.

2:05:41 - Leo Laporte
Yeah I didn't spoil things by telling you that. No, it's in the trailer. Josh Hartnett is the serial killer In the trailer. You see that? I hope I didn't spoil it, but that's.

2:05:51 - Alex Lindsay
The trailer spoiled it Like every other.

2:05:53 - Jason Snell
Trailer spoils it, yeah, but if it is, the real killer in Knives Out is the only one who uses an Android phone. Yeah, exactly, spoilers for Knives Out.

2:06:08 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, and I still think this is hysterically funny, like in the sequel quote unquote the glass onion. There's like there is a plot point where someone has to hand an iPad to another person because they don't have and and that and that and that and. But the person who does it like is actually a bad person, and so the way they solve it is that you just he, he enters the room, they cut to the person. You see, like an ipad being thrown into his lap and then cut right back, and then the other person enters the scene completing the movement of having thrown something.

2:06:37 - Leo Laporte
That is hysterical, yeah I didn't actually touch the ipad. Yeah, exactly, apparently knives. Both the actual murderer and somebody you suspect throughout the movie don't have iPhones, so he actually was smart, he kind of yeah.

2:06:55 - Andy Ihnatko
Now that people are trying to just like. There was a time when no one knew what the Wilhelm screen was.

2:07:01 - Alex Lindsay
And it was like a little in the joke.

2:07:02 - Andy Ihnatko
But now, like everybody knows exactly what it is, now that I think more people are knowing about this trope, about how apple is going to pressure you not to make a bad person use their products, like what do you do when it's like, ah, we really have to. We can't have everybody, but these two people be using iPhones? Uh, it's, it's, sometimes it doesn't get in the way. I uh, obviously, an apple TV Plus series, ted Lasso, it's going to be like everybody's going to be using nothing but Apple products. But it's like okay, but this isn't the United States. It's like people do use things that are not iPhones. It's weird, just like in Parks and Recreation, pawnee, indiana, was the only town in which everybody was using Windows phone and everybody was using Microsoft Surface tablets. No one was using iPads or iPhones. It's like you tend to notice that sort of thing.

2:07:55 - Leo Laporte
It's like if I uh point of order. Mr Lindsay, if I played the Wilhelm scream, would I have to pay?

2:08:02 - Alex Lindsay
royalties? No, I think everyone stole it, it's all been stolen. Okay, it's been stolen for a long, a long time. It's like. Please stop using the will home screen like it's we know.

2:08:14 - Andy Ihnatko
Oh look, it's cute, oh look, it's an in-joke. No, it's not an in-joke anymore, you're just being annoying.

2:08:20 - Leo Laporte
It's great, the very first will helm scream from a movie in 1951 called distant drums. I think I could play this without fear of getting taken down. Boy, listen to that music. They used to do music like that in movies. Library music is so cool. Here comes the alligator. I don't know if this is the first one I think.

2:08:44 - Alex Lindsay
I think that there's actually one before that. That is a guy getting hit with an arrow in his oh yeah in Western.

2:08:53 - Leo Laporte
The Charge of.

2:08:54 - Alex Lindsay
Feather River. Yeah, I don't know which one happened first.

2:08:57 - Leo Laporte
That's why it's called the Wilhelm scream. That came two years later because the guy was Private Wilhelm. There you go, but the actual originator of the wilhelm scream is is lost to.

2:09:08 - Alex Lindsay
uh, there are some recordings that appear to be somewhere around it um, that that the the sound effects library museum or what wants to be the warner brothers sounds library stock library. But there's, there are some. There are some a couple different records of someone doing something similar.

2:09:24 - Jason Snell
So you know what they think it was cheb woolley do you know what cheb is primarily known for one-eyed, one-horned, flying purple people yes wow, Jason, you're coming with me in the next bar trivia, that's that is really funny.

2:09:46 - Leo Laporte
I'm undefeated in bar.

2:09:46 - Jason Snell
Trivia, I bet you are True story.

2:09:47 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, what do you do, jeopardy? That's the question.

2:09:52 - Jason Snell
When they call me, they got my number.

2:09:54 - Leo Laporte
Have you applied? Have you taken the test?

2:09:56 - Jason Snell
I'm in the pool, they just have to call me. Oh man, Now I'm going to have to take the test I'll have to reapply At the end of the the year I'll have to reapply, but I'm gonna do it in the contestant pool if they uh oh, wouldn't it be funny if we were both in the same episode yeah, I bet they wouldn't allow that we don't mention it. I don't know no, yeah, you don't know how we're related in any way.

2:10:16 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, there are thousands of hours of video online with us sitting next to each other, but I don't know him. No evidence, no evidence. All right, take, uh, take, a moment breathe. We will get to our picks of the week in just a minute and then it's going to be a time for security now, but you are watching for now. MacBreak Weekly with Jason snell from sixcolorscom, Andy inaco from wgbh and officehoursglobal's a Lindsay Alex. Pick of the week.

2:10:49 - Alex Lindsay
So last week we did what we believe is the first spatial live stream of a concert to the Apple.

Vision Pro. So we had the Verve Pipe was visiting and they were playing in Sweetwater in Mill Valley, and we chose to. I think I have a picture of it somewhere here, but we chose we were able to put a a a camera. We did an interview with them as well, so here's the. Here's the picture of it here. So this is us. This is with Ryan Van Der Ark, and so this was our first little test here. I think there's probably a couple of this is us setting up, but this is me putting it up at the top here. Oh, there's.

Sweetwater yeah, so there's Sweetwater and there's our kind of place.

2:11:32 - Leo Laporte
Is the Verb Pipe an Irish folk trio, because that's what it sounds like they are.

2:11:36 - Alex Lindsay
It does sound like that, but no, they're from Michigan. The song that they're most known for is Freshmen from the 90s.

2:11:45 - Jason Snell
Like an alt-rock band.

2:11:46 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, alt-rock Freshman from the nineties, um and uh, like an alt rock band, yeah, alt rock band really really great band and really great live, if you get a chance to see them. And uh, so, and and I've done some stuff in the past with Brian, and so we were talking and so we, we did this, we did an interview with them live and then we did uh, the uh concert live, um to Apple vision pro and we had, um, I think it was, I think there was somewhere between three and 500 people on Apple Vision Pros watching live that watched it there, and so we think that that was the first one for a concert and so, anyway, so that camera app was released, I think Friday. So we were a little ahead of it because I was doing the beta. So now, if, um, if you look for stream voodoo spatial on the on the iOS store, you can get the camera app. Now, that's the.

The the player app has been available for a little while on the Apple vision pro, but there was the business model and how to figure it all out and what to do and how to manage folks was still being worked out, and so I was testing it and doing stuff for the whole summer, um, or since may, I think, is when we started streaming from it and um, so that is the uh.

So now what you can do is is this camera app.

Uh will let you, and I don't know exactly what the costs are for the camera app, you know what the subscriptions are, but it will allow you. All you do is you hit, you open up the camera, you hit start stream and it starts streaming in Spatial and it will see like, for instance, in this case I had a USB Pre-2, so I'm feeding audio in through the USB-C connection on the 15 Pro Max and so you can stream Spatial to Apple uh, without a lot of other gear, you know. So so it's a, it's a pretty, it's doing it in MVH UVC, um, and we think that, you know, we're hoping to see an even better version for the 16, but that's a brand new, a couple of days old, um on the, on the app store and uh, if you're interested in in that kind of thing, I I found it to be pretty compelling. You know, if you've shot any spatial video for an Apple Vision Pro and looked at it, it looks like that, except that it's live. So anyway, you can check it out there.

2:13:56 - Leo Laporte
A number of people in our Discord say, like Walk Blind, live events are what I want most out of VR. That's the feature people really want.

2:14:05 - Alex Lindsay
You know the funny thing is is that it really feels like you know we're not moving the camera around and everything else we keep on talking about multi-camera but it felt very good, uh, just to have the camera there and you just watch the experience and it really does feel like you're, you're just there, you know so. So it's uh, it's pretty. Um, it's a pretty great app. The, I know stream boot has been working really hard on it for like the last six months or nine months, I think, so it's pretty slick. I'm sure your input is very valuable.

It's been mostly like don't add more buttons. I just keep on going, don't add more, like they have all the tech, they don't need anything from me. I just always want to be. My goal is that I want to be streaming 10 seconds after I start thinking about it, and that's what you can do here, and you can just literally just text someone the link and they're just. They hit the link and it opens up in Apple Vision Pro and they're watching what you're watching. And we've done stuff. We were surprised, you know. We've done stuff where I moved the camera around, like we fixed it for this one, but we've done some where I'm panning and walking and everything else and it's it's worked out pretty well.

2:15:05 - Leo Laporte
So a hundred dollars for the pro version, 25 for the basic version. Can you? Can you use it for free for a little bit?

2:15:12 - Alex Lindsay
uh, I don't know if you can, so you may have to decide. This is something you really want to do, but it's yeah, it's the only app out there on the phone right now, that. So if you want to do that thing, I think it's. It's uh, uh, voodoo spatial there. You.

2:15:25 - Leo Laporte
It seems like I mean it's free, so it seems like there must be some functionality. Maybe it's only for a few minutes, or something like that.

2:15:32 - Jason Snell
Yeah.

2:15:33 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, very cool. Andy and I go pick of the week. Actually, I want to give Andy credit for coming up with a very important date in history before your pick. I don't know if you want to do that no, as your pick. I don't know if you want to do that no, as your pick. But today is the anniversary of the amazing us festival. That's pretty cool. 1982 unite us in song. This is what was did with his apple money. I think you probably spent it all too. Eight million dollars. I don't think there was much revenue. Um, what a classic event that was.

2:16:09 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah the uh, I I also uh. Oh darn, I think I lost my tab, but the the uh, so the lineup I have it here the lineup. Yeah, the police talking heads, the b-52s, oingo Boingo, a whole bunch is like oh gang of four Ramones Gang of four the Ramones. Yeah, that was day one.

2:16:34 - Leo Laporte
That was day one and holy. No wonder it cost $8 million, Holy moly.

2:16:42 - Andy Ihnatko
It's like. This is a guy who is not trying to make like a build, like a huge billion dollar bunker to survive the next social apocalypse. I want to get all the greatest bands of the day.

2:16:55 - Leo Laporte
Can you imagine having been there to see all these bands? I mean, they probably were Waz's favorite bands, right, and he had good taste in music Santana, the Kinksinks, tom Petty, grateful dead. Fleetwood Mac closed it out and this is 1982, when they actually had hits yeah, these are all bands you've like still heard of yeah, they're all still.

That's a good point. Here we are. What is it 30 years later? And uh, no, almost 40 years later, more than 40 years later, and they're still memorable. Yes, yeah, wow, I don't remember the Thrasher brothers particularly, but uh, not really they were. They were, they were an acquired taste okay, now you're picking, I just I, I skipped over that story, but I think it's a really good thing to mention, so thank you for any.

2:17:42 - Andy Ihnatko
and if you go, if you go on YouTube, like most of the lineups are like, I think I still have the Stray Cat set still saved up somewhere, so it's all somewhere.

2:17:52 - Leo Laporte
In 1982, VHS quality.

2:17:55 - Andy Ihnatko
VHS quality, but it's charming. It's like watching Babe Ruth walking fast to the mound in black and white. You get to see scan lines. That's our versions of black and white. Yeah, so you get to see. You get to see scan lines.

2:18:07 - Leo Laporte
That's our versions of you know black and white, any any you ended. Did any of you go to the uh us festival?

2:18:11 - Andy Ihnatko
No, that's 82. I was. I was not allowed out of the house. I was 11.

2:18:15 - Jason Snell
Yeah.

2:18:18 - Leo Laporte
Wow. Well, this is a great video from a historic films archives. You can watch it.

2:18:24 - Andy Ihnatko
Oh look, you wore a tie. You were a nice young man he wanted to make? He wanted to make a good impression upon the crowd. That's good, that's professionalism, kids today.

Okay, so I I came. I, so so much of like my work every single day is about like bookmarks, basically researching things on the web or coming across news articles or things I need to follow up on or things I'm trying to build and references I need to go back to, and my bookmarks on Chrome are an absolute mess. I try to do some sort of a manual thing where I create manual folders sorted by region of date and, occasionally, by topic, but it's an absolute mess. And so I was looking for something better and I found raindropio, and I've only. But it's an absolute mess. And so I was looking for something better and I found raindropio, and I've only been using it for about 10 days. But I went from like, okay, let's see if this works, and to okay, I'm gonna install the browser extension and the iOS app and the Android app and use it alongside Chrome bookmarks to I don't even bother bookmarking anything in Chrome anymore.

It's all being done by this like all within a 24 hour period, because it's not just I've saved a bookmark. It'll do things like you can have multiple collections of bookmarks, like libraries of bookmarks. You can tag everything individually. Not only that, but it does like it's not instantaneous. When you bookmark something in Safari or in Chrome, all you got to do is command shift S and it brings up the, the raindrop IO bookmark creator and after like a slight pause, it will guess which of your collections you probably want to put this into and it will populate with suggested tags. So it's only like a very, very briefly brief pause. Well, because one of the one of the big problems of managing bookmarks with other tools that I've tried is that it takes me out of my head and into the problem of archiving this important bookmark when actually I just want to. I want to remember this for later on. But in addition to all of that, it also will do things like if you're on the, it's free for a limited feature set. It's based on a paid subscription model. It's actually one developer that's doing this. If you have the paid subscription model, it will also index the entire page as it saves it. So later on, if you do a search for a certain topic, it won't just search through page titles, urls and your tabs, excuse me and your and your tags. It will actually search for phrases that appeared in the actual content of the thing you're looking for.

Another feature that I was really, really happy to have is that you can also set alarms, set reminders. There's so many times where I'll come across a long form article or something, something that, oh, I really want to get into this tomorrow. I don't have time right now. When you bookmark it, you can actually click a little alarm bell and say, please like, surface this again for me tomorrow at 10 30 AM. You can click one button and bookmark all the tabs that you've got open at one time over and over again. It has. If this, then that integration has APIs that integrate with a whole bunch of other things. I'm just very, very happy with it so far.

I was tentative at first because obviously, if you're exposing your web behavior and your bookmarks to a third-party utility, that's a privacy, potentially a privacy problem. I've been. I've assured myself and been assured by things I've been looking up in the past week, that that's not something I need to worry about over much. It's been around for about 10 years now, again all by the same developer, so it's not like it's been a football that's been kicked between shady organization to shady organization. They're very, very explicit on the page about here's our privacy policy. The privacy policy looks good. All this stuff is stored securely on an Amazon Web Services container in Germany, so that sounds good. The only weak point in it is that it's not end-to-end encrypted. So, yes, raindropio can see your bookmarks. It would be nice if you could optionally have ways of hiding some of your bookmarks from knowledge of even the service that you're subscribing to. But overall, really, really, really good, and it's been rock solid for the past week, week and a half.

One of the reasons that really prodded me to finally look for a better solution than just organizing Chrome bookmarks was that I would find that, wait, there was a story that I was trying to follow. I know it's, I know I bookmarked it. Why isn't it here? And it turned out that that's one of like the X out of a hundred bookmarks that I would save on my phone that didn't sync through the cloud to my desktop and other versions of Chrome. This has been absolutely rock solid from top to bottom, inside and out, so I'm very, very happy with it. I became a paid subscriber on day two and if things go super south, I will let you know about it, but this has solved a number of problems for me.

Where now, when I'm getting ready for Mac break. It's easy for me to surface everything that I thought that would be good for Mac break very, very quickly and not just simply have to look through folders to find stuff that I might have saved. It might've not saved, so very happy with you. There's an iOS app. There's an iPad app. There's not a desktop app. It basically it's a web-based service, but admit that there's also an Android app. There plugins for every browser you might want to use, so no matter where you surf the web, it will be able to capture stuff from there. Again, very happy with it. Raindropio yeah.

2:23:49 - Leo Laporte
Of course, bookmarks are a big part of our business because we've always bookmarking stories for the shows. Like you, Andy and I started with Delicious Remember that. Then Yahoo bought them and it's kaput. And then Maciej Czajkowski created Pinboard, which used the Delicious API, and I've been using that ever since and I played with. I'm actually looking at my Raindrop account. I played with Raindrop, in fact, imported all my old bookmarks, it looks like last year Because it is a better bookmark tool. It's just that Pinboard is as simple as it is. I use Zapier to put it into a Google spreadsheet and stuff. I'll have to go back and take a look at Raindrop again because I was very, very impressed with it, not free. Well, there is a free version and there's an inexpensive, as you said paid for.

2:24:41 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, it's like $28 a year or $3 a month. It'd be worth it. It'd be worth it it'd be absolutely worth it. Yeah, it saved me a lot of time. Saved me it's it's really made a lot of my work a lot more efficient and a couple of people in our discord were at both us festivals.

2:24:57 - Leo Laporte
Mark causal was there and jammer b john slanina. Hi, john, how's retirement going? He was there. He said he has is the first concerts he had press passes for. He is, as you know, major music fan. He took the entire team to see roger waters, not once, but twice, maybe three times, I don't know. Uh and uh, we all are umphreys mcgee's fan, umphreys mcgee fan because of him. But yeah, john, I said he saw both of them and had press passes. Wow, wow, that's pretty cool, that's really I'm jealous.

2:25:32 - Alex Lindsay
By the way, I just wanted to correct there, there's a in in my pick. Um, there is a free version, so you can do it. You can do 30 minutes for 10 people. Oh, you know sessions of 30 minutes for 10 people all the time, so there's a way you can test it I was like, I was like there's got to be a way to do that, so I pinged them and so, yes, you can do that, so yeah uh, your pick of the week.

2:25:52 - Leo Laporte
We already have a little preview.

2:25:54 - Jason Snell
Yes, now yeah, it's a little foreshadowing, but I'll just refer back to what we were talking about in a rat hole earlier. I like the button having a bunch. This is not the rat hole, this is the pics. These, these count, these count. This is for all the marvel there's no rat hole here.

This is legit so the idea here is, ambient information is good, like it's really nice to have to build a. You know, we look at computer screens all day, we have that. But like there's lots of good information that's inside computers, that nice to glance at, like when you're walking by or something, but it's not something that you want, uh, on a computer screen. You just want it like in your house or something like that. So, um, I enjoy a product called the metric time. It's $200. So it's not cheap, but it is they. They say it's like an alarm clock and it's a radio player. I don't even use it as any of those things, I just use it as a display. It's a simple bitmap interface but basically you can pass it a JSON file and they've got a whole bunch of icons that you can use and you can do text and you can set up.

And with the new one, the one they released a couple of years ago, they even have an app you can install from their app store that you point at a JSON file on a server that you control and you can have that JSON file display anything. Mine is I have PHP and it writes out, it outputs JSON based on a bunch of different things. So when it's raining, there's an animated raindrop on the display, and when the sound or the smoke from the forest fires is thick outside my house, it actually puts up the AQI symbol and warns me about it, but in a normal time it's the time and the temperature from my weather station. So it's a lot of fun. And if you want something with more I think more pixels than this and it's a little bit bigger.

There's also the tidbit, which is sold out right now and that's about the same price 189 for the V2 of the tidbit which Leo mentioned and they have, you know, basically varying degrees of programmability. You can write apps, or you can just do this very simple thing where you feed it some basic data and for me, apps, or you can just do this very simple thing where you feed it some basic data and for me. I know enough to be dangerous with building like that simple php output based on a bunch of different variables from my weather station and from the weather forecast and from my purple air sensor and stuff like that, and I roll it all together and I get a little thing that sits under my tv and there's one over my shoulder here too Tells me the time and the temp outside and then alerts me if anything else is going on. It's great, so I like it.

2:28:32 - Leo Laporte
Why do you like it better than the Tidbit?

2:28:34 - Jason Snell
I didn't like. So I got the first generation Tidbit and I thought that the pixels were too big and too, far apart.

Which is funny because the pixels are bigger on the LaMetric, but they're close and it feels a little more like a light break, bigger on the lametric, but they're close. I think it's the space between them that really struck me that it felt more like a light break. But I have a friend. I gave my tidbit to a friend and he loves it and has built. He like took all the x screensavers this is my friend, greg nos, and he. He converted them so that the x screensavers play on the tidbit oh, that's hilarious, that's very um yeah, you can do some really advanced jwz knows that.

That's great, that's hysterical the story is I used to use, if anybody remembers, slim devices. They used to make the slim p3 and then they the squeeze box, a bunch of really great uh music players. But they also had this back vacuum fluorescent display that was really bright and I used it as a clock and and uh and uh temperature in my living room and it was great, great. And they got bought by Logitech and, as all things that get bought by Logitech, they were destroyed. Moment of silence for slim devices. And then I was at Twit doing a show and I saw the Lumetri Time and I said, leo, what is that? I want that? You said it's Lumetri Time and I bought one and I have never looked back. And when it was unplugged accidentally not too long ago the truest endorsement my wife said what's wrong with the thing? Because she actually uses it. It's not one of my stupid computer things, it's just the time and the temperature for regular human beings to enjoy. So yeah, limetric time.

2:30:01 - Leo Laporte
Actually you know much of other weird stuff too and if you want I'm thinking because it will take a json file it would be easy for me to enjoy so yeah, limetric time actually you know much of other weird stuff too, and if you want I'm thinking because it will take a json file it would be easy for me to have one in behind me that has the total member count of club.

2:30:16 - Jason Snell
Twit yeah, that a lot of their use cases are like show you Youtube subscribers show many people are watching live, which is a fun one. Oh, that'd be fun, right, and it's and, and the json thing makes it super easy, right, because you have a script somewhere that processes and talks to whatever apis it needs to, and then it just outputs a little little json file that goes on the screen oh, that would be kind of cool if I could have.

2:30:38 - Leo Laporte
So it'd show the club membership and then the right after that, the number of people watching live, because it's got seven different streams it supports multiple frames in the json file, so you can say I only have one for mine, but you could say frame one, frame two, frame three, dump the contents in there and then it'll rotate between them. It's very are you mad when they named that after you the json file?

2:30:57 - Jason Snell
no, I love it. I own it. Okay, it's mine. My Jason's json files are the best of all of them. How could they not be? What are you talking about?

2:31:07 - Leo Laporte
that's Jason mock. Schnell from six colors dot com. Yes, check it out and if you want to know what's what, what he's up to, podcast wise six colors dot com slash Jason, anything you want to plug oh, what I want to plug, upgrade.

2:31:21 - Jason Snell
Uh, that I do with mike hurley. Yesterday we drafted, we do a draft before every apple event where we competitively choose what Apple is going to release. Who's winning?

2:31:29 - Leo Laporte
so far.

2:31:31 - Jason Snell
Well, it's gone back and forth. I had a big win streak, then Mike had a big win streak, I won the last one and we'll see how it goes, see if I can defend my title this time, and we'll be back, obviously next week after an event. You put a little competitive twist on it in order to talk about what we think is going to happen nice.

2:31:54 - Leo Laporte
Thank you, Jason snell. It's always great to see you and I will be listening to, upgrade and scoring your results next week upgradecards to score along at home oh, there is, there is a there, there are actually cards absolutely wait a minute. Oh my god, there are. So each event has its own cards.

2:32:15 - Jason Snell
Yeah, and you can just click and keep score um on who's right and who's wrong, as god you guys are such nerds, that's great oh, and this benefits saint jude, as always with relay. So that's we are, we are going to do a thing where we we have like catchphrases that apple says and we put down points on uh, whether you know, will they be spoken at this event or not?

2:32:34 - Alex Lindsay
will they say it's?

2:32:34 - Jason Snell
a blow away feature.

2:32:36 - Leo Laporte
I clean up if they say a blow away feature and I'm guessing that it was you, not mike, who did the mlb tribute icon uh, I art directed that a little bit. Yes, that's true, because I don't think Mike even knows what MLB is.

2:32:49 - Jason Snell
We had another icon that looked like somebody was using a bong and I said, can we fix this? And then that was what came back, so I like it.

2:33:00 - Leo Laporte
Mr Jason, thank you so much, appreciate it. You will be running the show next Tuesday post Apple event. Micah Sargent and Rosemary Orchard will be hosting that show. Next tuesday post apple event micah sargent and rosemary orchard will be hosting that event. By the way, monday 10 am pacific 1 pm eastern, uh 1700 utc. You can just watch apple's event straight, but it's so much more fun to watch the mst mstk 3000 uh mst 3k version of it. If I said that right, Andy annaco wgbh is calling yes, uh, not.

2:33:30 - Andy Ihnatko
I got rescheduled a week so it's not going to be uh this week but next week after uh on uh 12 30, 12, 45 from 12 45 week from thursday it's the third second thursday of the month.

2:33:45 - Leo Laporte
Uh go to wgbhnewsorg to listen to it live or later. And Jason P Hall in our Discord says he had one of those Slim Devices clocks which recently died when Logitech finally killed the servers. He says they've been losing about a minute a week ever since.

2:34:01 - Jason Snell
Well, the fun thing about the Slim Devices stuff is that the original server was open source.

The idea there they were a competitor with Roku back in the days before stuff is that the original server was open source. The idea there they were, they were a competitor with roku back in the days before roku video and and so if you've got a really really old slim devices music player, you should be able to get that software from somewhere and use them. But yeah, once logitech bought it, you and they ran out of vacuum fluorescent displays. I think that was actually part of the big problem. They they had to go to LCDs and they're not as bright and they're not as good. And Logitech bought them and put them on a proprietary platform, and we know what happens when your hardware is on a proprietary cloud platform. That's actually one of the things I didn't mention about the Lometric time is, I believe they now, in their latest version, there's a local API, so if they ever went out of business, you could still use it, which is, I mean, yeah, that's how it should be that's a must, to be honest.

2:34:51 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I know, uh, Alex Lindsay office hours dot global every day, and then the after hours and then the, and then gray matter dot show and the thing and the thing, and he's doing it all all the time. I'm not I mean, there's just somebody is a big village.

2:35:06 - Alex Lindsay
That puts it together um we had jessica calarco on uh on friday. She talked about inequality and education and what that, what that looks like. It was a great interview with michael krasny and uh extra hours is our new thing.

So that's monday nights, um. So if you haven't been able to tune into office hours because it was too early, you can now ask questions and's a much more conversational, like we just kind of like wander around like in the evening, uh, much different than the, than the morning, Um, so, uh, so it's um, but it's, it's a lot of fun. And, again, we're testing a lot of cloud infrastructure as well. It's funny. We, we have like four or five people or I think last night we're looking at three people different people editing the show, like testing different, you know. So there was being done in memo live. I think someone might've been planning to do either did it, or planning to do an Ecamm. Uh, you know cause then we can all just jump into the cloud and grab onto the, onto the files, and so there's lots of experimentation going on, uh, with how we do these in the cloud as well.

2:36:00 - Leo Laporte
Some very cool people involved, including, of course, mr Alex Lindsay. Thank you all for being here. I will not see you for a few weeks. I hope you can survive without me. I bet you can. I bet you do better, but I do appreciate your holding down the fort while I am gone. I'll be back September 24th, so that's three weeks, almost three weeks, I'll be gone.

You can watch MacBreak Weekly right here, wherever here is, on YouTube, on Twitch, on Discord If you're a Club TWiT member, on xcom, on Facebook, on LinkedIn, on kick soon on telegram. But if you can't watch us live every Tuesday 11 and Pacific 2 pm, eastern 1800 UTC, you can always watch on demand because it's a podcast. That's the whole point. On demand versions available at our website twit.tv/mbw. If you go there you'll see a link to the Youtube channel. You can also watch there. That's a great way to share a little piece of it with somebody else. Uh, Youtube makes that easy.

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