MacBreak Weekly 955 Transcript

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

0:00:00 - Leo Laporte
It's time for Mac Break Weekly the gang has assembled. Jason Snell is here from sixcolors.com. Andy Ihnatko from WGBH in Boston, office Hours. Alex Lindsay we will talk about the new TSMC plant making Apple chips. But is it enough to wean Apple off its dependence on China? Probably not. 20 new products expected this year. We'll do the Gurman report, and we'll talk about new features that might be coming to the apple watch. That and a whole lot more coming up next on MacBreak Weekly.

This is MacBreak Weekly, episode 955. Recorded Tuesday, January 14th 2025: Squeeze, don't shake. It's time for MacBreak Weekly, the show we cover the latest apple news with Andy Ihnatko from GBH in boston. Hello, Andrew, hey there. Good to see you in your comfortable, cozy abode featuring books and a view of the river.

0:01:13 - Andy Ihnatko
Yes, and they've locked. Actually, there's also a view of a very, very football-shaped squirrel as I was closing the blinds. Oh, that's good, and I'm like, oh my goodness, as I was closing the blinds. Oh, that's good and I'm like, oh my goodness, If you're best protected not only from the heat, from the cold weather when you're a squirrel like that, but also if a hawk tries to carry you off, that's got to be like 10 foot claws to get even through the layer of fat into the muscles. So you're good.

0:01:39 - Leo Laporte
A football-shaped squirrel. We already have a title and we haven't even introduced the other panelists yes, amazing new personal best. It's an. It's amazing. Alex Lindsay is also here from office hours dot global and oh, nine, oh media.

0:01:51 - Alex Lindsay
Hi, hello, hello, I'm already. I'm. I'm spinning up the mid journey for a football shaped squirrel. We'll see what. We will come back to me a little later. In the show we'll see what we've created. So far.

0:02:03 - Andy Ihnatko
Oh, oh, oh oh, Alex, in my google photos I am well well supplied with football. I'm sure that when you mid-journey football shape squirrel, it's basically educated from my, from my training set.

0:02:16 - Leo Laporte
So um, oh, and also Jason Snell from sixcolors.com. I've been looking for news is what I'm doing right now.

0:02:32 - Jason Snell
Is there any news? Is anything going on in the Apple? It's real quiet out there right now, real, almost too quiet.

0:02:46 - Leo Laporte
It's the Phenomenal Quiet it's like.

0:02:47 - Jason Snell
the only news is like oh good Gurman has his first newsletter of the year. Yay, oh, and it was the lightest weight newsletter. It was a recap of his reports about what was going to happen this year, from nothing, yeah, earlier this I think I think the without mac world expo, you got nothing really on January, right, yeah ces right, which doesn't have a lot of apple. There's a little apple relevance, but not a lot. Not a lot, but wasn't that? Didn't he have something on the Little?

0:03:03 - Andy Ihnatko
Apple relevance, but not a lot, Not a lot. But didn't he have something on the Apple Watch Ultra that will have not blood pressure sensing but at least blood pressure alerts?

0:03:13 - Leo Laporte
I think that was new, Apparently there was at CES, a company oh, I wish I could remember the technology I was hearing father robert was telling me about it on sunday on TWiT that does non-invasive glucose monitoring that can go in a watch size device. It wasn't radar, which is what the university of waterloo came up with last year, it's some other technology and, uh, I'm very curious about it and I imagine apple is, you know, already on the on the horn. Yeah, whoever that is uh saying let's do it. Um, so I would. You know, ultra three is supposed to come out this year. I'm a devoted ultra fan and you know it's been two years. It'll have been. It's a cool watch, yeah, yeah, I love it.

0:03:56 - Andy Ihnatko
I'd love to. I'd love to see, like, if they, if there is like a new apple watch se, I would love to see them introduced, like even a third styling to, because hey it, because it's easy to confuse an SE for the regular ones, but also it's one of the greatest things they anticipate when Apple was planning a watch is that, wow, this is the first time that Apple gets to design something that is, yes, it's technology, but it is firmly in the arena of style, of fashion, of jewelry, of something you wear. And I've been really, really keen to see them not just go with the same square pillow design year after year after year, but to give us something interesting and something different, like the.

Ultra, which is just wonderful.

0:04:39 - Leo Laporte
Well, the Ultra is different, isn't it? But it's still a square pillow.

0:04:43 - Andy Ihnatko
Well, it's still square, but yeah, it's a thicker square, but it's still a square pillow. I mean, well, it's still, it's still square, but yeah, and they have the mandate of making sure that, like it looks tough and that looks like when they find your body, they'll be able to get your id off of the watch because it will still be running this thing I have no scratches, no dings, no nicks, I think partly because the titanium ring is slightly raised around the crystal, uh, and I imagine they're also using sapphire, so that's tougher.

0:05:05 - Leo Laporte
This I'm very happy with this. It's a great, great little watch once you get used to three pounds on your wrist, but I figure it's like a workout. You know, I'm just pumping some.

0:05:14 - Alex Lindsay
I'm far more resistant to upgrading the ultra, like you know, like I paid a lot more for it, so I found that I was when I was buying the lowest end. Uh, uh, watch, yearly's no big. It was like, oh, we'll get another one, the ultra. I'm kind of like, well, it's got to be really good for me to. Well, I still have the version one.

0:05:32 - Leo Laporte
Oh, you haven't even gone to the two. Well, you're going to skip to the three, then That'll make sense. Yeah, I might skip to three. We'll see, I don't.

0:05:45 - Alex Lindsay
Honestly, I think Now, if they put in a glucose monitor, I will say the glucose monitor is the thing that would move me over Right now. The timers work great, the alarms work great and the exercise stuff works great. So for me, 99% of how I use the watch, it's fully operational, and I don't know how many other features I need.

0:06:04 - Leo Laporte
I will literally I'll get the get to the gym and come back and get my watch, because I before I work out, because I didn't want credit I.

0:06:12 - Alex Lindsay
I I went to. I went swimming last night and usually you know I keep track of all my laps, you know and how many hundreds of meters or whatever that I'm. And I went swimming yesterday and I my watch had died, like I just hadn't been plugging it in, and I was like I almost like, is it really worth? It was right at the end of the day, so I couldn't go back and forth. I was like, should I really go swimming? Because I can't, it's not going to be tracked. And I went anyway, but it was just random. I came home and Carlita asked how far I had gone and I I looked at the time and figured out well, I'll just swim for this amount of time and see how it goes.

0:06:45 - Andy Ihnatko
I guess I swam for my health. Yeah exactly, even if we didn't collect any data on it.

0:06:51 - Alex Lindsay
That's what Lisa says, she says well, you know.

0:06:54 - Leo Laporte
I said no. No, the watch has to know. It's not enough for me to know.

0:06:58 - Alex Lindsay
Well, no but it's like I start off when I swim. The first hundred meters is me, the watch tells me how fast I did it, like I'm always trying to carve off a couple seconds off of my my first hundred meters, and um, and then uh, uh and then and then. After that, it's just how many meters do I get done that that day?

0:07:16 - Leo Laporte
so I'm always trying to add about 50 meters a day their current big ad campaign, which I saw in the uh. By the way, sorry about your steelers we.

0:07:24 - Alex Lindsay
I was at very low expectations. They almost got under my low expectations. It was pretty low. When we entered the season, we thought it was going to be a train wreck the fact that they were in the playoffs was kind of like oh, this is a bonus, and now I don't have to watch football anymore. As soon as the Steelers season ends, it's the end of football for me, it's over for you.

0:07:43 - Leo Laporte
It's curling now. The season ends at the end of the fall. For me it's over, for you, yeah, it's curling now, uh. But I saw a lot of apple ads on there. And what were they for? They were for the watch. They were for, uh, athletes training and it's snowing and the watch says get in, out there, and they go ahead and do it.

0:07:56 - Alex Lindsay
You know I I haven't had a new person talk to a new person.

I finally bought my wife of a uh the watch um, yeah, you mentioned, she loves it and she's like she missed her meeting, but she's going to like going for training and she'll know more about it than I do soon and um, but she just really every, she just really enjoys it and I was, she was the holdout because my kids of course, wanted them earlier than that, um and uh, and so the whole fam now is a bunch of apple watches and so anything you can do as a family with those, I mean like I know where everybody is do you have walkie-talkie?

enabled. We should, we should do walkie-talkie.

0:08:34 - Leo Laporte
I haven't, I, I hadn't until you break it one nine. I'm on route to uh elementary school over.

0:08:41 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, exactly, so yeah, so for a bear in the air doing a double nickel.

0:08:49 - Alex Lindsay
I mean, I think the most popular thing is timers and a lot of the Apple fitness stuff is really nice when you have to watch.

0:08:54 - Jason Snell
Yeah, that ad is good. That ad is really good and it's interesting because it's a and it's not just for athletes. It really is like it's New Year's resolution, themed right, and it's the idea that the second Friday, I guess, of the year is when everybody, on average, quits their resolutions, and it's basically, well, what if somebody was there to make sure you stayed on your on your path? And the Apple Watch will do it, I think it. Also. What I find interesting about it is it says something about Apple's whole philosophy of this, which is they want to be in this space where they are encouraging you, and that they're leading people to good health through the Apple Watch, actually encouraging them.

And what is interesting is one of Mark Gurman's rumors, in fact for a while now, has been that they're working on this kind of AI-based health coaching system.

And it has the ring of truth about it to me, because currently, what the Apple Watch actually does, I mean it's a lot of, yes, the Apple Watch will help you meet your goals, but, you know, just add your own effort, which is, you know it's like, oh, we'll prod you about your rings or we'll say, hey, you're behind schedule, maybe you should go, but it's like really not sophisticated.

Hey, you're behind schedule, maybe you should go, but it's like really not sophisticated. And when you look at that ad and you see what Apple really envisions as a mission statement for the Apple Watch in terms of keeping people fit, they really do need more active coaching that knows things about your life and your activity and can make some actionable suggestions. And you know, and they're not there right, it's very simple in terms of what is offered right now. So I think that's interesting to think. We can look at this ad and see what Apple believes the end goal of the Apple Watch is and maybe suggest what they're emphasizing in their internal development, which you know Mark Gurman suggests is something that might come this year.

0:10:46 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, and I will say that I I thought when I first got it that the rings were silly. But the rings are, they are, I mean, I definitely look at them. I mean they're on my front face and I look at them and I know I haven't gotten up very much or I haven't done anything today. You know I need to take a walk, something else, and and um, and so I do think that it they, they're more, they encourage me more than I thought they would, you know to to have them there, so to just as a as just kind of a picture of that day of whether I'm actually doing something.

0:11:15 - Jason Snell
So yeah, I mean it's, it's nice, but it's a little more passive than I think apple wants it to be.

0:11:20 - Alex Lindsay
I think that there is a level where I think apple knows that there are people that they're losing because they're not able to provide enough of a yeah, framework delicate, yeah, I think those people it was definitely like hey, you haven't stood up for a while and I'm like shut up, yeah, I don't care, right, you know like right, but if it's I mean anytime ai, everything's an ai based system.

0:11:42 - Jason Snell
Now right, theoretically, but like ideally it would be able to adapt and know what doesn't work and what does work for different people and like, oh, you don't want this anymore, but I'm going to recommend this and all of that. And what they have now is kind of hard-coded. You know, if this, then that there's a lot of that in there, and if it annoys you, you turn it off and then you never see it again and that's the end of the story. So I do think that that's a place where I think a more sophisticated algorithm that was trying to analyze your health data and motivate you could probably do a better job than what they're doing now.

0:12:15 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, Particularly when not just that but also all kinds of reminders where, if it's the, I get, there's times where I get the same reminder that I've set for myself day after day after day after day, without clearing it, and AI can say okay, let's take a look at this task that you really want to be reminded of and why you're not getting that done. Things like that for exercise is also a really good thing. Not just you're being annoyed because hey, oh no, there's something wrong. You only did like 1,200 steps today and you normally do blah, blah, blah as opposed to okay. For the past. This past week you've been down. You've been down for the past two or three weeks, do you? Let's have a conversation, if you're interested, and figure out, like why maybe you're not walking so much and if how we can encourage you to do more.

0:12:59 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, and I I I will say that as someone who grew up working out at a gym, I just feel like and I know that it's complicated because everybody's gyms don't change their equipment very often, and so the problem has been mostly that gyms don't don't change their equipment very often. And there are handfuls of things that do this at home, but usually they're kind of weird hit thing, you know, hit devices that sit on your wall or whatever. But man, I just feel like if people could walk up to a machine and see a video on how to do it and then have it keep track, the machine tells the watch or the phone this is how much weight it's set to and this is how many reps it would transform how people work out. There are some home machines that do it, but they don't do it. They're like doofy.

I mean, it's just like I can't like. They're not like the gym, you know they're like doofy, I mean, it's just like I can't like. They're not like the gym. You know, they're like goofy little machines that go on your wall. That that's the only ones I've seen that will really tie into your phone, right. Um, you know, I had.

0:13:50 - Leo Laporte
I had peloton I think because they have an app and I bet you I have to look, it's pellet yeah it's like I'm pretty sure the app ties into apple health.

0:13:58 - Alex Lindsay
But it's a bike, I mean yeah, it's a biker.

0:14:01 - Leo Laporte
They have tread treadmills now.

0:14:02 - Alex Lindsay
I like recumbent bikes to watch TV while I'm biking. Oh no, I spin man, you got to spin. I hate that position, yeah, you don't feel nauseous after working out.

0:14:11 - Leo Laporte
You're really not doing it right.

0:14:13 - Jason Snell
I'm just saying.

0:14:14 - Leo Laporte
I'm just saying, I use an app that I really like I guess I could recommend it called Gentler Streak, and it and it it is basically apple health with a little ai thing on top of it that you know they monitor your, your workout, but you also they recommend other stuff. Um, I I think it's pretty cool. I mean it's good, uh and it. It you know it take has a lot of extra things like tai chi and dancing. I guess apple health probably has that now too. I don't know if it's worth spending money for something that does this, but but I I like it, and it's that ai thing you were talking about a little bit more.

0:14:52 - Jason Snell
It's got a little little more gloss on top of it yeah, it's funny we think about how sophisticated so much of our technology is, but the truth is that I think in some ways, the quest to do ai is in part out of a frustration that you know in the end you are just creating a chain of if-thens. And it's not that sophisticated and it doesn't know you and it doesn't learn about you and it doesn't think about you. And a lot of stuff like the Apple Watch hardware-wise is so sophisticated. Apple's health database knows so much about you and yet train it with AI, right?

0:15:29 - Leo Laporte
I mean, it knows the difference between rowing and stepping, but what it?

0:15:34 - Jason Snell
doesn't do is is analyze what you do and when you do it and how you're doing it, and come up with an actionable kind of plan.

0:15:43 - Leo Laporte
I think there's a reluctance to do that because of the FDA, because health recommendations becomes a little problematic.

0:15:50 - Jason Snell
This may be why. Well, for fitness, though fitness is different than health right, okay, they're not saying go to the hospital.

Exactly, although they do. I mean they'll give you an AFib notification and say you might want to talk to your doctor, right, like they'll do that. And even with their vitals app they're doing a little exploration of this, where I think there's some machine learning involved, where they're trying to sort of make notice general trends, but they're a little reluctant to go beyond that because, again, I think there are some regulatory issues. But for fitness, fitness training I think that's why they're focused on it, according to Mark Gurman is that one is a much less regulatable area and I just I'm struck by the fact that, as sophisticated as some aspects of our technology is, some of it is not that sophisticated and it could be way better if it like you've got all this personal data, but the algorithms aren't personal and so it ends up being they data work for you or they don't.

0:16:46 - Alex Lindsay
And I think this is where Apple has a key advantage, in the sense that most services that required that data to go off my phone I would not do Like, I just wouldn't, I wouldn't interact with it Exactly, and Apple really built it on device. Yeah, if it's all on device and it's inside of that, that relatively secure enclave, much more than sending it to some web company that I don't know. It's much more likely to do it than do it.

0:17:15 - Leo Laporte
I understand that, but it hobbles it. I mean, just look at the image factory or whatever they call that thing. It's terrible because it's on the device, but I think that, generating ai images and and looking at my health data, I think I understand more complicated, but if you want ai to really sing, you're gonna have to go off device in the long run, I think I don't know.

0:17:36 - Alex Lindsay
I think it's a function, I think that the, the image generation, the genmoji or the image playground or whatever, is really, I think the biggest thing that limits it is not the processing power, it's apple's unwillingness to give it that. It needs to be effective, you know, like and so it's just.

0:17:51 - Leo Laporte
That's why I use grok x's uh image generator, because it doesn't care.

0:17:58 - Alex Lindsay
Grok's the honey badger yeah, yeah, like whatever you want there, yeah, whatever you want, I'll give it whatever you want.

0:18:04 - Leo Laporte
You want to put trump in? Whatever you want, I'll give it. Whatever you want to put Trump in jail, go right ahead, we'll do that. In fact, there were a lot of Grok-generated images of Elon Musk as a puppet master, with Donald Trump attached to the strings that I thought, wow, elon allows that. Huh, maybe Elon likes it, I don't know. So I guess we could talk about this. There's some other things we'll talk about that have more to do with Apple, but at CES, this company named Bee B-E-E, like a bumblebee, showed this. They actually were.

I bought from this week like two or three things that do this. There's one that's a pearl that you stick to your temple, but the idea is this little wrist thing or you can clip it on your lapel records everything and, yeah, sends it to an unnamed. I don't even know. It's Bcomputer. They don't even say, I don't think, what AI company they're using I doubt it's their own but sends everything that happens. It's recording everything, sends it up to the cloudzes, it sends back notes, but in here there's also a transcript, not exactly. Yeah, there's, yes, there's a transcript you can assign voices to, so I'm sure they're going to be clobbered, uh, as soon as somebody figures out. They're doing that and I'm completely. I'm doing it right now. I'm sending every now. It's not hearing you because I'm wearing headphones, but it's hearing me and it will. It will undoubtedly give me a synopsis of what we talked about on the show. So, yeah, you couldn't use this, Alex, because you have to do stuff that you've got NDAs. I don't sign NDAs.

0:19:42 - Alex Lindsay
That's another many. I have an NDA stacked on other NDAs that I don't sign NDAs. That's another comparison. I have so many. I have NDAs stacked on other NDAs that are interleaved with other NDAs.

0:19:48 - Leo Laporte
But I think the potential here I guess what I'm saying is if you're willing to give up your conception of privacy. There's a lot more you can do with AI, and I think the AI… there's so many things other people can do with AI once.

0:20:03 - Alex Lindsay
You've given them all. Fine, I the I so many things. There's so many things other people can do with AI once you've given them all.

0:20:05 - Leo Laporte
Fine, I don't care, I'm getting so much out of this. I've only had it for a day. I just came yesterday and I'm already very impressed. It takes notes. It actually makes a to-do list based on stuff you know. When you agree to do something, it actually adds it to your to-do list. You can to do list. You can, of course, delete it later. It summarizes your day.

I was reading this before the show, so pardon me for repeating it, but let me just show you what a great day I had yesterday. For Alzheimer's patients. This would be amazing. I'm thinking for my mom who, who can't remember much. Let me show you. This is the interface. Good morning, leo. This was yesterday. Daily memories, passions and camaraderie shown brightly through animated debates and shared laughter, brimming with social interactions. We were watching the football game. It talks about what we talked about. It says you know, we made jokes about the medical ads. I think this is kind of interesting. Uh, I'm, it's, I'm not. I'm sure I approve of the florid prose. The overall mood of leo's day was dynamic and lively, characterized by a blend of excitement from sports analysis, upbeat sharing of personal hobbies and spirited discussion there was an evidence.

0:21:23 - Alex Lindsay
When it goes bad, like does it tell you that? Like does it tell you that? Like does it tell you that, that you know you had a horrible day today well, we'll see.

0:21:29 - Leo Laporte
That's a good question. That's a very good question. I mean this was a good day because we were watching the Monday night football with Lisa and her son and her ex-husband they don't mention that, uh and we had warm social ties, rich and camaraderie, uh, underlining the strong bonds within leo's purse. I can't wait to have a bad day and I will let you know what it says on a bad day. Um, oh, this is. I also gave it. See, I really gave it ever, gave it up everything. I gave it my email. I gave it my calendar. I gave it uh, um, everything, my whole Google, my contacts. This is emails. It's summarizing my emails. I haven't seen that yet. Late-night visit from Stephanie I don't know the woman, I don't and chilly weather. It's a little confused on that. It says it's 18 degrees. I hope that's not. It's not going to be 18.

0:22:25 - Andy Ihnatko
His jason, this is friendly chess match with stephanie, 18 celsius maybe what did california do to god to make god so angry with california?

0:22:38 - Leo Laporte
I just think this is so cool. I um, I so, but the point being not. I mean, this is cool, it's 50 bucks and so far no subscription. I'm sure there will be a massive subscription or they'll go out of business, but this is the promise of AI down the road right, and this is something Apple could do. In fact, I can use the Apple watches recorder with the be AI. They said, um, we'll see how quickly Apple turns that off, but I don't think it would be as good if it weren't connected to the outside world. I think this is kind of the challenge that we're facing with AI. Apple can do it, but if it's all on device, I just don't think it's as rich and as useful.

0:23:19 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, well, that's why I was so excited about NVIDIA's $3,000 personal AI machine that they announced last week they're shipping in May.

The idea of having a personal AI server in the house, something that can run these enormous models that normally have to go into the cloud, so that you won't feel bad or sketchy about using it for financial advice, using it for personal therapy the sort of stuff that I would never allow this to leave the house and live on another server, let alone possibly be used to train other AI, possibly to be exploited by people who have red teamed correctly this chatbot and know how to exfiltrate information out of it. It's not going to be easy to get those kind of huge scale models the kinds that do the really good stuff to work on device and give you the results that you want. However, I think for just like a lot of people are willing to spend $500, $1,000, $2,000 to have like a home storage server to do a whole bunch of things, I think a lot of people would be willing to spend that money, that amount of money, to have like the ultimate in secure and personal and private AI tools.

0:24:31 - Leo Laporte
I wonder if that's what Nvidia is thinking. I mean, I think they intended more for researchers, right?

0:24:36 - Andy Ihnatko
yeah, to develop models that they have been deployed really interesting idea the supercomputer the idea of democracy by the way, it's only 200 billion tokens.

0:24:45 - Jason Snell
I think it's still not quite as big, as you know an external, but it's still pretty good doesn't it feel like we're watching the computer industry repeat itself here, where I think because I think Andy's exactly right that right now, you know all these incredibly usefulIs are on huge servers that cost a lot of money and burn a lot of power and are in the cloud, and you have to send a data, and I think some people expect that it's going to stay like that, and it's like it's not.

We have already learned that for so many reasons, and Apple's already learned this because they've got neural engines in everybody's pockets and so they're trying to build small models that can run on device, as well as their cloud models that they're trying to build.

But, like, in the long run, I think this all points toward personal data that belongs to us and is analyzed on our devices by models that run on our devices, and devices get more powerful and the models get more efficient, and I feel like that is a direction that everything has to point, because it's so much more effective for your AI model to look at your personal data collection on your device rather than say, well, okay, I guess I'll authorize all my personal data to some server that's provisioned somewhere in the cloud and I hope that they don't hack my entire life um and you know, if there's an ai leo here next week, we'll know what happened well, the cynic and me says that really, the reason this whole thing is developing as fast as it is is because there's so much money to be made by exfiltrating all your personal information of the cloud, and that's what's really driving open ai and everybody else.

0:26:29 - Andy Ihnatko
Uh, not that you're gonna pay for a service, but then they're gonna be able to suck you dry for all your information and, in addition, like if you uh, if you have a conversation with any one person, like if you work alongside somebody or if you had a personal assistant for five or six or seven years, at some point, they know so much about how your work functions and what you need, what your priorities are and what you mean when you grunt something, instead of being really, really explicit about what you need. That is such a valuable set of training data about how to be a good assistant to Leo Laporte that why should it belong to anybody other than you? Why should it not be an open corpus of data that you can then put on another box, upgrade to a different sort of AI?

0:27:18 - Alex Lindsay
I still think that Apple over time again, I think that they and I think Apple has more time than everyone else because their user base is moving. I mean, I'm constantly looking at different AI models for what I want to do, whether it's in Throckmorton for one thing, and chat GPT for another and Google, you know, for something else, and I'm constantly optimizing. So they're they're in this kind of, you know, pit match between each other, because people like me are like deciding which ones I'm subscribing to, and I'm turning subscriptions off on stuff I'm not using very often, and so, as soon as I decide that this isn't as good as the other ones, I just get rid of it, and so they have to fight every single day over what that looks like. I'm doing all of this on my Apple devices, which I'm not planning to leave anytime soon, so I think, so I still think Apple has a lot of time to do this, and I do think, though, that, as they continue to optimize the hardware so that it can process this better, it's going to be able to do more of that data, and then, in this kind of secure area, it's going to get stronger and stronger and stronger, and I think that some of the things we're talking about.

This personalization is not the hardest thing that AI has to figure out. Figuring out imaging and video and everything else, that's really hard stuff, you know, and compared to figuring out how to optimize, how to work with us, I don't think that that's nearly as complicated for an AI tool to do. And again, I think that you know Apple, I'm going to guess, is spending billions a year on improving this model, as is everybody else, but I think that they're going to continue to grow. The stage one and stage two, that are relatively secure, and stage three, which right now, I think is 80% of the solution, will become 10% of the solution over the next five or 10 years.

0:29:01 - Leo Laporte
It's going to be very interesting times, no matter matter what and I agree with you, Andy, if I could buy 3 000 is worth it a server that I could run in my house. That would give me all the capabilities. The problem is, it's probably not, because one of the things that makes, for instance, perplexity ai so good is that it's always connected to the internet and it's always getting stuff from the internet.

0:29:24 - Andy Ihnatko
I guess my digit server like what if you could? What if you could just set up fence posts that says it look right, the conversations that I have with you are private. If you want to, if you want to go and google something on my behalf, do it, but don't say it's because you want to talk to me about this.

0:29:38 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah right, I think it's possible I just think that the the processing power required when you, as soon as you get out there, I don't think we could have something at home that would do it.

0:29:50 - Leo Laporte
Well, what's powerful and I've actually talked about this, which, by the way, AI has become such a focus that we've decided to make this week in Google, kind of retool it. We're going to call it intelligent machines. It's not going to be just AI, it's going to be about intelligence and artificial intelligence and machines that are intelligent. This is clearly going to be the next for this decade, the next big thing, I wonder. I just really wonder how well apple is going to be able to survive in this. But it is the case we were talking about this on wednesday on on twig that there are a number of AI scientists who say really, we got all the information now. Thank you for putting everything you know into the internet. Really, it's about better models and faster machines.

0:30:38 - Alex Lindsay
And Moore's law is very much the benefit.

0:30:41 - Leo Laporte
AI is very much a beneficiary of Moore's law.

0:30:44 - Alex Lindsay
I think that, again, I don't know like I'm doing all this AI stuff on my Apple computers, so I'm not sure when I'm going to decide oh, I have to leave Apple because some other computers are doing something.

0:30:53 - Leo Laporte
That's the point. They're going to have more memory and they're going to get faster. But even but I'm, but. I'm saying like I'm using all these tools on my Apple devices, yeah, but as soon as you use ChatGPT, all bets are off. You're now, regardless of what platform you're now sending information to ChatGPT.

0:31:13 - Alex Lindsay
Right, but I think that the I think so. I think Apple's got a lot of. All I'm saying is, if I'm using it, apple's just a lot of things. I won't ask ChatGPT or I won't go into or I won't whatever, because you know, from a security perspective. But I think that if Apple got good at those things over time, they have a huge advantage over everyone else who's just simply unable to provide that kind of security.

0:31:56 - Andy Ihnatko
If it becomes a product, then it might not be quite such a big defining deal. Remember that both Google and apple provide a lot of the same services. Um, and a lot of people don't seem to mind that google is an advertising company and make well but remember information.

0:32:13 - Leo Laporte
But google was gonna, was kind of doing this. Remember those cards and the whole idea is we know you're at the airport, so here's your flight information, your travel information, and they kind of pulled back.

0:32:23 - Andy Ihnatko
I don't know, yeah, why well, but well, yeah, but all I meant is that, like if right right now we're we're at such a point of freedom for artificial intelligence, because I think there was a recent study that said that something of of apple iphone owners, they regard apple intelligence as important to them. I think the number of that who answered yes that question were like high teens, very low numbers. So there's still. So if Apple A thank God needs to make a whole bunch of mistakes over the next couple of years, they can. They have the freedom to do that. They've got the space.

0:32:58 - Leo Laporte
Because they're not leaving.

0:33:00 - Andy Ihnatko
But also like eventually we're going to settle into a world in which people understand basically what AI is. Just like there had to be a time for people to understand what word processing was, understand how it's relevant to them, even if in the first two or three years there weren't products or services that were relevant to what they do in its boots, just as Google?

0:33:23 - Leo Laporte
is that something like this is going to come along and obviate the need for a smartphone that there's going to be?

0:33:32 - Alex Lindsay
I mean Google's terrified that searches and they should be are going to be replaced by AI, but I think Apple again, because there's so many people with so much of their hardware, I think that their base is not going to move very quickly one way or the other. It's a pretty solid base as far as people Tell that to MySpace. I think people know MySpace was a web page and that's easy to disrupt. I think that Google has more to worry about because they're primarily software. Tell that to BlackBerry.

0:34:00 - Andy Ihnatko
Tell that to Palm. I kind of feel like it's exactly the opposite, where Google is putting their chips on every single square in the roulette betting board, where, whatever it is with AI, they've got a business there. They're not just giving you a better smart assistant on a phone, they're not just giving you funny emoji emoji. They are building world models that, hopefully, they hope AI developers of this year and 10 years from now are going to be relying upon and creating the computing power that they will be needing to lease service from in order to run these models.

If AI eventually comes into a topic that I've been coming back to so often, that, again, if I just had, all I need is one wireless Bluetooth earbud that can connect to, that can talk to let me talk to my phone and have conversations.

That's a lot more powerful than VR headsets for me or augmented reality, and so, no matter how what piece of hardware comes along, google can create the AI for it, create a product and service for it or, again, create the compute power that this third-party company is going to build it on Apple. If people go away from phones, if they decide that it's the earbud and it even doesn't really even matter what earbud, it is so long as it's relatively good. They're the people who I think would be in trouble Now. I don't think that that's going to happen anytime really soon. I do think that the phone is going to be the host for the AI for the foreseeable future, but you never know. There are so many things that nobody saw coming until it was the only rational thing that anybody could conclude. But I do think that Google is not as vulnerable as Apple on that specific scenario.

0:35:48 - Leo Laporte
I think Google's almost out of the business. To be honest, I think Google's really looking laggard and I think both Apple and Google should really be worried that they're about to be kind of replaced. As happens always in technology, the next thing comes along. It's not such a big deal to go from an iphone to an android phone, and the next time you buy a phone it may not be an iphone. And then what does apple have?

0:36:14 - Alex Lindsay
yeah, I don't think the lock in is as strong as you think.

0:36:17 - Leo Laporte
I own a lot of both and I would never use an android on a day-to-day basis. Android outsells apple Apple.

0:36:23 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, it does, but I mean when we look at the next generation, it doesn't. So it's I mean, I think, that's the in the US, but that's a pretty big market. You know, I don't know if it. Yeah, I don't, but again, I don't know if the current market is really going to.

0:36:48 - Leo Laporte
I don't know that many people that have gone from an iphone to an android. I think complacency on apple's part at this point would be a big mistake and I bet you anything, I don't think they're complacent, very hard about what. What to do to stay relevant well, I mean what?

0:36:55 - Jason Snell
what? Just look at the evidence of the last six months, where everything is apple intelligence. That is a sign of a company that got the got scared and got the message. Who knows if it's enough, but I would say that, at least at a very bare level, you can't say that they seem complacent. They do recognize that they can succeed or fail, but they are.

They are not being complacent because and because Apple intelligence, first off, it's forcing them to behave in ways that I would say are maybe even counter to ways that Apple has behaved. They're making mistakes and throwing things at the wall. You have to. They're doing that because they feel an existential threat from the rise of AI technology, especially as embraced by their competitors, and they got to catch up. And that is I mean. I think that says it all. I think that says it all. Now, I think there was an interesting question about whether Apple's ways are so locked and have been so fixed for so long because they've been so successful, whether they can unlearn the details.

0:37:57 - Leo Laporte
It's always the question. It's the innovator's dilemma, it's the question for every company.

0:38:01 - Jason Snell
It's the corporate culture and how it all stacks up. And I, you know, I was charged in my career at a print magazine with dragging the entire staff onto the web, and I would have meetings where everybody would agree that it was a good idea, and then it wouldn't happen Like they would, because saying we're going to do this is not the same. Changing corporate culture is brutally hard and I think that's the risk that Apple has is not not that they don't agree that it's important and they need to meet this moment, but that culturally, they are using a culture built by Steve Jobs in a very different era. And two, and they're too calcified. They're just too tied to what got them here, which is to be very successful, but it might not be the rulebook you need to follow going forward.

0:39:13 - Alex Lindsay
But I also think that the upside is that when you look at how many people, when they're asked, do you want to share my, you know, ask to not share my information the percentages, I don't remember what it was, but it's very high the people just say I don't want to share my information.

Um, and so the the issue is, is that that this kind of, as we get more intimate in our connection with with AI, and wanting to have something on all the time, like I would never put something on my body or or anything else that that gave something to someone other than Apple, that ongoing data, like you know, like and the thing is, is that because I don't think I think Apple culturally, I mean, I think they consider privacy an existential problem for them, you know, like, so they and I think that's a challenge for them in AI, but I think that also this device, then private enclave, then everything else approach, it's one of those things, like, if you can pull it off, it's far superior for many users to do things with it that are much more connected to their everyday life than many of the other AI solutions.

Now the question is can Apple pull it off? And it's going to cost billions and billions, tens of billions of dollars for them to do that. But if they do that and as some of these other you know models you know will are a little uh uh leaky, you know, I think that as more of that stuff starts to come out, then I think that that apple is in a in a different position, you know, than everyone else and but they have to pull it off. You know that that's when I, when I do an image, playground image, then I go maybe they can't do it.

0:40:46 - Leo Laporte
No, I agree with you if apple couldn't do it if I could get all the benefits of this b thing on my wrist, but it's all apple.

0:40:52 - Alex Lindsay
I'd far prefer that, but exactly, and that's this, so that's that's apple's opportunity yeah, the risk is is that they don't move fast enough and they don't get that done, but their opportunity is something that is far superior from a. I'm willing to share all of my private data, because you know my health data and my other things and everything else.

0:41:10 - Jason Snell
And it's trust, it's ecosystem connectivity, it's familiarity with the brand, all of these things.

0:41:15 - Leo Laporte
But they have to have the product right yeah, but if kodak could have owned digital photography, could have owned it, but they didn't.

0:41:23 - Jason Snell
It's the innovators dilemma it happens again and again, and again but existing companies are not precluded from adapting. We don't tell those stories, but they do, they can adapt.

0:41:34 - Leo Laporte
But sometimes they don't exception.

0:41:36 - Alex Lindsay
That proves the rule, though I think I mean it's very well, somehow microsoft has stayed in the top five for a long time. Well, smart, no, microsoft.

0:41:42 - Leo Laporte
And apple is struggling, and apple has done it too they've done the transition in the top five for a long time. Well, they keep adapting. They're smart.

0:41:45 - Alex Lindsay
No, Microsoft was struggling and Apple has done it too.

0:41:47 - Andy Ihnatko
They've done the transition, absolutely, I will say one thing, though I think that, regarding your comparison to the app tracking protection, I'm not sure if it's 100% comparable here, because the way that I would think of it is that if you ask somebody, would you prefer that here is a diner that you like or a restaurant that you like? Would you prefer that there are no vegetarian options? Or rather, we'll get rid of the vegetarian stuff on the menu to make room for more non-vegetarian options. In abstract, I think most people might say yes, because most people aren't vegetarians and they're not looking at the place of the menu. However, if you put in front of them red beans and rice and quinoa and a really great vegetarian dish and you ask them would you like this to be on the menu, they might say yes, I'll give you an example that's actually real which is that if?

0:42:44 - Leo Laporte
you ask people if they watch PBS, far more people say they watch public broadcasting than actually do. It's a poll question, and poll questions are a notoriously bad way to find out what people really think.

0:42:58 - Andy Ihnatko
Maybe I introduced this the wrong way. What I'm getting at is that I think that people would much rather have more privacy than less privacy in the abstract. When you give them an exact example saying here is what your calendar app can do for you if it collects no information about you. Here's what the calendar app can do about you if it is almost always aware of what's going on in your life, do you feel that strongly about privacy? Then? I do think that it's. I do think that people's desire for privacy is flexible If you give them something that it seems like a good trade.

0:43:33 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, I mean, I mean the uh, the. The equation that I often use is action will always occur when possibility is greater than circumstance. So so it'll always occur. So if you view the possibility of getting something more than the circumstance of giving up your privacy or more work or whatever, you're always going to move forward. It depends on what that circumstance is.

Most Apple users, if Apple gets within 10 or 15% of the quality of something else, they'll choose it because because you know, so they'll just go down, they'll, they'll go that automatic path. I think that you know if it's you know. But I'm using, for instance, I'm using lots of AI that I know is leaky. I'm conscious to what I'm putting into it, but I'm also asking lots of questions. I'm trying to learn how to use Airtable right now. So I sit there with chat GPT open and I'm sitting there like, how do I do this? I want to create this kind of table, I want to do this, I want to do this, I want to do this and I'm asking all these questions and I'm giving up whatever I'm giving. I'm probably not giving up very much there, but the point is, is that if Apple did that, I would use Apple to do that if it got within 10 or 15 percent of the quality.

So Apple's advantage among their own users is they don't have to beat everyone, they just have to be within, they just have to be close and an Apple user will tend to use the Apple resource. Apple user will tend to use the Apple resource. But if they're really far behind, apple, you know, lost a lot of ground because they didn't choose subscription for Apple Music until it was, you know, way too late. If they had done, if Apple had done, subscriptions in 2009 or 2010, spotify wouldn't exist. You know like you know, like it would, you know, and so you know they can fall further behind. And then you know, but you know, I think that when all things are equal, apple has an advantage. Or even if Apple's a little behind on another innovation, but I think that there's, but I, so I think that if Apple can get it turn the corner, they have a huge advantage. If they can't turn the corner, they've got time to figure it out. I think that's all I'll say is that I'm not saying that they are obviously very focused on it.

I mean, they're there, that's all they want to talk about. But so it's not that they're not that they don't see it, but I still think that they have years, not months, and I think some of the other ones have months. You know, like if chat GPT didn't perform as well, like I've decided that Claude is better than chat GPT to do programming programming built, you know, playing around building programs, writing programs in Xcode based on stuff I did with AI, and I started in ChatGPT but moved over to Cloud and that happened in a series of weeks. So that's a much different situation for these AI tools.

0:46:17 - Leo Laporte
It's not sticky. You will move away from Cloud in a week if it doesn't do it.

0:46:22 - Alex Lindsay
If I found something else that does it, but that's the problem for the software-based ones or the cloud-based ones. It is, but I'm not leaving. I'm not going. Oh, apple intelligence isn't close enough yet I'm going to leave my phone. So that happens over many years. So that's the curve that Apple has is that there's a huge ecosystem. I have to make big decisions. I've got Apple TVs and speakers and computers, and and, and watches and iPads and everything else. Leaving that ecosystem is a that's really sticky and I think that gives still gives Apple some time.

0:46:55 - Leo Laporte
We got to take a break. I'm way behind. But I have one more provocative question Do we have any information on how many homes are heterogeneous or all Apple, and how many homes are heterogeneous? They're all Apple, and how many homes are heterogeneous? I'm guessing that just because you have an Apple phone doesn't mean you don't use Windows or have a Google TV. But I wonder, do we have any numbers? Has anybody ever done any research on this? I'd be very curious. The all Apple homes, I think, have to be in a more.

0:47:23 - Jason Snell
Oh, there are very few, right? Just the sheer number of iPhones, especially in the US. And you look at Mac market share and it's like it's not possible, right? I think you could even argue that maybe most iPhone users use Windows, right, like just because of the numbers. It kind of has to be that way.

0:47:42 - Leo Laporte
We know that because of the success of iTunes once it went out on.

Windows. I think that's still the case. So I think you're an outlier, Alex, is all I'm saying. I think that the people are much more comfortable with a heterogeneous system than you are in general. Anyway, we'll see. I mean, we're all going to see. I would also say and this is a longer subject for another time but yeah, the app tracking question location, because they're and, by the way, this information was then leaked in a hack file from a company called Gravy Analytics the app developers don't even know that the location is being tracked. It's because they're using an advertising ecosystem that is tracking you. And if you look at the list of apps, it's everything. It's period tracking apps, pregnancy apps, it's game apps. It's huge. And this spreadsheet, which is available from 404 Media, goes into the let's see, I'm at the bottom. No, no, I'm not yet. More than 5, 000 different apps. Um, you saw this, Andy, I can hear you, uh yeah exactly I mean this.

This is the notion that you are somehow magically protected because you're on apple yeah, it's, it's good.

0:49:20 - Andy Ihnatko
It's just good to have that broad understanding. I would much. I value the fact that Apple has ways of exploiting me that don't involve exploiting my personal information, and that's one of many reasons why my desktops are all Macs, my iPad is a Mac, all that kind of stuff.

0:49:39 - Leo Laporte
I use them because I like them.

0:49:42 - Andy Ihnatko
That's really why people use them, right. I value it, but people have to make sure that they understand that just because Apple goes the extra mile and truly, truly, truly this isn't just marketing hype they do truly go the extra mile to make sure that if they can make something private without affecting their profits, they absolutely will that doesn't mean that you're clean, you're pure, you're safe, because there's so many other organizations out there that are trying to track you.

0:50:06 - Leo Laporte
This is one of the People use Windows and they know how bad Microsoft is and they still use Windows in the vast majority and I know you need to get to commercials, I'll say this is one of the reasons why I don't.

0:50:18 - Andy Ihnatko
It mitigates to me the argument against like using Google products and services. There are people who want to de-Google their phones, go to really extreme lengths to make sure that their phone is absolutely clean of any taint or influence of Google. That's perfectly up to them. I absolutely respect that decision. However, it's really really hard to exchange oxygen for carbon dioxide on this planet without being tracked and without losing your privacy. So that's part of the matrix when you're making the decision. What companies do I want to deal with? What companies am I willing to trade my personal information for if they're giving me a better user experience for it?

0:51:00 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I got to take a break. It's a great conversation which will never end, so that's the good news. We'll be back to it soon, I'm sure, and I think it's really fascinating to see what's going on with AI, because it's moving fast, but it's also moving in unpredictable ways. Steve Gibson did an assessment of AI on last Tuesday on security now, and is basically his conclusion is everything you thought about AI yesterday is different today. It's going to be different tomorrow. We are in a giant disruption, the kind of disruption that happened with the internet, but it's happening in a much faster time frame and I think incumbent companies are going to be challenged in general by what's going on. It's fascinating to me, and the fact that I'm willing to wear this thing that's recording everything I do all day, all night and sending it to an unknown server in an unknown country just shows you how all-in I am on AI. Right, we got a great show. We got lots. We actually have Apple News we'll get to in just a moment with Andy Ihnatko, Alex Lindsay, Jason Snell Great to have you here on MacBreak Weekly.

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0:55:03 - Andy Ihnatko
What are you dreaming about Leo. What are you?

0:55:04 - Leo Laporte
talking about. I have thoughts I don't know. Let me ask my little AI pal. Maybe it knows what's going on in the real world. Actually, there is real Apple news. Not a lot of it. There is a question, though, I have. Apple did say that they were going to release the new CarPlay in 2024. Let me check a calendar. They didn't, so I'm guessing that this doesn't have much to do with Apple's ambitions, but the automakers right.

0:55:36 - Jason Snell
Yeah, absolutely yeah, because this requires integration on the automaker side. So it's not Apple releases a software update and then they've got CarPlay. It's this bespoke partnership that they sort of wanted to enter into with car makers, and the car makers are less interested in that. Yeah, and the car makers are less interested in that?

0:55:51 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, perhaps with the help of Apple. Aaron Paris has leaked on Xcom an upcoming look at widgets in this so far unreleased CarPlay 2.0. There's a little add widgets screen you can add. I like that. I think that would look nice on my car's dashboard.

0:56:12 - Alex Lindsay
But of course I'm never going to see it because automakers I don't think the hard part is the automakers are not very good at building these interfaces, but they don't want to be this intermediated either. You know I can so because you know I have finally upgraded my, my old car, with a new screen and you know it's as good as far as I'm concerned it works as well as a new car. I've got all the Apple features on it. I don't feel like I. You know my car no longer feels as old as it did, um, you know, two weeks ago or whatever, and I love CarPlay. I wouldn't buy a car without CarPlay, but 100 like I would not.

0:56:41 - Leo Laporte
There's no way, it's like you tied in point out, the manufacturers are doing everything they can without actually getting rid of CarPlay, although GM did get rid of CarPlay, but the? I have a BMW and it's, you know, yeah, it's got carplay, but that's not the preferred screen right and uh, and they have their own widgets and they have their own apps and they have all this other stuff and it's, it feels like it's uh, it's redundant, since I just want to use carplay, but they want to make sure they gather the data the carplay could, that could gather, I guess I don't know More data.

0:57:14 - Alex Lindsay
I think it's about data, isn't it? And Apple users going hey, I would love to just have it all inside of this little bubble.

0:57:19 - Jason Snell
Right, you know, and that's the, it could be my phone.

0:57:21 - Alex Lindsay
I mean. But but for me, I have to admit it's not data, it's just that the interface I'm used to the interface it looks the stuff that I want it to have my playlists and my maps and everything else and I don't feel like trying to figure out how to. I think that that's the big thing, that I still think that Apple users not all of them, but I think a majority of Apple users they just want it to work. They don't need it to be perfect, they don't need it to be the best thing ever or the coolest thing ever. They just don't want to think about it.

0:57:57 - Leo Laporte
I just want it to work, I just want to turn it on and have it do the thing, and and I think that carplay does that exceptionally well uh, something that probably won't come out in 2025 vision pro 2, at least according to mark.

0:58:05 - Alex Lindsay
Anybody ever expected it to come out in 2025.

0:58:07 - Leo Laporte
I did see a story that said apple actually uh, sold a lot of vision pros later in the cycle that they I don't know.

0:58:16 - Alex Lindsay
I mean, I mean, I think that, but I think that there was a goal to sell. I mean I think that before we did it, everyone was like they're not going to sell more than half a million, and then they sold about a half. They sold about what they. And then the next ring that most of the rumors had was sometime in 2026, there'll be a higher level version and a lower level version than what we have right now. The one we have right now is the middle.

That was the rumor two years ago, and now they're acting like well, apple's now working on a lower cost one. Yeah, they are working on a lower cost one. They've been working on it for probably a little while, probably since before they released the product. They knew that $3,500 or $4,500 or $5,000 when it's all done is going to be too much. This is the state of the art of what they could do within that price range. I still think that, either at the same price or a price higher, they're going to have one that's a higher performance version, and then they're going to have a lower, and we all everybody knew I mean I don't know, just about everybody knew there was going to be a lower cost version that's probably under sub sub 2000 I didn't play the vision pro theme because I thought this probably doesn't merit a theme that's fair, there's really nothing else to say we don't want to devalue the vision pro theme.

0:59:22 - Leo Laporte
It's such a good theme but that was the vision pro segment such as such as it is.

0:59:30 - Andy Ihnatko
That's speaking of someone who gets 27 dollars and 30 cents every time that music is played, because I'm the composer.

0:59:34 - Leo Laporte
Oh, that's right. Well, you wrote the lyrics. So there's a. Did you write the music too? Well, I did.

0:59:40 - Alex Lindsay
There's the writer and there's the mechanical rights.

0:59:43 - Andy Ihnatko
You know how Gene Roddenberry wrote some BS lyrics to the Star Trek theme just so he could have half the royalties from the program I thought he was. He was a smart guy. People think the world of him. Why can't I get a piece of that pie?

0:59:57 - Leo Laporte
uh well, I guess we're in the Gurman section of the show, and since I do pay now for access to mark's uh newsletter, I guess we should do the Gurman section of the show these days, though, sounds like we need a.

1:00:08 - Alex Lindsay
A.

1:00:08 - Leo Laporte
We're gonna need a theme for that a, we're going to get a theme for that one. Where are you? Who are you? Where are you? German? Wait a minute, I'm off to sunoai.

1:00:24 - Andy Ihnatko
If you give me some lyrics, I'll uh man of the future, Gurman he'll mark Gurman.

1:00:40 - Leo Laporte
What'll we buy? What'll we find? Who knows Gurman mark Gurman, but he's in the know it's the mark Gurman show. Okay, let's see, I'll just have suno generate a little something.

1:00:55 - Andy Ihnatko
What style of music would that be?

1:00:56 - Leo Laporte
maybe jazz, jazz vocals. It should be like the theme song from bewitched, the tv theme song. Yeah, oh, tv theme song. I like it all right, suno a. By the way, this is the version 4 of suno ai, which is kind of amazingly good. I've been playing with it, as usual, and I cannot stop so. So this song is now titled oh, mark, Gurman Mark, this one is going out to you. It's a little request. Let's see if I can get it to play.

1:01:32 - Andy Ihnatko
Walking down a dirt road with a fishing pole oh, mark German, he's not German. Walking down a dirt road with a fishing pole of his dream.

1:01:36 - Jason Snell
He's not.

1:01:36 - Alex Lindsay
German, but he's in the know.

1:01:42 - Jason Snell
It's Mark Gernon's show.

1:01:46 - Leo Laporte
That's pretty good. Makes you want to watch, doesn't it? I know there's a lot of supporting characters.

1:01:52 - Alex Lindsay
Jason is just embarrassed for all of us like he's, just like he's not Gurman is the is a very bad rhyme.

1:02:00 - Jason Snell
We're all squirming. Okay, I'll change it to. We're all squirming with.

1:02:05 - Leo Laporte
No, I'm making fun of you I intentionally uh write, uh bad lyrics because it makes it fun. It makes it fun. Um, all right, the marker, that's the mark Gurman segment. Here we go great uh.

1:02:25 - Alex Lindsay
Apple plans 20 new products in 2025 yes, not new set categories, just new products.

1:02:33 - Leo Laporte
New products iPhone and there's going to be an iPhone Slim, smart Home, push, new AI features.

1:02:42 - Alex Lindsay
Well, I think that the smart home thing we've talked about, I think Apple will not be successful until they build the core themselves. I think it sounds like they're going that way.

1:02:51 - Leo Laporte
But it also sounds like it's taken longer than we thought. I don't know. I don't know, it's hard.

1:02:55 - Alex Lindsay
It's hard. I think that Apple really thought that they could somehow build with enough integration, with enough talking. But the home automation market is just such a mess, you know like, with so many different formats and so many different standards and so many different ways of doing things and everybody wants to hang on to their little island of what they're doing. And I think that that you know it was never going to work until Apple. I think Apple really didn't want to get it stick their nose into it, cause the problem is there's the Sherlock factor, which is, as soon as Apple builds something, they kill that market. Like you know, they, they, you know like it's going to be, like the users are just going to go to that. And you know, if the company that makes doorbells and a whole bunch of other things, if Apple builds the doorbell thing, we'll just stop trying to integrate with Apple. You know, because you know the Apple is just going to roll into that market.

And so, as they do, if they did, I think the concern on their end was, if they do too much of that, they end up with having to build everything that you're going to use. But I build everything that you're going to use. But I think that if they build the core, most of their users will be happy and be using a lot more home automation and probably be a better market. But I think eventually is that they're going to stop using material or whatever. They're going to whatever. The next thing is some apple matter and they're just gonna um no, I don't boy if I tap.

It seems like that would be a mistake but no, I think, I think, I think if they're successful if the doorbell is successful, it's going to be an Apple integration Like you're going to. They're going to stop asking, they're going to stop trying to play with others, Because the bottom line is is Apple is not good at playing with others Like. That is not what they're. They have a lot of great skills, but integration with other people is not one of them.

And I think that they thought that Matter was going to work. Everyone thought that Matter was going to work. It's been a disaster, and so I think that Apple may just say hey, here's how you talk to our devices, and here's how you talk to our computers and our phones, gurman says Apple's been planning to introduce the Home Hub in March, but it may take longer to reach consumers.

1:04:46 - Leo Laporte
The new operating system, codenamed Pebble Good, times Pebble. I want an operating system named Bam. Bam is heavily tied to the app. Intents features coming in iOS 18.4 and 19. So he says it's plausible. The hardware itself will ship a bit later. 19 won't be out until September.

1:05:05 - Jason Snell
Yeah, this is that last feature that is sort of really intriguing. The app Intents, as well as the personal data store that can be mined, and those are the ones that are the most promising and also the ones that are going to ship the latest because they're the hardest to implement what do they do it? Sounds very much like they went all in on like app intents as a way to drive this product and then they're not ready so you can't ship the product.

1:05:25 - Leo Laporte
Describe what an app intent is. I mean, I know what, when you, when you have an app, uh, you say I have, I need a camera, so I'm gonna have an app, uh, and you write an app in x code you say I have, I need a camera, so I'm gonna have an app intent for camera access no, no, no, no, no.

1:05:37 - Jason Snell
So this is different. This is not um, the, the permission stuff that an app gets. This is what can an app do that is exposed to. If you want to think of it as a scripting interface, it's actually like if you use shortcuts. All of that stuff is basically app intense. An app contributes, like, here are the things that you can tell this app to do, and it can contribute that to the system and it can contribute that to Siri and it can contribute that to shortcuts. And the idea and they really evangelized this at WWDC last year is that developers need to be building on this Hint, hint. The idea is that this is going to be a huge way that they're going to drive the platform forward. So you need to atomize your apps, basically, and say, all right, here's my app. You can tell it to do 15 different things and it'll do them.

1:06:20 - Leo Laporte
And then it integrates those. Isn't this what we did back in the day with AppleScript?

1:06:23 - Jason Snell
Yeah, this is the next step of what was you know in the last generation was AppleScript, which is how do you make a scriptable app? Well, in iOS and modern macOS, you use app intents to make a controllable app using app intents, and then the system will you know whether it's shortcuts or Siri, or Apple intelligence will tell your apps what to do. And the dream is you'll say hey, let Shlomo do a thing, and it knows that it can do that thing by using this app to do that part and then passing it to this app to do this other part. Solved, right, it's going to use your apps to do what you want, and that's a great idea. But, um, you know that that's, that's where they're headed, and so it is. Yes, it is sort of a replacement for, well, you know, I can't tell my app to do this very specific thing that I could back in the AppleScript days. You know that's what they're trying to evangelize here.

1:07:16 - Leo Laporte
That was such promise with AppleScript, and except for a few narrow niches it just really didn't do what I thought it would do. I was hoping every app on the Mac would be scriptable.

1:07:28 - Jason Snell
There was a time when almost every app on the Mac was scriptable, but it passed pretty quickly and you know know, at least they were considering not bringing it to os 10 at all.

1:07:37 - Leo Laporte
Huge and pre-press they can't yeah, that's why that's why they kept it.

1:07:41 - Jason Snell
That's why they kept it in the os 10 transition is that all the people who are doing publishing used it.

1:07:45 - Alex Lindsay
We used workflows, I used it really heavily to like, like the amount of data that we took tying FileMaker to Quark, you know, and other data like we would be. I mean all the classified ads on it. On it I was working on a magazine all the classified ads, all the displays, everything else was all driven from a database that was feeding in and that was all Apple script using it to to tie it, tie those things together, and it was so key.

1:08:09 - Jason Snell
And when I still use Apple Script, it's mostly for the fact that shortcuts or other things won't let you get that granular control over doing a specific feature in an app, and if Apple Script is going to fade into the distance, then something needs to let you do that. What is that? And app intents, I think, is the answer.

1:08:30 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, and it's a really big deal with AI, because the ability to the thing that's going to hook a lot of people is agentive I hate to use the buzzword but agentive AI where you can say things like take this OmniOutliner doc and turn it into a Google Workspace spreadsheet and format it with A, b and C and for it to be able to control Safari, control OmniOutliner and apply everything you want to do. I mean the last funny we're talking about AppleScript, because I just wrote AppleScript yesterday to essentially reformat some stuff from OmniOutliner into a spreadsheet and I went there after spending like an entire afternoon trying and failing to get Google Gemini and open and chat GPT to do this really, really simple thing that I thought would be. Oh well, why am I even bothering to do a BB edit, search and replace? I can just simply say, hey, here's a file, I want it to be reformatted like this no, no, no, no, no and so-.

1:09:33 - Jason Snell
Did you know that there's actually one of the great ways to generate AppleScript now is to use an LLM? They're actually pretty good at writing.

1:09:43 - Andy Ihnatko
That was the ironic thing. I should have started with AppleScript, but as usual, I should have just basically asked hey, I need a routine that does this Boom Okay that's a little bit wrong, but I can fix it.

1:09:57 - Jason Snell
Thank you, yeah, I used Apple Script this week too, because I had to script something very specific that I couldn't use just command line or Python or shortcuts for, and so I went to Apple Script. That's why Apple has not replaced Apple Script yet, because you would lose lots of functionality in controlling apps. But I think Intents is where they're going. By the way, this is probably as good a time as any to mention because I don't think we mentioned it before that Script Debugger, which has been around for 30 years, is being retired, and the developers I wrote about this this week, the developers are retiring, which again like Because they're old, I can't, because this has been around a long time right, so they should retire.

I'm not going to complain about that. It's just one of those things where it is a classic indie Mac app that has been around forever, but the problem is, if it's only a couple of people working on it and they're going to retire, that's the end of that app. The truth is, if AppleScript was still like the A number one priority of Apple, they'd sell it, but it's not. It's fading away. The problem is it hasn't faded away yet, in part because they can't, it hasn't been replaced and the fact that Andy and I sometimes still resort to AppleScript and that I'm starting to tell people oh, just ask ChatGPT to write you an AppleScript to do this thing. It's so dumb. But like until App Intents are and evangelism is the point, leo, what you said about how I really wish more apps were Apple scriptable back in the day goes for app intents too.

1:11:19 - Alex Lindsay
Right, because that's why Apple to their credit is really evangelizing this.

1:11:26 - Jason Snell
But if the developers have to do this, the problem is if you're a developer and you hear Apple say okay, here's our plan, we're going to make it so people don't need to use your apps anymore, They'll use them, but it'll just be our AI driving them and they won't actually have to use them anymore. If you're a developer, do you like that? I'm not sure you do, but I'm not sure what your alternative is, because the platform owner is telling you to do it, so maybe you ought to do it.

1:11:54 - Leo Laporte
But we'll see what happens several very several uh editions of script debugger. It's, it's so. Software I'm so good, you know it's a great product. Uh, I'm sad that they're going out of business, but uh, not out of business, they're retiring. So yeah, by the way, it's weird you guys both did something with apple script.

Because I did too. I I launched automator so that I could write a quick action, so that I could have emacs, open text files if I right click on it and have a quick action. And uh, that just shows you, there's little weird niche. Yeah, uses for it.

1:12:23 - Jason Snell
You can do most of that quick action stuff in shortcuts now. But I still have some stuff that's based in automator that uses some apple script at a few points and and actually the funny I've got one that's huge. It's probably the most complex thing I've ever done and I have to keep it an Automator for now at least, for expediency sake, because an Automator action you can like put command line utilities inside the package and then hand it to a friend and say, just use this and shortcuts. You know that would be a horrendous security hole for me to give software to people. So I still use Automator for some of that. But the truth is Apple is slowly replacing all that stuff with a new version. That is going to be the way forward. There's a reason when they announced shortcuts that they said it's the beginning of a multi-year process, multi-year transition. Multi is a great word because it could mean one or two or five or 20 or 50 or infinity and it's fine. It's just a lot of years, more than one, more than one.

1:13:22 - Leo Laporte
And since we mentioned Automator, we should probably mention that Sal Segoian, who was the king of AppleScript, the king of Automator, in fact, I think one of the first guests on MacBreak Alex. Way back in the day we did a bunch of shows with Sal, one of the first guests.

1:13:35 - Alex Lindsay
He was in the first record. He was not only with Sal the first, he was in the first day we recorded, which we recorded like 25 episodes or something. I think we got four or five from Sal. He was also the first time we ever tried to do a 4K upload. When YouTube allowed 4K, sal came in. I was like we're going to do it in 4K and then it took us three weeks to.

1:13:57 - Leo Laporte
That's the one he is still around. He works for the Omni Group. In fact, he just has put out a series of Omni Automation vids. You were mentioning OmniFocus. It's a podcast from Auto automator, which is Sal, and it's also on the Omni group webpage.

1:14:20 - Jason Snell
So what Sal's been doing a lot of lately is, I mean, first off every now and then I get an email where, where I I've talked about you know, apple should really do this thing with Siri, and he'll say that's what we told them, you know, 20 years ago. And they said no, no they.

1:14:31 - Alex Lindsay
And he'll say that's what we told them 20 years ago.

1:14:32 - Jason Snell
And they said no, no they weren't interested and now they've gotten there, because he was really absolutely ahead of his time and there was a period where they just stopped listening to him. The people in charge at Apple just didn't want to. But once he left Apple, one of the things that happened very quickly is that OmniGroup approached him and all their app scripting is not in App Intents or AppleScript, it's in JavaScript, and they built a robust JavaScript-based scripting system so that you can script all the stuff that's going on.

1:14:59 - Leo Laporte
That was kind of smart and that's fine.

1:15:00 - Jason Snell
I use Audio Hijack scripting to do a lot of stuff and it's JavaScript-based and there are like shortcuts that say, run this script or you know, run this code and that's good enough, it's close enough. You know, run this code and it's a good, that's good enough, it's close enough. Like it doesn't all have to be necessarily in the same format, as long as you can control an app and tell it what to do. But that's what a lot of what's missing in the shortcuts era right now.

1:15:22 - Leo Laporte
So just to follow up on late night software, the end of development is this month. They are going to withdraw the product in June, but they will offer a free download of script debugger, which is kind of nice, and their forum will continue to operate.

1:15:36 - Jason Snell
Yeah, they're going to put all the versions, like the last many versions, up with serial numbers in mid-year. So if you're somebody who has basically for retrocomputing, if you've got an old system that relies on this or I think in the future somebody is running an emulated Mac from a particular period, they could get it up and running and that's cool. I mean, they can't open source it, but they can make their binaries available with serial numbers. That's pretty great.

1:16:00 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, they say there's too much encumbered stuff in there, they can't release it. Mark Aldrit and Shane Stanley, enjoy your retirement. I'm actually thrilled that they were able to make a living for so long selling what was an excellent product.

1:16:15 - Jason Snell
I do fear all of these classic Mac indie software groups that are potentially, you know, full of people who are approaching a retirement age. I guess the upside is a lot of its most loyal users are also approaching retirement age.

1:16:31 - Leo Laporte
But like I just don't. Many of the podcasters who cover Macintosh are reaching retirement age.

1:16:38 - Jason Snell
I never want to reach that day where Rich Siegel says you know, I don't need to do BB Edit anymore, I'm just going to go fishing.

1:16:44 - Leo Laporte
Yikes Don't want that that day's probably long ago, but he hasn't done it yet.

1:16:50 - Andy Ihnatko
Well, he's got a backup plan. He's fixing the.

1:16:53 - Jason Snell
Mixers. He's going to open a KitchenAid mixer stand somewhere in Rhode Island.

1:16:57 - Andy Ihnatko
No, he's fixing. His hobby is fixing KitchenAid mixers. I'm not just talking about replacing the plug, we're talking about he's a car nut and he basically strips it all the way down, takes all the gears down.

1:17:09 - Leo Laporte
I'm going to send him mine. I've had mine for 40 years.

1:17:12 - Andy Ihnatko
Plastic gear can be replaced with a bronze one. I'm gonna repack the. I love my.

1:17:15 - Jason Snell
I've done two, I, I did, I, I did mine that my kitchenaid mixer was my mom's and so all the cookies I had as a kid. And I and I, uh, I used rich's advice, I replaced a couple of gaskets and re-lubricated it, because it probably hadn't been lubricated in 40 years or 50 years ever. And uh, and then, one day, a couple years ago, I was uh running in my neighborhood and there was a kitchenaid mixer by the side of the road and I was like oh, boy, uh.

And so I got it and I said rich, he said bless you for being a good person. And then we rehabbed it and now it's in my closet here. I gotta probably one of my kids will end up with it, but I got got it back to working condition. So yeah, rich does that as his hobby. It's pretty hilarious.

1:17:55 - Leo Laporte
That's hysterical. I might have to write him and send him mine On to the Mark Gurman continued with the Mark Gurman segment that we really went far afield on that one. He did say, which will be a little disappointment to some people, that there will be new iPads, but there are a number of things who that will not come out. Uh, this year a revamped siri for chat gpt, due in the spring of next year, more than a year from now. Um, also an in-home privacy centric security camera, a face id driven doorbell. He says 2026. So what is available in 2025? A mac studio refresh. I think we knew all of this right which?

1:18:35 - Alex Lindsay
is gonna be a beast, I mean it'll be great an m4 mini does I mean? I'm doing a bunch of stuff with a mac mini m4 right now I have the 599 version. I am streaming 120 frames a second out of the hdmi and is running at six percent, you know, six percent utilization. That's with OBS running 120 frames a second, pushing something out and it's like I don't know if I should go to sleep.

1:18:57 - Leo Laporte
He says it'll have the M4 Max, M4 Ultra chips, iOS 19, six months away. Of course, There'll be an 18.4 update with new Apple intelligence features in the next few months. I think we're in beta now, right, Jason, for 18.4?

1:19:16 - Jason Snell
No 18.3. 83 is right now okay for is yet to be seen and there's very little in 18, 3 which, right, it may just be a bug fix update with minor things and we'll have to wait for a point for which will be much later and an updated Apple watch, which we were talking about, including, we presume, the ultra three um apple's planning a revamped coaching.

1:19:37 - Leo Laporte
Uh health app we kind of mentioned that already iphone 17 pro pro max and an air or slim, some sort of slim, two millimeters slimmer, isn't that slim?

1:19:49 - Andy Ihnatko
there's also the 11th generation ipad, which, in the government report, was a really interesting because the suggestion is that it's going to it's going to support Apple intelligence, which is a really good sign that, if there's really going all in that, look, if this is an Apple, any new Apple hardware that we're releasing from now on has to support Apple intelligence. I don't care if it is the, the, the, the riffraff end of the range. We're going to have to make sure that it runs Apple Intelligence.

1:20:15 - Leo Laporte
He says don't expect too many changes in the MacBook Pro later this year. He says he does expect the M5 versions will continue with that 2021 design. But that's because next year is the 20th anniversary of the MacBook Pro and he says there'll be a bigger revamp next year. New Mac Pro in development. High-end Hydra chip Is that when they combine two M4s or two M5s to make one giant thing? He says the machine is on track to be ready before the MacBook Pro, although the timing isn't yet clear. I wonder how many people are buying Mac Pros these days? There's less and less reason to do it Nobody. New AirTag already nearing production. New HomePod mini Apple TV plan for release later in the year. I'm a. I mean the Apple TV doesn't really need to be updated, but uh, I have there throughout the house. I love every TV as an Apple TV. It's all I need now. Everything's's over the top.

1:21:12 - Alex Lindsay
I just wish they'd upgrade the controller to the old one. Yeah, yeah, I still use the old controller with the new TV, because there's like features in YouTube TV, for instance, that you can't get to from the new controller that you can from the old one.

1:21:26 - Leo Laporte
Right so that's them. So that is the Mark Gurman segment with its own Mark Gurman theme. We thank Mark for allowing us to use his name in vain. I wrote new lyrics.

1:21:46 - Jason Snell
Hey, hey, Mark Gurman, give us your tech sermon.

1:21:50 - Leo Laporte
What's cooking in the Apple room. Tell us what's coming soon. Actually, this is Paul Holder's lyrics. Don't like that. I got another one here. That was better. This is like Saturday Night Live. What are you?

1:22:09 - Andy Ihnatko
doing. Andy, are you dancing? I'm not dancing to music. See, I'm not throwing shapes to things that are designed for someone who's 30 years older than I. That would be foolish. Okay, thank you very much. I thought I'd do an okay-go sort of thing where, when you speed it up, you get the actual dance. Ah, that's the key.

1:22:29 - Leo Laporte
You just need a little one of those things. What do they call those things? You know, treadmill. You just need that, that's all you need a treadmill. Yeah, that's what I was saying not the first time someone told me that actually jason has a very nice article is did you write that on the treadmill desk? Well, that was lex friedman, right, lex did that. Okay, he's apparently decided that he wants to move all the time yeah, he wrote the whole article at like 1.5 miles per hour something to be proud of.

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BitWarden.com/twit. Try the enterprise or teams planning your business too. Really good, BitWarden,com/twit. We thank them so much for their support of MacBreak Weekly and, by the way, you can support MacBreak Weekly very simply by going to that address. That way they know you saw it here. BitWarden.com/twit. I'm glad we could mention Sal's new videos. I got an email just Christmas, early December I think from uh Naomi Pierce, his, uh, his fine, fine friend. So I was a legend. Yeah, Sal, and I love Naomi, I love the two of them you know many as you have too, I think many geek cruises with them.

1:27:05 - Andy Ihnatko
Oh yeah, no, but they've been to their house. It's hung up. It's one there. I haven't been to San Francisco in a while, but there used to be one of my regular San Francisco hangs.

1:27:14 - Leo Laporte
He's like Zorba, the Greek right. He's amazing.

1:27:18 - Andy Ihnatko
Again. Look at his energy, his style, his positivity, his hat, his beret. And it's just like we forgot to mention that one of the reasons why AppleScript actually made it into OS X is because there's the legend that Steve Jobs came back, took control of everything, had a big, big company meeting inside the town hall 150, 160 people in which he went person to person berating them, all these product managers, for making terrible, crappy products that they should be ashamed of. That's bringing the entire company down and we should cancel this. And people just sort of hanging their hands, heads in shame or trying to, like you know, not have the courage to, and Sal just basically comes back with you're totally, you're crazy, you're totally wrong. You don't understand Apple script, if that's what. And after back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, the story goes. Then Steve just pauses, looks at him and says okay and then moves to the next guy.

1:28:19 - Jason Snell
So I have a related story, which is they were doing an OS X press conference essentially right, so they invited us down to. It must have been infinite loop in the town hall. It's got to be where it was and it was during that rollout of OS X. So it might have been developer preview, it might have been, you know, post 25 years ago or just a little bit longer than 25 years ago, but it was one of these. We're rolling out our OS 10 strategy and it was back in the day where they took questions from the audience afterward, from the press, because it's just the press who were there and I stood up and said to Steve Jobs a lot of your professional publishing customers rely on AppleScript.

Are you going to support AppleScript and OS 10? Because they had been real squirrely about it and jobs. Pause for a moment. And then he said, of course, in a way that felt to me at the time a little like he was making it up on the spot. I I have it on good authority that you could literally like cut to offices where Apple script people work. Somebody burst in the doors and says did you hear? Steve said of course. He said of course, like they weren't entirely sure it was going to get it and get into OS 10. But then I asked him the question and he said yes, I'm not saying that I saved Apple script, but I'm saying I did put Steve jobs on the spot and made him defend Apple script and saved AppleScript.

1:29:53 - Andy Ihnatko
But I'm saying I did put Steve Jobs on the spot and made him defend AppleScript and at the same time Steve Jobs did once give him a little bit of applause from the stage during a keynote and said, yeah, there's good old Saul.

1:30:02 - Jason Snell
Saul, who y'all know. That was when Saul unveiled Automator. He couldn't pronounce Segoian, so he just said here's Saul, who y'all know I don't.

1:30:13 - Leo Laporte
I don't know how to say his last name or his first name. As it turns out, it was Saul who y'all know I still.

1:30:19 - Jason Snell
Every now and then I hear from Sal and I'm like oh who y'all know, y'all? Know, Y'all know it's a classic moment heels a little and it was, uh, you know if it helped at all in making him feel like there was pressure for them to keep apple script.

1:30:35 - Andy Ihnatko
uh, great, because I'm afraid it was a powerful enemies, I would argue.

1:30:39 - Jason Snell
I would argue that if they I mean I know I ranted about this a little bit last week, but like that os 10 transition if they had done enough things wrong, they would have just been abandoned and their customers would have gone to windows. So apple script was one of those technologies's like I don't even know if, like, in the long run, they really even needed to keep it, but like in that moment, they had to keep it. Because if we're going to break the workflow of every newspaper and magazine that's built, these AppleScript workflows, we're going to break it when they go to OS X They'll just go to Windows. At that point right.

1:31:20 - Leo Laporte
Like, just like, like, why are what are we even doing here? Why? Why are you not maintaining continuity? So it's good that they did it. I think those are the days. Those were the days. Those were the days. So apple uh got a little, got a little. Uh subtweet little little shade from mr zuckerberg on the joe rogan show. He said they haven't invented anything great in a while.

1:31:35 - Jason Snell
Man who never invented anything says they never invented anything.

1:31:39 - Leo Laporte
What did they invent?

1:31:41 - Jason Snell
I invented no legs.

1:31:42 - Leo Laporte
He says I invented. Yeah, what did Facebook invent?

1:31:46 - Jason Snell
What did Facebook invent? They did a knockoff of Are you Hot or Not. That turned into the Facebook, which turned into Facebook. They bought Instagram. They've knocked, knocked off, they knock off everything, yeah yeah, they bought whatsapp and then and then they're famous for knocking off other people's features and implementing them like come on man.

1:32:06 - Leo Laporte
Apple is sitting on the iphone. He says apple's used the iphone to put in place a lot of rules.

1:32:11 - Alex Lindsay
I think or feel arbitrary it just really felt like he's just really bitter Hoopa Kitty, yeah, like he doesn't have control of something he wants to have control of and he's mad about it.

1:32:19 - Jason Snell
He's really mad about app tracking transparency, obviously yeah.

1:32:23 - Andy Ihnatko
He was also throwing shade at Apple. Basically, their lack of innovation is reflected in the fact that their market share is going down the iPhone, their sales are going down in the iPhone, Like really.

1:32:39 - Jason Snell
Yeah, what are you talking about? He's making things up.

1:32:41 - Leo Laporte
He made some good but he shouldn't have said those things. Don't forget the.

1:32:44 - Jason Snell
Quest 3 is way better than the Vision Pro, which is only true in terms of value, because it's so much. It's also way cheaper than the Vision.

1:32:53 - Leo Laporte
Pro, but he does make some interesting points. He says, for instance, we don't have the same ability to do with the Meta Ray Bands on the iPhone what Apple does with the AirPods.

1:33:03 - Jason Snell
He's right.

1:33:06 - Leo Laporte
You know, that's fair.

1:33:08 - Jason Snell
It's a terrible feeling when the worst person in the world says something you actually agree with.

1:33:13 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, we talked about that a few weeks ago. That's actually one of the things that the EU is going after Apple for. But they're not saying you can't make Apple watches anymore, but they're saying you have to explain why it is that there's a level of intimacy between Apple-branded earbuds and Apple-branded smartwatches that you are not willing to give the same advantages to third parties. And yeah, I mean this is one of the reasons why I'm a little bit more inclined to stay on Android for the near future, because I do feel like sometime in the next two or three years, I'm going to be buying a pair of smart glasses or some sort of AI enhancement device that is yet to be really designed, that I don't know about, and I feel as though that thing is never, ever, ever going to work with Apple the way that it can work with Android, and I'll be stuck with waiting until Apple decides to make one a knockoff not a knockoff, a version, an improved version, the right version of that, and see if I can afford it when they do.

1:34:12 - Leo Laporte
And of course Meta killed their diversion, equity and inclusion programs and probably Mark thinks that's a bad thing that Apple does. The Apple board has actually recommended that shareholders vote against a proposal to eliminate DEI programs.

1:34:28 - Jason Snell
I have to. I also wanted them to stop their environmental efforts.

1:34:33 - Andy Ihnatko
I actually have a list here because they released their proxy document for their shareholder meeting in February 25th next month and there are four shareholder proposals. Many of them are really deeply politically motivated.

1:34:47 - Leo Laporte
Are they all from the National Center for Public Policy or are they from different shareholders?

1:34:50 - Andy Ihnatko
No, I think a couple are different, but you can tell them. There is kind of standout report on ethical AI data acquisition and usage, which is something we've discussed before, where it's like yeah, you said that, how does you having a deal with OpenAI match in with your pledges and that sort of thing? But yeah. Then number five, which is probably related to that class action lawsuit that's spinning up report on the costs, the shareholders asking for a report on the costs and benefits of child sex abuse, material identifying software and user privacy. But then six and seven are a request to cease DEI efforts, basically saying oh, it's because the Supreme Court has basically made you liable for lawsuits if you use the DEI processes. And number seven a report on charitable giving. I don't want to read the entire first paragraph of this question to you as written, but it's basically saying that some of the most fundamental rights are the rights to free speech and religion, which are recognized by the first. Okay, here we go.

1:35:49 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I guess Apple needs to give more money to the inauguration, and I just I just think that the shareholders, shareholders need to stay in their lane.

1:35:59 - Alex Lindsay
Like you know, like, like I just I just all these, all these shareholder actions are usually driven by somebody who's an idiot, you know. And so the you know, like it's always some idiotic whatever. And and the fact that that it's even possible to do this is annoying. You know, like hey, here, kid, have a piece of cAndy. Like it's even possible to do this is annoying, you know, like hey, here, kid, have a piece of cAndy. It's a public company, that's how it works. We'll tell you what we're doing. If you don't like it, then divest Right. Like if they have a way to vote, it's called selling their stock. Otherwise, be happy that you're in the bus and just shut the up.

1:36:29 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, didn't Tim say something kind of to that effect at one shareholder meeting a while back? Steve said it a bunch of times. I think the way Tim put it, and his Tim level of calm, was that we feel as though we deliver great value to shareholders. If you wish to sell your shares, we feel confident that you'll find someone to buy them from you.

1:36:49 - Alex Lindsay
That's a nice way to put it. It's a much nicer way than I said, but but but it's really like oh my gosh, like you guys, just like I've never seen I don't think I've ever seen a shareholder like thing that I thought, oh, I should, that would be a great idea.

1:37:02 - Leo Laporte
It's always some stupid tsmc is almost uh ready for uh apple approval for their arizona plant. Of course, this is a big initiative to get more of these chips made outside of China. Tsmc is a Taiwanese company, but I think people are even concerned about that. So back in 2020, tsmc announced to build a processor plant in Arizona. By 2022, they expanded plans for a second plant. Tim Cook said we promise we'll use those processors. According to nikkei asia, and I'm reading from apple insider, apple is now in the process of certifying and verifying the processors made in arizona.

1:37:46 - Jason Snell
Yeah, these are four nanometer processes yeah, it's, it's what tim cook loves to call legacy nodes. Yeah, so it's what it's. It's a step behind what they're doing in Taiwan, but these processors are still throwing out chips. I believe these are the chips that are in the Apple Watch, the current Apple Watch, and as well as the A16, which is in a bunch of sort of secondary products that Apple is making, and I would imagine that's where we will see this all start. They're not necessarily going to be cutting edge, but the fact is, those legacy nodes get used for a lot of stuff too.

1:38:16 - Leo Laporte
Ironically, these processors will then be shipped to Taiwan and China for packaging.

1:38:21 - Jason Snell
Yeah, yeah, it's true.

1:38:23 - Leo Laporte
And then they'll be putting the iPhones in China.

1:38:26 - Jason Snell
But it's a start right. I mean, it's a chicken and egg thing. The more processes you can do outside of Taiwan and China Like the more processes you can do outside of Taiwan and China, then the more you know you are able to withstand something bad happening in Taiwan and China.

1:38:42 - Andy Ihnatko
This is the result of the 2022 CHIPS Act.

1:38:45 - Leo Laporte
They got $6.6 billion from the CHIPS Act and that's why they're doing it. Apple is building a plant in Peoria, illinois, that will do the packaging, but that won't be ready for a few more years.

1:38:54 - Jason Snell
Did you see? The New York Times did an excellent story about the cultural impact of a bunch of people? Because you know, tsmc ultimately is going to employ a lot of people from the United States in these plants, but they also have to bring over their people who know TSMC from Taiwan to get them up and running, and all of that.

1:39:12 - Leo Laporte
So, cory, Doctorow was talking about this also on Twitter. He said they're paying PhDs to run their EUV and chip manufacturing machines, their fab machines $50,000 a year in Taiwan. They ain't going to cost $50,000 a year in Arizona.

1:39:28 - Jason Snell
No, that's true. I mean, and that's one of the reasons why the CHIPS Act is funding this, and that they wouldn't necessarily do it. Although, you know, tsmc may also say, yeah, you know, being in another place is probably not the worst idea in the world, but I like the New York Times story because it's about all those workers from Taiwan who are suddenly in the desert in Phoenix and how do they deal. And it's like there was a small Taiwanese community in Phoenix but it's in the other side of that valley which is so huge, but they started to come over and they put Taiwanese food into the mini malls that are next to the TSMC plant and the people from Taiwan have to adapt to the very different climate and the educational system and culture of the US.

The New York Times story was just a great little slice of life about the human fallout from building a west. It's just. The new york times story was just a great little slice of life about the the human uh fallout from building a taiwanese chip plant in phoenix, arizona, which is it's. It's complicated and interesting and I I thought it was a really cool story they call it tiny taipei.

1:40:26 - Leo Laporte
Tiny taipei 282 new students enrolling in schools in the area.

1:40:31 - Jason Snell
Yeah, chinese-speaking uh students, yep, um, it's going to be an interesting uh cultural, uh shift now let me tell you, I will say, because my mom lives in phoenix and I go there a lot. Phoenix is a rapidly growing area. So, yeah, uh, there are. There are lots of people pouring in to phoenix in general. Uh, among them are this group of people from taiwan. But, uh, and I love the fact that the people who already have the Taiwan community in Phoenix are like.

We can help. We understand the culture clash. We can help you work it out.

1:41:00 - Alex Lindsay
And that's pretty cool too and a lot of water engineers, Because Phoenix is growing so fast. And where are you going to get? When I see people build this up, you're like how is this going to work?

1:41:12 - Leo Laporte
It's way oversubscribed. Paolo Bacigalupi wrote an amazing book about this, the Water Knife, and I think it will probably prove to be prescient. It's kind of a depressing book, but it really talks about this issue.

1:41:26 - Jason Snell
Yeah, for sure.

1:41:28 - Leo Laporte
Phoenix is built in the desert.

1:41:29 - Jason Snell
Yeah, no, they've got all the land but no water.

1:41:32 - Leo Laporte
Right, this is a great article. Thank you for pointing uh, pointing it out uh to us, arizona's tiny taipei, how a taiwanese chip factory seeded a community. Uh came out at the end of the year last year from john lu and jack healy, reporting from phoenix great little story yeah the food looks a lot better.

1:41:53 - Jason Snell
I gotta say they gotta move all the way from taiwan to to phoenix and little story, yeah, the food looks a lot better. I gotta say they gotta move all the way from taiwan to to phoenix and they're like, what the heck am I getting myself into? I'm sure they got, uh, you know, are being paid really well for it by tsmc to have the move there, but what a wild, uh, what a wild thing for them to adapt to yeah, all right, let's take another little break.

1:42:12 - Leo Laporte
I don't have any theme songs, but I can work on them if you want. No, all right, all right, our show today, brought to you by unbreak my show read another ad. I like that. I love these uh suno 4.0 things. It's kind of amazing what you can generate uh, just simply by stealing members, you won't hear the ad, but don't go away. More content is coming like hold music for uh uh, no, we just cut it out and you get right back to the show. That's why you should join the club. By the way, ad-free versions of all the shows, none of these interruptions.

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Uh, wildfires, of course. In LA continue its seventh day. Uh, I think we all know people who've lost their homes. We've been evacuated. Kevin Rose uh, he, his wife Daria and their children and Toaster the dog all safe, but his home was burned in the in the fires in Pacific Palisades brand. He was brand new home. They just built it too. It's very sad. So many people displaced. Apple, of course, donating to wildfire recovering and if you are an apple card holder in the area, you can delay payments as well, which I think is nice the least they can do.

Yeah, I think that's really good. Nice, the least they can do.

1:47:14 - Jason Snell
Yeah, I think that's really good anybody we know in in the down there in the fires. I was going to say there's a great verge story.

1:47:24 - Leo Laporte
That's basically a profile of the people who did the watch duty app?

1:47:26 - Jason Snell
which very rapidly went to like everybody in la like on the news. Three million downloads in a week.

1:47:29 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, on the local I have a million downloads in a week on the local news.

1:47:32 - Jason Snell
So I I have um, I have the channels app which lets you um record stuff If you're a, you know, if your cable company allows it from an internet stream, and one of the weird side effects is you get the local news channels for like 30 different cities. And so I've been spending a lot of time watching the LA local news and there is a moment where you can see everybody say watch duty. And watch duty goes from being an app Nobody's heard of to an app that literally everybody in LA has heard of, and so Abigail Bassett story in the verge is really great. Talking about the people who built it. It's a five oh one, c, three, nonprofit, and they the whole idea is they just want to make it simple. They don't want to track you, they want to get that information out to you. It's got notifications for your area.

1:48:19 - Leo Laporte
It came out of the santa rosa fires, I believe is the people who started it our local, uh, our local wildfires and I've been using it ever since 2018 when those wildfires hit us.

1:48:30 - Jason Snell
Yeah, it's really good the people really have their heart in the right place and everybody out there I think in LA especially, has taken to it, and it's great because that's got your immediate warnings about where the fire is going and the winds are about to pick up again. So it's a good thing for people to know if they need to prepare. They seem to have like a green, yellow red system. So yellow is get ready, that you know. It's like ready, set, go. Yellow is get set, prepare to evacuate, and then, and then the red is to go, or is it green, I don't know. Red is danger and you should get out of there is what I'm saying. So, uh, a great app if you don't have it free, non-profit, um, and just a happy story amidst the terribleness, that these people put this great app together to give people information.

1:49:15 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I mean, I never took it off my phone and I've turned on notifications so I get notified if there's a wildfire. And it's very useful because you know and you live up here too, jason, you know very well, so do you, Alex that we are in high danger time. Absolutely, we think about it a lot.

1:49:31 - Jason Snell
We do too.

1:49:32 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, we do too.

We got a go bag and the whole thing like it's a it's leaving a lot of discussions with our with our neighbors about, like, what needs to be cut down and what needs to be moved around and like, just trying to make sure that there's. No, you know, but you definitely there's right across the street from where my house is. Uh, there's a whole bunch of charred wood, you know. You know across the big road that where the fire got some fire somewhere in the past, not too far in the past, charred everything on that hillside. So we're pretty clear that it's quite possible.

1:50:02 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, we, uh, we took out all the vegetation around the house. We have just stone everywhere. Uh, and you just, you know, you kind of cross your fingers. The other problem, of course, in California is getting harder and harder to get, uh, home insurance, fire insurance and that will only increase now yeah, we were told uh by our insurer uh, that they're going, our insurance is going to be canceled in june.

We have to find somebody else. Um, yeah, just, it's uh horrific uh, tim cook getting a little raise 18%. You know, poor Tim, he's only making $74.6 million a year.

1:50:39 - Andy Ihnatko
But even so, that's another piece of information that's disclosed in the proxy statement that got released a few days ago. I think his base pay is still the same $3 million, not bad, exactly. And when you look at the documents, every single one is like but none of these top executives have had raises in many years. It really is all based on performance pay.

1:50:58 - Leo Laporte
As it should be, yeah, right.

1:51:01 - Jason Snell
Yeah, it's. You know he is running a business that generates huge profits for its shareholders and should be compensated. I think there's probably a conversation to be had about how the disparity between the pay of the high executives and the rest of the people who work at apple but if you're, if you're talking about the highly you know, highly important compensated people in cupertino and all um, they probably get paid pretty well, you know. So it's I get it, he. He has increased the value of that company tremendously.

1:51:30 - Leo Laporte
He makes half what the ceo at the united health group makes. Just to put it, there you go. Perspective.

1:51:37 - Jason Snell
Or david zaslov of warner brothers right right, creating a lot less value, negative value in some cases he does make more than linda sue at amd or such an adelaide at microsoft or suffra cats at oracle or

bob chapik at disney and I think that that's the point is we can, we can all like lift an eyebrow at the disparity, which has increased dramatically over time, of ceo pay versus average pay at a company. But in this era, would we say, tim cook should not be compensated for the value that he's created at apple. I, I mean, I wouldn't. He's earned it if anybody has. It's a little different from, like a professional athlete, where the entire organization is worth billions and only has 100 employees. It's not quite that, but his compensation, largely being tied to the stock right, I mean kind of makes sense.

1:52:29 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, yeah, I mean, and I've had the opportunity to work, I've worked with Tim Cook, but I've worked with a lot of executives and, yeah, I would say that my experience has been mostly for most of these executives. There's the athletes that you see watching playing football professional football, european or American, or baseball, or whatever. I mean. They went through a huge winnowing process that got to the, got them to that place, and of course, they make mistakes and some of them are better than others. But but I would say that, um, especially now with companies, uh, with what they have to do from a publicly traded company, it's they're getting paid what they what you need to pay to keep. Although I don't think that Tim Cook, regardless of the any kind of bonus, I think his next job is nothing Like. I don't think he's, he's not. It's not like you're giving him a raise to send it to so that to keep him at Apple. I think he's just going to do Apple until he's done and then then go do other things. Yeah.

1:53:36 - Leo Laporte
What do CEOs really do, though? I mean, how important is a CEO really?

1:53:41 - Alex Lindsay
Uh, yeah, they're really important. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's there, they're like they are the quarterback and and the you know they are.

I mean, I understand how important Steve jobs was. Hmm, no, I. There's a lot, of a lot of them are making a lot of decisions, a lot, and it's not just making decisions. They have to make decisions through like eight levels of decision-making. You know they're looking at what those things are. They have to build an entire team around them that's providing that information. It is, it is a. It's a yeah, not yeah, it's a. It's a very complicated uh job and they have to figure. You know they have to be looking pretty far down the road and a bad CEO can drive a company into the ground pretty quickly.

So it's you know like it's also, and that can be done because they take up the there's this balance of delegating and also being explicit, and some things are going to come up to that CEO and they're going to have to make a decision and some things they have to not make the decision and they're building a team around them that is making those decisions and they got to know that those two people are those make the right decisions in that area. And there's this what I'm always amazed at, again when I've worked with a lot of I've worked with a lot of CEOs, is that there's this kind of you know, you can tell that they're thinking and they say just what they need to say. And there's, you know, and oftentimes and there's and they're, you know, they're very careful. Once you get to the C-level of a Fortune 10 company, there's this very careful view of how they look at things and how they talk about it and how they work with others to make that work.

1:55:21 - Leo Laporte
It's very important. So does the CEO decide what the next products are going to be, what money is going to be spent, or is it a team?

1:55:33 - Jason Snell
It feels like it's a team effort A good CEO or a bad CEO, right, I mean this is the thing is that I would argue, a bad CEO makes more decisions and doesn't listen to their team, and a good CEO is enabling the team and enabling the corporate culture. Listen to their team and a good CEO is enabling the team and enabling the corporate culture. And forgive me if I've told this story before, but just really quickly, there was one of the more perceptive interviews I've seen. There was an interview when Obama was president where he described his job. Somebody said, like, what comes to your desk? And he said everybody thinks being president is that you're given these things that are like well, 70% we should do this, 30% we should do that. And he says that's not what comes to your desk. When you're president, what comes to your desk is 51, 49 or 50.5, 49.5, or literally 50, 50.

The hard questions. Everything else is filtered out, and that is one of the big jobs of the CEO is you do? You know, not everybody agrees. There's no clear answer. You need to think about where you're headed and you need to affect.

I mean remember when Tim Cook took over at Apple, people were like, oh my God, he's just an operations guy, he can't be a genius like Steve Jobs. Apple is doomed and what you know Tim Cook did was say I have a whole company full of brilliant people who helped take Apple here and who will help take it to where it needs to go in the next couple of decades. All I'm going to do is, you know, steer the ship and listen to them and make sure we're all going in the right direction and that is ultimately. That's all you can be as a CEO. I mean, to use a sports metaphor, like some of the worst head coaches are micromanagers who won't stop calling the plays and like and they lose the plot because that's not their job anymore. I would argue that any kind of like fairly senior level at a company. It is a problem if what you really want to do is the little stuff, because the little stuff. There are people to do the little stuff. You need to think about the big picture.

1:57:28 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, and you need to be able to surround yourself with people that you trust enough. You know, like when I started doing productions, I told everybody what to do pretty explicitly by you know. Nowadays I hire people that know each individual job better than me and I asked them what they think you know, like, what do you think we should do? Yeah, what do we? You know, and I still got to make a decision and I know enough to cause damage. But I, but I'm, you know, I'm I'm asking for their input and then and then figuring out how we coordinate with everybody else to make that happen.

And CEOs are at a different scale. I mean, if you look at a, you know a company like T-Mobile, didn't he? And he, that's one person who came in and flipped that whole company and on the outside he looked pretty crazy some of the time, like he did this cooking thing and he has all this stuff and he'd wear all these crazy things. And when you saw him actually do a um, a quarterly or whatever, man, I mean he had ever all the numbers in his head, he had all the, the, the employment and say he knew everything about that company inside and out, as a CEO would and was still able to kind of play off this rock star thing. But the rock star thing was all about. It was something he was creating to create the cool factor for T-Mobile which is what they had, it was marketing, it was cool.

1:58:39 - Leo Laporte
Benito says in my experience working at big corporations, the CEO is always so disconnected from what is actually happening on the ground.

1:58:49 - Jason Snell
That's probably true, right? I mean, do you think Tim Cook is really connected to what's happening, assembling in a factory or working at a retail store? No, but what you want is to create a chain of accountability and understanding and corporate culture so that you know, tim might not know, but Tim is talking to his selection of senior vice presidents and they're giving him the scoop about it and he's telling them what they think. And then those people are dealing with people who are probably managing people, who are managing people, and that's hard, but you can understand the gestalt without understanding all the little details, or you can be kind of like in a fantasy world where you're clueless about it, and that's I mean.

1:59:23 - Leo Laporte
I don't know. Well, to give you an example, r it and that's I mean I don't know. To give you an example, rbn in our discord says I was an engineer in the mac os group at apple from 1990 to 1997 during which a succession of ceos gil amelio john scully nearly killed the company yeah right, and then steve came back to save it, but it was really on its last legs.

1:59:46 - Jason Snell
A good, capable ceo does make a difference yeah, it's, it's a, it's a bit of a black art as well. I mean, sonos is the one, that's the obvious one, the well, there's the example they got fired, they got ejected and probably their head of product needs to get ejected as well, for for that and it's just an interesting thought of, like you know, what did he do wrong and what did he do right.

2:00:06 - Leo Laporte
Whatever he did wrong, though, he created a breach between the customers and the company and the brand promise, and that is kind of uh, unforgivable do you think, though, that companies in america, where the ceos are getting paid, you know, ten thousand percent more than the line worker, are doing better than companies in Europe, where the CEO is paid a much smaller multiple of what the lowest paid employee?

2:00:31 - Jason Snell
gets. I don't think there's any such thing as an irreplaceable CEO. I think there are a lot of people.

2:00:36 - Leo Laporte
It's clear compensation is kind of out of the control.

2:00:38 - Jason Snell
It's a hard job, but it's not as if we have a huge CEO shortage, and that's what I would say is, I think a lot of these CEOs get paid because they're the CEO and not because they're worth it, and that's a difference. I mean, at least Tim Cook can point at what's happened with Apple under his stewardship and he can take some level of credit for it. But I feel in general that that disparity is toxic and that if you're making that much money, you should pay your people better.

2:01:04 - Alex Lindsay
But that's where we are. The hard part is is that the scale is, when you pay a lot of people a significant amount more, the number is bigger than paying one person a lot of money. It's a you know the multiplier, you know you look at the multiplier is a hundred thousand. So I can pay everyone a hundred dollars more and that's $10 million. You know like the thing is is that it's, and $100 more doesn't move the needle. What they want is $2,000 or $10,000 more, and $10,000 more times 100,000 is a lot of money, you know, and so it's easy to say, oh, we shouldn't do that. But as soon as you start doing actual math about what it takes to move the needle for someone, where you're going to give them enough of a raise that it matters, it's a lot Like it's, you know it's billions and billions and billions of dollars, and that's the part that doesn't make as much sense.

2:01:51 - Leo Laporte
One CEO I am not sad to see go is Patrick Spence. He was the CEO of Sonos. Yeah, and Sonos announced that he will step down effective immediately, which means he was fired. Yep.

2:02:07 - Alex Lindsay
And he's off the board as well is he part of the bricking?

2:02:08 - Leo Laporte
yeah, so this is a good question, because I mean, how responsible is he for the crappy app, the software and hardware problems sonos has faced, the the how much they've annoyed people like me who spent a lot of money on sonos equipment by uh, but I think that he's not directly responsible, but he's definitely picking teams.

2:02:25 - Alex Lindsay
He's picking the people who pick the teams.

2:02:28 - Jason Snell
Ultimately he is responsible.

That is part of the reason that CEOs get paid is that CEOs take the bullet right Like they really should. This was a disaster and the board is going to call him to account for it, and so they. You know they got rid of him. You know they got rid of him and that, that, like it's very clear.

Look, over the last year, all these statements that have been, as this fire has been smoldering at Sonos, of like it's been very slow, low level, but it's like people were mad.

They kept saying things, nothing changed. Then they, then they finally came out and said, well, yes, you're right, it is a disaster, but we can't go back. And you know, in the end is it's a disaster, but we can't go back. And you know, in the end is he responsible? I mean, ultimately, yes, he is responsible, and I think that the fact that the board probably thought he had failed to clean up the mess right, I think that maybe he had been given the opportunity to fix it and they were feeling like it didn't get fixed and so maybe they're wrong, Maybe he was working on it, and then they're going to be too capricious. But boy, from the outside, I look at that and think there are several people at senior levels inside Sonos who made colossal mistakes, including the guy who is still there so far, who is the head of product design, and probably need to go, based on the reports about how they totally mise-executed this.

2:03:47 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, shame you're always happy about his firing.

2:03:53 - Jason Snell
I'll be honest with you, even though I still have a lot of sonos equipment you know I never want to be gleeful about people losing their jobs and we don't know the complexities of the story.

I don't want to say like this person should be fired fix the problem that well yeah, and that's why I think that maybe the issue was not that they had this problem that they fired. The CEO now suggests to me that the board is not convinced that they know what the problem is and that they are fixing it, and I agree. I mean, sonos is a premium brand. I saw somebody referred to them as the apple of audio and that it's so true, their stuff is really expensive, but people rely on it and like it shows you how little their space there is between you having a very successful premium brand point and burning your whole brand down well and they and the saying is, of course, you know, trust arrives on foot and leaves on horseback, and and the problem is, is that I, you know, I have 14 Sonos amps that don't really work and I would never buy a Sonos product again.

2:04:56 - Alex Lindsay
Like, just ever Like. There's no way. And I thought it was a cool brand, you know, like and I would never ever.

2:05:02 - Leo Laporte
I spent thousands on.

2:05:03 - Alex Lindsay
Sonos. I see the brand, I see the logo of Sonos and I'm angry.

Like and that's a huge mistake, like that's how you really screw something up Is that the amount of digging that is required to get out of that hole is a lot. When you have people who are passionate about your product that now hate you, you know, and would never buy anything, would never give you another chance, you know, and I don't even have another solution. Yet. You know, like it's, you know it's just, but it's so frustrating uh, jason says he has a golden parachute oh well, he he does.

2:05:35 - Jason Snell
That guy is gonna get paid, he's like consulting nobody's gonna talk to him yeah, he's gonna.

he's gonna get millions uh to to, you know, look out the window and then uh, and then take his leave and leave, and that's how the game is played. But when we talk about CEO compensation, let's just say it. This is part of it. Is the CEO in a bad situation, you can destroy value for the shareholders and you can destroy your brand, and that's what you need to not do. And that does come back to the CEO. In the end, they have to be responsible.

2:06:07 - Alex Lindsay
And definitely like a football team. If you're having a winning season and your quarterly keeps on going up, they're going to do everything they can to keep that quarterback. And if you have a couple of losing seasons. Hey, who can we replace?

2:06:20 - Jason Snell
Yeah, the great John Madden line is winning is a great deodorant. It masks a lot of underlying scents and then when you stop winning, suddenly you realize that it stinks.

2:06:32 - Leo Laporte
Jammer B has all of our old Sonos speakers we had. How many do we have Jammer B in the Eastside studio? We had like a dozen or something that had been accumulated over the years. He's able to use them. He's keeping them working, but he only can do it by downgrading SMB on one of his nests, so that's not a perfect solution. Um, just don't not expose it to the outside world, john, you'll probably be okay. Let's take a little break. Your picks of the week, gentlemen, and I want to thank al Andy for his pick of the week last week, a couple weeks ago, but we'll talk about that when we return. You're watching MacBreak Weekly Andy Ihnatko, Alex Lindsay, Jason Snell.

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2:10:35 - Jason Snell
You know, the Thunderbolt doc comes for us all eventually.

2:10:38 - Leo Laporte
I got it.

2:10:41 - Jason Snell
Leo picked this last summer you got a good one. Doc Rock picked this at one point in the history. I checked on mbwpickscom, your official source for picks of the past, but I'm deciding that I just bought one, so I will pick it again. Cal Digits TS4 Dock. It is not cheap but it's got 18 ports and it allows you to lead what I think is one of the most important things to do if you're a laptop user, which is the single plug lifestyle.

So out here in my office I now have a MacBook Pro as my main system so that I can work at a desk in the back of my house or I can work out here and with the TS4, single plug provides power and data to my back book pro.

It all runs through the ts4. Hanging off the ts4 is all the other stuff you know and it includes my keyboard and my stream deck and my trackpad and my usb microphone interface and my thunderbolt uh driven studio display and all the stuff that's attached to the studio display, including including my camera. It's all hanging off of that one dock and so that dock has all the cables. That's the mess of wires that you expect to come off of a computer, because when I come out here. I don't want to plug in eight things or five things or whatever. I don't want to do that. I want to plug in one cable and that's living the dream for a laptop person, when you're docking at a desk. And I can do it and it was enabled by that ts4, so it was totally worth the price, this one.

2:12:12 - Leo Laporte
For months it was back ordered 18 ports.

2:12:15 - Jason Snell
It's got ports I don't even need to use. It's got like a couple different audio ports on it. It's got like an sd card reader on it. It's got all. It's like it's anything you ever need. But the key is it's got multiple thunderbolt ports on it, because I need to have thunderbolt out to drive my display, uh as well, as you know, coming out of the computer. But the fact that it also provides power, so my laptop remains, uh, fully charged while I use it here. Just one one cable Love it. Couldn't love it more.

2:12:46 - Andy Ihnatko
Truly one dongle to rule them all.

2:12:48 - Jason Snell
It's the way to live. You can see, I purchased mine in May 2022.

2:12:53 - Alex Lindsay
And I still use it Although.

2:12:55 - Leo Laporte
I will see your Thunderbolt 4, and I will raise you Thunderbolt 5. Well, that's pretty nice. This is the Otherworld Computing. Thunderbolt 5 dock Half as expensive, but it also has fewer than half the ports.

2:13:09 - Jason Snell
Yeah, that's the problem. There are a lot of great ports out there. I have an Anker it's actually a USB-C and it's got a couple USB-C and some USB-A on it and Ethernet. I have a couple of these that are pretty nice too. The challenge is if you need like full speed thunderbolt, uh and and a bunch of usbc, the, the pickings get slimmer and slimmer, because I think that there are lots of challenges with data and power as you start to add those ports.

2:13:38 - Leo Laporte
I think there's also. It's expensive too, I think you have to license the the chips.

2:13:43 - Jason Snell
And keep in mind, most of these things are being built out of very specific chipsets that are being built or boards that are being built, and that's why they all look the same, they all have the same ports on them and all of that and it's not likely that somebody is going to do a bespoke design for this. So you sort of have to take what you get.

2:14:00 - Leo Laporte
I trust CalDigit. I think that they did a good job. It's a solid.

2:14:03 - Jason Snell
And I'll give one tip that I'll throw out. There is a Thunderbolt 4 dock from CalDigit being sold in the Apple Store. You can get that, but it's not quite the same. My understanding is CalDigit releases firmware updates for its ones that you can get on Amazon. The one in the Apple Store I don't think they do firmware updates on. I think it's like special Apple store SKU something to keep in mind. Uh, if you can get a better price or even the same price outside the Apple store, you might be better off buying that model and not the one that seems to be the same, but it's not quite the same at the.

Apple I.

2:14:45 - Leo Laporte
I got this because it's thunderbolt 5 and I have the new mac mini, but there's nothing. I don't need thunderbolt 5 you really need it.

2:14:52 - Jason Snell
If you need a thunderbolt 5, drive with that speed or something else, that requires thunderbolt 5. Yeah I did my calibrations, I was like, you know, I actually thought about buying the, the cal digit ts3 dock, which is just thunderbolt 3, and that would probably be fine. But I was like, okay, you know, I'll buy this thing now and then I'll keep it for years and it'll be fine at thunderbolt 4 I I don't.

2:15:11 - Leo Laporte
I don't need more than I am using this for dock right now as part of my studio setup with the mac uh, macbook uh m3. So I'm that's what you're seeing me on it's right over here. I would, I would disconnect it, but the whole thing would go to part fault yeah, yeah, and then a little tidbit as an aside.

2:15:27 - Jason Snell
I have a switching power strip under my desk that turns off a bunch of stuff that's not necessary when I'm not working, and I thought what am I going to do now that I'm not using a mac studio anymore? How am I going to get that power to flip off? Because I would like that power to turn off when I'm not out here a bunch of other stuff that doesn't need to be on. And it turns out. The answer is I plugged the, not the computer. I plugged the dock into the sensor switch because, guess what? It doesn't draw very much power unless you plug a laptop into it, at which point it draws a lot of power because it has to power the laptop. And so I plug in the laptop and all the other stuff turns on. Too smart, because the the cal digit is now pulling a lot more power very smart, very smart that's my pick good pick.

2:16:10 - Leo Laporte
I want to thank Andy for his uh anchor 140 watt power supply pick. Mine came. I'm thrilled it does everything's off the bottom, so when you plug it in the cables are going down, which I like. Thank you, Andy, that was a great pick. I appreciate it. What have you got?

2:16:28 - Andy Ihnatko
for us this week. My pick is actually related. At the end of that pick I actually recommended it when we're talking about hey, the great thing about this new one is that it's got four not just four USB-C ports, but each one delivers enough power that you can fast charge everything you've got in your bag all at once from just one outlet. And I recommended a technique, but not the tool I used to do that.

2:16:50 - Leo Laporte
Everybody wanted to know how do you do that, Andy? How do you do that?

2:16:54 - Andy Ihnatko
So, for instance, there are things you kind of need to know. This is the adapter that it replaced, so this has three ports on it. It's 100 watts total, and I have to remember that if I use both of the USB-C ports, the top one is going to be delivering 60 watts, the bottom one is going to be delivering 40 watts, so I'll make sure that I plug my MacBook into the top one, my iPad into the bottom one. There's also another one for the third, but this is something I do with all of my power jacks. I make sure that the information I need to use them and not screw up either my day or my hardware is written right on it, and that's why I have the Pentel Presto Correction Pen.

This is something that I've found out about from an Adam Savage video on Tested, because he uses it to write labels on stuff on drawers and stuff like that. It's technically a correction fluid for when you're typing and you need to wipe something out, but actually it is full of a very, very, completely opaque white ink that is completely durable. I'm trying to find out exactly what kind of paint it is, but it's the kind where you have to shake it up and there's a thingy in it to keep it shaken up like when you're using it, and it's not like a felt tip, it literally is. This part of it is squeezable, so you have to basically hold it like gravity down and give it a little bit of a squeeze as you write and it will squeeze a little bit of paint out. I always have to if I haven't used this in a while. I have to practice because it's easy to get really, really gloppy with it.

But the thing is they're dirt cheap. They're like on Amazon. They're like $5 and 1 and 1 half bucks. At other office supply stores you can get them like 10 of them for like $3 each. And if you have these around every time, you've got something that you just need a label on it, whether it's a, whether it's a, an organization bag, whether it's a power adapter, whether it's a drawer or something. You can just quickly write on it after like 30 seconds it'll dry. If you're, it's uh. This thing has been rattling around like my backpack, like every week when I come here, for months and months, and months. It's still perfect, and this wasn't the first time that I used it either. If you cover it with nail polish clear nail polish if you really are concerned about it flaking off, but super durable. It is really one of those things where it's high ratio of how little money I spent and how many annoyances in my life were done away with once I had access to a Presto correction pen technology.

2:19:31 - Leo Laporte
It's really a page of wonders. I have like the Dymo label learn, but it's just too much trouble to type out a label.

2:19:37 - Andy Ihnatko
I have one too, and that was I think I got that on uh, on Alex's recommendation one week, and I do use it. But the thing is like, oftentimes it's like, oh right, so, oh God, okay, is it plugged in? Yeah, okay, do I have? Like, do I have a material for it, like the tape for it? Okay, oh, I need to. I need to use the phone that has the app on it, and actually all I want to do is like I'm just go rummaging through a box of stuff, say, oh right, this is the adapter. Before I forget, this is the adapter for that circular cutter.

2:20:04 - Leo Laporte
I have get the pen adapter for circular cutter and I'm done yeah, it is cheaper to buy it directly from presto than it is to buy it or from pentel rather yeah than it is to buy it on amazon, for some reason.

2:20:18 - Alex Lindsay
So is it? Is it, does it stick better than like I use uh silver um sharpie, sharpies, yeah, um I will tell.

2:20:27 - Andy Ihnatko
Well, I'll tell you one thing you can. This is me rubbing my fingernail on the a and amps and it's not coming off. One thing I will absolutely tell you it is a thousand times more opaque than those, those pentel pens. I see those pens you talked about is the sharpies, Some of the Sharpies. Basically, it will put deposit a. It feels like with the Sharpies you're depositing a thin layer of silver or gold particles to the surface, Whereas with this one you have a paintbrush and you are obliterating it with white paint. This thing is like you can see this from a mile away. You don't have to crawl under the table to see this adapter. You can just glance and see oh, 15 volts, 2 amps, got it, I just bought three.

I can practice with them first. You sold me when it's in your hand and also it comes with a nice cap with a clip on it?

2:21:22 - Leo Laporte
Is it one of those things where the smell is going to like you're going to go, whoa.

2:21:25 - Andy Ihnatko
It has no smell whatsoever. Ah, it's even better and I forgot what I was going to say. But oh, I was saying, make sure you practice with it Again. It looks like a pen. It looks like a lot of like felt tip pens. You've seen that has like a metal barrel on it and you'll wonder, gee, why is the ink not coming out? Why is the ink not coming out? Why is the ink not coming out? And you might shake it and you wind up shaking paint over the thing. Don't shake it, or or you'll suddenly, oh that's right, I have to squeeze it, and then you'll squeeze it like you're frosting a cake and then you put a big blob of it. Just a little bit of fingertip pressure, use a no shaking started, gentle squeezing on the presto jumbo correction pen now I'm adding gentle squeezing, no shaking, to the list of possible show titles don't squeeze it, shake it.

2:22:14 - Jason Snell
No, don't shake it, squeeze it and he's got this episode title covered. Wall to wall, yeah from fat squirrel on finish man football shape squirrel. No, don't, do not, do not shake or squeeze the football-shaped squirrel.

2:22:28 - Leo Laporte
By the way, that's maybe the real title.

2:22:34 - Jason Snell
Too long.

2:22:35 - Leo Laporte
Alex Lindsey.

2:22:38 - Andy Ihnatko
Hey, who had mid-January 2025 as the episode in which the team would go totally, totally insane and need to be put away someplace?

2:22:48 - Leo Laporte
Alex already talked about this pick. I talked about this a little bit.

2:22:50 - Alex Lindsay
You're using a lot, I think, man you know, you think that you're gonna you get into into media production and you think you're gonna spend all your time plugging in cameras and stuff like that, but eventually you end up in google sheets. You know, and you're doing a lot of stuff in google sheets or numbers or excel, and you're trying to figure out how to manage lots of projects and lots of particles and keep people going. And it's easy for me to run out of like it starts to get pretty complicated to have complex data interactions with Google Sheets. I mean it's great because everyone can interact with it, but it's hard to build a real database with it. I know people who can.

I can't, and so I was on the outside in for a long time with Airtable and now I'm building something I can't show but I have to deal with many teams, hundreds of people, many locations and everybody has to have their own view of the data, Like that's. The big thing is that they have to. I can send out a form, for instance, that everyone has to do. That has to feed all back into that data and it's a relational database and I need it to all look. And Airtable is the thing that it's not cheap Like what it is, but if you're looking for something that is really you know, I spent a lot of time. I mean, I programmed a radio station with HyperCard and then spent years doing.

2:24:05 - Leo Laporte
This is the replacement for HyperCard.

2:24:07 - Alex Lindsay
Well, it's a lot more than that, and you know I used FileMaker for a long time, you know, and so what I was looking for is something that's kind of an online database, but what happens is that you can very, very quickly build lots of views of your data. So you're all everything's you got the same source of truth, which is the data, and you got the same source of truth, which is the data, and you know Salesforce would do that for even more money. But this is a very, very easy way to build UXs that are hey, I want to display the data this way for these people, but I don't want them to touch it, I just want them to see it. And then these people I want them to edit it. And then some people I want to fill forms out that feed into the system, and so all of these different things that have to happen. I can make them all work from one source of truth and I can pump out like someone needs something that they. I just need to see this information. I can push that out as its own interface in minutes, you know, and it's still driven back. If I make a change on my database, their interface changes to what it looks like and it takes me almost no time to put that together and so, um, it is.

If you're trying to manage, you know, more complex. I mean, there's a lot of things that, uh, I will say that now that I have air table I'm not really using. I mean, I used Google sheets and use numbers for building quotes, and then I used Google sheets for anything we had to interact with lots of people. I think that, uh, the numbers I still use cause it's pretty quick, I'm pretty fast at it, but, but for Google Sheets, I think that if you own Airtable, you'll stop using that. You know like you'll, you'll start to just go into Airtable. For this I will say the danger is, is that man, is it? It's addicting? And then you can't. You know it's the lock-in I'm sure is going to be pretty heavy because there's so much data and it's tied together so well, have you?

2:25:51 - Leo Laporte
ever used Notion or Coda or any of the other competition.

2:25:55 - Alex Lindsay
I don't know if those are really competition. I mean, I think that those are for personal. You know managing things.

2:26:01 - Jason Snell
This is.

2:26:02 - Leo Laporte
I think this is a different scale you know like it's you know, so I think that I wouldn't. I don't know about the free is the free version worth trying. It's 20 for per seat per month if you go with a team yeah, I.

2:26:14 - Alex Lindsay
I think that's the version that we have right now, probably going to go up to another version above it. Um, but the the uh, the free version is definitely. You can jump in and start building stuff.

See what's going on see what's going on. See what's going on. It took me a little time and again, there's still things that I'm like, oh, how do I do this? And I will say it's very well documented. I sit there with chat GPT opened all the time I think I mentioned this earlier and I'm trying to build something in Airtable and they offer a AI plugin themselves.

2:26:48 - Leo Laporte
Do you use?

2:26:49 - Alex Lindsay
that I have not been successful at using their AI. I've been using, I've been successful at using chat. I tell it what I want and when it comes out of it, I'm like, nah, that's not. Maybe someday it'll be great, but right now, you know, and again, as you keep on, the reason I got into it is that I have to build something very complex that's going to keep growing over many years, that's going to have a lot of data in it, and usually what happens is you start in Google Sheets and you build up to a certain point where you've now outrun what it's designed to do, and now you have to figure out how to port all that information to something new. And I decided, hey, let's just do that at the beginning and start building all the data when it's small. And so that's what I'm working on. It's pretty powerful If you're looking for that kind of thing lots of different views of the data and the ability to generate new interfaces that are isolated for given certain people, but still dynamic. Um, it's, it's a pretty.

2:27:49 - Leo Laporte
It's been around for a long time and I know a lot of people really love it. One of our uh, one of our club members, mike gaines, says oh, I love air table, run my entire business with it, and automations, interfaces, api, etc. He also says the free version works great for most things. So thank you, mike, for seconding we.

2:28:08 - Alex Lindsay
We started with I had the free version for a week and I was like, oh, this is great. And immediately hit the wall like of what I wanted to do. And so, yeah, you know, like it was like this is amazing and and I had put it off for a long time I've been on projects where someone's using air table and they're providing it to me and I was like, oh, this is fine, this is fine. And I really resisted. I was like I want to learn something new. So I resisted it for months, you know, when we were trying to figure out what to do. And once I gave up on that, I'm in it half the day Interesting Cool.

2:28:38 - Leo Laporte
Airtablecom.

2:28:40 - Alex Lindsay
It's not free, but it well, there's a free there's a free version kind of mess with it, you know, first the first hit is free yeah, thank you, Alex lindsey.

2:28:48 - Leo Laporte
Thank you, uh, for being here. Office hours dot global. What's going on over there in the office hours?

2:28:55 - Alex Lindsay
you know, we're starting to do this thing where we experiment, where someone just kind of comes in at the last minute, right, right at the very beginning of the show, and talks a little bit. Yesterday last week, uh, laura davidson from sure came in.

They had announced a new mic and so she just said that was gonna happen, yeah, and showed it and then, and then, uh, and then we had, uh, kirk haller, who was the head of youtube live engineering, just dropped in on friday, answered some questions, uh, so you never know what's gonna happen, we're not duty, we're not announcing, uh he you know we're not announcing them, so you never know what's gonna happen at the top of the hour.

So some of them are like, if we can schedule somebody in to talk about some and youtube live and stuff like that, so so we'll continue to work, we're.

2:29:33 - Leo Laporte
That's kind of a new thing that we're starting to play with office hoursglobal, but I would recommend also the youtube page office hours global. Yeah, absolutely good. You're built up now a huge quantity of very useful you can watch there's.

2:30:06 - Alex Lindsay
You know we produce a new hour a day, so there's of talking and, and every day we don't know it's, we're just answering people's questions, so there's not other than these little things that happen at the top of the hour, um, occasionally. Otherwise, we answer about anywhere from 15 to 25 questions every morning. Uh, we don't know what they're going to be. We, we don't know who's showing up, but so far we haven't missed a day since any day, holidays or Sundays since May 25th 2020. And so we're always up there answering people's questions, and it's always interesting to see what people are working on.

2:30:42 - Leo Laporte
OfficeHoursglobal. Thank you, Alex WGBH is calling Andyy and I go oh, when are you gonna be on next?

2:30:50 - Andy Ihnatko
uh, tomorrow. As a matter of fact, on wednesday, uh 12 30 eastern time. Go to wGBHnewsorg to watch it live, or later. We're in the library. Um, I don't know if I'm going to be in the library. I'm going to be in a library. I don't know if I'm going to be in the Boston Public Library or my local library, some library, but I will be in one or two of those things. Awesome.

2:31:11 - Leo Laporte
Thank you, appreciate it. Appreciate you, my friend, and also, of course, Jason Snell sixcolors.com. He is a legend in the Macintosh community. You can also hear many podcasts at sixcolors.com/ Jason.

2:31:28 - Jason Snell
What's the latest? There is a person named Jason out there somewhere. Others think it's just. Are you going?

2:31:34 - Leo Laporte
to. Are you talking about severance? It's, it's, it's a. We're only a week away from its return.

2:31:40 - Jason Snell
I do not have a podcast about severance. You can check out upgrade on relay where my currently and I talk about stuff and, uh, probably in a couple of weeks the sixcolors.com report card on apple for 2024 will be, out, and this is my reminder to you, fellows, to fill out your report card I got my email and I haven't done it yet.

2:32:04 - Andy Ihnatko
I will get around to that I was focusing so hard on it that I said I'm going to give myself two weeks of thought.

2:32:10 - Jason Snell
Yeah, well, the thought process there is I don't want to shock people, so I tell them that they've got two weeks to work on it, and I know that then, by not shocking them, they all say oh, two weeks, I'll just leave it, it's okay I. I've done this for 10 years now.

2:32:27 - Leo Laporte
You'll get a reminder email from me. Thank you, Jason, and here for your edification and delectation is a football-shaped squirrel. Thank you everybody for joining us. We do MacBreak Weekly every Tuesday, 11 am Pacific, 2 pm Eastern. That's 1900 UTC. You can watch us do it live If you're a club member. Thank you very much club members. By the way, that's 1900 UTC. You can watch us do it live If you're a Club member. Thank you very much Club members.

By the way, that's a wonderful thing to do. You get a great feeling, a real warm feeling throughout your entire body when you pay that seven bucks a month. But you also get access to the club, to a discord ad, free versions of all the shows. You can watch the show and talk about it in the behind the scenes. Be one of the wise acres in the back room uh, watching the show and talk about it in the behind the scenes. Be one of the wise acres in the back room watching the show.

So that's one place you can watch it Discord, twit.tv/clubtwit to it if you're not you know member. Also, you can watch it on YouTube. There's a live stream there twitch, kick, tick, tock and you know what, even if they ban TikTok still gonna stream on TikTok. So there, uh, because I don't know why, because they're not going to ban our streaming on it, which is weird. Um, what else? X.com, Linkedin and Facebook we're on all the Nazi platforms, so come on and watch. Um, I'm being facetious, but we're on all the platforms and some of them are Nazis, but not us. We're nice guys.

Watch live if you want. You don't have to. It's easier to watch or listen whenever you're in the mood. So for that, we've got a website twit.tv/mbw. If you want to subscribe, you can also go to your favorite podcast player and get it automatically as soon as it's available. Um, you can also watch it on YouTube. There's a YouTube link at twit.tv/mbw. So there are lots of places to watch, lots of places to go. Anthony, you think we're going to red note if TikTok. See, TikTok's not going to go away though we're going to find out soon I'm sure the supreme court will rule, um, tomorrow but, yeah, uh, actually tomorrow Cathy Gellis will be joining us on twig.

2:34:32 - Alex Lindsay
She is a an attorney admitted to the supreme court and we'll talk about the oral arguments and maybe about the decision it feels like nothing's going to happen, like we're just going to get to the other side and everyone's going to, other than the possibly the most the largest move to VPN in the history of the world. You won't even need to do that. The only thing the law does download new ones yes, is.

2:34:53 - Leo Laporte
It prevents apple and google from putting it in their store. It does not prevent ISPs. It does not prevent you from having TikTok you just won't be able to get a new version that's all yeah and we can stream on it yeah, I, I, I, yeah.

2:35:06 - Alex Lindsay
I kind of felt like this whole rush to stop the, the whatever by January 19th. I was like we're all going to get up on January 20th. It's all going to be pretty much the same, yeah, for a long time like it's I.

2:35:18 - Leo Laporte
I have a feeling the supreme court's gonna protect it, but who knows, who knows? I don't have a dog in the sun, we'll go to. He's saying we're going to red note.

2:35:26 - Andy Ihnatko
I never even heard a red note is that another Nazi bar it's the number one download of downloaded free app on the apple app store. It is a Chinese, basically. Perfect, talk that basically as a middle finger tick tock, saying okay, I'm going to create a count on the absolutely. You think tick tock is Chinese. I'm going gonna go double Chinese Mr man, oh perfect.

2:35:48 - Leo Laporte
You can't win in this world. You just can't. Thank you all for being here. Uh, I, uh, look forward to seeing you again next Tuesday. Stay tuned if you're watching live, security now is just around the corner. Meanwhile, it is my sad duty to tell you you've got to get back to work because break time it's over. We'll see you next time. Bye.