MacBreak Weekly 956 Transcript

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

0:00:00 - Leo Laporte
It's time for MacBreak Weekly. Andy Ihnatko here, Jason Snell, Alex Lindsay Of course we're going to talk about TikTok. None of the ByteDance apps are on the App Store again. Why is Apple holding back when everybody else is saying, yay, TiKTok has been saved? Did you know that Tony Fidel wanted Apple to buy Sonos and Steve Jobs said buy them, we're suing them? Wanted Apple to buy Sonos and Steve Jobs said buy them, we're suing them? We'll talk about that anecdote and Apple Intelligence. Somebody's got to tell Apple Intelligence Joanna Stern does not have a husband. All of that and more coming up next on MacBreak Weekly

This is MacBreak Weekly, episode 956, recorded Tuesday, January 21st 2025: Asparagus Chips. It's time for MacBreak Weekly, the show we cover the latest Apple news from apple and others. Hello, Andrew. Andy Ihnatko is here from uh the library wearing a crew neck.

0:01:12 - Andy Ihnatko
you look like you're on your way to the quad wrangle oh uh, if I were walking to the quad wrangle in 12 degree weather?

0:01:18 - Leo Laporte
yes, absolutely yeah, because that's how is it. It's 12.

0:01:20 - Andy Ihnatko
It's uh, this is the time of time where, uh, even wingleters stop saying that this isn't cold, this is crisp, and start saying, yeah, this is, yeah, this is cold, it's 12?. This is the time where even wingleters stop saying this isn't cold, this is crisp, and start saying, yeah, this is cold, yeah, this is cold.

0:01:29 - Leo Laporte
Here in a polar vortex. Congratulations.

0:01:33 - Andy Ihnatko
Sunny though.

0:01:33 - Leo Laporte
Oh well, sunny polar vortex. Yes, it's chilly here, isn't it? Jason Snell it is, and he's from GBH Boston, Jason's from. sixcolors.com

0:01:41 - Jason Snell
Yes, uh, it was. In fact it got down to a brisk 28 degrees overnight in my in my backyard and yeah and uh, you know I'm in my unheated garage so layering might put on the gloves later, you know. But uh we'll survive here in california, we can.

0:01:58 - Leo Laporte
We can survive it and also in northern california. Alex l Lindsay. A little chilly outside OfficeHoursglobal, also in layers. Not very many layers, but yes, I'm the only one in short sleeves because this room gets toasty.

0:02:13 - Alex Lindsay
I got a radiator, so it just keeps it a little bit warmer.

0:02:17 - Leo Laporte
I got a radiator too. It's called a Mac M3. It's not as radiated as I. Should have a a pc, then I'd really not have to worry about anything.

0:02:28 - Alex Lindsay
So TiKTok's back kind of kind of yes, not in the app store, so marvel snap is back, uh, cap cut is back.

0:02:37 - Leo Laporte
These are all bite dance content.

0:02:39 - Alex Lindsay
Content is back. The apps are not back. If you go to the apple store, it says TiKTok and other bite dance apps are not back. If you go to the Apple store, it says TikTok and other ByteDance apps are not available in your country or region. In the country or region you're in and you learn more.

0:02:48 - Leo Laporte
So basically, Tim Cook was at the inauguration yesterday. Surely he could have worked something out Well so here's what's going on.

0:02:55 - Jason Snell
Right Is that the cloud providers for TikTok, like Oracle, have decided to take Trump at his word that it's all fine, just do it, just turn it back on, it's fine, and apple and google have decided to take the law that was passed by a large majority in both houses of congress and signed by biden.

That says you will get fined by the united states supreme and approved by the, the supreme court, that says you will get fined enormously for every single download you allow of this thing that's been marked as illegal, and so they've just decided. You know the president's okay, because the thing is, if you look at that law, the law doesn't say the president can just do whatever the law actually says the president can say well, he's got a discretion.

His discretion is up to 90 day wait if there is a transaction in progress, which there isn't. But he said yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah that. But like there's no guarantee that he I mean first off, if you're Tim Cook, if you're Sundar Pichai, you're like, when has donald trump ever gone back on anything he's ever said?

0:03:58 - Leo Laporte
and like the penalties are enormous. Senator tom cotton is saying oh no, we're gonna enforce this law. Not that Congress is in charge of enforcement. Yeah, executive branch yeah.

0:04:07 - Jason Snell
We're in. We're in this negotiation phase where they're trying to say we're going to save it if China lets us save it. But that like, if China won't sell it, if the Chinese government won't let ByteDance divest itself of the American operations of TikTok, the law, unless they repeal the law which would be interesting because they would need everybody on side in the House of Representatives, which they probably can't do for almost anything then if China won't sell it, then it's illegal and there's no ifs, ands or buts about it. It's pretty stark.

0:04:42 - Alex Lindsay
And the problem is is that the bite dance did exactly what Congress was worried about when they passed the law, in the process of what they did on Saturday and Sunday.

So what they did on Saturday is they poked everybody in the eyes Congress and the Democrats and Biden by saying we're getting, we're turning off, because they told us we had to turn off. And then 12 hours later they turned it back on and said thank you Trump. So they told 170 million of their users that these people are bad. And then they told 170 million people these people are good. And that is exactly the manipulation that the law was designed to stop. And so the problem is is that, if anyone looks at the nuance of that, that they've actually done what everybody's worried about, which is a big push because you're going to have a bunch of users of TikTok, they're going to look at Trump differently. Based on that, you know, based on that community, just just that communication, because there was no reason for them to turn this off. This is all show, like it was, there was, like they, you know, no one was telling, everyone was saying we'll handle it later.

0:05:47 - Leo Laporte
Turning it off for 12 hours was totally theater.

0:05:50 - Alex Lindsay
Big win for uh trump, though, and a big loss for the democrats. It is, and this is what tick tock wanted really putting myself.

0:05:54 - Leo Laporte
It's not even a geopolitical thing. This is the game.

0:05:58 - Alex Lindsay
They played the game very well and won and trump played the game very well. I I wouldn't be surprised if trump didn't tell them to do that. You know, like didn't want to be the one that came and turned it on, and so so I think that the I think that it's it's problematic. You know of what they, you know what they did there, but none of their apps are back on. So apple and google are like, hey, we're just going to wait until we can, until someone actually tells us what is legal. And well, you can't download now, right, you can't, said you no, I can't on the App Store, I mean online.

I'm not CapCut, not Marvel snap mark. I went to CapCut and I got. I got the tick-tock and other ByteDance apps.

0:06:36 - Jason Snell
Yeah, unavailable and Marvel snap is a little different because that is a company that has a publisher that's owned by ByteDance, so they're in the process of basically changing publishers right, right given that which I think given that their publisher is not allowed to distribute software in the US anymore, I suspect that's in violation of their contract and they can find a new publisher now.

0:06:55 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah, I get that the same disclaimer TikTok and other ByteDance apps are not available. Okay, so I guess the servers were turned back on and if you were using cap cut, you'd be able to use it. If you were using some marvel snap, you'd be able to use it, just like you can tick, tock and, and you know, of course, uh meta's trying to make hay with it.

0:07:13 - Alex Lindsay
With uh they they have an app. I guess it's. This is edits that they announced.

0:07:18 - Leo Laporte
It's not out yet, but they announced it.

0:07:19 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, it's not out for two or three months or two months or something like that.

0:07:23 - Leo Laporte
You don't need cap cut because we've got to have edits, but it does they're the potential winners from with a TiKTok band is, of course, that they feel like instagram will be the replacement.

0:07:32 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, a lot of folks, that a lot of friends of my kids said, oh, we'll just go to reels, like it definitely was kind of like a that's.

0:07:38 - Leo Laporte
That was the next step I asked henry, my son, salt hank, who made a lot of, is making a lot of money. It started with TikTok. Tiktok made him go viral. He was smart enough to also expand to Instagram and Reels and I asked him first of all, have you ever made any money on TikTok? He said, well, not from TikTok, but I make a lot of.

All my advertisers want to be on TikTok. And I said, ah, and he said, but that's not a problem, because they're just going to take those ad dollars and move them to Instagram, so he's not too worried about that. In fact, he just got a couple of big buys, including one from Google, so he's kind of sanguine about the whole thing. But he also said I have a lot of friends who are only on TikTok. I have friends who he had a friend who just quit his job to devote his time to his TikTok account because he was making money there. Oh man, those people, yeah, bad timing. He's going hat in hand today to get his job back, but those people, you know, I mean, it's not easy just to now go to reels, is it Well?

0:08:41 - Alex Lindsay
and there was a lot of warning. I will say that there's a little bit of the the ants versus the grasshopper parable here, of they've been talking about banning, I mean it's a law was passed a long time ago.

I think some people didn't believe it and they talked about. I know they didn't believe it, but it doesn't mean that you should. Just because you don't believe it's going to rain doesn't mean you shouldn't have any rain gear, and so you know, and I think that there's. I think that the issue is you saw a lot of TikTokers, you know, pushing people towards YouTube, pushing people towards Instagram, you know, using the platform, you know, I had a friend I was when I was starting up, when Pixelcore was starting to do production, and I was talking about the fact that, oh, I only have one, I only have one client at when I first started, you know, and he said that's what always happens is you end up with, as soon as you get to a certain size, you got to open up, you got to find other, you got to diversify your, your, um, your income.

0:09:27 - Leo Laporte
That's what Henry did.

0:09:28 - Alex Lindsay
He was smart you know, but you can't do all of that at the beginning. You can't take a bunch of clients at the beginning because you don't have enough attention.

0:09:33 - Leo Laporte
His point was he wouldn't have had the same success on Instagram or or YouTube shorts. Um. So he was able to parlay existing Exactly, but he says there's nothing like that. Tiktok algorithm there literally is the best algorithm there is.

0:09:49 - Alex Lindsay
I don't know. I will say I'm not sold, that it's the algorithm Like I think that I think that it is the nature of the content itself is. I think a lot of people put a lot of weight on the TikTok algorithm, but I think that a lot of the algorithm has to do with the fact that of the sharing culture that's inside of TikTok, the idea that people post content that they not only allow but expect other people to riff off of, to take their content and use it for something else, and that, along with the music that they used illegally for a while and then were able to kind of parlay into a contract, I think produces a different kind of content. I'm not clear that the algorithm is as powerful as everyone, but I don't. But because nobody else is doing that part, that part where people are just grabbing other people's content, if you do that in YouTube, everyone's all upset. Youtubers get all upset.

0:10:34 - Leo Laporte
Dr On a Sunday said the other thing TikTok does is they. They anoint accounts, so they will manually say we're going to make you a star, we're going to make you a star, uh. And he says a lot of people do that. Yeah, well sure, I'm sure youtube does that right. Everybody does it. Yeah, everybody does it so that's not new right. So henry was just kind of lucky. I guess that somebody tic tac said those, we like those cooking videos.

0:10:58 - Alex Lindsay
I mean push the button back in the old days. You look at twitter and when you join twitter it said hey, you, hey, you should check out these people.

0:11:05 - Jason Snell
That was all driven by.

0:11:07 - Alex Lindsay
we were all. I mean, that's when they left all the tech folks behind and started making Obama and actors and everything else. That was all them just putting the thumb on the scale, Like, hey, it would be good for us to, for all these people to bring their fans to our platform. Yeah, Okay.

0:11:22 - Jason Snell
Well, let's keep in mind that that sort of trump started the the band TiKTok bandwagon, and it's worth saying that he might double back, and all of his statements about this are I'm bringing back TiKTok, but it's also well, china's gonna have to make a deal with me and you know where that could lead anywhere. So that what I love about this story is there is no way to predict what will happen. I think anybody who says certainly TiKTok will be back and fine, or somebody who says certainly TiKTok will never be back I mean check their pulse, because TiKTok like we don't know all the ways this could go, because it takes what the chinese government wants and what donald trump wants and what the congress wants and like. There are so many variables here.

0:12:03 - Leo Laporte
Well, and crazy grandpa says tick, tock was worth is worthless if it's banned, but it's worth. What did he say? A trillion dollars if it's not, and I want half. Yeah, so that seems to be a non-starter, but I don't, you know well but also the Chinese government has been using this as basically a rallying point.

0:12:22 - Andy Ihnatko
They feel as though this is a case of the West trying to steal something valuable that uh chinese business they might get more value out of not selling it yeah exactly so.

They're not. They're not very well motivated to say well, you know, now that we think about it, you know this is they could. They could use it as, as Jason Jason says, there's a lot of ways this could go down. They could use this as leverage for something else that they want. Ways this would go down. They could use this as leverage for something else that they want. But there is no particular downside to China basically saying no, no, we don't. You have to get our permission to sell. We're not even going to sell half of it. Go pound sand. And hey, new president, I'm glad you stuck your neck out by telling everybody how you had the power to make us come to heel because you don't. Yeah, put that in a news release.

0:13:06 - Jason Snell
Yeah, there is danger, though, for all American tech giants, which is, for all you know, because Trump has also been complaining about like oh, in Europe they're trying to do mean things to Apple and Google and Facebook and we're going to we're going to tell Europe not to do that anymore. One major region banning entirely a social media app is not a great precedent when you have most of the tech giants that are playing in other parts of the world. It's not like it's not the greatest look in the world either to be in that situation.

0:13:37 - Alex Lindsay
So I think the problem is Trump doesn't believe in precedent or anything else. He just he deals with every transaction on its own and he'll just go and he'll just go. Well, europe, if you do, if you keep on messing with our companies, we'll, we'll, oh attacks your wine 80%.

0:13:50 - Jason Snell
You know like, like you know it'll be, it'll be some kind of like but TikTok and he'll be like but but but I don't wanna hear about it.

0:13:54 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, yeah, well, no, no, totally, and only lost the last day. This is the warning that you should probably get a backup right now, Like the next three months. There's probably a three-month window of whatever this is going to look like. Tiktokers should be not leaving, but definitely finding other boats that they're going to have in their little group.

0:14:20 - Leo Laporte
Honestly, though, that's always the advice.

0:14:22 - Jason Snell
Yeah, it should be the advice for everyone.

0:14:24 - Leo Laporte
You shouldn't be a monoculture. You should, as soon as you have enough clout to diversify. You should I have.

0:14:29 - Jason Snell
I have some friends who are TiKTok or who are youtubers and it's the same thing, right, the youtube. There wasn't a ban, it was youtube just changes the terms of what it's doing and changes its algorithm and all that. And so the wise TiKTokers or youtubers will will, uh, do things like build up a patreon, build up a newsletter, do anything they can so that that youtube isn't the only relationship and TiKTok is the same, like, regardless of their long-term future. Being stuck on someone else's platform and not having your customers be your customers is a mistake for all anyone on the internet yeah, yeah, although, as Henry pointed out, there's nothing as good as Tick Tock.

From his point of view, tick Tock is a kingmaker yeah, you don't have to leave it, but you gotta, you gotta make sure you gotta hedge. Right, you gotta hedge.

0:15:17 - Leo Laporte
You still have to do it in fact, I always said to him every time I saw him, I said you're not just gonna be on Tick Tock, you know, you don't't know you could lose your account, anything could happen. You should always. And uh, he didn't listen to me until about a year ago, but he did start moving, uh, a year ago. And so, yeah, and then the other thing to do is open your own restaurant in downtown new york, and after that you know sure because restaurants are really easy businesses.

I hear that like I don't say anything about that.

0:15:41 - Alex Lindsay
You open a restaurant and it just, and everything turns out, and suddenly money just starts rolling in and rolling margins. There's great margins. That's the best part. No regulation, great margins yeah, really easy.

0:15:50 - Leo Laporte
That's the other thing I said you're going to be republican soon. Uh, henry, because have you run into a guy named eric adams yet? Uh, yeah. He said yeah, there's a lot of stuff, a lot of hoops to jump through to open a restaurant. I said, yeah, you're, you're going to throw those liberal credentials out the window soon. I know, um, he's got. It's gonna be nice. It's called salt hanks. The good news is is right next to the best pizza place in new york city, john's. There's always a line around the corner oh yeah, going right in front of his restaurant.

so he's gonna put his studio, his sandwich making studio, in the window, so people in the line might say, hey, that looks even better. I'm going to go in here Anyway.

0:16:28 - Alex Lindsay
Making stuff in the window is good. It's a good idea. Huh yeah, good idea.

0:16:32 - Leo Laporte
By the way, I know you hear that beep, beep, beep. That is my Nixie clock trying to contact TikTok. I don't know, I don't know what it's doing Connects via a slip server. It sounds like it doesn't. Uh, all right, so enough of the tick tock. Uh, it is interesting. Do you think? Uh, what? What will be the trigger for apple to put it back? Because, honestly, regardless of whether the servers are working or whatever, if tick tock's not in the app store, the.

0:17:00 - Alex Lindsay
I mean they could repeal the law. I mean there's a.

0:17:02 - Leo Laporte
You know that would be the it would require. That's what they're going to wait for, something like that.

0:17:06 - Alex Lindsay
It would require an enormous push from Trump, because there's a whole bunch of Republicans that also voted for the ban, and so they all have to go reverse themselves, which no one likes to do so. So I think that it would be very complicated to re to reverse it, but I think it would have. They're going to be owned by somebody else or they're going to repeal the law, but I don't know if there's a lot of other options, like there's still a law there until. I mean, president can't do everything, so he's going to have to actually figure out the way to fit it inside of the box.

0:17:34 - Leo Laporte
So Anthony Nielsen says there are some folks working on and I'm sure there are people working on TikTok alternatives everywhere, but some of them are working on the a app protocol, which is what drives Blue Sky, which might be interesting a distributed Tick Tock alternative. It won't be as successful.

0:17:51 - Alex Lindsay
Of course, the problem with the, the problem with the problem with all of this is that uh, is that you, it's hard to get critical mass and it's hard to do it unless you break all the rules that they broke right when they started it, and musically was breaking those rules. When they bought, they didn't start TikTok from scratch, they bought musically and then they took that culture and moved it forward and then added, you know, added more to it. I don't think that anybody's going to just jump in and create another TikTok, because number one is you don't have enough people Like you don't have enough views. That's the big thing. This is the problem with blue sky is that you drop a stone and you just listen to it. Echo.

0:18:30 - Leo Laporte
So if somebody bought TikTok, China has said we're not selling the algorithm. Assuming that China does not sell the algorithm, Could you recreate TikTok in the US? It'll be called TikTok. It'll be on the App Store without the algorithm.

0:18:43 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, I think you could.

0:18:45 - Leo Laporte
The algorithm isn't that?

0:18:46 - Alex Lindsay
important you think? No, I don't think it is. It's a, it's a, it's an. I mean, it's a complex version of a nearest neighbor and and it's not it is. I don't think it's the algorithm, I really think it's the content. I think it's the kind of content that was built up that had dna and musically that has a, has a dna in in copying other people's stuff. Have they? Have they permanently damaged that? No, I, I think that if they left it off for a couple given how a laissez-faire I mean, or just blase that my kids friends were about it yeah, if tick tock, shut off for a month, they're dead. Yeah, I was surprised henry was very blase about it. I was like, yeah, we'll just go to something else, like, and although they were downloading red uh book, which in chinese is actually little or red, what is it? Red, light, red. It's a little red book is what it is in Chinese. It's a little red book.

0:19:33 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah, you only do a little research to figure out that yeah is yeah, it's a little red book, it's not quite. The founder says yeah, I made it red because I went to Stanford, sure the founder, who has Mao in his name and, by the way, yeah that's right, his name is Mao and, by the way, uh, you can't post any anti-Chinese content on, or?

0:20:00 - Alex Lindsay
many other things, a lot of things.

0:20:01 - Leo Laporte
It's much more sensitive than the tick tock was. Yeah, you know that was more of uh tweaking my phone. Yeah, yeah, we'll show them.

0:20:12 - Alex Lindsay
I don't think anybody really wants to use it. It's horrible. I did download it to find out what it was like. Yeah, it's a horrible interface. Yeah, yeah it.

0:20:20 - Andy Ihnatko
It does point to how complicated and weird uh 2025 is going to be in tech, because everything is going to be is going to have that factor of what is transactional here. So now Trump, for instance, has put his neck out on the line saying congratulations, I have brought TikTok back to you. After that evil president, who shall remain nameless, was actually me roused to rouse congress to ban it, but I'm bringing it back to you. And now apple and google, both of whose ceos were front and center at the inauguration, to the detriment of other people who are usually front and center at the inauguration can come to and say, yeah, we could do that. Uh, we're obviously concerned about the penalty penalty parts of this law, but it would also be lovely if you could make some of these National Labor Relations Board inquiries go away. We would love it if you would put pressure on the EU to not make a subject to another couple billion dollars in fines.

Apple and Google I think there was another report this week about exactly how many billions of dollars in fines that they were issued by the EU last year. Apple is number two behind Google. It's nothing is going to be linear, as complicated as every decision tree used to be where, where government and uh Tech was before. Everybody has a seat at this poker table. Everybody has chips in front of them. Nothing is going to be linear and nothing's going to be terribly predictable.

0:21:46 - Alex Lindsay
And I think I think Apple's chief focus will be the EU, Like if they're going to talk one thing about Tim Cook. When he talks to Trump, it seems like he he, he knows what he needs out of that conversation.

0:21:58 - Leo Laporte
He needs no tariffs from China.

0:22:00 - Alex Lindsay
number one but I think that his primary focus will be getting the EU off of Apple's back, you know like I think that's Billion dollars last year.

0:22:08 - Jason Snell
Well yeah, Tariffs is number one, eu is number two.

0:22:11 - Andy Ihnatko
It might be.

0:22:12 - Jason Snell
Make sure the tariffs is no. No because I mean if they tariff, every single thing that gets, every iPhone that gets imported from China. That's number one, although it sounds like that's already kind of a deal, but we saw.

We saw four years ago or sorry, eight years to four years ago in the first Trump administration that Tim Cook is. He knows how to play the transactional game with Trump. He understands the language, he's speaking and that's why we saw Trump at the at the Mac Pro factory, and we saw Tim at the roundtable. And it's happening again now, but you know I think that Tim was at the inauguration.

Yeah, exactly so so this is the this is the thing is that I think Tim Cook understands what what he needs to do for Apple to sort of like, be in in Trump's good graces and they will do those things, like like the Mac Pro factory thing was, and Trump apparently has already talked about how Tim Apple told him that they're going to do all these reinvestments and Apple has been planning. They make PR statements about their US investments and Apple has been planning.

0:23:20 - Andy Ihnatko
They make PR statements about their US investments.

They do all of that because they know that that's part of the quid pro quo with the Trump administration to get what they want, which is number one, not get, oh, apple has. I talked to Tim Cook of Apple yesterday and he's promised to make a massive investment in the United States because I got reelected. So he's basically saying that Apple wouldn't be investing much money in their business inside the United States had he not been re-elected, and I hope that that's not going to be like the trend that again, part of the transaction is that Apple agrees to sort of lay back and allow themselves to be used this way, and again, it's not a good look. It's not a good fit. It's also not a good look for any company, apple included, to say yes, eu, you have the sovereign right to make your own laws, but we are insisting, by virtue of the fact that we are corporations of trillionaires with influence, that we can basically announce that your laws don't affect us, even though we're operating inside your country. That's also not a good look.

0:24:23 - Alex Lindsay
The EU is doing. What Spotify is asking them to do, like spotify, is like chattering, chattering, chattering them to their little ear, and all these little european companies are going. You got to do something about this because, no, it's not. This isn't about users. This is about european companies complaining that they, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and so the eu is doing something about it, and so our companies are now complaining to our folks to fight you guys fight with, but they're. But these are two. This is a proxy war between European countries and American companies, like in and and of complaining about, about how this goes into, the EU is doing to either supporting their EU uh uh companies and the United States now maybe will support their American companies, but it is a. It's a proxy war between these two corporate, between all these corporations okay, there, there's nothing to do with the user.

The user is a collateral damage to all of this fighting it has to do with users, it has to do with markets.

0:25:14 - Andy Ihnatko
There's a long list of things that the EU and other nations are lambasting. The users don't care. Lambasting Apple I don't care that the users don't care.

0:25:21 - Alex Lindsay
The users might not care that my car got stolen last week.

0:25:25 - Andy Ihnatko
That doesn't mean that that was right or there shouldn't be a law against it.

0:25:28 - Jason Snell
Okay, no, I mean, Europe has a regulatory regime and the idea of protecting its consumers, and you say that the users don't care and therefore they're not protecting them.

That's not how it works in Europe.

Their users are sometimes protected from themselves, and so what I think you see is a real worldview difference between the way regulation happens in the United States and the way it happens in Europe. And you know, I just keep thinking about this, like, in the end, what's going to happen here is there's going to be some chaos, and some things that we thought were intractable are not going to be intractable, and it's because we're ending a relatively stable period where everybody sort of said, ok, well, this is how it is and this is how countries behave, and this is how heads of state in the West behave, and Trump doesn't behave like that, is, I think, emboldened to not behave like that, and a lot of things that seem like they're going to be in a status quo are going to suddenly not be. And I'm not saying that positively or negatively, because I suspect there will be some surprisingly positive outcomes and some surprisingly negative outcomes. And you know that thing about may you live in interesting times, being a blessing and a curse. Well, things are going to get interesting.

0:26:39 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, he withdrew the AI protection executive order that Biden put into place a couple of years ago and said oh yeah, let's full speed ahead. And of course that's david sachs and elon musk and the others uh, promoting that, sam altman, I'm not sure I'm against that.

0:26:55 - Andy Ihnatko
Uh, let's just see what happens um, I mean, if there's, if there's a pause, if there's a reason for optimism. It's that like if there's the Elon Musk school of CEO-dom, in which I learned about this concept of seagull management. No, it's actually a style of management in which the manager is nowhere, but then they swoop in, crap all over everything, make a lot of noise, but then they fly off again for another few weeks. So basically you only have to deal with them during the period in which they are in the office actually crapping on everything, but then you can fix everything or ignore the stuff that they told you to do, and that's pretty much Elon Musk's management style.

The question is that are there going to be enough lifer civil servants and lifer experts in the executive branch to basically say, okay, I know he said that, I know that he's getting votes on that, I know he's getting applause based on that, but obviously we are not going to turn off all electricity to California, new York State, all of New England, unless they, unless they, they, they override X, y and Z. We're not going to do that, so we'll just let them know that, yes, we're working on it, boss. Great, great decision-making, yeah.

0:28:13 - Leo Laporte
It's going to be. It'll be an interesting time. I'm not watching any news for four years. I'm just saying, I'm just telling you.

0:28:21 - Andy Ihnatko
You're joking, but I used to have like PBS news. You're joking, but I used to have PBS NewsHour. Subscribe to my YouTube feed. Yeah, I do. I had to turn them off temporarily until I don't want my feed to be all of this news when I come there just seeing hey, does Techmoan have a new video about an off-send tape format. I don't want to hear eight different things about how things might become really, really awful. I want to segment that into what I'm actually looking for hard news.

0:28:46 - Leo Laporte
No, I'm with you 100%. My stomach can't take it. We'll be back with more Apple News in just a bit, but first a word from our sponsor, 1Password. Do your end users? A question for you? This is for the IT department or the CISO Do your end users always work on company-owned devices? The CISO Do your end users always work on company-owned devices? They always use IT-approved apps, aren't you lucky? Oh, they don't. Oh, I'm sorry. Yeah, because that's the way it is in the real world.

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I guess we should do the Gurman Report. I won't play that silly song, but he does this now. Every Sunday he comes out with his long yeah, there's not a lot in this one Pretty scant Gurman newsletter this week yeah.

A couple of things though. Okay, fire away, andrew. What's this Wi-Fi router thing?

0:32:43 - Andy Ihnatko
I thought that was weird. That was kind of nothing. Uh, that was speculation. He basically he's basically talking about the new, uh, in-house Wi-Fi chips, saying that, well, one feature of this chip will be that any device that has it could potentially maybe act as a Wi-Fi router, should that feature be wired up and decide to be a good idea. Uh, now, and that's obviously wild speculation the headlines were like oh, apple don't. Apple hasn't quit on wi-fi base stations yet, according to new rumor. No, it's like no, here's a feature of the chip.

0:33:16 - Leo Laporte
They're gonna be putting speculation yeah, although he points out and he's right, google does this. Uh, I've had their wi-fi router slash speaker, the google google wi-fi. It wasn't very good, but that's just google. That's not necessarily what apple would do. Yeah, I mean, I don't know, is there a market for that?

0:33:35 - Andy Ihnatko
it's, it's a feature I mean it's, it's given that it's. If this is true and I'm saying that basically this is a capability, a low-tech capability of this chip you can imagine ways in which it could add functionality to all kinds of other things, like, for instance, if you wanted to be able to use an Apple TV without necessarily being connected to the internet all the time, like if you have spotty connections, or if you wanted to take it as a travel device, but still you wanted to be able to use it as a central video access point for something, or if you wanted to. Again, this is things that you want to speculate. If you think that, okay, if every chip that has Wi-Fi in it on an Apple product could basically be its own access point, as opposed to simply a peer-to-peer, that means that now eight, eight different phones on this, eight different phones on the same network, can be contributing videos to your playlist as you're in the living room, as opposed to analogous to using an ipad or an apple tv as a home kit base station.

0:34:38 - Alex Lindsay
Right, I think you could have a mesh network, maybe of some kind if you gave up on trying to integrate with everyone else and decide you're going to build your home, all your own home apparatuses, having everything have these access points would be super useful. Right, we're all guessing right now. But if you gave up and said we're not going to worry about material or threads or whatever, that whatever, you know whatever these things are.

0:35:00 - Leo Laporte
We're just going to make a giant mesh throughout your house of all the Apple devices. We're just going to start doing this all ourselves.

0:35:04 - Andy Ihnatko
Um, this would be one of the one of the many things that you would do to start going down that path yeah, but the thing is like, if you wanted to make that a feature of a certain product, it's easy to just basically make that a feature of a certain product, as opposed to this is something that every single thing that has uses this wi-fi chip is going to have again. This is far off in the future. I probably know there's going to be different series of these Wi-Fi chips and maybe they have a die for it that's going to have centralized hub features, but you also have different versions of it that are for different applications. So that's why it was in a thin week for Mark Kermit's newsletter. This was one of the thinner ones, yeah.

0:35:42 - Leo Laporte
Well, sometimes there's not a lot to say. There is a new mail app coming in. Uh, mac os 15.

0:35:48 - Jason Snell
4 well maybe I mean he's well, all he's really saying there is that they're going to add the thing that's already in ios mail to ipad and mac. He actually made a mistake and said it was already in ipad, which it's not. Uh, this is that uh thing. That's not technically an apple intelligence feature, it's just a uh, a different machine learning feature that categorizes your messages and lets you sort of like sort them and filter them, and this is stuff that was state of the art for kind of alternative mail clients like five or 10 years ago. That Apple finally kind of got put in this year, but it's been iPhone only, which is baffling, right, like why not even on the ipad, uh, let alone on the mac. And so, yeah, maybe it's uh he says in in point four coming to mac and ipad as well a feature that's already on the iphone well, I'm just trying here to find something very exciting.

0:36:45 - Andy Ihnatko
There was a leak that was non-German that we could talk about. That was a little interesting. So the Elec I'm sorry, not the Elec FrontPageTech, which occasionally has come through with some stuff basically has information and a mock-up that the next version of the camera app for the iPhone is going to take some UI cues from Vision Pro, which I thought was interesting. Not that I think that will necessarily make the app better, but the idea of taking UI elements that were designed for one platform and deciding wow, that's actually a really neat idea and it's also flexible enough that maybe we should make this a constant across all of our platforms. That's kind of it would be the first instance we see of Vision Pro, basically cross-pollinating and enhancing other experiences.

0:37:31 - Alex Lindsay
I don't know if it's enhancing necessarily as much as I think that Apple is constantly trying to wrestle with the fact that they've got a bunch of OSs and they're trying to get them all to work the same way you know they were all doing. They all approach these UIs differently and I think apple's where they can and I don't know if it's necessarily making our experiences better on all of them. They're kind of you know but but if you look at kind of the list views inside of apple tv, which I hate, um, the, the, uh and most of the other upgrades that I I don't like very much you mean that column on the left oh my gosh drives me crazy and you can't delete the old store uh icons.

Well, and half the time you get into the movies you can't find them. Like it won't give you the full list, or you get in and you can't get out, and it's why did I?

do that. It's just again. I think that there's a goal here to get everything working the same way, especially if, if getting all the inter I you know, I have a theory that, and a completely unfounded theory, that you know like the change to the preferences is largely driven by things that vision os needs, like you couldn't. It's much more navigable navigable in a vision os because they change the preferences inside, the inside of mac os, and so they're making it look nice for vision. Well, they're making it so that it's more it's easier to get to on certain, with less, less dexterity, and so so I think that there's more it's easier to get to uncertain in with less, less dexterity, and so so I think that there's. So I think that all of the stuff, I feel like everything's trying to find its way together.

0:38:51 - Leo Laporte
I mean, we've seen this happening between iPad OS and Mac OS for a long time, where they're kind of both impacting each other as they try to find a middle ground between famously did this with Windows 8 and it was a bomb because people who don't use their fingers hated it and I think there's a risk of appealing to a very small group of people the vision Pro users.

0:39:16 - Alex Lindsay
I and I feel like the risk that Apple has right now continuing to develop for development sake, you know, like a lot of the interfaces.

I feel like you know stuff that they changed with the, with the phone, that the mail app there to me garish at best. Lot of the interfaces, I feel like the new stuff that they changed with the phone, the mail app, are to me garish at best. That's the nicest way I can say it. You know, I don't it's the same problem that I had with photos. I don't like using mail on my phone anymore, like you know, like they put all these big things on it and the way it's sorting now and I don't, I just don't like using it.

So now, I'm you can turn that off but oh, like I just I wish, I just I couldn't figure out where to turn it off and I just was like oh stop, that's what happens people just go oh, screw it, yep like it yeah I I'll just say I mean, who knows john prosser, who's front front page tech?

0:39:59 - Jason Snell
he has gotten some things and you know he's he's sort of a divisive figure, but he has definitely gotten some stuff. That's been interesting. I will just say there is zero chance that Apple is changing the iPhone interface because they want to make things easy on Vision Pro users.

0:40:13 - Alex Lindsay
Not on the iPhone interface.

0:40:14 - Jason Snell
I don't think the iPhone interface. I was talking about that, I was talking about that.

0:40:18 - Alex Lindsay
There's other things that are happening that feel like they're trying to go that direction.

0:40:21 - Jason Snell
Again, I think there's zero chance that any Apple product is being changed to make it easier on Vision Pro users, because 0% of Apple's users use Vision Pro. It's such a small thing. I do think they play with interface ideas on other platforms that inspire them to change interfaces on different platforms. But I 100% agree with Alex there is a tendency and I think it's dangerous to I don't want to say that it's like fashion, but it is like well, we need to ship changes, because that's what gets people to update the software, and that sometimes novelty becomes the winner over utility and like I don't want to be a stick in the mud, who's like oh, just don't ever change anything. That's not what I'm saying, but I do think that you have to be really disciplined to not ship things because they're different, even if they're worse, and you just have to try to avoid that.

And the worst software updates are the ones where things get changed that actually degrade the user experience.

Change for change's sake, exactly you want to have, and that's that is antithetical to Apple's fundamental philosophy of products and has been their philosophy for decades now. And and when they do something like that, you know, I think it's because of a misguided sort of a sense of priorities where some you know group has gotten the upper hand over another group and maybe there are sort of like design changes that are not being thought through from a usability side. And it does happen and it's not great, right. I mean, it's not great Like I can understand, like Alex, I know, hates the Photos app and iOS 18. I understand 100% why they did it that way. I think that they have very good reasons for doing it that way and I think that in some ways they didn't have a lot of options to try to solve the problem that they were trying to solve. But the problem is you've got people with, at this point, decade, a decade plus of history of how that app works well, but I think you break it.

0:42:17 - Alex Lindsay
They did your peril. I think it was a sudden change to. What I know is that in the last version I literally opened iphone, iphone to see what it gave me. Like I opened it up just to see, open up photos. I'm sorry, I opened up photos just to see what the new little movie was or what the cool little thing is that I can do the cool images that it picked so that I can send it to my, to my wife, of my kids or whatever you know. Like it would just pull good things out and I would literally open it just for for no reason other than to open it. Yeah, me too. And now I? The big thing is I search and then when I click on a thing to look at it, it selects it and I'm like I don't want to select it, I don't want to select it, I just want it to open up, like when I hit a search. I want to hit the thing?

0:42:54 - Leo Laporte
Is it the same on the Mac and iOS?

0:42:58 - Alex Lindsay
Is it the same? No, no, it happens is I take pictures on my photo on my phone and then I just never see them again until I'm on my Mac. Like you know, like I opened up, I opened up the last ones I took and then, but I, I the photo one, I it's the selection problem. The selection is. The problem is that it defaults to select photos very quickly when I don't want it to like and that just makes me just insanely frustrated. Like it just makes it not worth using to me.

0:43:23 - Jason Snell
so this is the and I think some of the challenges in the details right is like they're trying to solve a specific problem and in solving it they've caused another bunch of problems and like I can't, like I I think they did a pretty good job solving it and I don't have a problem with the photos app, but Alex's problems with it show that they made a decision with perhaps some unanticipated consequences, and that's the. These are complex. That's part of the problem with a lot of this stuff is we all want our phones to do new things and be more advanced and be more complicated, but the more complicated they get, the harder they are to use, the harder it is to intuit anything, and you end up saying I'd rather this be really super simple which, by the way, they could totally have done by splitting the Photos app into two separate apps, but they chose not to do that.

0:44:06 - Alex Lindsay
Well, and I think that the problem is is that this isn't an Android crowd. I don't want it to be more complicated. I want my technology to be in the background and when I need something basic, I want to pop it up. If I wanted an Android, I'd buy an Android, and that's what I feel like the phone is becoming is an Android phone, which is this is all. This stuff is why I don't like Android.

0:44:23 - Jason Snell
That is a danger that Apple Apple. It's not as true now as it was in the earlier days, but, like the arms race with Google over iOS and Android features, there is the question afraid of being seen as being behind, while adding things that their customers don't necessarily actually want and complicating what's already there. But it's a tough thing to do because you risk not implementing a feature that everybody demands and losing market share to Android. So I get it. It's just a tough situation to be in, I get it.

0:45:02 - Alex Lindsay
The problem is is like the average Apple user, like my wife is. You know she works on websites and she's technology. You know she has chat GPTO all the time and she's you know, she does a lot of tech stuff. I asked her if she felt like she needed to get a new phone so she could do Apple intelligence. She said what's Apple intelligence? Yeah, like literally didn't even. She didn't even know where it was, you know and doesn't care. And I said what would get you to update the phone? And she said the camera. I would like to get a new one because I need a better camera.

0:45:30 - Jason Snell
I talked about this like a year or two ago on this show but, like my wife, didn't realize that there were multiple lock screens, that you could edit your lock screen, that you could put like a photo gallery on your lock screen on your lock screen and she did not. The update to iOS that allowed you to free place apps and move them off the home screen and just into the app library completely passed her by, because it was probably a single. This is one of the discoverability problems, right, a single thing came up on her phone that said oh, you can do this thing.

And she went okay, okay, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye. And we were sitting at a restaurant and I explained this to her and, you know, once I showed her what those features were like. She still gets delight. Every day her lock screen changes to a picture of our kids, a different one, shuffled from the photo library. It's an amazing feature, but the challenge is how do you express it, how do you motivate people to find this stuff? And that's sort of my point is like we don't want to make our phones more complicated, but we would love for them to do more things, but the problem is making them do more things makes it more complicated, and so it's a real problem.

0:46:37 - Alex Lindsay
I just it just feels very much like it's starting to feel to me like the 90s with Apple, like there's all these things that they're adding and it's just like I don't need most of this stuff and I don't know if everyone needs most of this stuff. I mean, I think that the like the thing that mattered in photos, that I do like in photos, the one reason that I'll go into it is because I can select things and delete them. Like you know, that's magical. Like I'm like that just added the whatever, that AI removal or whatever I would be over the moon, you know like it would be the best thing ever.

0:47:08 - Jason Snell
So I think, one of the possible challenges here is what Apple is trying to do with app intents and with Apple intelligence, which is potentially a solution to a lot of these problems, right, which is our phones and our apps have gotten way too complicated. But if the apps can provide to the system all of the things that they can do via app intents and you have some sort of an agent running on the device that will take your request for what you want to see and do it, then you could end up with a much simpler process, because the system knows what it can do and you don't need to know how to get there and how to do it. You just tell it. This is what I want, but I feel like we're a long way off from that.

0:47:54 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah let's play the vision pro theme, john ashley, because I have what do? You.

0:48:03 - Jason Snell
It's time to talk to Vision Pro no-transcript.

0:48:18 - Leo Laporte
And this guy on the Apple website has been blinking for an entire year now and a new era began. A new era began in headworn computing. We are one year into that era. Anything to report? No.

0:48:43 - Alex Lindsay
I mean I think that they have the same. I'll keep on coming back to it. It's about content. Like they have a tool that has a lot of great things and there's not enough content. And I think that I think Apple has missed the boat here. Like I think that they you know they I don't think they they can still get to the boat, like it's not like the boat's so far away they can't see it, but I think the boat is out in the bay and they are still on shore and they they had, so they've had so many opportunities to shoot content like if they had taken their these vr cameras and shot behind the scenes of the shooting of silo, behind the scenes of these other things you know, like there's all these moments that they could be shooting, that just putting up these it doesn't have to be a big production like just get and now and againmagic camera, which is getting closer and closer to the surface, opens up the possibility that many people could do this, and so that may change things.

But I think that the possibility of the video content number one not being there. Number two is, I don't think, putting enough money into app development, either by Apple or funding other people or helping them get enough out there. That is unique. I think there's a lot of people throwing things against the wall, um, and there's a handful of things that look pretty impressive, but they're. It's kind of like all the ingredients aren't there. You know, you've got flour over here and salt over there, the water's bad over there and someone's still looking for the yeast, and so so they they just can't quite get all the pieces together to to make that happen.

I mean, I definitely enjoy my my vision pro pretty often I mean, you know, almost every day I'm watching something on it or doing something with it, but I uh, but I will say that I feel like I'm going back to the same things all the time, like I'm not really like I go up and I download any free app.

I mean, when people say, oh, I want 29.95 for something, I'm like this better be really good, you know, like, like you get you know to to do that, but but I think that, um, and I think that you know, people are playing with ideas, but I think that there are things that again, we see the glimpses and we've said, said that we've talked about this over and over and over again but something needs to be easy and cheap. That does what JigSpace does, lots of space does. Lots of people would use ikea, should be using ikea, should be using what jig space has for how to build their uh, uh, how to build their furniture, and they should. They can just post now with less swear words and more screws. You know like, you know, um, but uh, but I, I just don't think that that kind of stuff is getting out there and being accessible I'm just I'm curious to say I'm keen to see what we see at WWDC.

0:51:07 - Andy Ihnatko
How much are they going to talk about Vision Pro? That will tell us whether or not they think that we think that the current Vision Pro did the job it was intended to, which is to give us a target of something to build and to give a certain part of the market enterprise people who, again, are not going to necessarily own these things, but are going to buy these things for their business. Are they satisfied with that? And this is just basically. We will never make a version two of this. Necessarily, we will make a new vision that takes what we've learned from the marketplace and what we've learned building from this, or are they going to introduce a whole bunch of stuff for developers to get developers more excited about developing for this platform? I'm guessing that it's going to be the first of those two things. I don't. I don't. I don't, by any means.

I don't think that vision pro has been a failure. I think they sold about as much as they thought that they were going to sell, as much as anybody was going to sell, but I think that it's a product of its time that fills a gap two years in the running until they can start to build stuff that is a little bit more meaningful and a little bit more relevant to what people actually are going to use. I'm not going to get into the discussion all over again. I do think that immersive video content is kind of like asparagus chips, where you can release them and people either release the snack food and people like them or they don't like them. Turns out they're not really into that and it's not going to be about. Oh well, maybe we need to have like new, like cajun ranch flavor. No, it's like it's a good product. It's just that it's not something that a lot of people want at this time.

Uh, I think that it's going to be the hardware. It's going to require a modification of the hardware as opposed to new kinds of content and, like I said, wwdc is going to tell the tale of whether they are thinking that again, this is a two-year product. As Tim said in an interview earlier late last year, this is an early adopter product. They didn't say that before the launch, but of course they're smart enough to admit actually what's happened. It's an early adopter product. We're not going to be necessarily making a second version of this, but this is going to help us learn to make the next thing and also give developers a leg up on what they're going to be building when this next thing comes out.

0:53:35 - Jason Snell
Yeah, I don't want to be the metaphor police here, but I would say it's not asparagus chips, it's more like chocolate that's in a store that costs $3,500 to enter. Chocolate's not for everyone, but it's pretty good. But I'm not paying $3,500 to buy some chocolate. It's not going to happen. And I think that I mean the idea might be if there was a lot of great immersive content, because I think most people who've tried it have really liked it. But it's two things. One more content, especially specific content, might motivate certain audiences to get on board. But it's also true that you got to lower that price to entry. You just you have to. You have to buy a lot.

And I think maybe immersive content, while it's one of the legs of the stool, it can't be the only leg of the stool. I was just going to say I think it's amazing, honestly, honestly amazing that other than this week where Leo played the theme, knowing there were no Vision Pro stories, I have been shocked at how much we've been able to talk about what's going on with the Vision Pro over the last year, because I kind of thought it would all just dry up completely. But there's been drips. Right, it hasn't been a flood, but it also hasn't been complete radio silence. We've had stuff to talk about and that's not bad for a product. That is absolutely. They admitted you know eight months after they released. It is a work in progress, that's for early adopters only, which everybody knew on day one.

0:55:00 - Andy Ihnatko
It fires the imagination, doesn't it? It's like you know there's something here, you know that that's this, isn't it, but you know, I'll, I'll, I'll continue. The food, the food analogy where you're in the kitchen, you're trying something new. You know that, ooh, this combination of this plus this isn't quite right, but there's something about that blend of sweetness and umami that I want to continue to develop. There's something here. This ain't it?

0:55:23 - Alex Lindsay
well, but I do think when I put the headset on um and I'm not one of the people that I guess, for whatever reason, I know the head, the weight doesn't bother me. I have talked to people who say, oh, the weight's too heavy and I have a big head.

I guess it's used to carrying a lot of a lot of weight anyway, so it doesn't matter yeah, so so, um, so I it doesn't like I don't notice it at all, but the, you know, I feel like a lot of it is there and there's a lot like the technologies there, and sure, the price is high, but that's. You know, tesla came in really high and then they started lowering the price. That's what you do, is you? You know you can come in low and then make a ton of technical compromises, or you come in high, figure it out and then figure out how to be more efficient about it, and I think that I do think that they'll probably fork. I think you'll probably see one that's the same price or more and another one that's less expensive. You know that they go for that lower market and start to figure out where they're going to, where they can cut those corners, but I really do believe that they haven't like.

I think part of it is Apple's self-correction system when they release content. It is so much work for Apple to put a piece of content out and because no one else had the cameras and no one else had anything else, it's it has to go through Apple's thing and even the stuff that came out. You know, I wouldn't necessarily agree with putting it out, like you know, I think that the artist for you know, the, or the, whatever concert for one, is literally a textbook of what not to do with the VR Um and uh. And so I think that you know, I think, but this is Apple trying to like, well, let's work with big names with lots of experience, and that oftentimes comes with old ideas, and so the um, uh, so I think that it'll be interesting.

I, I, I, I, I'll be very interested to see what happens if this black magic camera gets out and suddenly a whole bunch of filmmakers, like all my friends, are all trying to get in, like we're all trying to like, hey, when can we get a hold of that camera? There's a lot of folks that are, um, you know, excited to jump into that, into using that camera, both for meta and for and for apple and um, and so I think that when we see that content it'll be really interesting, because it's the first time it hasn't been like a huge science project to do Duel 180.

0:57:23 - Leo Laporte
So we're one year in. I think we've always said all along we need the killer app. Is there a killer app? Is it the screen? What is the killer app?

0:57:34 - Andy Ihnatko
I think the screen is definitely what people are gravitating towards. Just the simple idea of I can wear something on my face and create virtual displays that greatly exceed the amount of space I have available that's killer. Everybody gravitates towards that. It's something that is very easy to explain, I think, even if you're not stuck on a plane for six hours. It's something that is attractive to a lot of people. The idea of having virtual displays even inside your own office I mean, again, I'm sitting in front of you. I mean, again, I'm sitting in front of you.

I walked about a mile in like the teen degree weather, carrying enough gear to have a two display set up here with my iPad and my MacBook, because having different tasks in different discreet corners of your peripheral vision is such a productivity booster, such a great way to get work done. So the idea of having to be able to simply generate more displays for your workspace, for whatever, that's a really, really big deal. I think that simply is the killer rep the fact that we've been here for a year and no developer and remember that Apple developers they are some of the most brilliant, crazy geniuses ever If they have. If there is something interesting about a piece of hardware. It will trigger their creativity and they will build something that either has never existed before or will make you completely rethink an existing product category. The fact that nobody has come up with it, it hasn't really inspired those developers as yet, even the people who are not trying to make money off of it, people who just say well, I'm a developer, I want to buy this because I want to play with this. Ooh, isn't this an interesting idea? I want to play with that. That doesn't seem to have materialized yet. I think that speaks to a failure to inspire the creativity, the creative impulse of the developer community.

That's why I think that the Killer app is simply virtual displays. It's wonderful, I've used them. I don't own one myself, but every time I borrow one and use one, that's the thing that I find a perception of finding my headspace in, and I think that will point towards whatever the second version of this is going to be. Give me, give me great virtual displays, give me greater connectivity with all my, all my other devices, and make it affordable, so that the next time I'm considering buying a $500 monitor for my screen, for my office, I might consider well, that's $500 more or $1,000 more isn't a small amount of money, but what could I do if I bought a $1,000 headset or $1,500 headset? Get me on board that way, not by trying to give me a vision of spatial computing that, again, they haven't been able to deliver on to give me a vision of spatial computing that, again, they haven't been able to deliver on.

1:00:10 - Jason Snell
I'd throw 3D movies and immersive movies on the pile as additional things that would motivate the purchase of a, let's say, $1,000, $900, $750 version of this sort of thing. And then the other thing I'd throw on there that was something that they shipped late, but they sort of I don't know what they were thinking originally, but they got there eventually which was spatial personas in FaceTime, which when we first saw the personas, they were weird and creepy and they were in little boxes. And today I can tell you the personas are really good and they're not in little boxes, they float in the air or in an environment and I have done multiple spatial persona conversations with friends and it's like we're there in person. It's a killer feature, but guess what? Everybody has to have a $3,500 headset. So part of this, it is a chicken and egg problem in a way.

Andy you said, like search for the killer app, the developers aren't that motivated.

They are, in part, not that motivated because there are no users, Like the people I know who've done Vision Pro apps, like the number of users they've got is in the dozens right, Like there just aren't people with it.

So if more people bought it, they might be able to find the killer app or be motivated to seek the killer app.

But you know, that's the challenge here, which is why I think Alex and I have talked a lot about if there was a theater or live sports or some other entertainment product that was enough to motivate people, that that would be another way you could sell these headsets.

But in the end, I think the most important thing to know about the Vision Pro is what we knew on day one, which is it costs $3,500. And there are very few reasons you would spend practical reasons that you would spend $3,500 on this product. But if this product was cheaper and I don't know what that right price is, and obviously they can't get there with this version of it I do think it has enough applications between the virtual displays and the and the entertainment aspects and other things, we might learn that it could really give it a go. But like we're so far away from there right now that all we can do is sort of imagine and wonder and play around with the impractical technology in the meantime, and if you talk to lonely sandwich Adam Lissagor about his app, because I thought that was very innovative.

1:02:15 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, they have two apps and they're still actively developed.

1:02:19 - Jason Snell
I don't think they're selling very well, but I think they're really interested in that as a future. So they've got television where you can actually put a television in a space that plays television, and then they have theater, where you have a virtual theater space and you can do Plex and you can do YouTube. That just came out and the first version was a little rocky but it's actually getting better rapidly.

That seems like that should be something that does well I think they're very interested in that as the future, they want to be there. If vision os leads to products that are entertainment based, which I think is a, there's a pretty good bet that they will be and and so great there'd be a market for, uh, eight hundred dollar again.

1:02:59 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I said that you could watch movies. Uh, the issues are and the software I.

1:03:04 - Jason Snell
I think one of the shames is that one client shame of this whole thing is that, uh, john syracusa, my friend, who is an amazing critic of user interfaces, refuses to use one. Uh, won't buy one, doesn't think it's worth the money, and it's a shame because I actually I would love to hear his criticism of it. But I think I think the way it's implemented is really quite brilliant and thoughtful, and they are doing some. Apple is doing interesting things with interaction and gestures and things on Vision OS, and so I think again, I think the work on the product is great. I think it's a very impressive bit of hardware. I think that there are some potential killer apps already emerging. Again, the problem is it's just never, ever, ever going to be worth it at this price, and so if I was at Apple, I would not be beating up the people who did the software, I would really be pushing the hardware engineers. What can we do to make this?

1:04:04 - Leo Laporte
thing affordable. Will AI help with Vision Pro as it stands? Ryan Christofoli, at 9 to 5, max says 18.4, is getting him really excited for the Vision Pro's future because it's more AI on top of it. Sure, I mean, I think that the Okay.

1:04:23 - Jason Snell
Does AI get the price down?

1:04:25 - Alex Lindsay
I still think it's a supply line issue in the sense that I mean, I was talking to someone about, you know, live streaming to the headset and they're like, well, I don't know if there's enough people, I'm like, well, there's 400,000. How many times have you had 400,000 viewers? Okay, not very often, in fact. Usually, if the stat that no one wants to talk about is if you have more than a hundred people watching a live stream on YouTube, you're in the top 1%, like so, so. So you know like you know so, so you're you're, you're, you're you're so. The thing is, is that YouTube's got this massive number, massive number of of uh, of users, but, you know, only a handful of people are watching any watch, any given stream, and part of it is. Is that that's part of that's a promo pipeline from Apple being able to, you know, like, right now, there's just so many apps.

1:05:06 - Leo Laporte
We have 720, 729 people watching on YouTube right now. Right no more than a thousand watching.

1:05:12 - Andy Ihnatko
We were a thousand on Sunday?

1:05:14 - Alex Lindsay
I think, yeah, I thought it was just us.

And yeah, exactly, so the, so the, so the thing and to put it in perspective when we, when we streamed uh, we had, I think, 650 watching on the vision pro. When we streamed twit the last twit that we streamed from the from the twit require, you know, hundreds of millions of users to get to that number. It just required people to know it, knowing it was there. And I think that that's one of the big challenges is that there's 400,000 people that you can't get to. You know, like that, you know, and that one content they spent a lot of money on those headsets.

1:05:58 - Leo Laporte
I mean they just don't know where to go and to be honest with you, there's not a lot of content. That's there. Apple should put a little bell on it that rings when there's something to watch.

1:06:04 - Alex Lindsay
Well, I mean, I think that if people started to build those and again, I think that there's a huge supply line issue, which is that, for instance, usdz is potentially really powerful at being able to share models and look at models and play with them, but Apple hasn't finished they don't have a way to create those models easily, animate those models easily, put them into place. Keynote does a little of it, but whoever wrote it in Keynote doesn't really understand 3D spaces and the thing is is that you've got to make it easy to make the content for the device. If content creation is hard, no one's taking advantage of what makes the device different. And right now, I don't think Apple has built those tools. I don't think that.

I think that the camera will be a big part, big tool that, if it works, it's going to be a big part of. Suddenly, there's a lot of interesting content that's coming out, because I think that if a hundred or two hundred, not thousands, but if 100 or 200 of those cameras get into the wild and people start shooting like immersive content with those that you can only see if you have the vision pro or or whatever, um, I think that that's gonna. You can only see it, resolution at the right resolution or whatever. You know that's going to change the model a little bit, you know, on on how that, on how that works and so um. But I think that there also are all these 3d opportunities, but the tools to get it's. It's hard for me to get 3d tool content into the vision pro, let alone someone who just has the idea for content.

1:07:28 - Leo Laporte
But if maybe apple put too much capability into it. Could they make a very simple device like a view master that's just there for watching content and make it down.

1:07:39 - Alex Lindsay
I think you could definitely make one. That's just the problem is is that playing the videos at the re? The problem is? The movies look amazing and to play that resolution at that frame rate requires almost all the horsepower that you have in that vision pro, and so the the issue is they take? Out like if you take, you can't take. That I don't think. I think that it just becomes like everybody else if the resolution goes down again. Right, you know, and so If they include.

1:08:07 - Andy Ihnatko
I think that as part of the Apple ecosystem, it could really that could be like assigning a booster to a very, very plain and ordinary product.

If the video experience is really really good, okay, and they have enough horsepower that it can do the sort of video that you're talking about, it is as a playback experience or even slightly less.

Maybe they don't necessarily need that top thing If it's killer feature. We're simply continuity, that whatever you're doing on whatever device, it can be found by that iPad, by that iPhone, by that Mac book, by that Mac as a thing to put, throw a window onto or to change a stream from what you're watching here to what you're watching over there. That in itself would even if you had a thousand dollar Apple headset that had exactly the same sort of video specs as something that Meta came up with or anybody else the fact that it does continuity that well, that it's not a special, it's not a special weird thing that you're doing this kind of integration, that would really make it an interesting product and the only challenge is the desktops that you were talking about, that that are one reason to use it only work at that resolution, like if it gets much lower resolution you can't use them, you know, like you can't like.

1:09:16 - Alex Lindsay
So what makes that that virtualizing your, your, your desktops, which I, of course? I have nine monitors in front of me, so the idea of going down to only the ones that the vision pro is. But when I'm on a plane, I've opened it up and it was magical, like I will say, like I was like, oh, this really works, like to have my laptop closed and be sitting there typing on it.

1:09:33 - Leo Laporte
I was are there any physical liabilities? Do you get nauseated? Do you does your head get tired?

1:09:44 - Jason Snell
None of of that you just get. I don't have that problem. Okay, you know I don't. I've never had an eye problem or a nausea problem. I have had times when it I feel the weight of it. Usually an adjustment of the straps to get it to be fit better works for me and I admit I don't use that back strap, I don't like that.

1:09:58 - Leo Laporte
So they may have solved the logistic issues that really plagued early VR.

1:10:03 - Jason Snell
It feels very much like and everybody wants everything now. It feels very much like this is one of those products that we have to say check back in three years, honestly, because right now it is essentially a developer kit. It is an early adopter thing. We are all geeking out at the fun things that you can do with it, but there's very little content there and the and like the people who should be using it now are thinking what content could be there and what could we do, and experimenting and all of that. And that, if Apple really is viewing this as a long haul product and I think they are, because otherwise why would you make this product?

If you're not thinking about the far future and where you evolve it, then, like, because I think the truth is those displays, those Sony displays on the inside, those are a huge portion of the cost of the product and you can't get rid of them, right? You can't. I think they will slim down the cost of everything around them and they can throw in an M5 or an M4 or whatever. But, like, even then, the next one of these is still going to be too expensive and I think it's going to be multiple generations before it gets. But but the good news is there's this like crossover effect where if the software, if the content, if the functionality keeps getting cooler and cooler and the price keeps getting lower and lower, you will start to pick up an audience for whom that price is like okay, now it's worth it.

I travel a lot. I want that virtual display, whatever it is, and like over time you can push it down. But like you can't, I would say you can't really see it from here, because it's just well and it's just not there yet and and again.

1:11:38 - Alex Lindsay
I think that I, you know it. It's not just that the hardware doesn't have enough. People like Apple could get could change this this a little bit. They spent billions on this headset and they have put in a lot of, uh, social capital into expanding this thing. They're just not spending enough money on content, like they are not spending enough money on developing things that would get people excited. There are plenty of things that many of us and and I'll, the company that figured this out was Epic, and Apple doesn't pay attention to what anybody else does. They only do what they do. I know that.

But Epic has the mega grants and, man, when Epic launched the mega grants, developers just stopped hearing the word Unity. There was Epic, there was epic and unity, and it was all you know. It was, uh, you know, you had unreal and unity, unreal, unity. And then the mega grants came out and then it was just unreal, unrun, unreal, unreal, unreal, because everyone was trying to figure out how to pitch for a mega grant. Apple should be doing mega grants. They should be doing, you know, up to a million dollars of of. I mean because they were I don't know what.

I don't know how much epic was putting in there. It was like tens of millions of dollars. I think they did a hundred million dollars of mega grants for $25,000. You barely had a napkin. You had to write down barely anything on a napkin to get $25,000 from from Epic. You had to start showing them how you might make money with it at quarter million.

You know, like, you know, like you know, and, and, um, uh, and so the thing is is that is that there's. I think Epic did that very, very effectively and it it jumpstarted this massive ecosystem into a market that didn't have a lot of people when it. When they did it, um, and I think that Apple should have something like a mega grant where they're saying, hey, if you've got an idea. Because that's the problem this is the exact problem that we were talking about earlier is that a lot of developers are like well, I don't know how to pay for six months of my time to work on something that really is finished, so most of the products that we see are not finished, and then you put them on, then you don't come back to them again.

1:13:34 - Leo Laporte
Brett Kahn Five has a great idea. He says put the season finale of Severance.

1:13:39 - Alex Lindsay
require a vision no that would shit, would how to make everybody hate you so like. But I think that, but you want to know what happens.

1:13:48 - Leo Laporte
You gotta buy a vision pro you know people would be.

1:13:52 - Alex Lindsay
I don't think it would sell more vision pros, but it would make a lot more vision pros use their vision pros more often, which it has a chain reaction for the developers and everything else. If they put more 3d content in, I mean Apple should consider developing new 3D or new immersive content should be coming out at least once a week.

1:14:09 - Leo Laporte
At least there is an opportunity here because for at least some portion of the populace, meta has turned into the evil Empire, and so there is an opportunity, I think, for Apple to say, yeah, we're still the nice guys and you should if we. They just need to get the price down. We're gonna take, we gotta take a break, uh, but man, we sure got a lot out of that.

1:14:29 - Andy Ihnatko
The one-year anniversary amazing of the vision pro, as we say, for, for, for a thing that didn't, didn't, hasn't made much of a splash anywhere, commercially or socially we can again it's it's a lot of kids.

1:14:41 - Jason Snell
There's a soup, kids.

1:14:42 - Andy Ihnatko
It's a very inspirational topic.

1:14:44 - Jason Snell
Yeah, I mean, we're all tech nerds and this is cutting edge, weird future tech. And I think, given the age of this panel, a lot of us got into computers when they were all, like this, impractical and expensive and ridiculous. But the future we're Mac people.

1:15:01 - Andy Ihnatko
I mean, I love having to swap disks 20 times to write a nine-page turn paper the best.

1:15:06 - Alex Lindsay
I felt so bad for my parents when I did what is the equivalent of when I bought my Apple IIe. When I got my parents to buy my Apple IIe by having a hunger strike, I literally laid on the couch and cried for three days and wouldn't eat until I got an Apple IIe Aren't they glad they did.

The equivalent was $6,000. You know, like back in 19,. You know, like $6,000 for this Apple IIe that I then did nothing useful with. I mean, I wrote programs and my entire future was created from it yeah, exactly. But at the time it's not like it generated any revenue. I just did my papers on it and wrote useless apps. You know about Dungeons and Dragons?

1:15:41 - Leo Laporte
We're going to take a break. Come back. We about Dungeons and Dragons. We're going to take a break. Come back. We will talk about severance and we'll talk about the future of the Apple card. You're watching MacBreak Weekly Andy Ihnatko, Alex Lindsay, Jason Snell. So glad to have you here.

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Goldman Sachs' CEO eyeing an early exit. Goldman's been trying to get out of the Apple card for some time. How do they lose money? We don't know.

1:19:38 - Jason Snell
Volume volume, volume.

1:19:42 - Leo Laporte
David Solomon signaled a possible early end of the partnership due to financial losses and regulatory challenges. Where would it go? Well, there are a couple of people who actually are like synchrony, a digital uh bank is interested. Goldman lost 1.2 billion dollars in 2022 on the card. On the card. Yeah, also regulatory scrutiny. The consumer Financial Protection Bureau fined the bank more than 90 million dollars for how it handled the card. Billing errors, dispute resolution, compliance with the fair credit billing act uh, it's just been a nightmare. Uh, they're talking with JP Morgan Chase, they're talking with synchrony. There are people who think, well, the reason is because this is consumer is new to Goldman, right? Yeah, this isn't their business.

1:20:35 - Andy Ihnatko
They're, they're trying to, they're trying to do for they're opening that the Apple credit would do for Goldman what the iPhone did for AT&T. Singular. That we're, we want to get into this market, we want to be a major player. This will take us there, and it was just all the different ways that Apple wanted to think different and revolutionize the credit card business without really, I think, super appreciating how difficult it is to achieve compliance if you are going to make those big changes, as well as the difficulties of doing things as simple, as everybody gets the same credit card statement.

It's a statement of the same day. The billing date is the same for everybody. It's like this is an industry that's been around for decades and a lot of the things they the way they. One of the reasons why they do things the way they do isn't because they're fuddy-duddies and they're they, they don't like innovation but because they tried it the other ways, and the other ways created disasters, so that's the way they do it joanna stern would like apple intelligence to know she does not have a husband.

1:21:40 - Jason Snell
Yeah, she has a wife, she has a wife and she has sons, but not a husband but apple intelligence keeps telling her that she does yeah, we know why.

Right, like, it's one of those things where it's like oh well, by context, this is a person in a marriage and there's a wife, and they're talking about a, a male who is in the family, and and then it's like well, percentage wise because that's what LLMs do it's a husband and it's not. It's her son, although I also think that says something about the math of like, well, this male person in this family is acting rather juvenile. It's probably a husband, but it's just one of those things that, like Apple, make this statement and they're like look, we've tried to train this in all the ethical ways possible. I think the point and Joanna makes it is the point is that it's still an LLM and it's still based on probability and it still doesn't really know, and so it makes assumptions that are not intended to be homophobic or like they're just percentages, it's just math, but the end result is it's a shipped Apple feature that is telling Joanna repeatedly that she has a husband. There is no husband in that relationship.

1:22:50 - Leo Laporte
I would be annoyed. I don't blame her.

1:22:52 - Andy Ihnatko
So Apple's response and actually I think they're responding more to the BBC, who really was miffed- On Thursday, the latest developer versions of the iPhone and iPad and Mac and mac software temporarily disable those new notification summaries for news apps. Yeah, I'm glad that that's really the only thing they could have done until they get this thing looked. It's again. It's bad enough when it's as much malforming ordinary notifications, but when the bbc or the new york times logo and app says that hey, it turns out that it's going to be raining canned hams tomorrow and everybody gets a free Chihuahua, like okay, I didn't write that. I didn't write anything even similar to that, I didn't publish anything like that. And now we, the institution, look more like morons. You can't let that happen.

1:23:37 - Leo Laporte
Yeah.

1:23:42 - Andy Ihnatko
One of the problems, though, with relying on LLMs is that, like, it learns things in the conversation with you and as you use it, but that has like an upper limit and a rollover, and they're looking at, they're trying to figure out ways to basically figure out, just as I might mispronounce somebody's name the first couple of times, but eventually I learned that no, this is how this name is pronounced. Or I learned that this person, this woman, has a wife, not a husband, and those things will stick. Llms have a very difficult time in getting things to stick that way Because, again, they have a limited amount of memory and it tends to roll over, and that's going to have to be the next thing to be fixed. The idea of a personal chatbot, of an AI that essentially is attached to you, that is being used to process your information and help you out that's not a negotiable thing. That's something that's going to have to remember.

1:24:36 - Jason Snell
And Apple is working on something called the personal context. That would actually put a lot of this in practice, and the problem is it's hard and they don't have it yet, and so you end up in this position where it's kind of contextless. I do wonder. I mean, this particular feature is one where I feel like the LLM is probably not the answer anyway. The answer is probably to summarize a newsfeed from the BBC by creating like a new bubble that's a little taller, that has a few bulleted items in it and then says tap for more and then concatenates all the headlines into like a headline summary.

But this feature got built because they're like, where can we stick an LLM?

And they stuck it here, and I hope that what Apple's doing is saying, oh, actually that's the wrong tool for this job and we've got a different job that'll do it.

But for Joanna's story, yeah, I think that that's one of the ways that they could make this work better in general is if it actually knows who you are and all the relationships of everybody in your contacts and like all the data that's on your phone and can infer from that, then the model knows the name of Joanna's wife, the name of Joanna's kids, all of their connections and can use that to say, oh, I'm Joanna's phone, they're talking about your wife is talking about your son here, but right now it's just not there, it's just not hooked up. So it's good on Apple for turning some of this stuff off and making warnings, but at the same time, like how do you fix it? Like turning off temporarily, turning off the news summary is one thing, but like it's not, like they can tinker with a couple of lines of code of the LLM and say, okay, fixed it, turn it back on. This is a larger problem. That kind of dates from the inception of this feature that they're going to have to address.

1:26:11 - Andy Ihnatko
Somehow. The thing is, apple and every other company is trying to do features like that. They really do have to as part of the planning phase they're going to have to have on the conference room. Here's how long we're going to have to take a bunch of lumps, because it really still is all about training data and as good as you build this model, as much as you test it internally, it's only going to get better when it starts seeing tens of millions of data points on a regular basis. At that point, eventually it becomes smarter and eventually becomes better.

1:26:43 - Leo Laporte
However, that first round or or first couple of rounds of users are gonna have some psychedelic experiences it's also the case that apple's trying to do this on device which is, uh, hampering it a little bit. I'm wearing, and I'm I'm trying, more and more of these devices. This is one that was announced at ces. I've ordered one that you might have seen advertised on tick tock called plod, but this is a microphone for it's bcomputer that's always recording and then sends me summaries. But it does another thing. I have that up on my screen it listens and then it generates facts and asks you to verify them. I'm gonna, I'm gonna. I don't know what this is going to say. So this is potentially embarrassing, but let me review. I am associated with the speaker. Labor piano no, I, no. No, that's discard that one. I've seen heart perform at least 100 times. No, that that's lisa. Uh, I, like sole proprietors, I do. I prefer making connections for brain stimulation. We were playing the new york times connection game.

It's important not to get absorbed in negativity to maintain mental peace, men at peace. I think this was from today's conversation. Uh, et cetera, et cetera. So it's got facts about me, my hobbies, my health, my wife, and then it does do summaries. So, for instance, this is a summary from today's show.

Leo discusses the complexities and frustrations of managing multiple devices and applications, particularly focusing on the ongoing issues and the sheen renaming. That was before the show started. Oh, it's changed again while discussing the implications of TiKTok's potential ban and the evolving dynamics of social media platforms. Um, it gives you summaries, it gives you a to-do list, um, some of which is spurious but you can throw those out, but some of it's not, and basically all of this is generated by an ai and, yeah, you I mean anybody who's using this is going to understand there's going to be bad stuff in there, but I do think this is the future and I think that apple is being frankly lapped by these companies, um, that are taking a little bit more chances well, I love this idea of something that is it, goes with me everywhere, remembers what I promised to do, reminds me of what I did, gives me notes I think it's very handy and I would do that with apple.

1:28:58 - Alex Lindsay
I don't know if I would do that with anyone else. Like that's the thing well, that's the problem.

1:29:02 - Leo Laporte
So, um, it doesn't work very well with apple because they're private well, yeah, but they're.

1:29:08 - Jason Snell
I think they could do it pretty well, but they're like struggling to just get the basics up and running now. I do think that that is their plan is they've got they got to watch on many risks.

They've got a phone in everybody's pocket and they're going to have all your personal context from all the data that you have on your phone and, although that is a disadvantage in turn of in terms of the processing power, those iphones are pretty powerful and they get the advantage of all of your personal data that never leaves your device and like I think that's the dream. The problem is like they're. They're still struggling to execute the basics right now because they got a late start, but I do think that that's what they want to do look at.

1:29:42 - Leo Laporte
This is a to-do list. Cautiously check and clean the hallway for any more potential hazards, like the turd found, like the cat. Uh, turn off the heater before going to bed. Research the competition between vegas and local casinos. These are all extracted from conversations um which I think it's very interesting. Uh, yes, this is I. I have. God knows where this is going.

1:30:07 - Andy Ihnatko
Uh, probably to China, you know, I don't know but this is why, like companies like Apple and Google, have a big advantage over open AI and Facebook and the others, because they have the ability to put those features where they're of the most used like actually embedded into your own devices and the tools that you use every single day. You don't have to leave your workflow or what you're doing in order to tab over to a chatbot or a different app. In order to get this done. It can actually be well integrated. Apple is definitely behind, pretty far behind.

It's unnecessary for people to write, oh no, they're not behind. They've been doing AI for years. No, they are behind. For this, it's perfectly fine to acknowledge that they're behind, but the thing is, look at the list of all the different companies that were behind for years and years and years. Once you catch up, that's forever. They forget that if you still survive and if you wind up with a good product at the other end of that process, people don't care that you were two or three years behind. Android users don't care that Apple was first with an iPhone-like multi-touch interface and it took Android a number of years to solve a whole bunch of very, very fundamental problems. But they got there and now it doesn't matter that they were behind, because people can walk in and get a finished, polished product.

Apple is in the same position. Yeah, they're going to have. It's going to be hard, hard rowing for for a few years at least, but they're going to get there and they have a lot of really great things to offer. So let's come back in five years time and acknowledge that everybody at Apple is working really, really, really hard and they acknowledge that. Yeah, we are on the back foot right now, but this is a we're we're. We're trying to get someplace. We're not trying to win this leg of the race.

1:31:53 - Leo Laporte
All right, let's take a little break when we come back. Finally, we're going to talk about severance. Leo had a busy and productive day yesterday, juggling various tasks and conversations. He spent time practicing piano, working on a coding project with Lisa that's not true and cooking a delicious meal that is true. He also addressed several household issues, including arranging for a contract. So this is all relatively accurate, as long as you understand that it's an AI. The overall atmosphere of Leo's day was a mix of lightheartedness and productivity. There were moments of humor, such as the discovery of a quote turd in the hallway, and moments of frustration, particularly regarding the ongoing issues with the house's railing system and the lack of responsiveness from the builder. This is true. Despite these challenges, leo maintained a positive attitude and enjoyed connecting with Lisa and friends. The day was filled with the sounds of piano music yeah, I practiced for like three hours lively conversation and the aroma I don't know how it knew how good that smelled the aroma of home-cooked food, creating a warm and inviting ambience.

1:32:56 - Andy Ihnatko
It's a little froofy, makes me happy though just just keep in mind that that kind of summary and extracting useful information can be done from any device made by anybody that has a microphone on it.

1:33:08 - Leo Laporte
Including the Apple Watch.

1:33:09 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, that's why it's so interesting. You're making me remember that I have a device for interviews and certain other situations, where it's a Sony stereo little, tiny, tiny little digital micro recorder that stores on micro SD cards and the thing is at its lowest setting. It can record for 20 hours straight. I can just. There are times when I'm going to be in and out of conversations all day long. I want to remember something. I will just simply keep it clipped to a pocket and running all day long. And you're making me think that, gee, it would be interesting to, as a workflow, at the end of the day, un unclip this, plug it into usb, not only be charging it, but also have that file handed over to a transcription service and then be able to plumb that those documents for information later on.

1:33:59 - Leo Laporte
I have friends who are doing that, and that's what the plod is going to do. That's kind of what this does. This is this. By the way, this is only 40 bucks and there's no subscription, because it's like a developer thing, but, uh, I'm sure there will be. There will be a cost to all of these, a monthly cost, uh, and, and a cost to the health of the planet.

1:34:18 - Alex Lindsay
But obviously cost. I mean, you know, like it just you know what.

1:34:22 - Leo Laporte
So this is why I'm the canary in the coal mine, because I'm on the air all the time. There's no secrets, so I don't care. I don't care, but you're right. I mean, a lot of people care. Most people should care, but, uh, I'm willing to take the chance. The plod uses uh for chat, gpt 4-0 and sonnet and it says it encrypts the data to them and encrypts the result back. They're making an effort, although it is uh, I think it's a hong kong company. So, uh, you know, all bets are off, but I don't see. This is why tick tock didn't bother me. What? What are the chinese going to do about me finding a turd in the hallway? Nothing, by the way, I did?

1:35:00 - Andy Ihnatko
I did add turd in the hallway to the show title list I know you, you're not going to pick it, but I just want to make sure that was in the mix somewhere.

1:35:07 - Leo Laporte
You're watching MacBreak Weekly Andy Ihnatko, Alex Lindsay, Jason Snell we're so glad you're here. And if you're glad you're here, I'd like to invite you to join the club. We do this for you, we do this for us because it's a great way for us to hang out with our buds. But we also and I think this is true of every single show we do we try to illuminate what's going on in the world around us and as the world gets crazier and new technologies come online that are going to change everything, I think there's some importance to what we're doing. We want to keep doing it.

Advertising is up and down. It is sometimes good, sometimes not. It is usually not enough to maintain the operation, but fortunately, we have this great club and 12,000, 13,000 people who are supporting us and helping us stay on the air, and I'd like to invite you to join that group. Right now, it's only about 5% of our revenue. I'd love to get it higher. Maybe you could help. It's only $7 a month. You get lots of benefits. There's ad-free versions of all the shows's love to get it higher. Maybe you could help. It's only seven dollars a month. You get lots of benefits. There's ad free versions of all the shows. You all also get access to our fabulous club twit discord, which is where all the smart people hang out uh, talking not just about the shows as they're going on, but everything, every subject under the sun. I mean this is the ultimate geek hangout. You also get special shows that we only put out for the club.

For instance, home Theater Geeks Live is coming up February 3rd. iOS Today Live February 4th We've got a photo time February 6th. Micah is doing his crafting corner every month. Just did that. Stacy's Book Club is coming up. I wonder, did we finally settle? Settle on a book? It looks like orbital. No, oh, there was a sudden, sudden turnaround and we're going to be reading those beyond the wall. But Micaiah Johnson as our book for Stacey's book club. It's done right, that was, or people were, worried. Orbital was. It was close 39 to 37. That was a. That's a good vote, all right. So that's the kind of thing we do in the club. It's a lot of fun. Seven bucks a month.

Find out more at twit.tv/clubtwit. Thank you very much to all of our club members. You make this all possible, including streaming. Used to be on eight different platforms, only on seven because we don't stream on tick tock anymore. Oh, we're on TikTok. Oh, you got it. We couldn't get on it the other day. Uh, oh good, so we figured it out. So, uh good, hello tick tock. So we're on Twitcc, Youtube. Uh, discord, of course, for our club members. x.com, Kick, Linkedin, Facebook and, yes, on TiKTok we're streaming. How many, john ashley, do you have a overall number of how many people are watching on all those different streams? Um, do we have that?

1:37:55 - John Ashley
we have to go to each stream individually uh, roughly, maybe over 1000. I don't have a number on TiKTok yeah, with 749 on Youtube alone.

1:38:03 - Leo Laporte
So that's nice, thank you, but of course most people don't have a number on tick tock. Yeah, it was 749 on Youtube alone, so that's nice, thank you, but of course most people don't watch live. They watch after the fact. But whatever you watch, we're glad you're here, thank you. All right, have you seen uh severance yet, Andy?

1:38:17 - Andy Ihnatko
I have not. I do want to it's, I just haven't. I, I'm not. I'm not an apple tv plus subscriber. It's on the, it's on the, when the new season of Ted Lasso comes back on and I basically sign up for however long it takes to get through. That. That's on. The Severance is on the list of things I want to see, but I'm okay with spoilers. I do know what it's about.

1:38:34 - Leo Laporte
Season one was three years ago. Three years ago, yeah. So I had to rewatch the last episode to even remember what was going on.

1:38:41 - Jason Snell
We're rewatching the whole season. I think it's worth it actually and it is In fact. I don't do a lot of rewatches, but the great thing about rewatching Severance season one is you can see them laying all the groundwork for the things that they pull out in the last couple of episodes.

You can see all the foreshadowing that you now understand what they're trying to foreshadow. It also makes it honestly. Honestly, the pace is kind of weird and dreamlike and at the time I was like, what is this show doing? And having watched it once, watching it again, I was like, oh yeah, it's separate, right like I get it now. I get what they're trying to do and I want to be like fully engaged before, uh, before stiller, creator, showrunner and director says they do have an end.

1:39:24 - Leo Laporte
They do know how it's going to end. This is not lost, thank God. Right, and I think there's a little bit of a Easter egg, because the name of the production company changed from season one to season two and it is now something like fifth season or something, so I think they're subtly telling us there will be five seasons. Anyway, season two has debuted. According to Deadline, the series has made more than $200 million for Apple.

1:39:53 - Jason Snell
Yeah, this is using Parrot Analytics demand forecast, which is really interesting. I used to do a podcast I still do it called Downstream, but my co-host used to be Julia Alexander, who worked at Parrot. She has gone on to work for Disney and so she can't podcast anymore, which is sad. But Parrot really does this interesting research where they're trying to measure what demand there is for various streaming services?

1:40:17 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, because nobody pays for severance individually, right? So I don't know how you would get a number.

1:40:23 - Jason Snell
So they use demand for for content as a proxy to determine again. Is it made up a little bit, but I think that there's truth behind it, that this is sort of like what value does apple glean from a given show or any streamer? Because it's complicated, right. It's not just ratings, it's also do you bring new people to the platform, or is it just the same people who already pay? Are you preventing people from churning and going somewhere else? Or or it's complicated.

1:40:48 - Leo Laporte
It's also growing it. Uh, Barrett says that. Uh, EMEA and Latin American regions have seen the greatest contribution from severance. Yeah, so it's one of those things.

1:40:57 - Jason Snell
I saw a piece somewhere, I don't remember where, this week where somebody was complaining like severance, is this great show and you, it's on. It shouldn't be on apple tv because nobody's seen it. It's like well, that's the point, dude. That's the point is they want to.

This is how an apple like they put all the cast in a glass box in grand central last week wild uh, and like this is this is an opportunity for one of these shows that really takes hold and you're and you're going to get a second season, and it's also been while for Apple to make that kind of re-engagement of like this is a must-see show and you should sign up for Apple TV Plus to get with the program. And like this is their moment to do that with Severance, and I hope it goes well for them because it's a spectacularly good show.

1:41:36 - Andy Ihnatko
It really is, and when was the last time you saw that kind of like intensely flashy, expensive promotion for a streaming show? Usually like it's not, as though like.

1:41:47 - Jason Snell
Netflix and Hulu.

1:41:48 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, I mean it's not as though they've just let something just find its own audience, but it's like that's the sort of stuff that you're used to like networks doing in the good old days.

1:41:56 - Leo Laporte
I wish I had been in Manhattan for this. This is so interesting.

1:42:00 - Jason Snell
There's a blog post that I put in the show notes from somebody who was there. Who comes to. There's a blog post that I put in the show notes from somebody who was there.

1:42:05 - Alex Lindsay
It's so great and it was so.

1:42:06 - Jason Snell
It was. It started out and it was not the stars of the show. But then the stars of the show went in and for several hours they were doing the macro data refinement, which is this nonsense work that they do on the vintage computer terminals with, uh, with like these weird keyboards and milkshake, yeah, yeah. They're all in there. Oh, mrs cobell, they're all.

Yeah, they all showed up it was pretty wild but I also love the idea that if you went there at like one at like 10 am, there were drones in there doing the macro data refinement who you've never seen before, and then and then the cast showed up which was pretty cool, man, I would have hung out all day.

1:42:44 - Leo Laporte
That's just the coolest thing I ever saw.

1:42:46 - Jason Snell
Yeah, yeah, it's a great show it is. I mean, what's funny about it is that Apple is definitely one of the references that they're making, because it's these long white hallways and it feels very Apple-like and it's a tech company and it's a kind of a cult. And it's a kind of a cult and, but it's also like and we can laugh about that. But really, I think it's more broadly about corporate work culture and how weird corporate culture can be and how weird oh it's corporations are in terms of wanting you to behave your work life as if it was separate from your rest of your life.

1:43:22 - Leo Laporte
It's a commentary on work from home? I don't know if it's intentional, but we are now, and you know, one of the things, uh, the president did yesterday is order all government employees back to the office, and and companies all over the country are doing this. Um, you know, wow, I mean this is, we're all getting into this weird anomie of the of the office.

1:43:44 - Jason Snell
Oh, yeah, so that's that's what I mean. That's what severance is all about, plus I mean it is it's about lots of stuff, but it's just it's such a rich vein and and it's weird and creepy and uh funny. I mean it is funny it is strange and funny in theory it yeah, I don't know is it?

I'm not sure I would call it a comedy, but it is funny and also dramatic, um, and it's great. So so I love that apple is putting their their uh marketing effort behind this. Sometimes people complain that nobody knows about apple tv and nobody knows about the shows. This is a good example where apple is choosing to strike when the iron is hot. All the people are on talk shows and stuff, and they did this big stunt at Grand Central and it's great, because this is how do you get people to watch Apple TV. You get them through the content and through the debuts of shows that are really well thought of and have fans and are trying to build the word of mouth, and this is how you do it. So I'm glad to see them doing it for a very worthy show.

1:44:42 - Alex Lindsay
And I have have to admit, when there was rumors that apple was trying to like cut back on the cost, I was like why would you do that? Like, the whole thing about this is that it just oozes.

1:44:50 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, production value, you know, like like you know yes and no, I mean, uh, they're trapped in a cube farm. Basically, it's like the first scene of the first episode of season two is a very long sequence which apparently took days to shoot. Uh, mark s running down identical hallways, yeah, and apparently they used it. I would love you to look into this, Alex, and you got to watch it, because they used a camera crane. They use a robotic arm. He was on a treadmill for some of it because they want to make it look like he's running down this kind of infinite series of hallways over.

1:45:21 - Jason Snell
They had to shoot in so many different setups that it took they, they did. It didn't take five months to shoot, but it there are shots in that opening scene that were gathered over the course of five months because of all the different setups they needed to do to get that cinematic thing. I will just say most of the reports about apple wanting to spend less money are about them spending less money on movies, not on tv shows. Um, and, and that's good you to pick your spots.

Not every show needs to cost a fortune, but like, if you've got a show like this that looks like it's kind of popping, put that money in there and I think, in general, apple has, except for the ones that they bought.

1:45:55 - Alex Lindsay
I mean, you can, as someone who does production, you can just look at the frame and go, wow, they spent a lot of money on that frame, and I think that I think movies are a waste of money at this point. You know, like theatrical releases are like I don't, all I watch are series at home. Like I don't watch, like I'm like, oh, do I have to commit to like two and a half hours at one time. Like it's not, like my family doesn't watch movies very often, and so I think that I think that that I think Apple should of the streamers are moving away from features because they, you know, the problem is is that they try to offset the cost by releasing the theaters and then everyone says it was a failure. They're like anything. Any money that came in for something we're building for our streaming platform is free money, like it's free money and free pr? Um, but that's not how all the press.

1:46:38 - Leo Laporte
Parrot says that ted lasso has made them 600 million dollars. I wouldn't yeah, I wouldn't be surprised. That's movie money, right.

1:46:45 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, and I think that again it's. I think that I think you're going to see a continual movement towards more and more money going towards more and more series. But you know, because I think that that's how you hang on to people is you have a bunch of episodes that are. You know that are there not one one moment that you're shooting and trying to hit? And I think that these are, and when you talk to writers, they much prefer working on series. Number one is it's more work. Number two is it is it. You can flesh out the characters so much more effectively over eight series that might go into three or four seasons than you're ever going to get in two and a half hours, and so so I think that it's, uh, it's good and I hopefully that's, that's the direction they're going uh, I recommend uh vanity fair piece, uh, with ben stiller, um, and uh, mark s, whose real name is adam scott.

1:47:30 - Leo Laporte
I will always be our mark s to me, uh, describing how they shot this. They did not use want to use a steadicam because it would have been too difficult, for I bet your brother could have done it, Alex, but too difficult for the operator to keep up with mark's escalating pace of running. And Scott said he knew he'd be filming a portion of the high intensity scene whenever he was asked which flavor of Gatorade? It's a little bit, you know it's. This is what it really is In a nutshell is severance. It's challenging to the viewer, it's not. It's like this is going on a long time. It's not completely comfortable. Yeah, and that's the way the whole show is. It's not completely comfortable.

1:48:09 - Andy Ihnatko
Um, I get the one of the one of the things that that attracts me to it again. I haven't seen it yet but, like every time I talk to somebody who's seen it, every time I see some more piece of information about. It reminds me of the prisoner, where it's like creepy, you know that something big as afoot. There's no covenant between you yourself and the creator that they're going to explain what's afoot, but they're going to use that eerie feeling and that sense of disconnection to really land some big points. So, as I said, ted Lasso next season. I might actually watch Severance first.

1:48:43 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, Just be prepared. It's just be prepared. It's not a completely, it's not a show where you go. I'm loving this. It's difficult, it's a little challenging. To be honest, it's a little weird.

1:48:52 - Jason Snell
Well, you can toggle in with Bad Monkey and Silo and Shrinking and like you can program like a little network block with.

1:49:01 - Leo Laporte
There's so much good stuff on apple tv plus, if you would ask me bad monkey bad monkey is apple tv plus with vince vaughn it's so good, it is good, it's so good. And that kind of garbage for Alex, yeah, a little something, something.

1:49:17 - Alex Lindsay
I I think that they're they're right now as a group. I mean, there's definitely a couple things that I'm watching in other places, um, but as a group, the vast majority of what I watch if I'm not watching youtube is apple tv, like it's. It is really the best content out there right now. Um, and I did not like when if we go back to old mac breaks, when they came out, I was like this is all garbage, like all these.

1:49:37 - Leo Laporte
All these movies are garbage and uh, and I've, they've come around and I think silo is one of my favorite shows yeah, I got a little uh tired of it after the first season when we stopped watching because it was a little claustrophobic. But everybody's saying season two is oh my gosh, so good, incredible, yeah, yeah, apple, it's funny because Apple it was a slow burn for Apple.

1:49:57 - Jason Snell
Yeah, they didn't. Well, they had nothing and they started with nothing. Now they have a little catalog, right like that helps to have a catalog netflix had nothing like.

When you look at the early netflix stuff, it was um, it's okay, you know like it was and they got better house had some movies, though, right like apple, launched with almost nothing at all, but now they've got a catalog and the system and it's built up and I just again, I could never have predicted there would be so much good original material on apple tv plus like that. The executives there have done a very good job in programming, at least to me I mean thanks guys, and I know our worry was it was all going to be it was.

1:50:34 - Alex Lindsay
It was all going to be g and pg, and that is not what apple no, no, it is like dystopian world, you know, like it's modern, high quality, yeah streaming tv.

1:50:45 - Leo Laporte
I don't know if they'll make a commercial out of it, but Tim Cook says the Apple Watch saved his father's life.

1:50:53 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, that came out of a podcast interview where his late father was living alone. Fell over his watch gave an alert. The usual story the watch gave an alert. He was not responsive when emergency services came to his door. When they didn't get a response, they knocked the door down and got him help. And the punchline is that at the end of the episode he said that at the end of this incident, his dad was more upset about the broken down door than about the fact that he almost than being really impressed with the fact that what the Apple watch had done that's got to be a good feeling, though, to know that you created and manufactured and marketed something that actually saved your parents life but yeah, that's, and that's that's why I skipped over.

I skipped over that a couple times. Okay, another, another, another case of okay, that's great, but we've seen this a hundred times before. But this was from Tim. But also I love to imagine having had experiences with my father that were typical for his generation. Just the idea of, well, I guess your son's company's products are pretty good, and then him just tearing it off somewhere Because fathers and sons have weird relationships. It's like, oh yeah, I guess, but god dang, why? What? What about my door son?

1:52:11 - Leo Laporte
to get my door the information which is one of my favorite subscriptions. It's expensive but it's well worth it. Of course paris martin know from the information is on this week in uh google broken interesting story nick winfield said he revealed that an unnamed former Apple exec tried to persuade Steve Jobs to buy Sonos. Jobs wasn't interested. In fact he wanted to sue him. John Gruber had a theory it might be Scott Forstall or maybe Tony Fidel. He reached out to Fidel and Fidel said yeah, it was me, gruber writes. I asked Tony Fidel. He confirmed to me it was him, saying it was back in the earliest days of Sonos, when Sonos was set to deal to be with a device featuring an obviously iPod-like scroll wheel for input. Oh, I don't remember that.

1:53:02 - Andy Ihnatko
Oh yeah, no, it was essentially like a a living room living room coffee table controller. That was essentially an ipod cut in half, with the scroll wheel on one side of the screen on the other side. That's why you can understand why steve was a little bit salty about that.

1:53:18 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah, uh he, fidel said no, no, we should buy him and try. I wish they had. Now, of course, sonos is just falling apart. They've lost their ceo fired.

1:53:29 - Alex Lindsay
Uh, they lost their chief product officer fired because I just have to say, just a little late, like yeah, their screw up was a long time ago, like this was I don't know years ago, wasn't it? I mean that they did that.

1:53:41 - Leo Laporte
They really threw us all into the they switched from series one to series made all the Series 1 stuff incompatible. The real final straw for me was when they released a really terrible app last year that was unusable and they tried to fix it. They tried to fix it and never could. I'm stuck with a lot of Sonos gear and it works all right. But Jobs' response when Fidel said you've got to buy this thing is no one wants what they're selling. That was wrong. Sonos for a period of time was very successful. Not so much anymore. Everybody's doing it. That's part of the the reason. Oh, there it is, there's the uh, there's the device. I had the base station, the sonos connect, but I didn't have this remote. Yeah, we had sonos's all over the old studio, john. John got to take them, uh, with him. And how many speakers do you have, john?

he's got like 20 20 speakers, all the old, old ones, and I guess if you stick with the old ones, you're all right. You know, it's just that it didn't work with the new software. If you stick with the old ones, you're all right. You know, it's just that it didn't work with the new software. Finally, uh, apple wants to help la and wants to make it easy as they have done in the past with this natural disasters to donate to the red cross. Um, there's a red cross donation flow in the app store and the apple music apps. So many people who listen to this show, so many people who've been on this show, have lost their homes, including Kevin Rose. Uh, apple, uh, has donated money, but of course, they don't say how much, which is, I think, even more respectable. So you can, you can do that, uh, in fact, you can do it right in the app store if you want to donate um, they're also going to be streaming that, uh, that benefit concert.

1:55:25 - Andy Ihnatko
That's going to be something are they streaming that?

1:55:27 - Leo Laporte
oh good, oh good, that's gonna be something. Can't wait to see that. All right, let's take a final break and then, uh, if you will, your picks of the week coming up. You're watching mac break weekly andy inaco, Alex lindsay and Jason snell break weekly andy inaco, Alex lindsey and Jason snell. Time for the picks of the week. Who wants to go?

1:55:50 - Jason Snell
first, Jason, why don't you start this time? All right, I got a weird one, uh, but a good one. It is yet another app that is using ai transcription models and you might be saying to yourself oh, it's so boring. Oh, it's another app with whisper in the name. This is called super whisper. Super well, it's got to be better. Wow, here's what I like about super whisper. Super whisper it's on mac. It's another app with Whisper in the name.

1:56:04 - Leo Laporte
This is called Super Whisper, super Whisper. Oh, it's got to be better Wow.

1:56:05 - Jason Snell
Here's what I like about Super Whisper. Super Whisper, it's on Mac, it's also on iOS. On the Mac, though, it does some really interesting things based on context. So, yes, you hold down a keyboard command and you dictate to it and it puts your dictation. And why is this not just using the stuff, the system? What Super Whisper does that's interesting is it's got lots of models you can try, but it also does post-processing of your dictation model by a LLM, which is interesting to clean up the garbage, and it's all contextual.

And this is my favorite feature of it so far. I've just been trying it out the last week or two. If you're in a particular app, it can change what it does to the processing of whatever you said. So if you're in mail, you can have it transcribe what you say and it passes it on to the LLM for checking and formatting with special instructions to say this is going to be an email. You can have a different set of instructions if you're in notes and it automatically changes. Have a different set of instructions if you're in notes and it automatically changes. And the best part is, you can set up custom contexts per app or per website, even for your web browser, and, if you want, you can give the instructions. So you can say to the LLM basically format this as a blog post for a website and give it all the instructions it needs, and it creates this really interesting cascade where you are transcribing, you are passing it automatically to an LLM for proper formatting, the LLM knows the context in which you are giving the transcription and then it outputs the text and sends it back to you to check.

I really like the idea of adding all of that extra sauce on top of the bare LLMs, because, yeah, whisper's great and it generates okay transcripts, but they're not perfect. And LLMs are good and useful, but they have weirdnesses too, and it would sure help if I could give custom instructions about what I'm doing, and it can on the Mac. It knows the context of what you're doing. I think that's a really smart idea. I think the results from this are pretty good and I think it points the way toward what this sort of stuff might look like in the future, where you've got multiple layers that are. Some of them are LLMs, some of them are other AI-based things, some of them are human suggestions based on particular contexts that are being inferred from what you're doing on your device and they build in a stack to the point where, instead of just getting a dumb transcript out, you get something that knows exactly what context. You want to transcribe the words that are coming out of your mouth. I think it's really smart.

Is it based on OpenAI's Whisper mouth.

I think it's really smart Is it based on OpenAI's Whisper? Whisper is the model that is doing the transcription and you can choose the various different Whisper models. There are ones that are faster and slower but more accurate, and all that. And then on top of that, and again, it's free to try, but there's a pro version that they want you to pay for. Actually, if you pay for the pro version, it'll process a lot of stuff using GPT and you don't have to be a gpt subscriber because it's actually covered under their subscription that's cheaper than subscribing to chat gpt, yeah, you can only use it for this, right, you can't use it for everything.

But they're kind of like lumping it together. Really interesting again. I wouldn't say go out and spend you know a lifetime on it.

1:59:19 - Leo Laporte
I bought a month to try it out, 50 bucks forever for lifetime, it's 84 a year, or just eight dollars and 50 cents to try it out, for a month.

1:59:23 - Jason Snell
To try it out 50 bucks forever, for a lifetime it's 84 a year, or just eight dollars and 50 cents to try it out for a month, which is what I'm doing.

I think monthly is probably this I think so, because this stuff is changing so fast. But what I like about this is this developer is thinking not can I slap this open, ai uh, a whisper engine in an app and call it a day? But like, what could I do if I layered all this stuff and use some good mac stuff to uh, to put context inference on top of it? And, yes, it also works on on the iphone very, very interesting smart, smart, like contextual.

We've been talking a lot about contextual ai and like. This is one of the first examples where I thought oh, the fact that it's going to process it differently if I'm in my mail program than if I'm in bb. Edit, that's really interesting. Right, like I like that.

2:00:06 - Leo Laporte
That's an interesting idea yeah, I, I'm telling you, this year is going to be a wild year for ai. I really think so.

I think so we are uh re positioning the wednesday show this week in google. I kind of lost interest in google. To be honest, I don't think it's worth a whole show. We're going to call it Intelligent Machines and we're going to focus on what's happening in AI. Jeff and Paris have a big interest in that I certainly do and we're going to get people like these people on the show to talk about what they're doing.

2:00:40 - Jason Snell
I think it's going to be really interesting it starts.

2:00:41 - Alex Lindsay
February 5th.

2:00:47 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah, I'm going to check this out. I I am very excited. I don't know exactly how it's gonna shape up, but it's wild. Alex lindsay pick of the week I got a new keyboard.

2:00:53 - Alex Lindsay
It's more of the same, but it's still great I could buy new keyboards every month.

2:00:57 - Leo Laporte
I swear to god, it's just I got these I've got.

2:01:00 - Alex Lindsay
So here's what happened was I was sitting, I was, uh, we were doing a production a couple years ago and and and the EVS operator, the EVS operator, they do the playback. If you watch it like a replay of a football play or something like that, there's an EVS operator and they kind of she. She came in and she just pulled out this little, pulled out this little case and opened up her little keyboard and set it down and I was like it's like a pool professional and I looked at it. I was like what?

2:01:23 - Leo Laporte
is that it looks like such a pretty keyboard.

2:01:25 - Alex Lindsay
It's my snooker boy and I and I and I like I like I said, can I type on it, can I? And she's like, yeah, sure, I typed a little bit and I was like it's really nice, and so I put it off for a little while. I bought one and that's the one I'm using here, and then I got a smaller one for the road. So I'm doing a bunch of stuff that I'm on sites doing stuff, and I needed to have a keyboard that needs to be able to do wireless, needs to be able to connect via USB-C if I need to, and so I've gotten hooked on these NuPhy's. These are N-U-P-H-Y, and I just got the Air 75, which is the new one that they have out there, and it's just such a nice keyboard. There's nothing crazy about it. It's built really well.

I never thought I would be a key color. You know, all these cut, all these keys have different. Um, oh, it folds up, yeah. So I got that little case for it and and so I can just throw it in my backpack. Um, you know, they come in different colors and you can get. I have a dark, the darker. Which switch did you get? Um, I got the red switches. So this is the clickety clackety. No, they're softer, they're soft switches. I have a, so the one that I have in front of me is the moss, and now that I got the red one, I was like I thought I would never be a switch person, like I was never gonna be like, oh, you don't, you haven't used the red switches yet. But now, now I am that way, I'm like, oh, you've never used the red switches. Yeah, so the red switches are, I feel, much more pleasing to type on. So now, now I'm looking at my keyboard I have now and I'm like I don't know if I want to type on the last anymore.

You know the red ones are better so, um, so you know it's a geeky I will admit it's a pretty geeky uh collection of keyboards and switches and things, but, um, they are really well made. I don't like to say and so and, uh, and, and it's kind of become my. I just thought I'd bring it up because it's become kind of my standard now, like if I'm going to get a keyboard, I'm this is, these are the ones that I've gotten kind of hooked on nice they say.

2:03:11 - Andy Ihnatko
they say never cheap out on shoes, and I feel the same way about keyboards because, for the same reason that your your hands are always on it, you're using it like hours and hours a day and the difference between an okay keyboard and a really great one is rarely that much money and they generally last longer.

2:03:28 - Alex Lindsay
A couple of weeks of lattes if you're out, if you work, if you work out of that exactly yeah.

2:03:32 - Leo Laporte
Very nice New fee N-U-P-H-Ycom and he likes the Air 75 E2. Andy Ihnatko pick of the week. Indianako pick of the week.

2:03:41 - Andy Ihnatko
I've got a couple of picks. I was very, very late to the Letterboxd bandwagon. Letterboxd L-E-T-T-E-R-B-O-X-Dcom is like a social network for people who watch movies. It's kind of like that book review site where you can log all the books you read, all the books you didn't read, like Goodreads or something yeah.

Yeah, and I came to it late because last week I came across a Letterboxd user who wrote a review of Wicked. That was just amazing. It was like people have been complaining about the length of the movie People have been complaining about, like, some of the background characters, this, that and the other. This guy was just. It was not with a newspaper or anything, he was just. All he was writing about was the cinematography. It's nuts. Why is the background so well lit? It's nuts.

And every single thing you could have to do with lighting and setting up a shot he was basically unburdening his pain about in a very, very rational way, and some of this other stuff is like I could tell that he was someone who would be worth following because he mentioned another movie, saying, well, why is this in CinemaScope? And one of the comments below is ah, win the drinking game. He said why is this in CinemaScope? So that's when you take a drink and that's when I kind of got into like it's a good place to find, not just recommendations. Schrader's review of blue velvet here. That's wild. It was a. It was someone pasted in a comment that he made for I think.

2:05:17 - Leo Laporte
Oh, okay, he didn't write it, somebody pasted it in, okay but there's, yeah, it's.

2:05:21 - Andy Ihnatko
I found myself getting kind of sucked into it because, yeah, there it's. When you go to, there are other services like that or you go to Rotten Tomatoes to have a look at a roundup of reviews. You can go to IMDb to see people falsely claim that an explosion on set was actually an improvisation. Okay, but this is nice in that it does seem to be all about, like, individual people just saying what they feel about certain movies. And yeah, a lot of it is like, oh my God, this is the greatest movie ever and it looks like it was the first movie they must have ever seen.

But nonetheless, it's sincere and it's a good way to find out about movies that I've never heard about. That nonetheless have a lot of people talking good things about. It's free. Again, it's a social media app, so obviously they're going to try to monetize your wish list and, hey, I've seen this movie and your social connections, but I haven't been run out of town by it yet and so I signed up for it. I'm trying not to get too sucked into it, but I'm finding that when I'm interested in a movie but not really convinced about it, looking on the site for reviews is usually something that will. Either I feel as though I've had the entire experience of watching this movie from this person's reaction to it or, wow, this person really talks about it in a way that really gets to the heart of why I like movies, so it seems to be worth my time so far.

2:06:41 - Leo Laporte
I think I should join. I like this.

2:06:44 - Andy Ihnatko
And there's a phone app. There are phone apps for iOS and Android, so if you want to use this while waiting for a bus or while standing at a movie line, that's fine too. Letterboxd no E. In the end the other thing is that I wanted to do. A little bit of self-promotion, a little bit of pride. We're doing episode 500 of our Google podcast for the Relayfm network, congratulationsm network, the material.

Wow, I've been doing. I've been. I've been on board since episode one. Flow joined in Florence. I on, who worked rights for Gizmodo, has been doing it for, I think, for the past 200, 250.

2:07:16 - Leo Laporte
I apologize for everything I said about Google. You know.

2:07:20 - Andy Ihnatko
I hand you the baton. That's okay. As I often say about other things, it's like it's not so much that I think that this topic is stupid and not worth talking about, so much as I believe that I would not do. I don't find the interest in it and I would not do a good job on it. Oh, you have to be interested as long as they keep making a mockery of do no harm. That's always, it's. There's always something to be, to be, to talk about.

2:07:52 - Leo Laporte
We have conversations July 2nd 2015. It's been a long, strange trip, Since there was just before the AI era.

2:08:02 - Jason Snell
With Yasmin, who was so good at it that Google hired her, Yep.

2:08:05 - Leo Laporte
Oh, really yeah she works.

2:08:08 - Jason Snell
They hired her to work on material design and like, yeah, that was quite a coup there. And Russell right.

2:08:16 - Leo Laporte
Russell.

2:08:17 - Jason Snell
Ivanovich Pocket Cast. So yeah, yep, wow, come a long way. Flo is great. Flo used to work with me at IDG.

2:08:25 - Leo Laporte
Oh, we love Flo and she's a great co-host. It's hysterical because nobody who's ever been on any of our shows has ever gone anywhere interesting. So that's good, that's an accomplishment, that's very good.

2:08:36 - Andy Ihnatko
It's because we're happy here. This gives us our chance to be ourselves.

2:08:51 - Leo Laporte
Many of the people who've been on this show, hosted the show, have been hired away by apple and youtube. And youtube, yeah, come to think of it, uh, it's, it's actually a problem. It's a springboard, it's an incubator. It's good for them, bad for me? Uh, no, actually not, because we found, I think, we have the perfect cast Jason snell. Uh, sixcolorscom. It's been how? When did you start on this show actually?

2:09:07 - Jason Snell
oh, it is what. Two years ago, yeah, something like that, when uh three years ago took off for uh youtube. Yeah, yeah, that's right, because uh you know thanks to really for for leaving well, we're really glad we could fill his seat with a.

2:09:21 - Leo Laporte
Uh, you know he's Pip. You're the Lou Gehrig of MacBreak Weekly. What's coming up on sixcolorscom? Anything, any podcast you want to plug? Anything exciting you want to mention?

2:09:32 - Jason Snell
Yeah oh, I looked it was middle of 22, so it's been two and a half years. You know Six Colors. We are working on the annual Apple report card, which should be out, probably next week sometime, as well as, of course, there will be some results at the end of the month. So it's going to be a bumper month later this month on Six Colors. People should check out what we've got going. We've always got something going on.

And on the podcast front, you know the incomparablecom has a lot of shows I do, including my Incomparable. Mothership is my pop culture podcast, and Total Party Kill is our D&D actual plays podcast, which is very popular. People love it and so, yeah, people should check those out. And the Incomparable Game Show, which is just silly and fun. And if you want a game show in your pod feed, that is a winner. It is always fun. I don't understand how you find time to do this. I got people. Now I got people. That's remarkable. It's really amazing. I got some very nice produce. Those shows total party kill and game show would not happen were it not for the fact that that I got people to produce them, because I couldn't produce them anymore, because yeah, I didn't have the time.

It's a lot of work, yeah uh, thank you, Jason.

2:10:34 - Leo Laporte
Great to have you here. Andy and Akko, when are you going to be on GBH next?

2:10:39 - Andy Ihnatko
uh, my February schedule hasn't been set yet, but it'll probably be the second Thursday in February, probably around 12 30. In any event, go to wgbhnewsorg to listen to last week's show and everything else I've done yay and otcocom coming soon, as soon as I get the bank stuff rolling out, I'm thinking about like just basically putting on hold the idea of monetizing it just to get it actually up and running, because I've been writing a lot of stuff that I'm disappointed that people aren't seeing right now.

2:11:05 - Leo Laporte
That's the Silicon Valley way, you know. Just gain users. You can figure out how to monetize later, exactly.

2:11:12 - Andy Ihnatko
Step two question mark step three profit.

2:11:15 - Leo Laporte
Thank you, Andy. And, of course, Mr Alex Lindsay, host of Office Hours Global. He works at 090.media. What's going on at office hours?

2:11:23 - Alex Lindsay
You know, we're answering questions every day, seven days a week.

2:11:28 - Leo Laporte
That's what we do. You kind of refocused huh, to be a Q&A thing.

2:11:30 - Alex Lindsay
You know, we started as a Q&A thing and then we started inviting people on for second hours and the problem was that it turns into 260 shows a year that were pre-pro and doing all the other things, and I was like I think that we wanted to refocus so that we're going to have kind of a less predictable. Now we do have people just jumping on every once in a while. So we've had folks from Shure, from YouTube, folks from you know, just jumping on for the first 15 minutes to talk about something. But I wanted to keep it a little bit more casual and kind of get back to our center and just be able to answer questions which has been great for me.

2:12:09 - Leo Laporte
So so, anyways. So I've got your business.

2:12:10 - Alex Lindsay
Monday your graphics. Tuesday your video. Thursday your foundation. Friday audio. On Wednesday the audio. The audio one especially is is there's some deep experts that that if you've got an audio question it, it people ask some pretty deep questions and they they handle. But every day we've got both generalists and specialists showing up and answering, answering questions and I'm still surprised that we get we fill up an hour every day for the last almost five years and we haven't missed a day yet.

2:12:34 - Leo Laporte
So youtube.com/officehoursglobal or go to office hours dot global on the web and you can actually uh, you know, go in there and ask them questions like that's where the questions come from you, the people yeah, you can vote on them too.

2:12:48 - Alex Lindsay
You can chat on them nice.

2:12:50 - Leo Laporte
Thank you, Alex, thank you andy, thank you, Jason, so great to have all of you here as well. We do mac break weekly tuesdays, 11 am, pacific 2 pm, eastern 1900, utc. As I mentioned, we stream it live every freaking where, including tick tock, yay, um. After the fact, though, of course, it's a podcast, so after the fact, you can download a copy of the audio or the video your choice from the website twit.tv/mbw. There's also a link there to the youtube channel, which is all video, but a great way to share clips, little pieces.

You want to get somebody watching Severance or something? You can just click that and send it to them. It's good, because not only do you look like a smart, intelligent, connected person. Your friend will say, oh, I gotta watch that show, and then we like that. After the fact, you can also subscribe in your favorite podcast client, and that's probably the easiest way to get the show, as they say, wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you to all of our club members to make this possible. Our producer, td John Ashley, do you edit today too? Oh, every time, every day. He's got work to do, so we're gonna we're gonna let him get it, get out there and start editing it.

Thank you, John Ashley, thank you, Alex, Andy, Jason. Thanks to all of you, and now it is my sad duty I hate having to do this to tell you get back to work, because break time is over.