MacBreak Weekly Episode 795 Transcript

Leo Laporte (00:00:00):
It's time for MacBreak Weekly Holiday Edition. <Laugh> well this can be holiday editions all month long. Rene Ritchie's here. Andy Ihnatko Mr. Alex Lindsay, lots to talk about including Apple suing Russia. Good luck on that one. The secret deal Apple made with Chinese authorities five years ago, still in effect, App Store Awards winners, and some speculation about what Apple's gonna release in 2022. Lots of great stuff coming up next on MacBreak Weekly.

New Speaker (00:00:34):
Podcasts you love, from people you trust. This is TWiT.

Leo Laporte (00:00:43):
This is MacBreak Weekly episode 795 recorded Tuesday, December 7th, 2021. The Double Isaac. This podcast is supported by AT&T it's 2021. There are self-driving cars, plant burgers and tourists and space. The least your phone could do is stream without lag. You need to get AT&T 5g. AT&T 5g is fast, reliable, and secure. It makes downloading entertainment, staying connected, and protecting your device easy. Make sure your phone service keeps up with what you need from it. Get AT&T 5g. It's not complicated. 5G requires a compatible plan may not be in your area. See att.com/5g for details. And by Udacity. Udacity offers online education that's geared toward people looking to take their technology to the next level. Get the in demand tech skills. You need to advance your career. Visit udacity.com/twit to learn more. And by Userway.org.

Leo Laporte (00:01:52):
Userway ensures your website is accessible, ADA compliant and helps your business avoid accessibility related lawsuits. The perfect way to showcase your brand's commitment to millions of people with disabilities. It's not only the right thing to do. It's also the law, go to userway.org/twit for 30% off Userway's AI powered accessibility solution. It's time for MacBreak Weekly. The show we cover the latest Apple news happy holidays. The December has come December 7th. The day that will live in infamy is, and we are about to gather together to celebrate with Rene Ritchie, youtube.com/reneritchie Bon. You know, there was no Christmas in sight and now it's just everywhere. Yeah. For those of you in the club at Club TWiT, I think there will be a highlight <laugh> of what's decorating the studio. The amazing, yeah. Burke, just like BU everything you got the Christmas bomb. It was great.

Leo Laporte (00:02:49):
He did. He did. I needed it. Santa threw up all over. I know. Also here, Andy Ihnatko whose childhood memories of a closet seem to have returned these very can't forget. It's a little weird, but okay. Hi, Andy good to see you from WGBH in Boston.

Andy Ihnatko (00:03:07):
It involves exotic Italian meats and cheeses. That's nothing to be mocked, sir. <Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:03:13):
Illegally smuggled apparently illegally, illegally fer.

Andy Ihnatko (00:03:19):
It's it's only illegal if you ask too many questions about it and, and we're not gonna ask many, we're not gonna ask those questions are we Leo?

Andy Ihnatko (00:03:25):
No, we're not. Thank you, Andy. And also with us, Mr. Alex, Lindsay from Office Hours, who's taking time off is 24 hour day to, to join us. It's great to have you.

Alex Lindsay (00:03:36):
I'm taking, I'm taking time off, but everyone else is still talking.

Leo Laporte (00:03:40):
Yeah. Office Hours never. Is it, is there any point in like at three in the morning or anything where there's just not nothing going on or is it, is it all around

Alex Lindsay (00:03:45):
The clock? So there are times when there will be like maybe 20 people in there and you see people kind of working away or, or they'll, they'll just be some, you know, you know, cameras turned off or whatever, but if you get in there and start asking questions, people just are turning the cameras on. Like, you know, I can start talking, you know, and it pretty up the time of the day, it just wakes up. Well, it's just that it's just that people are working and they're in the room. It's like the ultimate water cooler, you know, so people are just in the room hanging out and they're working and they don't feel like the need to talk. I mean, I would say about 80% of the time, there's a discussion going on or a lab or something else. We're starting to do these labs now for an hour where there was a Alex Gulner, Alex Forney Gulner.

Alex Lindsay (00:04:20):
He's probably one of the ex like top experts in Motion, Apple's Motion, in the world. And someone asked him something, he did like a little lab in after hours and suddenly I get all these discords like Alex Gulner. It, it was like, Morpheus is fighting Neo, you know, like, like Alex Gulner is showing us how to use Motion, you know, and suddenly like all these people like start piling in and, and and so to watch it. And so it, it kind of happens organically at the moment. And we schedule a couple of them. You know, we're doing some stuff with Isadora, which I've talked about in the past with learning Andy Carluccia. Who's probably one of the top experts in Isadora and someone from Isadora sits there and they try to teach me how to do Isadora. And I'm not very good. So I, so it just me looking like an idiot for a, for an hour, every three times a week of just like, okay, now what do I connect? And then I forget what they told me the last time, and then I try to do it again. And so, but I'm slowly getting it. Good job.

Leo Laporte (00:05:12):
Yeah. You know, this is a slow period. But so I'm sorry to say, well, I would prefer a MacBreak Weekly to discuss the latest Macintosh and things like that.

Alex Lindsay (00:05:24):
We always say that.

Leo Laporte (00:05:24):
Yeah. Well, no, we can find stuff to, but a lot of this this week is weird. It's gonna be like lawsuits and court battles. And yeah. For instance, Apple is, is, is suing Russia, which is a kind of a weird they're. It's a good one. They're yeah, they they're taking the market regulator to court. They brought action against Russia's federal anti monopoly service. Earlier this year, the FAS <laugh> issued a request to stop abuse in the market. That's a, that's a direct quote <laugh> from, from, by the way, this is the story. The only place I can find the story is in RT. So this is the Russian from the Russian point of view, it's like listening to the Pittsburgh Steelers football network.

Leo Laporte (00:06:09):
When you're, when you're watching the super bowl, you're gonna get a little bit of bias in favor of the home team Apple's seeking judicial review of the warning, which forces the iPhone maker. Oh, this is the one that allows app developers. Yeah. To tell, oh, this is no, no, it's not about Russian apps to tell customers about alternative payment options when using the App Store. So this is exactly what apple was ordered to do by the courts in the us, the warning delivered by a government body in August gave a September 30th deadline to resolve the issue. They didn't. So the country's antitrust watchdog launched proceedings for non-compliance, you're in trouble, Apple, big trouble. They had find Apple 906 million rubels earlier this year, which sounds like a lot of money, but it seems money for Apples, $12 million for violating competition principles, because the company placed restrictions up on a, a Russian app called Kiki safe kids.

Alex Lindsay (00:07:11):
That's 12 million US

Leo Laporte (00:07:13):
12 million US. Yeah. Not, not gonna anyway. So we'll see. I don't, you know, I don't know exactly how well Apple will do in a lawsuit in Russian courts.

Alex Lindsay (00:07:24):
Yeah. This is an uphill battle <laugh> for, for apple. Yeah. Like, and I think it's for regulators in the United States, it's an uphill battle for the regulators, but in Russia probably Apple's got,

Leo Laporte (00:07:32):
Gonna have to sort something out. They're gonna have to do something. Yeah.

Rene Ritchie (00:07:35):
And it's weird because it's like, this is an international problem and Apple's an international company, but every, every little nation within that interation is gonna try to come up with different rulings and different parameters and making a uni. We've had a decade of a unified app store basically, and now it's gonna be subject to all these different regulations and all these different parts famously the EU does things very differently than the US and just reconciling those two is a huge challenge, but there's also what's going on in China and we're Russia, which are very different, very large markets. And it's, I think it's gonna be tough for many businesses, not just Apple, trying to navigate international law and protectionism and freedom of speech versus what they see as cultural content laws. That's gonna be a huge mess going forward.

Leo Laporte (00:08:17):
Actually, Apple may have opened Pandora's box. We're learning now, just now from The Information that Apple made a 275 billion deal with the Chinese government, this was a secret deal, but Wayne mot the information reported that this morning they secretly signed an agreement years ago, estimated be worth 275 billion with Chinese officials, promising Apple would do its part to develop China's economy and technological pros through investments, business deals and worker training was a five year agreement in 2016. So I guess it's maybe now just at the end of its rolled over. Yeah. Yeah. But maybe it did roll over. Maybe the secret

Rene Ritchie (00:09:03):
Like we knew about the parts of it, like DD was very famous and other parts of the deals, but I don't think anyone saw it as a huge unified deal before

Leo Laporte (00:09:10):
Wayne. Yeah. Right.

Alex Lindsay (00:09:12):
And, and, and this is where Tim cook, what does stuff that this is how apple became much larger is Steve Jobs, I don't think would have the patience for it, you know, like, and so he wouldn't, and, and I think that, and Apple probably would have a lot more trouble in China. If, if, if, if Tim cook, hadn't worked out, you know, how are we gonna do this now? A lot of times when you make these deals, I mean, these are there's a variety. So I, there are a lot of deals that get done <laugh> in, in in, in, in countries, you know, there's, you know, like you, you wanna, if you want to if you want to, there's an entire business around, oh, I wanna build I wanna sell you an AR you know, aircraft, you know, into South Africa or into Israel or into wherever.

Alex Lindsay (00:09:57):
And they have to agree. They'll agree to make the tires in South Africa and do this other thing. And these are offset, you know, offset deals. And these offset deals are billions and billions of dollars, and they're happening every single day. So it's easy for someone in the information to go look what I found and everybody who, who works in international things like, yeah, yeah. You found what everybody does, you know, so, so like everybody's doing it all the time's in China, every defense contractor, every manufacturer everybody's making deals like this, like this is not, this is like, okay, is

Leo Laporte (00:10:26):
What we call Tuesday. As you pointed out, the $1 billion for DD was well known, but this, the scope of this deal was not well known apparently was in the face of some real heat from the Chinese authorities back in 2016. Yeah. And Alex's pointed end

Rene Ritchie (00:10:41):
Saying that Cook, if they didn't have Cook, and if they don't have Cook in the future, this kind of stuff is gonna be very hard for

Leo Laporte (00:10:46):
Them to navigate. Yeah. Cook along with chief operating officer, and here's the picture Jeff Williams and Lisa Jackson government affairs head at the time met with senior government officials at the country's secretive leadership compound, John non high, neither side disclosed details of the visit, but they were there in part to sign the economic deal, which committed Apple to aiding roughly a dozen causes favored by China, including a pledge to help Chinese manufacturers developed the most advanced manufacturing technologies and the training of high quality Chinese talents. This was of course an Apple's interest anyway, cuz they were already manufac, you know, assembling in Foxcon but it kind of explains Apples. I don't know is this, Andy is this CD, is this to the board that politically ski or, I mean, it's good business. 

Andy Ihnatko (00:11:35):
It's an another piece in this convers about Apple's relationship with China. We started off with a story about apple saying, wow, Russia is trying to regulate us into doing something we don't wanna do. We're gonna Sue Russia to make sure that we don't have to try, try not to do that. When China offers the same sort of fresher, they're like send the CEO over there. Oh my God. Send the CEO over there, bring flowers. Do they like flowers? I don't know if they don't like flower ice cream. They must love like everyone loves ice cream. The, these revelations are, they're not necessarily shocking. They're not necessarily hugely damaging, but we need to understand the full picture of Apple's relationship with China versus Apple's relationship with the US, Apple's relationship with the EU, Apple's relationship with everybody else. The, the amount of power that the Chinese government, the Chinese communist party has to basically control every single operation that goes and goes on inside there without having to worry about like, we can have a president that's that, that hates Amazon and wants to make sure the at Amazon doesn't get contracts. The CEO of Amazon does not have to go hat and hand to that president and plea. What can we do to make thing to make you write sign off on this thing that we would like to do that you're opposed to be for, for a number of reasons. It doesn't mean that our system is better. I'm just comparing realities.

Alex Lindsay (00:12:50):
We actually did have that. <Laugh> that's like, that happens all the time. It's called lobbying. So I mean it's, but they're, they're,

Andy Ihnatko (00:12:56):
They're not Alex, they're not lobbying the president. They're lobbying Congress. They're lobbying the Senate. They're lobbying local.

Alex Lindsay (00:13:02):
They are, like Tim cook went to the white house to talk to Trump to make sure that he didn't get that, that the, that we didn't end up with import rules. So I mean like he did exactly the same thing in the United States as he did in China.

Andy Ihnatko (00:13:12):
No. If I could complete what I was gonna say. Sure. Jeff Bezos was hated by Trump. He did not have to change radically change how they, how Amazon operates in the United States of America to make sure that Trump's idea of how of how Amazon should operate should have to go. He also did not have to, to integrate your point, did not have to he had the ability to basically tell the Senate, excuse me, lobby the Senate lab lobby, Congress lobby, state legislators, please could you change these rules so that they work our way. He didn't really have to do that. Okay. But I'm saying what I'm getting at, please don't interrupt me is that in China, there is such a centralized form of government that if that everybody underneath is going to be terrified of even being seen to support somebody who has been put on the naughty list by the government.

Andy Ihnatko (00:14:04):
And so it's very, very important that Tim cook go out there and that go out there and make sure that these, that the, that these party officials are very, very happy. They're going to get concession that they can, excuse me, China's gonna get concessions that no other country can have. And that's even before. And, and part of that is gonna get worse and worse and worse. As apple becomes more and more successful in China, it's gonna be very, ultimately, it's very, very easy for apple to say, you know what, Turkey we're out. That's, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're making such restrictions on how we can operate. You're making so many demands that we change our, our moral stance on things that we're out. Congratulations. You don't have an app store in Turkey anymore. That will never happen in China. And that's why the conversation must always be where is the breaking point?

Andy Ihnatko (00:14:49):
Where's the point at which Apple negotiates tries to give the government, the Chinese government things that they want, but also get things that they want in return. Things that will ultimately benefit their users in China. And where is the line in which they simply say that there is no way we have, we, there's no way that we can pull the off switch on the app store at end of the day, whatever they demand that we do, we're gonna have to do. And that's the ongoing concern. I'm glad that this is being documented and explained again, it's not a, it's not a, it's not a crisis PR moment for, for Apple. It's not the thing that should cause any rational legislator in the United States of America. Good luck with that to, so, to, to wave the, to, to, to bang their shoe on the on, on the podium and say, something must be done about Apple's relationship with China, but it, they, they can operate as they must do as a business, but it is beneficial to the public to know that no, there are, there are here's here's what's going on on these inside baseball.

Andy Ihnatko (00:15:45):
I will simply, and I will simply say that this is not like conventional. Oh, well this is all governments, all companies. I do that with international governments. Oh no. This thing happens in the United States all the time. It is not the same thing because Apple is Apple and China is China. Just like there's, it's, it's a specific situation you may, to them, it's in a articulation.

Leo Laporte (00:16:02):
You may remember that round bat, 2016 headwinds in China. In fact, Tim cook said it several times in the analysts off as I remember Renee that yeah, we're having trouble in China where sales are plummeting in China. They bounced back after this agreement and China is once again, a big market for apple. According to The Information, Apple's not the only company that does this, but it does seem to be one of the few companies that keeps it secret. Microsoft has made a similar deal in the early two thousands. 

Rene Ritchie (00:16:37):
Apple keeps

Leo Laporte (00:16:38):
Everything secret. Yeah. Cisco, Cisco, how they operate.

Andy Ihnatko (00:16:43):
They

Leo Laporte (00:16:43):
Keep secrets from me. They have teams keeping secrets from each other, the other teams. I mean, that's just the nature of, and signed a deal to invest $10 billion over seven, several years back in 2015, the apple deal is a lot larger at 200, an estimated 270 billion dollars. The agreements, according to the information are technically non-binding, but <laugh> to your point, Andy, and I'm gonna quote here, Chinese officials take them more seriously than officials in other countries. Also the Chinese they're more binding than you would.

Rene Ritchie (00:17:13):
We've seen these huge incidents happen where somebody like the NBA will say something China doesn't like, and it's not just that China puts pressure on them. It's that huge SWA of the population turn against that brand. And the entire thing in China is very brand focused. It's very face focused. If it puts you in good esteem to have an iPhone, a lot of people are gonna buy an iPhone. But if it seemed like it's against the Chinese people, a lot of people are not get an iPhone. And you're almost balancing the Chinese government, the Chinese populist and apple is also, I think some people forget this. Apple is also a huge part of the economy of Guango Andi provinces throughout the whole manufacturing mutual

Leo Laporte (00:17:48):
Benefit. Yeah. It, China,

Rene Ritchie (00:17:49):
China can like, some people have, China will just cut apple off, but I mean, those would be impoverished. Like it'd be way worse than it was. So we wonder,

Leo Laporte (00:17:56):
You may remember relationship when the us government issued sanctions against Huawei and practically put 'em out of business. Yes. We wondered. Well, why IST apple retaliating against apple? I think we now know why this was a, a part of the deal. Part of the deal was the

Rene Ritchie (00:18:12):
Amount of control that China manages to influence like exert. Again, like you look at a lot of modern movies, they have whole scenes in China. They have whole sub plots in involving China because Tencent or someone is a massive investment. And I don't like, none of this is bad. I don't wanna be xenophobic. I'm not at all. I spent years studying Chinese culture. I love it. The, the power, the socio, but we power exerted by some governments.

Leo Laporte (00:18:33):
We always wanna make these things between the people of China, the country of China and its government. And so when we say China, that's shorthand for the Chinese, the power

Rene Ritchie (00:18:40):
And how it's used. Yeah. Because there are a lot of powerful countries, but they don't all use that power in the same way. Well, but

Leo Laporte (00:18:45):
Big markets like India also assert, you know, they're Brazil, India,

Alex Lindsay (00:18:50):
Apple's building factories. Yeah. And, and the other thing is, is that a lot of companies, including apple are slowly diversifying away from China because China's becoming less and less stable. And so the, so the thing is, is that a lot of folks, while this has been a, a bit of a blip, China has a huge huge set of problems that are unwrapping on their, on their end, that they are trying to manage as best they can. They can't really, this is not, this goes both ways while apple, you know, can't afford to twist China too hard. China can't afford to have apple divers and everybody diversify too far as well. They're trying to make a transition that they haven't made yet. And so, so the and I don't know if they can, you know, I think that they, they, China's got a lot of issues on its end on its end to, to manage.

Alex Lindsay (00:19:30):
And so, so I think that, that there is a, but I, but I will say, I mean, and I know I sound very jaded, but <laugh>, I work with a lot of governments and, and like, this is kind of part of the, like, this is like, I, I, you know anybody who wants to know how deep this goes, just, just do a, just do a quick search on defense trade offset, offsets, you know, like, just to realize the, that this is a giant business, like of trillions of dollars that are moving around between between this to make this work. And so, and this happens in nearly every major country, you know, and in every country, you immediately try to figure out how do I fit in? Well, wherever you work, I've worked in, you know, over 40 countries and many of them at government level.

Alex Lindsay (00:20:10):
And the thing is, is that every place you try to figure out how do I fit in and make sure that I work well with the government. And if I'm there, you know, how do I, you know, and oftentimes I've been able to do things that you can't normally do because I have good relationship with the government, you know? And so the, so the thing is, is that, is that those are all, that's all part of it. And I think that what you see Apple doing in Washington, DC, what you see them do at local leg legislatures, what you see them do in China is all, you know, making sure that they can continue to, to do their business, you know, and, and I think that, and I think that a lot of companies do it, Apple happens to do it probably a little better

Leo Laporte (00:20:41):
Than, well, me quote the information again, Nicole ping an analyst at canals says Apple is one of the only, the, one of the only international brands doing well in China right now. Mm-Hmm, <affirmative> apple has continued to comply with Chinese laws. And we've talked about this before that have led to increased censorship of its app store in areas like news, VPNs, L GBT, Q related

Alex Lindsay (00:21:03):
To apps. I think, I think that the line is the phone. Like, we'll, we'll see when we know that that we're, that, you know, that, that, that Chi and that Apple has no spine is when China says we want

Leo Laporte (00:21:13):
In late October, last couple months ago, Apple said it will comply with a new Chinese data security law requiring foreign companies to store more data about Chinese users in the country, obviously still in the cloud.

Alex Lindsay (00:21:25):
So, so the thing is that I think that the, for Apple and what they've shown everywhere in the world so far is the phone like you at point,

Leo Laporte (00:21:33):
Wanna take it LinkedIn and Yahoo discontinued Chinese operations, but Apple did not Apple moved their server, their iCloud server to China. Yeah.

Alex Lindsay (00:21:42):
Which they hand off to, they hand off to, to, they hand off to the United States government as well. Like, again, I think that where we've seen them draw the hard line, the red line is at the phone. And we'll see if Apple continues to do purchases in China. Both those things don't forget

Leo Laporte (00:21:55):
In our purchase <laugh> and line. No, they have though. That's why they're doing Russians for app purchases, basically. Yeah.

Andy Ihnatko (00:22:04):
And also, and also to be fair with, so home companies like LinkedIn, new regulations made it almost impossible for that service to operate. Not be not because not because of censorship per se, but because link LinkedIn is not just a resume, a resume bin. It's also, Hey, I can post something or retweet or excuse repost, an article that I found, or I can write something and share it with people I've now that kind of stuff is going, is under such tighter scrutiny under these new laws that Microsoft basically decided that we will keep it as sort of a job interchange thing, but it'll, it's gonna be so difficult today. And God knows how different mode difficult. It'll be tomorrow to also be a content manager that it's just not worth our trouble for it. So this, this is the sort, this is the sort of stuff that's also on my radar.

Andy Ihnatko (00:22:47):
That, I mean, it's there's a, there's, there's always a question of stability if you, if it's actually, I actually think that it's a stable government. If I know exactly who to bribe, I know exactly like what the terms of the bribe are going to be. I know exactly what I'm gonna have to give up in terms of my soul in order to get this bribe happen. If that's, if, for, if that's generational thro of government, that's actually a stable government and there's versions of that happening everywhere. I know is that the problem with China and, and other governments is that you never know that well, here's the situation right now? Is it going to get, is, is, are the deals going be changed two years from now? Is it gonna be is the business that we established in China that we made so much investment in where we trained so many workers, we hired so many people into, into, into our company.

Andy Ihnatko (00:23:33):
We contributed so much to the local government now, but now in three years from now, there is a new policy change that will make it impossible for us to operate, or we're gonna have to change so radically or localized. So radically, that's no longer gonna pay off for us. That's the sort of stuff that causes a lot of instability for a company. And that's, this is why we see a lot of companies sort of backing out. Not just, not really because, oh, well, we're offended by the human rights the human rights angles to this, but like you're making it so that we can't, we don't know if we can even operate in your country anymore. Just like if a state where does suddenly change. Well, here's how here's the new rules for here are new. Here are new rules for for for, I don't know, environmental impact, whatever. It's a lot of comp, this is why this is why companies move from like California to Texas for their auto clients, because they feel as though the tax situation has changed and now they can no longer do be as do as well in this state as they can in other state, that's the sort of stuff that causes instability. That's the things, stuff that makes things kind of random.

Leo Laporte (00:24:31):
Ke brewer in our discord is pointing out that last month cook told a business forum. He said that Apple has a responsibility to sell its products in as many countries as possible, including China <laugh> world peace. Well, this is a interesting though. He's saying world, it's a responsibility. No, no. It's a respons look at, we got a responsibility here, world peace through world trade. There's some, I mean, look, that's that little self-serving obviously we can't just leave

Rene Ritchie (00:24:59):
Mcdonald's

Leo Laporte (00:24:59):
Principles. Not, it's not wrong either though. I mean, if we are if we are trading partners with a country, they're gonna, you know, call, you know, declare war against us. They're I mean, right. That's that's a good point. Also leave an engagement at the policy keeps you engaged. Yeah. In a little bit is like when the people in my generation gave up protesting and took jobs with the government saying we're going to affect change from within a,

Rene Ritchie (00:25:25):
A fifth column. Yeah. <laugh> but, but cook has routinely said over the years that he believes, you know, policy of engagement, that if Apple is not involved in a situation, exactly it can't affect change in that situation. And sometimes it backfires because sometimes engagement becomes appeasement. But I think more often than not, they've managed to move the needle on a lot of environmental and political and sociological and civic issues by staying engaged.

Leo Laporte (00:25:46):
I wonder Apple, when it said we're gonna do the, you know, in phone screening for a child sexual abuse material, you know, the world went crazy apple back down. I don't know if they're gonna ever come back, address it again. But that was a case of people felt Apple going too far getting into the phone. Was that a lesson that Apple learned that okay, see is really Sacra, thanked.

Rene Ritchie (00:26:09):
It's not just engineering. It's about the people. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:26:13):
And, and will they do that to China? I mean, that was the concern. A lot of people had the FF said, well, now all it takes is you know, the United you know, Saudi Arabia or China or Russia come to them and say, we don't want any gay material on the phone either. So can you do something about that? It opens the door. So maybe really this is the bright red line, no phone.

Rene Ritchie (00:26:33):
Well, the door was always open. It just, the people got a better sense of what these devices could do through that. And I think Apple was like, engineeringly, if Apple wanted to make a privacy solution, they did it, but they ignored all humanity. It was just way too intrusive. And a lot of the other arguments were not technically sound, but they were emotionally valid because it made people feel like apple was int Trudy. It's like, no, no, no, the police are gonna come to your house. You don't have to go to the police station. The police are coming to your house. And nobody wants that. Nobody wants that. Even if it means that you don't have to have every, like, it, it was a misstep in terms of how they understood the situation. But I think it was a cautionary moment for them understanding that there is this sort of reaction out there. And if not, I don't think it's gonna change their stance on privacy, but it's gonna change their stance in how they both implement and communicate, especially privacy going forward.

Alex Lindsay (00:27:16):
Well, and, and the two, the two chinks in Apple's privacy armor is terrorism and pedophiles, right? So that's the, that where the government always talks about, we need to get into the phone. So I think that, that they're trying to solve that problem is related to them trying to, to actually protect the privacy of their, of their entire infrastructure. But, but I think that it was misguided <laugh> like it was, you know, and so I, I think that I can see why they did it, but oof, it's dangerous. Would've heard

Rene Ritchie (00:27:43):
Iphone say so they couldn't, they just couldn't do it.

Leo Laporte (00:27:46):
Yeah. All right, let, let's take a little break. I will have an Amoo Bush with a Mac rumor and an iPad rumor coming up. So don't worry. It's not gonna be all politics and courtroom activity. Our show today brought to you by AT&T it's 2021. <Affirmative> you can, you can buy a self-driving car. You can eat burgers made out of plants. You can even fly to space in rocket ships or near space if you have the money for it. So if you can do all this futuristic stuff today, at least your phone could do the very least is stream a show without buffer and lag over and over again for that you should have AT&T 5g at and T 5g is fast, reliable, and secure. It makes it easy to download entertainment in a flash, stay connected across the city.

Leo Laporte (00:28:36):
It helps keep your device protected, even from spam calls. If you wanna make sure your phone service keeps up with what you need from it, get AT&T 5g, it's not complicated. 5G requires a compatible plan may not be in your area see at&t.com/5g for U 5g, F O R Y O U for details. Thank you AT&T for your supportive MacBreak Weekly you know, it's a rumor, but in, in, in late December, the best you can do <laugh> is, is just hope. Pray that you're gonna get a rumor. This is for mark Iman's power on wait before

Rene Ritchie (00:29:16):
We start this, Leo, I, I wanna just, this is a constant objection. I'm making, I'm raising it again. Mark Garman reports for Bloomberg. When he reports for Bloomberg, he says, sources is familiar with the matter. And he has is like a full report when he does his newsletter. He says, I think Apple might do this. And people still don't differentiate between the two. He's very careful with his language. So when he says, I think it's him, it's his opinion. It's not like a source report when he says people familiar with the matter, then it's like, he has actual information on it. I just wanna keep making that clear. Okay.

Leo Laporte (00:29:43):
So good. So this is from power on. This is from his newsletter. This is an, I think not sources. Tell me yes. I have to think that he thinks stuff because he's hearing from sources, but no, you say that's not the case. This could be it true. Like sometimes

Rene Ritchie (00:29:57):
It's based on sources, but mark also like mark, like we on the show a lot of times Andy or Alex, or I say, we think Apple should do this. I think Apple would do this based on my experience covering apple for 10 years. I think they should do this. But you know, that that's our opinion. It's not like somebody came and told us that they were gonna do it. And mark is very good about saying when somebody came and told him what

Leo Laporte (00:30:14):
They're doing, <laugh> yeah. He says, you know, well then we won't belabor this. Just mark thinks <laugh> mark thinks based, you know? I mean, he's an informed observer.

Rene Ritchie (00:30:25):
Yeah. He, no, some of this is really good. Some of it, I think he's gonna get his heart broken on, but I think some of it is really smart. Yeah. Well,

Leo Laporte (00:30:29):
Good. Let me, let me throw it at you and you tell me what's gonna stick redesigned iPad pro. That seems fair. I mean, it's been a while, right? Highly reported. Yeah. High and iMac. Obviously that's an iMac pro, right? That's

Rene Ritchie (00:30:44):
So the iPad pro, if we can stick with that for a second stick with the iPad pro, because the M two is a, is, is a given the M two is gonna go into the MacBook. Air's gonna go into the, the low end MacBook Pro. It's gonna go into the next iPad. But the idea that it's gonna have mag safe is really interesting to me because nobody has deployed MagSafe through aluminum, which is what the iPad currently has on the back. And they they've only done it through glass. And Google had, I think, an interesting solution where they had sort of an area that was glass in the metal and it was hidden. And so I'm wondering what Apple's gonna do, because what if it's Meg safe is as

Leo Laporte (00:31:15):
A iPad? What if it's Meg safe in the same way that the laptops do Meg safe? What if it's a connection?

Rene Ritchie (00:31:19):
Yeah, that could be another way to do it too. Yeah.

Andy Ihnatko (00:31:22):
Or,

Rene Ritchie (00:31:22):
But it wouldn't be like, it wouldn't just sit on a T charger,

Leo Laporte (00:31:24):
Right? Yeah.

Andy Ihnatko (00:31:25):
You get, you got this Apple logo on the back. It's supposed to be shiny anyway. And the Apple can definitely do the material. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:31:30):
Make it glass

Andy Ihnatko (00:31:31):
There's it's it's also a really great, there, there are, I, I love thinking about ideas like this, because there are ideas that work impeccably on a laptop, like mag safe. Again, you can, we can have disagreements about whether, whether I, it kicks outta my, my MacBook too easily or not, but it's a really good idea. And it works great. Now we think about, well, how about we put MagSafe on on a phone or on a tablet. And that's when we have to start really picking this thing apart and thinking about what problem are we trying to solve by putting MagSafe here? And it make, it means that if I, by, I love about the magnetic amounts for for these devices as it is, is that like, if I have a, if I have a stand next to my display, and these are gonna be coming, a stand next to your display is becoming, gonna get a lot more important, a lot more useful once the integration between your, the keyboard of your mouse and your iPad on your desktop is gonna be even better and better.

Andy Ihnatko (00:32:21):
It means that I just slap it on their boom. It grabs it's good. Stuck through for good. It's really interesting to have the idea that Noah will also give you your power hookup at the same time, but we also have fails, like, or excuse me, my opinion fails, like face ID <laugh> on, on, on the iPad where so many times I'm like, I have to pick it up and turn it a certain way because unfortunately, because like, I'm, I'm lying in bed and reading I'm my, my, my arm is blocking whatever it needs to it, it needs to see in order to verify my face, or I have to double tap at some point to to verify a purchase. But I have to use this. I have to use this arm, not this arm because this arm is gonna block the face ID stuff that got it in and landscape mode. So I, I like this rumor. I like the I like how simple it will make to simply have the, have my really nice 12.9 inch iPad pro as a secondary display and as a different depository for, for apps and docs on my desktop setup and the, the, the, the modern miracle. Just, I just grab it, pop it off. I don't have to disconnect anything, unplug it. I think I just grab it and go, and suddenlys an iPad again. That's a great idea. So

Leo Laporte (00:33:23):
This is this is really marks though. Concerns me. This is really Mark's Christmas list. <Laugh> of like end of the year, let's look at next year. So I

Rene Ritchie (00:33:33):
Think products are solid. I think like him wanting glances back on the Apple watches where he's gonna get

Leo Laporte (00:33:37):
His hand his, yeah. So the overall outline of it sounds right. We'd, we'd all agree product. Yeah. Yeah. The details, the details where, you know, they may or may not be true. He says iPad. I don't

Rene Ritchie (00:33:50):
Wanna see unboxed therapy, like bending an iPad because of the mag safety

Leo Laporte (00:33:54):
Stop. Stop it. Stop. I just don't wanna see that the, I

Andy Ihnatko (00:33:59):
Had my, a pacemaker hold an iPad next to his heart for three days to find out if it affected

Leo Laporte (00:34:04):
Is healthy. Let me say this Renee, you're the only YouTuber I trust period at this point. Oh, thank you. So just, you know, take it all with a grain of salt. I'll never lie to you. Well, you know, they all are just trying to generate hits and they don't really seem to have any I underlying ethical <laugh>, you know, it's like, it was funny. Lisa and I were talking about the fact that CNN had fired Chris Cuomo because he helped his brother out. And and Lisa said, you know, this is so old fashioned, nobody cares about journalistic ethics anymore, just, and well, and she's sort of right. They won, they won, they kinda won Andy. I hate to say it. We're old timers. I believe in it still you know, I understand why you can't cover something that you're in bed with, you know, that doesn't work you know, and, and people need to trust you, but apparently the audience has gotten sophisticated enough that they know now to take everything with a grain of salt and, you know, consider this source we're the opposite.

Rene Ritchie (00:35:05):
Or they just, they don't care anymore because they're so based out

Leo Laporte (00:35:08):
And that bad for us, they just believe it all. And it's over. Yeah. <laugh> okay.

Rene Ritchie (00:35:13):
I mean, if you look like we talked about this before, like, but like when we were younger, Leo, there was like one PI incident and the company almost went bankrupt. One, one whiff of political impropriety, and you could know ever run for office. Now people are like apologizing every day and companies are like Gary exploding

Leo Laporte (00:35:28):
Phone back to give up his run for president cuz there was a picture of him dangling some honey on his knee on a yacht monkey. Well, there was a swift boat

Rene Ritchie (00:35:35):
Thing too, right? I mean like the whole,

Leo Laporte (00:35:37):
And that was it. It was all over the career was all over. And now what, you know, do whatever

Rene Ritchie (00:35:43):
You want. I was like on your eighth murder and you're still not resigning. Like it's just, it's literally it's it's

Leo Laporte (00:35:48):
And again,

Rene Ritchie (00:35:49):
Likes a world exploding phone back. No, I wanna like

Leo Laporte (00:35:52):
Shouting at the sky. There's nothing not shouting at the clouds. There's nothing months we could do about it's anyway, point well taken that, you know, take this with a grain of salt and I think it's our job and I think we're, we're, we're credible and good at enough at it to you just did a great job saying, well maybe, but here's the issues with wireless charging for instance, on an iPad pro I think we it's time for an iPad pro it's just a simple schedule thing. Yes. Redesign is the question and yeah, it's about time for a redesign as well. You know, maybe rounded corners who knows, I don't know. Apple has redesigned the MacBook air. We've been hearing rumors about this also for 2022 in colors I'm hoping. And will, and will this yeah, it sounds like will this have, so this is the, really the interesting underlying question you started it M one is tied to the a 14, right? It is an a 14 basically. Yes. the, the iPhone 13 has a 15 in it. Yes. So will we see an a 15 M two I guess, or something like that? Yes. This year I'll be for sure. Yeah. In 2022. And we might see it in a MacBook air. Would that make here's my real question. I just bought an M one pro will it make the MacBook air faster than the, so this is the

Rene Ritchie (00:37:09):
Thing people had that same issue when the, when the iPad pro came out with the a 12 Z in 2020, because there was already an, a 13 out and they're like, well, does this mean the iPhone on is faster? And it, it will be faster in some, well, the efficiency cores are about 20% faster in a 15 generation IP. The performance cars are about 10% faster, but they're way more efficient. Like Apple actually changed the names from firestorm and ice storm to avalanche and blizzard to just sort of describe how cold this thing runs, which is not, not really important at all in a MacBook pro, but is really important as something like a MacBook air or a phone. There's no fan in that. So you want it? Yeah. Our phone too. The graphics cores are more powerful. They actually throttle down in the iPhone. They're so powerful. And the report is that we're gonna go from eight to 10 graphics cores in the next version of the M one, like the M two for the iPads. So it'll have better graphics performance, but it won't have like 16 or 32 GPU cores like you have in the MacBook pro. So it's, it's designed for ultra low power efficiency and it wants to make that better. It's not gonna touch at all. Anything, however,

Leo Laporte (00:38:13):
Massively make a MacBook air in color, sound dumb, sexy. See that super. And I think that

Alex Lindsay (00:38:20):
I'll be interested to see if they, if they include things like the ProRes chip in the air,

Rene Ritchie (00:38:25):
Which they may that's on eight 15 already. Oh, is it

Leo Laporte (00:38:28):
Is. It's all. It's

Rene Ritchie (00:38:29):
On the ProRes on the iPhone. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:38:31):
So that's great. You get it for free. It's amazing. It's amazing. Yeah. Well, I was talking to my son cuz you know, he does, he wants to start shooting eight K video for his TikTok. I don't know why as you should, as one should. Okay. I'll tell him. Oh, AB absolutely. And he's, he's about to buy the MacBook pro 16 and he said, and what the guy he's using a 5g and an R six.

Alex Lindsay (00:38:52):
You should get a black magic. 12. K I know

Leo Laporte (00:38:54):
He should. I'll tell 'em next time

Alex Lindsay (00:38:56):
Or, or tell em, eight K one 20. You know, I told him that's

Leo Laporte (00:38:58):
The, what about don't spend all your money. <Laugh> put save it. Don't just cuz you got it doesn't mean you should all put it all in.

Rene Ritchie (00:39:06):
What was that? Vincent de lahar Rick. He filmed New York with, it was two, three black. It was three red, eight K. It was 24. K. Fued amazing.

Leo Laporte (00:39:15):
But you, but it's TikTok. Let's let's be honest. Okay. So anyway that's not, it's neither here nor there. <Laugh> where, where was I? So I said, yeah, get it. Oh, I know the guy at the apple store said, oh, don't get the max. The pro is plenty for what you want to do. He's using premier. And to do the editing and probably he's using after effects. A few other things like that. I said, no, he's crazy. I said, max out the Ram. Yeah. And get the max max out the processor, max out the Ram. Cuz you can't upgrade it. Absolutely. Right. I wasn't

Alex Lindsay (00:39:49):
Dual rendering

Leo Laporte (00:39:50):
One time is everything. Well, that's what I said. It's not it won't, it's not that it won't work. Cuz for instance it has this progressed chip. So a playback is gonna be fine. It's the, it's the rendering rendering. Yeah. It's the rendering. It's got double. It's

Rene Ritchie (00:40:01):
Got double the ProRes engines on the max. Yeah. Like the battery life will be worse just because there's more Silicon to light up. Yeah. I don't think

Leo Laporte (00:40:07):
Time for battery life. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So anyway,

Alex Lindsay (00:40:09):
Once you get into real production, it's all about time. It's operator time. That's everything. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:40:14):
Well he's self-employed so he's he was, he texted me at 1:40 AM. I mean I could just see the BL in his eyes. Think, I mean you told me it would be, there would be suffering <laugh> yeah. Well,

Alex Lindsay (00:40:27):
I mean the whole thing is, is that, is, is that when you, when you talk about time, when it comes to production, you know, no one ever finishes a project, they just run out time, you know? And so you, you have to, you have to ship. And so when you have some thing that is way more fluid and way faster, you do more, you don't, you don't work less. You just do more with the time that you have, you make it cooler. You add a couple extra bells and whistles because, because you have more time given back, if you're passionate about what you do, you're always gonna just keep turning it to 11 and that 11 just keeps moving.

Leo Laporte (00:40:54):
Yeah. You're buying time. In fact I'm texting him that right now you're are buying

Rene Ritchie (00:40:59):
I'm. Alex says you are buying <laugh>

Leo Laporte (00:41:02):
Right. Anyway, but I do love the idea cuz I like the MacBook care. I like the form factor a lot. I have to say I bought the bottom of the line, M one pro the 14 inch and it's great. It's perfect for what I do. Yeah. Cause I'm not doing video editing. I'm not doing 4k or AK or anything like that, but for battery life. Oh it's just, it's just, and it replaced the M one 13 inch, you know the last year's M one. Yeah. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> and it was a, and at least it got the new M one upgraded from an Intel MacBook pro everybody's happy. And it is just, I it's a stunning machine, but I kind of those things it's air. I really do

Rene Ritchie (00:41:40):
Well, the air is gonna be like a whole different thing. It's gonna be smaller again. I think it'll be very similar to the 12 inch MacBook and it'll be colorful. Like the iMac was so you're gonna have the best

Leo Laporte (00:41:49):
Consumer and probably a thousand, right?

Rene Ritchie (00:41:52):
Well, well it's gonna be more expensive, but the, the MacBook error is, is about like this, this, this problem where it started off super expensive, but then apple got it down to 9 99. And then everyone starts thinking the air means cheap when the air really always meant mobile. Right. And there's some rumors suggesting they won't even gonna call it the MacBook error. It's just gonna be the MacBook again. But it's this idea of having that's a good

Leo Laporte (00:42:11):
Idea.

Rene Ritchie (00:42:12):
Yeah. And within tell the Y series just could never deliver, like apple had to wait years to get retina on it. It was awful. You had to wait forever to get the power. Yeah. It was always an anemia process. That's the upgrade

Leo Laporte (00:42:21):
Lisa made is from the Y to the M one and she's blown away.

Rene Ritchie (00:42:25):
Yeah. It's night and day. And now we're gonna have all of that in a new enclosure because I think sometimes people forget too that the low power doesn't just mean long battery life. It means that you can make enclosure. You could never make before you don't have to. I was watching Dave two D's video. He was trying to put the latest Alder lake in a mini tower and he had to water. Cool. It like, not even, not even a laptop, no naught. Like

Leo Laporte (00:42:43):
It was a, we have a name for a 12th generation processor. It's called scold lake. Okay. Just let's say everybody agree on that. It's it's

Rene Ritchie (00:42:51):
A little like you might say, like it doesn't matter. But if apple wants to make, it's a hot iMac, they can't, there's no way Al lake would fit in any iMac enclosure they've ever made. Nevermind than you want.

Leo Laporte (00:43:00):
No, I don't think anybody doubts apples move at this point. It's funny. It took a little while for the go for power PC to Intel. But boy, this is like so night and day clear. Well, and the funny thing is

Alex Lindsay (00:43:11):
Is that you, you know, I, I really thought, well, we'll wait until the third of fourth version before I, before I buy it, we'll just keep on buying Intel versions now. Like I won't buy an Intel version. Like, all right, I see 'em on sale. And I'm like, you came

Leo Laporte (00:43:22):
Along. No, I'm not interested. You came along for the ride. Yeah. Okay, good. That's good. As long as your software has moved over, you're fine. And in most cases, it's very few cases now where it's not the other thing. That's really a lot of credit to apple for Rosetta too, that have made this transition where it's really well as easy as possible. They did it well. They did it once before. Yeah, they've done it before, but I think they, they,

Rene Ritchie (00:43:41):
And if you're on metal, it's faster. That's the thing that blows my mind is like, cuz in video always wanted to abstract away the computers into dumb beige boxes. They just hosted Kuda cores and apples. Like no we're gonna abstract the away the GP so that we can just swap 'em out and it's not gonna be a big deal to you. And that turns out to work because if you have like a, a piece of Intel software, that's written to metal, it is so much faster on apple GPS than it ever was on the Intel integrated. And even the low end AMD stuff

Leo Laporte (00:44:07):
Garman says a revamped high end iMac with apple Silicon. We thought that the iMac pro new entry level MacBook pro that's a surprise. What would that be? A new entry, the entry level MacBook pro I don't know what that would be. It seems put like I put

Rene Ritchie (00:44:23):
The video up on that today. So that's, that's the one that Phil Scher announced back in 2016. That's where MacBook air customers. That just want a little bit more. So it's gonna be M two, not M two pro or M two max or anything like that. Yeah. And it's, it's basically a MacBook air that can sustain heavy workloads longer and have a longer battery life.

Leo Laporte (00:44:40):
Oh, that's interesting. This is what the M two is gonna give them is a broader range of choices, an air pro or

Rene Ritchie (00:44:47):
Pro air, depending how you wanna phrase.

Leo Laporte (00:44:48):
Yeah. I will

Alex Lindsay (00:44:48):
Say it's not as bad as it was in the nineties, but I start feeling like I even, I start looking at it going, oh, I don't know which one I want. And as soon as I start squinting at it, I'm like, oh, maybe they're making too many skews. <Laugh> like,

Leo Laporte (00:44:58):
You know, like that's what Steve famously

Alex Lindsay (00:45:01):
Said. And you're kinda like, you know, just keep them. I don't know. I would have less

Leo Laporte (00:45:05):
Skus. Okay. Yeah. I air. Well, that's why taking away air makes sense. You got your MacBook and you got your MacBook pro and maybe there's a MacBook air and then a high, a little bit higher MacBook, you know, the MacBook Mac, former MacBook air, the laptop, formerly name known as a MacBook air and a little bit higher MacBook. Well, they're gonna keep that

Rene Ritchie (00:45:28):
Around because the new one's not gonna be that lower price. So they're gonna have the M one Mac book, Garrett 9 99 and then the M two Mac book Garrett like usually starts at around 1200 then goes down over a couple

Leo Laporte (00:45:36):
Years. Okay. Also new Mac pro according to Garman. This is again, I think you're right here, projection, but a safe bet because it's due Apple said three years. This is year three next year. And a new Mac mini in the works for or next year. Yeah. That all makes sense. I mean, this isn't anything people are gonna go, whoa, I can't believe it for the Apple watch three new models and updated watch se an updated standard model. I like this third one though. And I wonder if this is his guess or from information he's received a rugged eye aimed at extreme sports athletes to compete with say the garment forerunner could. Yeah.

Andy Ihnatko (00:46:19):
That was rumored for last year.

Leo Laporte (00:46:20):
Pushed. That would be very interesting. Yeah.

Andy Ihnatko (00:46:23):
The fact that there's such a market for, for protective bands and protective screen covers for this beautifully elegantly designed tiny thing, the people wanted to look like a CA G shock. That should the, that was the big warning sign for everybody. And, and also a sign of how successful this thing is. I mean, one of my, one of my favorite, I only have three watches, but one of my favorite is the G shot. Cuz my God, it is 10 years old. Still working perfectly. No dings, no cracks, no nothing. If I were to it it's

Leo Laporte (00:46:49):
And also looks cool. Let's face it. I will say that. It looks cool. It goes with your tactical pan.

Andy Ihnatko (00:46:55):
Thank you very much. <Laugh>

Leo Laporte (00:46:58):
Honestly, I'm, I'm glad. I don't mean shock. I'm not, you know, I'm not a Navy seal, but you can see, but I love how it looks up

Rene Ritchie (00:47:04):
Suiting up in the morning. Like the scene from like a Batman movie, you

Leo Laporte (00:47:07):
Look like a Navy seal. Like your night, day job, you know, might be a Navy seal, you know, who knows? I don't know a te

Rene Ritchie (00:47:14):
Sir.

Andy Ihnatko (00:47:16):
I'll be, I'll be it for, for the Navy seals.

Leo Laporte (00:47:18):
<Laugh> yeah, he, I don't know if you want that job. I really don't. I think you have to go in the field if you're an it,

Rene Ritchie (00:47:26):
My laptop got shot again. Yeah. Oh, mm-hmm <affirmative>.

Andy Ihnatko (00:47:29):
I, I, I don't, I don't wanna divert the entire topic. I will say that in the movie, the, the, the character, the action movies, the characters, I always wanted to be like, I want to be the guy in the van. <Laugh> I wanna be the guy and say, okay, big camera, 12. You 12, the radio man. You wanna be Sparky? No, no, no, no. I'm I'm, I'm not, I'm not, not the person. I'm the person in like the, the logo list, baseball cap, who's monitoring like 18 screens and lots of things with like graphs and diagrams saying, okay, I'm getting a really, I'm getting a really bad AEM. EMMP on the 12 on the 12 meter band. Watch out. There could be cameras on you. <Laugh> that's what I want. I don't wanna be the guy with a gun who gets shot at, I wanna be, yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:48:07):
Act actually not Roberts in here. Robert bingo. Bingo.

Andy Ihnatko (00:48:10):
Bingo. Bingo. Yes. So 

Leo Laporte (00:48:14):
This is the quote, and I'm really curious cuz it didn't sound didn't doesn't ring true for me. 2021 was a modest year for Apple product updates, but I'd expect a wider range of new products in 2022. Really? Really? Was this a modest year? No, I don't think this was modest year. M one iMac, M one pro M1, max pro with many L E D. Oh my.

Alex Lindsay (00:48:35):
I still think, I still think that I, when you see what Apple has queued up, it feels modest because you can see where compared to what's coming, you know, like they're like, you're just realizing, they're just kind of planting everything down. And so like this was, you know, it's like, you know, we're gonna reduce, you know, they're gonna move fast, not slow, like before <laugh>, you know, like, and so that's the thing that I think he's talking to is that, I mean, especially when you talk about, you know, potentially other wearables and so on, so forth, I think that, you know, things can get really interesting. The VR headset

Leo Laporte (00:49:03):
Has that got your

Alex Lindsay (00:49:03):
Eye Alex mm-hmm <affirmative> I mean the rumors, so literally the, you know, the, the, the, I mean, it, it, the rumors seem to be that it's bubbling near the surface. So, so I think that that'll be really interesting to see, and I, and I think that March is where we're gonna see March and June are gonna be really interesting. I think, I think that we'll probably, you know, traditionally Apple does kind of an education focused March event with a new iPad and, you know, possibly a new Mac mini and, and and the, then we may see what I'm really interested. We'll know that we're close when again, when Apple opens up SD Z across more apps and so on and so forth and really makes them available. Cause that really sets the stage for, does it

Leo Laporte (00:49:44):
Need a new name, Alex? It's like USD, is that not friendly enough? S

Alex Lindsay (00:49:48):
It needs some Apple name, like Apple 3d, like probably don't want it to be that. So I think part, part of the reason you leave it as USD Z is cuz it's an open format standard. Everyone can use ITT to be. And people in the industry know it as U S D with a zip, you know, zip to S D is SD Z. And so I think apple, I don't think wants to change it cause they don't want to take ownership over it or people will stop developing for it, you know, because it is an incredible format. It was by Pixar. It's a, the only thing Apple added to it was the zip, you know? And so there's there's a us, us, there's two version, two flavors of U S D that are out there. And the problem right now is that they're not, it's not well supported, but but as it, you can, you know, everybody's working on it because of Apple and, and it'll probably become the standard because of Apple. And so, so I think that it'll be, but as we see that expand, it'll be really interesting.

Alex Lindsay (00:50:41):
I am so excited about year two or I guess year three of the M one. Yeah. I mean, I just wanna, I just want, the funny thing is, is that I think in post COVID that most of us in office hours, at least aren't talking about MacBooks. Like, no, one's like, this is a handful of people say, this is really fast. Everyone wants, like, we were just talking about that. Everybody wants Mac minis. Like everyone's like, when am I getting the new M two Mac mini? Yeah. You know, because what the Mac mini did, what's changed for it after all, all these years, it used to be this kind of little piece of glue that you used for little extra apps or to glue things together. It wasn't very powerful, but it was, it was rack mountable and you could do reasonably good things with it.

Alex Lindsay (00:51:17):
It's now like a little workstation I'm using resolve. I was rendering stuff and resolve last night with eight K files on my Mac mini, you know, and not even a 16 gig, <laugh> the eight gig that, that was having trouble with my 16 and gigs. And the eight gig is sitting there, rendering away, you know? And, and so the thing is, is that it is super powerful. So it's become this workstation. And so suddenly everyone, since a lot of people aren't traveling as much, they're kinda like, well, do I really need a, like for me, I don't need another MacBook, you know? And so, so I don't, I mean, I have a Mac I have, I don't need another MacBook, but I <laugh> can always do I, but, but my, my whole thing is I have lots of laptops. If I need to go out somewhere in the, you know, I can take one with me and check my email and do the things that I need to do.

Alex Lindsay (00:51:55):
But when I do production, I'm home enough now. Right. That doesn't matter. You know? And, and so I think that, that, I think it's gonna be interesting. I think that the Mac pro is gonna need to be just screaming, which makes me, you know, excited to buy Mac pro. But, but it, you know, to compete with the its own product, just, it's not gonna, I don't think the Mac pro's gonna compete with any workstation, it's gonna be competing with its own Mac mini, you know, it's, that's like running really fast and really inexpensive. And so to, to ask for the, the big bucks, which I think they will, I think we're gonna see just an insanely fast machine mm-hmm <affirmative>.

Andy Ihnatko (00:52:28):
But one, one of the things we've been talking about as a, as an underscore is that it's important for Apple as big as in successful as they are. They really do have to have a P a portfolio of desktop of desktop computers, meaning that's not enough for them to have their own quirky aesthetics, not enough for them to have their own point of view of things. The thing is people want a, their, the market for laptops includes people who want something as light and portable as possible. People want things that are, want laptops that are affordable. People want things that are, that will sacrifice both of those things in order to have the most powerful thing imaginable, which is why it's, it's, it's a problem that Apple needs to solve. If all they have are two of those three zones for the desktops they, one of the, the Mac mini fulfills a really vital function, which is that, thank you, Apple.

Andy Ihnatko (00:53:16):
I, that's a beautiful display. It's a lovely display. You should be proud of that display. I'm glad you're proud of that display. I don't need that display. I'm a, I'm a, I'm a small company that has lots of displays that work just fine for the stuff we do. We just want the thing you plug into the display. And sometimes we need that to be just basic table stake, CPU power, because we have someone at the front desk that that's just pretty much managing, managing aspects of the office. We need the screaming fast ones out the, down the back for the people who are doing and production related thing related things, and the Mac mini covers. So many of those bases really, really well. So this is why it's, it's a gap before there. There's, there's a gap in the line when Apple only has like their basic proof of concept Mac mini out.

Andy Ihnatko (00:53:58):
And this is why the, when they come out with the M the M two Mac mini next year, that's gonna be a very, very significant moment in transit. I think it's gonna be equally as important in terms of again, having a portfolio that, that causes Apple to be still considered a real computer company. I think it's gonna be just as important as the workstation grade devices and stuff that I don't care that has eight fans. I don't care that it actually kind of levitates that they there's, they're, they're turning so fast to get this, this processing job done fast. The that's good. That's great. That's, that's impressive. But we also need that commodity computer so that I, I need to buy a six pack of these to upgrade my office. And that's what the Mac mini's gonna do

Alex Lindsay (00:54:34):
Well, and, and I, and I I've now bought seven of them. <Laugh>, you know, cause you're just like, oh, I need some, I needed something to do the M

Leo Laporte (00:54:41):
One Mac one,

Alex Lindsay (00:54:42):
You bought seven. Yeah. I have seven. Nice. Yeah, the company the company's bought 15. Oh, I know. And I personally bought seven. Wow. So it's so between the company and I is 22 of 'em floating around and, and it's just because they are so U useful, you know, like you, you know, and, and we run office hours, you know, on it. And, and, and, and, and they're, and there's like, I have these little, lots of them are the eight gig ones, because I just don't, I don't need the 16 gig for most of them for what they're doing. I'm still getting used to the fact that they could be power powerful. I just need 'em for these little things, but we're running like four Kennedy peace streams out of every Mac mini and it's running at like 20%. <Laugh> like, it's like, yeah, sure. Wow. So it's powerful.

Leo Laporte (00:55:24):
All right. Well, we're excited about the future. If was, if this was a kinda slow year, I can't wait to see what 20, 22 brings,

Andy Ihnatko (00:55:31):
You know, what, that, that's always, that's already enough upgrade over 2020 where it's like, we're, we're not resigned to the future. We're excited about the future. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:55:38):
Yeah. Wow. they did it on iOS today earlier today. And I recommend that you watch Micah and Rosemary talk about the apps store awards of 2021. Apple does you know, they, they, they take a, an opportunity at the end of the year to talk about the best we talked last week about the best apps and best music and all that this time, the app store award winners, the <laugh> should I just run through 'em why not sure. For a, for a deeper dive watch iOS today to life, world from Toca Boca is the app of the year on the iPhone. This is a game kit for kids. I, you know, they're, it's, they're fun. They've been, tocas been around for a while with a lot of big hits. So the I'm glad to say the iPad app of the year is Luma fusion from Luma touch. I think everybody would agree that which just

Alex Lindsay (00:56:27):
Deserves its what a powerful application.

Leo Laporte (00:56:29):
Yeah. Like just amazing. I mean, this was a tough category though. I mean, there's a pixelated pro there's a lot of, I mean, pixelate photo, there's a lot of good choices in this category.

Alex Lindsay (00:56:37):
The big thing, the big thing with, with Luma fusion is that it is built from the ground up to be a touch application that manages video and, and there's no, it wasn't port somewhere. It wasn't figured out like how are we gonna do it? It just built for that purpose. Just an amazing application. Yeah. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:56:54):
Highly agree. And boy, the other thing that's great. My who was it? Somebody who was asking me what to use? Oh, I think it was on the radio show for, at photo of editing. I said instead in lieu of light room and Photoshop, I said, boy, you're really lucky on both the Mac and the an iOS. There are some really strong choices, pixelated Luma there's just some really good dark room. We are in a, a wonderful time. You don't have to buy light room and Photoshop anymore. You really don't. Yeah. Right. And the price like 35 bucks, you know, amazing

Andy Ihnatko (00:57:26):
On top of all of that. Can I just, can I just put a, a rah for just the iPad pro as a platform, the iPad generally as platform again, I, I, I spent, I, I just came home last night from like four days in New York city and the, I got the apps. I absolutely got the photo work floor workflow. I've always dreamed of I on my iPad pro I come, I get, I get back to the hotel. I get back to my room at night, dump my pictures because this has a, a, a, but load of storage. I can just dump the entire card. Now I'm doing my photo triage of these two or 300 pictures looking at beautiful eight by 10 color glossies on this gorgeous screen, which allows me to see every single detail where this one, the focus is almost perfect on this next one.

Andy Ihnatko (00:58:08):
It's perfect. Great. Except that one. And then because of the power of this CPU and the power of these apps, not even have to worry, I'm gonna boy, as soon as I get home to my MacBook and my, my desktop Photoshop, I'm definitely gonna work on that. So no, why not work on that right now? Then I also have this Apple pencil, which is a few years, three or four years ago. I was thinking about, well, maybe I should actually it's time for me to actually buy a WM tablet, cuz I'm doing a lot more Photoshop work. Now that would be a step backwards. Why would I want to draw on the, on the tablet, cuz again, I'm not gonna be able to afford the kind with the built in screen when I can actually manipulate this thing directly. Again, it's the it's for people who enjoy photography, let alone professionals is worth twice. It seems, it feels like it's worth twice the price cuz it is exactly an invisible but power enhancing conduit between the pictures I took and the pictures that I want to be able to keep and, and, and display with everybody. It's such a perfect, perfect system that I can't recommend highly enough to people who enjoy taking and working with photos. It's

Leo Laporte (00:59:07):
Moving on to the Mac app of the year. I don't know if you guys have tried craft from Luki labs limited. I have, because I'm a constant quest to find the best note taking app. And this is a really, it's just never ending.

Andy Ihnatko (00:59:21):
Can I say there's no, there is, there is no best note taking app. There's just your next note. Take it is it's a disease.

Leo Laporte (00:59:28):
You're right. This one is beautiful. They've done a really nice job. It's kind of like notion for the Mac, but I like it because your data is local. I wish it were cross platform. It would be an option for if it were it's not so but you know what? For Mac specific users, this is a gorgeous tool, really nice craft from lucky labs, the Apple TV app of the year. I'm not familiar with cuz I'm not a big ultimate fighting championship X expert, but days in, from the days in group. And that's what this is, is streaming video of battles of some kind looks like there's some football there as well. Boxing. They're not streaming take Paul. I'm happy fighting that kind of thing. I think you'll agree. Everybody will agree that the app of the year for the watch is carrot weather. <Laugh> the S Nott weather app ever say. I was

Alex Lindsay (01:00:22):
About say they, they, they, they picked such a nice, nice, like it was like intense part, you know? Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:00:27):
They made, they, they probably did. There is a setting in carrot not to be snotty and not to be snarky.

Alex Lindsay (01:00:32):
Clearly. I never seen that part. Clearly

Leo Laporte (01:00:33):
They have chosen the the non snotty interface. Cause usually it, you pooped. Yeah, exactly.

Andy Ihnatko (01:00:42):
Like it's not like you're gonna go out in a date tonight anyway, who cares this for

Leo Laporte (01:00:45):
Any outside, which is always fun. Always fun.

Andy Ihnatko (01:00:48):
Not, not someone who's someone hasn't completed any of their fitness bands in like eight years. Like, okay, that was a

Leo Laporte (01:00:53):
Little bit, but perfect. Barely really found a niche. Didn't they, it's not a app who would've thought it. Right. That, that would be a whole category. They make the best. They

Alex Lindsay (01:01:03):
Probably went to that. There's that remember, remember that diner in Vancouver that they just they're snotty to you the whole time. I dunno if you ever went to that one. Yeah, yeah. There. Then you go to this one and they're just mean to you. Like that is the whole shtick. Is that they're mean to you? I think they probably sat in that diner. It was like, I think there's a

Leo Laporte (01:01:16):
Business here. Yeah. Yeah. The

Andy Ihnatko (01:01:18):
Hot, the hot dog place in Chicago is like that. I can't remember the name of

Leo Laporte (01:01:21):
It, but oh, every, I think every 10 San Francisco was very famous for Edel Fong Ford was in Chinatown.

Alex Lindsay (01:01:31):
He was just, I wanna say all of Chinatown is yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:01:33):
But Edel Ford particularly was very rude and and, and was good

Alex Lindsay (01:01:38):
Food. The second day I was in San Francisco ever. I was in Chinatown and I, we, there was like, that's five, five of us that, that came in that were not Chinese. Everyone else is Chinese. We all got put on the same table. We all ordered different things. And we all got some weird chicken soup thing. Like it was like,

Leo Laporte (01:01:55):
No, you want this, what are

Alex Lindsay (01:01:57):
You talking about? This is what you want. They didn't say that they didn't argue with us. They just all gave us the same thing. And I was like, that is the most subtle, like you're not well welcome here that I've ever seen. Yeah, exactly. Like it's kinda like, you know, we don't care what you said. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:02:08):
<Laugh> cross-platform, notetakers, somebody's asking. I use obsidian, which I'm really a fond fond of obsidian.md. I never tried that. Oh yeah. You, you, thank you. You're you're enabling my, sorry. Sorry. <laugh> this was because the community is so rich. It's Mac PC Linux. So it's cross platform. You keep the files in markdown on your own drive. So it's you're never gonna ever have to worry about it going out business cuz you, your stuff will, you know, is yours. They do have a it's free but you could pay for a, a sync plan, which I do. It's worth it. And it's it's, it's just very, very good. And the community around it is so good that there's a lot of extensions, which means there's very little, you can't do because people scratch their it and boom, there it is.

Leo Laporte (01:02:58):
So let's see our, are we done here? Do we get everything? The, the, oh, wait a minute. No, but wait, there's more. There's the game of the year. So I thought to might be a game, but no league of legends, wild rift little nod to probably the most popular online game of all, certainly up there it's and all without advertising, I'm being sarcastic. <Laugh> nonstop advertising. Yes. Marvel future revolution from net Marvel is the iPad game of the year. I have not played this, but I'm not a big fighting game. Fan, I don't know what it looks like. This is a fighting by

Alex Lindsay (01:03:32):
The way, with, with the league of legends. Have you guys seen Arcan? No. Have you watched

Leo Laporte (01:03:36):
It yet? No. What's that? Wow. Is it a

Alex Lindsay (01:03:39):
TV show? So yeah, it's arcane is on, I think Netflix and it is some of the best rendering in that style that I have ever seen. My kids just watch the whole thing, you know? And they, my kids are like my kids and my wife are really into watching. So it's like a league

Leo Laporte (01:03:58):
League of legends fan thick kind of you're yeah. In the league of

Alex Lindsay (01:04:03):
Legends world, my gosh. But yeah. Look at the rendering. Look at the trailer. It is like they turn that thing all the way to 11. Like it's if you look at the, I mean it is you know, just really, really well done. Huh. So anyway, it's my, and my kid's really in enjoyed it. How about the story's really good? I said, my kids really, really liked it. They watched it all the way to the end and they watched them in large. It's good. It's, it's a really, that is pretty. Yeah. And it's just gorgeous really, really it's like the next, you know, taking it to the next level. And the story is really good and mean according to my kids, I didn't, it's not really my, well, that's the

Leo Laporte (01:04:40):
Thing. It's not my either, but 

Alex Lindsay (01:04:42):
But as the rendering though, I looked at it and I looked at the trailer and I watched my kids watch it on a big screen. And John loves that. He says

Leo Laporte (01:04:48):
It's not his cup of tea either. You know, it's interesting. I wonder you know, I've been watching the wheel of time on Amazon prime and a number of people said, you know, they really should just have done this in this style as an animated because animation has gotten so good. Yeah. And, and especially with fan fantasy there's you can do so much. I mean, they're spending $10 million an episode for world wheel of time to build, build towns and burn them down. And you know, I think maybe animation, you know, the, the,

Andy Ihnatko (01:05:17):
The, the Marvel, the Marvel move cinematic movies, the action sequences would not look halfway as weird if the entire movie were, were animated. It's it's these dis it's these marginal disconnects between, oh, so there is no GRA suddenly something turned off gravity in the entire world to make things more exciting. It, it, it also tricks the brain into thinking that, oh, I I'm willing to accept a whole lot more because I'm seeing something that I know isn't real. So I'm willing to accept more fantasy. But you know, this, this conversation is making me suddenly wish that I real a lot of reasons why I wish that Roger Ebert was still around, but man, he would've been, he would've been so into games, not, not playing them, but enjoying the cinematic qualities, the storytelling qualities, the emotive qualities that were only just starting to wink through when he passed away. I mean, he, he did write, he did write a piece about how he was aware games. Can't be art. Yeah. He was,

Leo Laporte (01:06:08):
He wrote, oh, games are art, dear. But that I know that's a famous well, but no he's

Andy Ihnatko (01:06:15):
Well, we'll go into it. Basic. He, he was making a very, very thorough academic argument that unfortunately could be easily summed up as, oh, he's saying video games are no, no I'm saying here's how I choose to define cinematic art. The technology right now is not capable of delivering that component of it. Therefore, therefore, because of my academic, he changed. He, he absolutely would have as the, as he was,

Leo Laporte (01:06:39):
Do you look at something like last of us, that is cinematic, absolutely

Andy Ihnatko (01:06:42):
Cinematic. I can. So much of my YouTube watching is just watching people play through the stories of these games. I'm, I'm watching, I'm watching the the, the NBA 20, 21, like the, I I'm there's

Leo Laporte (01:06:52):
I'm cinema that.

Andy Ihnatko (01:06:54):
No, but no, but I'm saying I'm more, I'm more, I'm more interested in the story of this player that they're being moved through. Oh my God. But what happens if he doesn't make it through G league? Is it gonna have to go to gonna have to play record ball for the rest of his career? Hey,

Leo Laporte (01:07:07):
Credit to Georgia Dow her, she's got a series called therapist reacts. You might remember. She was doing therapist reacts to the, the Marvel movies. Now she's doing it to Arcan. So here, here she is explaining what's going on with these characters emotionally. And that shows you the depths you've got here right directly. She is so good

Rene Ritchie (01:07:27):
At this too. And this for a moment, she went from 10,000 subscribers to 20 to 25,000 in a week with this. And these videos have 700,000 and 300,000

Leo Laporte (01:07:37):
Views. Now this just came out. It's 313,000 viewer already. She's obviously this is so blowing up as a kid say, I, I, this, I wanna temper what I said about YouTube journalism with the fact that YouTube has given people a new, a way to do things that no one's ever done before. You could never do a therapist reacts to arcane on, on national network television. But thanks to YouTube, we are seeing an amazing amount of creativity in new ways. Maybe the go B, but nowhere else

Rene Ritchie (01:08:04):
<Laugh>,

Andy Ihnatko (01:08:05):
But not, not can I, can I say that? Not, not only that, but the fact that it's there, there was such a, there were so many barriers to entry when, when, when I started out that yes, that it's just me too. You have to, you have to love

Leo Laporte (01:08:18):
Way to get on.

Andy Ihnatko (01:08:19):
Yeah. Whereas sometimes the most valuable video you'll find on a subject is one with a channel with like 400 subscribers. This thing has had 1400 views, but this is, this is like, this is someone who comes into the point of view of, I am not the world expert on this technology. However, I am a normal person who bought this one thing. And here is my experience with this one thing. And also I care enough about this video, this 10 minute video to be very, very expressive and, and, and clinical about the way I do it. That's what I love. And that, and the fact that sometimes these these individuals who just made a couple of videos because they inter interest them and they had an opinion to share or can make a living, sharing that stuff. That's the sort of thing that just makes me really happy about my life in the, in the 21st century. I

Leo Laporte (01:09:01):
Agree. Yeah. And you know, and this is the point and Jeff Jarvis always makes this, there are, you know, we always talk about the negatives and the downsides of social media and the internet, but there's so many positive sizes. So we should really remember that this is a much better world on balance absolutely than it would've been without, it,

Andy Ihnatko (01:09:20):
It, it came with a price, but also comes with benefits. Exactly.

Leo Laporte (01:09:23):
Just to wrap up wide range too, because, okay, sorry. No, no.

Rene Ritchie (01:09:26):
I was just gonna say, like, you're also gonna see Craig Mazen doing the last of us for HBO. So it goes like full circle all the way around

Leo Laporte (01:09:32):
Back again. Yeah. That's true. Mac game of the year mist, who would've thought that you're like, who would've thought that it's a remastered version of mist from the same company from C wait missed while

Rene Ritchie (01:09:44):
We're playing halo and waiting for the matrix to come out. What year is this? I

Leo Laporte (01:09:47):
Know isn't that interesting? I haven't played it. Is it different at all from the original mist? I mean, the original mist was a HyperCard stack move very slowly from image to image. Oh my God.

Andy Ihnatko (01:10:00):
I totally gotta buy a CD Ru. This is awesome.

Leo Laporte (01:10:02):
Yeah. I haven't played it, so I guess I'll have to check it out. That's why these awards are kind of important for the companies, Apple TV game of the year space, Marshalls three from pixel bite, looks like a top down RPG and the apple arcade game of the year Fanta tasian from mist Walker. Again, I haven't checked these out, I guess I will, but for a deep dive on all of them you must watch iPad or iOS today from this week. Yeah. They just talked about all of these and I think really, really good stuff.

Andy Ihnatko (01:10:38):
So can I raise the final question before we leave this topic? Yes. Does, has Apple ever put out like a little sort of document or a little bit of experience saying here's how we select these, these winners every year? Oh, good question. Like, it'd be nice to note. It'd be nice to know for the processes we have, we, we have people inside of Apple that are part of, sort of an award committee that they promote they out and they, they, no, we have a wide pool that nominates them. We then have a pool with an apple that, that discusses them. And then the final decision is at least signed off by, by three or four specific people. It'd be because it would break our hearts. If we found out that, well, first of all we got, we have a sponsorship deal that includes a high profile, like no <laugh> or we, we, we only consider apps that have above a certain threshold of whatever.

Andy Ihnatko (01:11:24):
Not, not, I'm not accusing Apple of anything, but these are the sort of things that make it more interesting. It's more interesting when it turns out that there, the reason why the game of the year is the game of the year is because this one kind of freak inside Apple who had access to the right ear, loved this game so much and was, and was concerned about why aren't more people playing this game and suddenly made the, the 100 people who are in on the committee, all rabid fans of this game. And they decided, okay, our job is done. We can move on to every other category with three month left to go, because we are not allowing any other game. Other than this one, we now all love to, to become the app of the year. Cuz we want this com we want this game to be known by everybody. I

Leo Laporte (01:12:01):
Think it's pretty clear. Apple is not doing something like it's a sponsorship deal, but I agree. You're right. They're all well known. There's no major discovery. So I would be very curious. I don't, I don't, I don't know of Apple ever. I'm not,

Andy Ihnatko (01:12:15):
I'm not,

Leo Laporte (01:12:16):
But it's always no, no, no, but they should. I agree. They totally should. It's a, all of these, it's

Rene Ritchie (01:12:21):
Usually the editorial team. So it's the people who are responsible, let's

Leo Laporte (01:12:23):
Ask Seren would under,

Rene Ritchie (01:12:26):
She wants, she can't tell, well, she's evangelism now. She can't tell us, oh, she's an Evangel, Kaha and lean, lofty used to work in editorial. They don't anymore. But the, the process was generally that they get together and, and sort of figure out what to them was emblematic of the, the biggest trends. And the biggest movements in the app store for any given year, the, the ADAS are more like what serviced Apple's framework agendas. Like if you took the latest and greatest and made something really good out of it, the ADAS would recognize you, but this was more like trends. And I think that's why they have this whole section of other additional apps they thought were great. Just based on the whole last two years of COVID that we

Leo Laporte (01:12:58):
Lived through as well. Yeah. I actually didn't mention that, but the top trend of 2021 was connection. Join us to celebrate the apps that worked to restore our sense of togetherness by helping us find friendship, romance, community, even some lighthearted competition among us is in there. Canvas is in there. Peanut. That sounds so familiar. What is peanut? I'm trying to remember Bumble, peanut at all. Yep. Find friends and support. Oh, it's for women. That's why fertility, motherhood menopause. None of us here need that. I don't think Bumble was another winner dating and meet people. This is a lot of, of people like Bumble, because it's also about making friends, not specifically about well, you know, and ed okra, which I do use ed okra highlights black owned restaurants in your area. And it's a great app. I really like Edo OCRA. So this might be a really good example. I, these awards actually are kind of except with the exception of Canva and among us letter lesser known apps that, that, that have made a difference. And I think this is a good, these are good five, very good choices. Yeah.

Andy Ihnatko (01:14:10):
This is why these, these are why these sort of things should never be like popularity votes cause gold. Great. The one, the thing that everybody's playing is, is now becoming more famous. But, but this it's always, there's a danger of making this insight baseball, but sometimes it's interesting to find out that, oh, so none of these documentaries would've even been nominated except for the fact that people who actually work in documentaries did this. I'm sorry, I'll get, I'll get off the topic, but it's, it reminds me of one of the most interesting controversial award wins, which is when suicide's the first suicide squad. I think the cost, the makeup for Harley Quinn won best makeup in a year in which, oh my God. But how about this other movie? These, these incredible alien effects, this other one, which this guy was that no, these are being nominated and voted on by people who are actual makeup artists.

Andy Ihnatko (01:14:58):
They understand the, they, they looked at this with their mouths at Gabe saying they had Harley Quinn's makeup, perfect at the start of the movie, and then gradually get worn down by the things that are happening in, in hers experiences over the time as time goes forward. Do you have any idea how impossible that is to achieve on a three month long film shoot? That's the sort of stuff that I, when I love finding out, how are they, how, what are they seeing in these, these nominees that really impress them and who are they impressing? Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:15:28):
Yeah. Well maybe someday will know how Apple determined. Let's take it a little on Apple TV plus. And we'll have more coming up in just a bit. Andy NACO Renee Richie, Alex Lindsay here, our show today brought to you by Udacity love Udacity. What a great place to get an online education that is geared towards people, looking to take their technology to the next level. In particular people looking to get a job in tech. Udacity has specialized in exciting content that can help take you farther in your career than ever. And they offer the latest cutting edge. They call 'em Nanodegree programs and they're exclusive to Udacity and they are great. Listen to some of the top Nanodegree programs in the cutting edge, edge area like AI or wouldn't. You love to get a, a, a Nanodegree in a flying car, an autonomous flight engineer, intro to self-driving cars, machine learning, engineer, robotics, software engineer, and a lot more.

Leo Laporte (01:16:28):
And Udacity is not just here to, to give you the classes they're here to encourage your career growth. They wanna provide you with the information you need about the career. You want give you the skills for that career and then help you get the job. Just look at some of the success stories on the Udacity site like Aaron, he said Udacity, Nanodegree programs and career resource center played an integral part in helping me land a job offer from Google. Yeah, Google Udacity. These courses are created with companies like Google partners and industry leaders like Microsoft, Google, IBM, Amazon web services and more, and your teachers, your instructors are from the team leads at these top companies. So they re look at that blockchain developer. Wouldn't that be cool? You're gonna get the right knowledge from the experts who are working in the field every day.

Leo Laporte (01:17:19):
I love it because Udacity is project based. You got that's active learning. You gotta get your hands dirty. You gotta actually, you can learn the stuff, but until you've really sat and done it, <laugh>, you can't say, you know it. And that's the whole point of Udacity, Nanodegree programs, project based, active learning that lets you test your knowledge. All homework and projects are reviewed by qualified professionals. People were working in the field, you'll get real human feedback code reviews like you would get in, in, in business with access to mentors, 24 7. So you're never on your own. You can always ask for help and flexible schedules. You choose what works for you. They, they know a lot of people who are Udacity learners or, you know, have day jobs. So you can put in as little as five to 10 hours a week and still graduate in three months.

Leo Laporte (01:18:05):
Great scholarships available too. I want you to go to udacity.com, scroll to the bottom of the webpage and under resources. You'll see scholarships. Here's an example. One 10 blacks in technology, great group. They've teamed up with Udacity to offer part-time online tech scholarships for black Americans who don't have a four year degree. They're offering 2000 full scholarships for qualified applicants. So I, that is great. Apply today at udacity.com. Again, that's at the bottom of the webpage select scholarships under resources. If you're a business upskill your whole workforce with Udacity, they've got great enterprise programs. Check it out at the enterprise section of Udacity website. Look, this is it. Get the in demand tech skills you need to a advance your career. Visit Udacity. UDACITY. udacity.com/twit to learn more udacity.com/twit. We thank Udacity, so much for the job they're doing for supporting MacBreak Weekly.

Leo Laporte (01:19:05):
We thank you for supporting Mac break weekly, dear listener or viewer by using that address on cuz that way we get credit for it. Udacity udacity.com/twit. I, I mentioned this, but that's really how it works. You know, there's no other way of them monitoring, you know, how well their advertisings work. So please <laugh> use those addresses. You know, the problem is we have a smart audience and they know, oh, you Udacity. I remember that. And they type in Udacity which is fine. Okay. If you're gonna do that, that's fine. But if you, if you remember udacity.com/twit US state department says, or maybe it's Apple, that's saying this, that the NSO has provided Pegasus software to hack at least nine state department employees operating out of Uganda. The hacks took place in the last several months.

Leo Laporte (01:20:04):
Officials either based in Uganda or focused on matters concerning the country, according to sources, gee, I wonder who might have bought the the, the exploit from the NSO group to go after. So group says that they don't target American phones, but they differentiate based on phone numbers. And these data officials had phone. Oh, oh yeah. Well, we couldn't possibly numbers. We could possibly have known they had phone. We, we had no idea gambling in the establishment <laugh> we didn't have any indications as the NSO group that it our tools were used, but we have canceled access for the relevant customers. And we're gonna investigate, meanwhile, Apple is suing them, Facebook them, the US government's sanctioning them. I out of order, you're out of order the whole court. Yeah, no comment from the Ugandan embassy in Washington. No comment from Apple. 

Andy Ihnatko (01:21:01):
Yeah. We're, we're gonna see a lot of LinkedIn updates things. So, and so has, is no longer working for NSO, then next message. Congratulate them for the new chops. NSO

Leo Laporte (01:21:11):
Yeah, they've done that. They've done that people. This is the, this is the way of the world to just change the name, maybe meta software group. How about that? Apple sends an alert to affected users. And in this case, they were notified by Apple, including American citizens, identifiable as us government employees, because <laugh> their email addresses ended in state.gov. How could we have known, there you go. How could we have known,

Andy Ihnatko (01:21:44):
Do you know how impossible it is to understand how well cards work in search terms?

Leo Laporte (01:21:48):
It's like, it's like

Andy Ihnatko (01:21:49):
A, it's like moon man

Leo Laporte (01:21:50):
Stuff. God, this was they and other targets notified by Apple in multiple countries were infected through the same graphics pro processing of vulnerability, Apple fixed in September. But you know, that's, that means they were hacked before then, right? Yep. Basically the way it works, NSO group sends an iMessage that opens up the door and then says to whoever bought this exploit go ahead, have, have at it, have some fun victims would not see or need to interact with a prompt for the hack to be successful. Yeah.

Andy Ihnatko (01:22:28):
Yeah. Apple shut, you know, Apple shut down all these exploits shortly thereafter, but it just goes to show that there are always more exploits out there. And a, and a well funded company like this with such well deep pocketed people behind people who buy those services will always find the next one. It's it's it's a blight. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:22:48):
You remember last week we mentioned that tile had been picked up by a family safety app, life 360. Well, here's the other shoe dropping. Yeah. Life 360 is happy. Happy. I tell you to sell your precise location data to whoever wants to buy it. Yep.

Rene Ritchie (01:23:07):
You like the, the worst part of this is that there were all these articles saying how Apple was cracking down on companies like life 360, just because they were using MDM software to try to protect your kids. And ample was being anti-competitive to them. They wanted to lock down the, the parental control and they were, so me, those articles were so snarky and so angry. They never stopped for a second to just ask why, like, what is the other discussion? What is the other point here? Yeah. And also like Apple's encroaching on tile. This is like, I'll, I'm not, I'm saying like, be hard on Apple. Be, be severe on Apple. Never give the benefit of the doubt, but ask the other question.

Leo Laporte (01:23:41):
Well, that's why I'm glad this, this is getting reported. The markups reporting life 360 S used by 33 million people worldwide. The app is selling data on kids and families, whereabouts to approximately a dozen data brokers who have sold data virtually anyone who wants to buy it. Yeah.

Andy Ihnatko (01:24:01):
And, and everybody should keep in mind that it doesn't mean, well, what does that matter? Only my, I only use my tile tracker for this one thing. No, it's the app on your phone. They've got it. They've got everything. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:24:11):
And I'm not saying by the way, this is not asserting that tile's doing this this is life 360, the new owner of

Alex Lindsay (01:24:16):
Tile and right. And the other thing to underline what Andy's talking about, it's not just that it, what happens is the data brokers are taking the data from everyone. So they're, they're where you were and what you bought. It's all that. Yeah. And then what you're doing here and what, you know, and, and when you, when you go to a page that has a Facebook, you know, tracker on it, they're, they're tying that all back in. Yeah. And so, so all of this stuff, it's, it's this huge web that you're now part of. And I think that this is gonna probably be, you know, I probably won't be the end of tile, but tile, you know, with, without Apple there, it might last for a little longer with Apple already having an air tag there. I think anybody would be nuts to buy a title. At this point,

Leo Laporte (01:24:52):
The mark spoke to two former employees both still employed in the data industry. They formally worked at location, data brokers cubic and ex mode. They they said that li life 360 is one of the largest sources of data for the data broker industry CEO and founder of life 360 says, well, we have no means to confirm or deny the accuracy. <Laugh> we see data got caught doing this. They did say by the way, and this is a direct quote from the mark. Thank you. The markup.org. We see data as an important part of our business model that allows us to keep the core life 360 services free for the majority of our users, including features that have improved driver safety and saved numerous lives. Yeah.

Andy Ihnatko (01:25:43):
See, Google can get away with that. When they're saying that we provide infrastructure structure for tiniest institutions to the largest institutions that cost nothing. We give you a mapping system that is the best in the world and costs you nothing on and on and on. But, and yes, we do run a ad network that use exploits, that stuff. That seems like a fair deal. When a company like when a company like this says, no, no, no. We're using it to make no, no, no. Don't tell, don't even pretend that's in any way, a fair proposition. It's like we, we're gonna hit you in the head eight times with this paper towel roll, but we're also gonna give you one piece of free candy. It's what hard candy. It's like, no you're being jerks start pretending that we, you should be grateful to, or you're doing anything innovative. We

Leo Laporte (01:26:22):
Should mention that if you read the life 360 privacy policy does mention cubic and all states' ity. They say those are among the companies that we sell data to the the leaker and ex former XMO engineer said the raw data that the company received from life 360 was among X mode's most valuable offerings due to the sheer volume and precision of the data. A former cubic employee joke. The company wouldn't be able to run its marketing campaigns without life 360 S constant flow of location

Alex Lindsay (01:26:54):
Information. And, and again, for, for advertisers and for people who are talking to, you know, who are trying to figure out all of this stuff to make it work, this is, this is just another brick in the wall. Like this is I people say when they get the option on an app, on an app Apple phone, it's why 85% say, Nope, I don't, I'm not interested because it's gross. You know? And it just keeps on showing up as more and more gross, you know? And, and I think that that's gonna be it, it's gonna keep on making it harder and harder, and people are gonna be more and more open to further regulation. And, and, and mostly just them just checking out, well,

Rene Ritchie (01:27:25):
It's the apps you don't expect that are doing it too. Like, in some ways you expect certain apps we'll do it. And like, like Andy said, with Google, we, we have a fair exchange for those things. But when you turn on like the Bluetooth monitoring thing, or you turn on the tracking thing and suddenly like, like your local TV network is taking all this information, the store, the shopping mall is following you through the thing you're like that you have no need for that. You're just stealing that information. That point for me, the

Alex Lindsay (01:27:48):
Turning point was when I got the GDPR a notice from PG and E that's, our that's, they provide power in California. And I was like, you guys, you can't even keep my power on. And you're like, stealing my data, you know, like you, you know, like I was insulted, you know, like, because the reason I went to the page was cause I didn't have power, you know, like, you know, and, and

Leo Laporte (01:28:05):
It was, here's another little fun tidbit. The CEO and founder of life 360 Chris halls said, well, I can't reveal who our customers were. They're about a dozen partners, but I would be supportive of legislation that would require me to reveal that.

Andy Ihnatko (01:28:20):
Yeah. Yes. So they, so they they're concerned. They're concerned with privacy, but not for a lot of people.

Alex Lindsay (01:28:27):
That's contractual, their clients get

Leo Laporte (01:28:28):
Privacy just to be clear is not their product. Whether this data is sold aggregated. I think it probably is rather than where does Leo to, you know, last night, it's more like but

Alex Lindsay (01:28:40):
Again, but again, that data, I wouldn't be surprised though, if that data is, when you say group people, though, it is tying you what they want in that it's aggregate data. Yeah, no, it's not, but you

Rene Ritchie (01:28:51):
Can tie person

Alex Lindsay (01:28:52):
Fairly. They wanna tie your

Leo Laporte (01:28:53):
Position. Cubic spokesperson said the company doesn't sell raw location data, but provides access to an aggregated set of data through its workbench tool. And by the way, customers include the CDC to track mobility transfer to COVID 19, the CDC only exports aggregate privacy, safe analytics for research purposes, which completely anonymizes any individual user data cubic does not sell data to law enforcement agencies or provide raw data feeds to government partners, unlike others, such as collector and safe graph. So cubic one, they don't, but others do so. Okay. That is point that's

Alex Lindsay (01:29:31):
The whole thing taken. All that data is being tied in. And again, what they want to do is they want to tie it to your Facebook tracking bit your purchases at Safeway, or, you know, they're building this, they're building a, a picture of you that they can then manipulate and pull at.

Andy Ihnatko (01:29:49):
Yep. I shut an Amazon go store for the first time. So I could like document it and, and write about it later on this weekend. And it's like, just every time, every moment you're in there, you realize that I am doing nothing. I'm not tapping like after you tap in at the, at the, at the entrance, it's like, I am not like, hold, make sure your make sure your phone is turned on and switched to this. Or now scan this every time you take this, when you took this sandwich, make sure that you put this, you, you, you, you scan this thing or whatever, or make sure that there's a sensor that you can see an optical sensor to see that like that the San has been taken. All I did was shoplift what I was going to eat on the Amtrak train on the way home. And that was able to had such granularity of being able to track where, what I'm doing and where I am inside that space, that it didn't, it, it just, I, I got a ping, as soon as I was on the sidewalk saying, here's exactly what you bought. Here's exactly what we, what we charged you for. Thank you. Come again. Well, let me

Leo Laporte (01:30:42):
Me ask this. It's not clear that it is individual data. It's a, and that maybe doesn't surprise me, but let me ask this, would it be okay if the usage were, and this is, I think what most of the companies are, are attempting to at least give the impression of, if not explicitly saying if the usage were AED data, like we know 25 to 54 traveled to the AMAC train between this hour and this hour and great numbers we're sold to advertisers, that kind of information would, would you all be okay with that?

Andy Ihnatko (01:31:16):
Yes. So long as there's something in the user equipment saying that, acknowledging that, Hey, we will, we, we will or, and we can sell aggregate data as long as there's something in the user agreement saying we are expressively forbidden in this agreement from selling personally identify personally identifiable information in terms of what we collect. We will never, we will never tell anybody Andy and ACO was here at this store. Here is what he did here is what he bought. I think that's, I think that's fair place so long as it's there for people to read. I think what you really need, however, is federal legislation saying that your personal data belongs to you? It is your property. Just like a, just like as soon as I publish something, the copyright belongs to me. That's what the law says. I don't have to file anything. I don't have to declare an intent. It belongs to me. So if you take it from me without telling me, I can legally do something to make your day very, very hard. We need something like that, about personal information saying that we, I have to specifically agree to sell this or lease this to you. You can't just simply have an agreement saying, oh, by the way it's kind of, okay. It has to be something

Alex Lindsay (01:32:17):
A little bit firmer than that. And we have to be clear that with all the apps that are on our phone, doing all the different tracking people can take anonymized data and make it press reference UN anonymized, right? They can, you know, so they can, they can tease all this information out and, and start tying you directly to it. And that's the, that's the real danger. And that's why Apple's giving us the option to turn it off.

Leo Laporte (01:32:34):
Here's what the article goes on to say two former life, 360 employees also told the markup the company, while it states it anonymizes the data. It sells fails to take necessary precautions, to ensure that location histories cannot be tracked back to individuals. They said that while the company removed the most obvious identifying user information, it did not make efforts to fuzz, hash aggregate, or reduce the precis of the location to preserve privacy halls. The CEO said that all of life's 360 S contracts prohibit its customers from re-identifying individual users, along with other privacy and safety protective practices. He says they follow industry best practices for privacy and only certain customers. Okay? Wow. Only certain customers like cubic receive raw location data. The former exo engineer said the company exo also received raw data from life 360. The company relies on its customers to obfuscate that data based on their specific applications says alls. So some of our data partners, it's up to you guys, like what? We're gonna give you the information, but you gotta take, you gotta have a, oh my gosh, you gotta keep your phone 300 miles away from you every time, all time <laugh>. So let me tell you how profitable this is. In, in 2016, the company made $693,000 from selling data. Four years later, 16 million from selling location data. They did have a loss of 16.3 million last year, but I suspect that's partly because they're buying, no one was going

Alex Lindsay (01:34:10):
Anywhere. No one was going anywhere that we couldn't track. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:34:12):
That's home. They're like,

Alex Lindsay (01:34:13):
But they're tracking, buying in the living room and the kitchen and the,

Leo Laporte (01:34:15):
You know, the company's expanding its business to include other digital safety products, data breach, alerts, credit monitoring, and identity theft protection features they're Austral wrong. They're Australian. I didn't know they were an Australian company. They've also acquired companies that expand its tracking in 2019, they purchased Zen screen, a family screen time monitoring app in April, a purchased a wearable location device, company, geo bit aimed at track, young children, pets and seniors. <Laugh> hus said they have no plans to sell data from geo bit devices or its digital safety services. And then of course they announced the plans to buy tile a couple it's just too

Alex Lindsay (01:34:56):
Sticky. Like once you're in there, you can't, you know, and, and the other thing is the regulations will be light and, and slow because a lot of the intelligence agencies don't really want you to, they love this, you know? Yeah. So they're kinda

Andy Ihnatko (01:35:05):
Like they're, they're talking to the, the, the legislators going, eh, you know, like, like, like let's not, let's not get too heavy handed here, you know, it's, it's it's pretty useful. It's, it's also all this, this timeline really explains why it's important to note the difference, particularly at Apple. This is one Apple strengths between we collect information from you, but we are very, very trustworth. I believe that Google collects information from you, but it's very, very trustworthy. They treat it very, very securely. Apple can say that we collect as we don't collect any information from you that we don't absolutely need because we do trust app. I, I absolutely trust Apple with this stuff more than any other tech company of its size or under its size. However, just think about, imagine 30 years ago saying, well, Sears will never go out of business Polaroid.

Andy Ihnatko (01:35:49):
Oh my God. It, it will never just be like a logo that people can stick that a company can stick on any piece of crappy electronics to make it think it's sophisticated. Apple could be that company. It all needs us. A couple is a couple of bad generations in which suddenly there is this immense, the, the most trustworthy company in the world with the most valuable treasure trove of previously unknown unreleased unevaluated unmonetized personal consumer data is now up for grabs by a bankruptcy court. It's like, it's not impossible. So this is why these things matter. It matters when Apple says we are not just good with your data. We are actually not collecting it in the first person. But

Leo Laporte (01:36:26):
Remember again that even if you get that pop up saying, you wanna let this guy track you. If you're buying an app specifically for tracking, you're gonna say, oh yeah, I guess I do wanna allow that there is, I, should it tell you if you want to use life 360, a setting that can disable the sale of location data in the privacy setting. So there is a check box. Yeah. It's nobody tells you about it,

Alex Lindsay (01:36:49):
But you can find it well, and this is, and this, this unwrapping, like this is a, this is a, a system that Apple is like slowly adding, you know, to the know to knowledge. And I mean, this came out in the press. But if you look at the new updates that Apple's working on, where they're going to start telling you everything your app is doing, like every website, everything that it's talking about, all those things. If, if people thought that that it felt gooey before, <laugh>,

Leo Laporte (01:37:13):
It's not gonna be, I'd be a lot more segment about this. If Apple didn't collect this information, this is the problem with both Apple, Google, Facebook there for first party. So all of these warnings are about third party data collection, but all the first party data collection continues. Yeah. But, but I,

Alex Lindsay (01:37:26):
But I, but I still think what the effect that it's gonna have on people is when you open it up and you get these reports of third party. Yeah. You'll suddenly be aware of this. You're gonna be like, wow, I do not want that. But again,

Leo Laporte (01:37:35):
It's a little it's like, because it's saying, yeah, oh, these people, these bad people are collecting data. Don't don't, but they don't mention the first. And it's not just Apple. It's I'll Google, Facebook, Microsoft, everybody else. There is first party collection. And that's a big problem, I think. But,

Alex Lindsay (01:37:53):
But what the, but what Apple's not doing is interconnecting it with all the other, all the other, like, you know, Facebook,

Leo Laporte (01:37:58):
We don't know exactly what Apple's doing. I mean, I think they imply that they're taking good care of your data. It's not, they're selling ads against it. So

Alex Lindsay (01:38:06):
Against the first party information that they have, but there's not crosschecking it with Safeway purchases. That's the, I mean, literally that's where it's dangerous. Like, like when you, when you get out into that web is where things get super weird and, and people are able to build this stuff. When you're talking about how people interact with your own app. I, I think that that's very different than as you start to cross, you know, when you start to cross it, you can get into a whole different world of knowing some about someone. That's why third party data, that's the real value, very different than first. The real value is you stick. Now, first party data is how they interact with, with us in the app. And I want to create a better service and I wanna give them those things. Third party app is I'm gonna connect you with a thousand other, all this info information tracking that you're talking about here.

Alex Lindsay (01:38:47):
Plus again, what, you're, what you're buying with your credit card, where you're driving, how you're, what you're, you know, where you're going, who you're standing next to with two iPhone, you know, like, like those are the kind of things that, you know, that, that, and that's why, you know, you say, oh, I was just talking to this person about this. Well, that person was probably searching something there and that it knows they search this. Now you're standing next to them. I'm gonna send you an ad about that. That's what's happening. Like that is like, that's the part that is super gooey. And, and so I think that, I think I don't, I think it's very important that we don't equate first party and third party as the same thing, because it is not, it is the first party is how to make the app work better. Third party is everything's out there, like, and it's all being interconnected and you're being used, you know, like, like <laugh>, I would say something very used, like, but, but you're being used, you know, like, you know, and so, so you just need to, you know, third party app is the devil. Like the third party sharing is you should never, that should not be okay. It's not okay.

Leo Laporte (01:39:43):
Not okay. I, I think there is a risk though. Well, I won't use Apple cause I don't wanna offend you Alex, but let's say Facebook or, or Google. There, they have an advantage. If they can get the third party data shut down, their first party data is so good that they have a massive advantage. It's something called regulatory capture where they basically can, can say, you know pull up. It's why you're seeing all these ads on TV from Facebook lately saying, oh yeah, they really should. Government should really regulate two 30 because they can handle, but any upstart, any competition can't. And I think that this is the risk of people thinking that they're protected by, by stopping third party data, Apple knows what credit cards you use. They know when you're next to an iPhone user, cuz of airdrop. They know a lot of this stuff. They have this data. So the fact that they're not cross referencing it, it with data from Google is a small,

Alex Lindsay (01:40:41):
But you gotta understand like reassured Google and Facebook's cross referencing is the secret to the operation. Like you, it is what they're doing. <Laugh> so you

Leo Laporte (01:40:49):
Don't think what Apple knows is of value.

Alex Lindsay (01:40:51):
I think that I don't think Apple keeps very much of it. Like apple doesn't want Don that data. They don't need it. They don't we don't need

Leo Laporte (01:40:57):
That data. We don't know. Do you know, do you have a, according

Rene Ritchie (01:41:02):
To language don't actual trade, there's a vast SWA information. They don't exfiltrate and VWA information. They don't keep

Alex Lindsay (01:41:08):
Yeah, they don't need it. They're not

Rene Ritchie (01:41:10):
Good at this. If you look at their advertising, it's there. Well, they are

Leo Laporte (01:41:13):
So good at it doesn't necessarily mean that they're safe. So I just would say, look, I, in general, I'm gonna feel better about Apple. We were, we've been talking a lot about the privacy of Google auto Google's, Android auto. And now they have an operating system, Android automotive, which shares a huge amount of data back to Google compared to what Apple's CarPlay share years back to Apple. You know, in general, I feel like Apple's doing generally trying to do the right thing, but Apple is a for profit corporation. I would not assume they are acting on,

Alex Lindsay (01:41:48):
I think they're acting on their own behalf, but their own behalf relates to privacy and they don't need this to make money. Like they, that's the big thing. It's not, it's not

Leo Laporte (01:41:55):
Microsoft. Doesn't edge. Just don't buy now pay later. But for some reason they do. And so you can't diminish the desire of a company to make even more money. Well, also

Rene Ritchie (01:42:05):
Think that the issue decides he wants to go big into this. It could be a concern because they have the apparatus to, to derive huge loss of

Alex Lindsay (01:42:11):
Information. But I think that the snapback that, that Apple a got with just the we're gonna search your photos is the problem is, is it would be, it would be almost impossible for apple to change the direction dramatically because we expect something from them that is very different than what we expect from everyone else. If Google said they were that, that we're like, well, that's what Google does that's. But if, if you know, into it, when you do it one step into it, we've bought into, you know, as apple users, we've bought into something that we expect to get and, and their entire that's the, that's the reason it's not that Apple is altruistic in this area or defending us it's that their business model is based around it. You know? And so the thing is, is that they, that they, and, and it would be very, very difficult at this point.

Alex Lindsay (01:42:53):
They've created a contract, you know, with us in the way that they, we bought it, which you saw as soon as people got upset that we expect something as users. And if they, if they broke that, that unwritten contract with folks, they probably, you know, it'd be a huge hit on their income, you know, because people would suddenly start thinking about, should I be here or not, but as long as they hold that contract, I think that, and I think that's why they can't go down that path very far. I mean, they, you know, if it, cuz if it, if this article that we saw with life 360 came out with Apple, their stock would fall by 20%. Like it would, you know, cuz it would, it would, you know, and the revenue would definitely fall, you know, people would be like because, and, and they, they can't afford that, that kind of press. And so, and in general you can't do a lot of things that you can't afford the press for very long because you'll get it

Rene Ritchie (01:43:38):
Snarky, Washington, post articles, quote by 3%.

Alex Lindsay (01:43:41):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Particularly

Andy Ihnatko (01:43:44):
With Apple I'll I'll just say that Apple sometimes brings this sort of risk on themselves by if they don't thump their Bible against the table over and over again about how they're the sole people, the whole corporation that understands and respects and adores privacy and security. This is when say, oh, what else did you lie to us about Apple? Or what else did you hope that we wouldn't find that we wouldn't hear the full story about, whereas it's kind of okay. When a company says, I, I we're no. When a company is gonna WAFF little bit on that point, at least, you know, that they understand that it would, that would make us upset. If we learned about this at, at minimum,

Leo Laporte (01:44:17):
Be careful. <Laugh> bad. Guys are putting air tags according to the York regional police they're the losers are abusing their air tags. Thes they're putting tags in your, in your guests or your trailer hit Canada stole the maple syrup. <Laugh> Canada like, like, like I just didn't expect this from Canada officers, according to New York, New York police. I'm sorry, go ahead. Canadians should not be doing this officers in New York. We do. We hold Canadians at a higher lot of Canadians at a higher standard. Like

Andy Ihnatko (01:44:53):
We expect them to be, I'm sorry, Alex. I, I, you just reminded me of like a, a parent who has like three children, like one of which gets all and, and, and volunteers for the community. You're the one like smokes behind the boys room and does all this necessary. You know, I, I expect Teddy to be a loser and embarrassment with the family, but John, it hurts when you it's cold outside.

Leo Laporte (01:45:13):
We can't be tracking these kids. It genuinely, what are you talking about? It's the good kids who are the worst. I just wanna say that <laugh> so the way this, this this works we're we're good

Andy Ihnatko (01:45:21):
At PR. Sorry. Good.

Leo Laporte (01:45:23):
Yeah, exactly. That's all it means. You're good at you're good at marketing. That's all. In fact that that's even more suspicious. I was the kid

Andy Ihnatko (01:45:30):
Who was coughin, like why no, Mr. Vice does, does that, does that last sound like something I would do?

Leo Laporte (01:45:35):
Who's worse. Eddie tag up a moose or the beaver come on. Who's worse. Since September 21 officers have identified five incidents where suspects have placed small tracking devices on high end vehicles. So you're at a mall, you're at a parking lot. They go, Hey, that's a nice humer they, they place. And they come in four packs, Leo they're missing. They come in four packs. They place the air tags in there, and then they follow you home. <Laugh> steal it from your driveway. Thieves typically use tools like screwdrivers to enter the vehicles a through the driver or passenger door while ensuring not to set off alarms ones inside an electronic device, typically used by mechanics to reprogram the factory setting is connected to the onboard diagnostics board. Well, this sounds hard. So now these days, air tags makes it much, much easier. <Laugh> the key is that you have to put your air tag in as well. So it's there. Air tag is air tracking you that, but when they drive away, there could be an air tag anywhere. I think air tags are the worst possible choice for of this because don't you get warned when a, when an air tag is you, you do well. There was an article today about a better, there was an article today about a woman who

Rene Ritchie (01:46:41):
Was driving home, I think from school and a warning went off saying, there's an unregistered air tag in this car or location device in this car. And she's like, do I stop? Do I go home? Do I drive to the police station? And she couldn't find it like they, because it hadn't started beeping yet. She just got the alert on her phone and she's like, I don't know what to do. Now. This is so creepy beep so, and they should have it very hard to

Alex Lindsay (01:47:00):
Balance. They should have it set up where you could say, there's one near you make it. Beep I guess that would other issues. But, but if it saw, there was really only near you and not near any anybody else, it would be, you know, like it, that they couldn't be searched by anyone else you're in a car driving. It feels like it should. It it's identify

Andy Ihnatko (01:47:16):
Itself. We're we're all, this is such a complicated issue to solve because you are talking about just like a, just like how you win the HRI guy to the galaxy game, by holding T and one hand and no T and the other, this is exactly the same thing where you have to have, you have a device that has to be able to broadcast all the time, its location. On the other hand, you have to make sure that no one can track its location by, by the virtue of the fact that it's broadcasting all the time. It is such a hard thing to, to solve. And I don't, I don't fault Apple for not solving it. I, I think that Apple, for me evaluating this as an Apple product, this sounds like this sort of thing that they would've looked at tile, they would've investigated tile. They would've done a million experiments on tile and decided that, you know what, we're gonna need another couple of years to really figure this thing out. It's well,

Alex Lindsay (01:48:02):
And I think that all, I think also from a regulatory per perspective or a criminal perspective, you know, what you have to do is start, the governments have, have to start saying, Hey, you know what, using a tracker as a felony, you know, three to five years, you know, like, you know, if you, if you, if you put it on someone who doesn't know that it's coming, like if you, you know, a first degree, you know, tracking thing should be real, real, real time. And that takes all the fun out of it real quick. <Laugh>

Rene Ritchie (01:48:26):
The cost of entry. Like previously people would just get us a cheap smartphone and throw it in the car. It's a up gym bag. And they track people that way. But that was like 300 bucks a pop. And now you're talking like 20 bucks a pop

Andy Ihnatko (01:48:36):
Doesn't matter. I think we're gonna this also step, right? I

Alex Lindsay (01:48:39):
Think we're gonna have to adjust the criminal code for this one

Leo Laporte (01:48:41):
Little Easter egg in your Apple store app on your phone. I've turned it on, on mine and it's snowing. And if I shake it like a snow globe, the snow store starts moving around. When did you start a shut of shake? I guess <laugh>, I guess some developers at the app store at a little time on their hands. All you have to do is go into the app store and type, let it snow. You don't even have to hit search, just type, let it snow. And it starts snowing. I don't know how to turn it off though. So they did this a couple years ago. They've done this in the past. Yeah. Yeah. So I presume in January it'll stop. I don't know <laugh>

Rene Ritchie (01:49:20):
In March, if you're lucky. <Laugh>

Alex Lindsay (01:49:23):
And immediately had me think about whether as soon as I saw that, I was like, I wonder if you could build an AR like a SD Z one with, with a particle system so that you could have like little snow going down and you can rotate around. Of course you would

Leo Laporte (01:49:33):
Sink that and look at it and shake it. Of

Alex Lindsay (01:49:33):
Course you would think that shake it and make it like it all flow around.

Leo Laporte (01:49:36):
Sure. You would. All right, let's take a break. And your picks of the wink. I can't stop shaking my phone. Your picks of the week coming up in just a little bit, Andy and NA from w GB H in Boston, from Renee Richie dot Renee, Richie dot Renee Richie, youtube.com/renee Richie. It's Renee Richie all the way down. It's Renee Richie all the way down and from office hours.global and oh nine oh media. Mr. Alex, Lindsay. Good. He's doing the game show thing or is it the Brady bunch thing? No, no. It's

Andy Ihnatko (01:50:07):
He's doing, he's doing the love boat. The double Isaac, the double Isaac.

Leo Laporte (01:50:10):
He did a double Isaac. What is the double Isaac?

Andy Ihnatko (01:50:14):
Oh, to the opening, Chris. So the Isaac, the bartender, the opening he's the everyone goes hi, I'm Judy I'm Judy cruise director. I'm the, the purser Isaac turns around and goes. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:50:24):
And you captain's team pistols. Boom, boom. Okay. So the double Isaac I'm good. I like it. I didn't even know I had the name. That's impressive. Alex, did you know you were doing the double Isaac?

Andy Ihnatko (01:50:36):
That was my invention.

Leo Laporte (01:50:37):
<Laugh> oh, you invented it. Copyright. Andy, not copy. I, I

Andy Ihnatko (01:50:42):
Didn't, I, I need to put it under dictionary. I need to run that. Andy. Andy, I I'll. You give it the name and I'll do this and we'll NFT NFT. That's what I'm NFT for the double

Leo Laporte (01:50:52):
Isaac. It's all about the block. Double Isaac. Yeah. All right,

Andy Ihnatko (01:50:57):
Renee, could we, could we do a sponsorship thing for one of your episodes? We'll just <laugh> for the double Isaac NFT we'll make, makes the whole, everybody will get a grift out of this. That's on this panel

Leo Laporte (01:51:08):
Except Isaac. Unfortunately

Andy Ihnatko (01:51:12):
We'll we'll, we'll let

Leo Laporte (01:51:13):
Speak. We'll speak. We'll let to speak. Let him, let him we to speak our show today brought to you by user way.org. Let me tell you something. If you have a website, it is a public entity. That means you are required to make it accessible required. I mean, I don't wanna bring out the stick and everything. It is the Americans with disabilities act a federal law that requires you to make any public entity accessible, but really it's also the right thing to do. Why would you turn away business? There are over 60 million Americans with disabilities and those people would really like to use your website. You also could be liable if, if you don't meet ADA requirements for accessibility. So what do I suggest user way? User way is an incredible AI powered solution. Tirelessly enforces the hundreds of web content, accessibility guidelines. The WCAG guidelines with just one line of JavaScript user way can achieve more than an entire team of developers.

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That's a big deal. Millions of people will require user way to just to purchase your products. So, so let, 'em let 'em automatically generate image alts using AI. It writes the image descriptions for you. It remediates complex nav menus. It ensures that all your popups are accessible. All the forms are accessible. Your shopping cart, it is accessible. It fixes vague link violations, broken links. It sures your website makes use of accessible colors without, you know, changing your brand color. It gives you a detailed report of all the violations that were fixed on your website, and you can interact with it to tune it up too. So the, the base is great, but it can get you even farther. One thing you should do check out their free scan tool. See if your website's ADA compliant. If it's not, it's easy to install user way. It works with WordPress. With Shopify, with W's AEM site course SharePoint it's cost effective, easy to add just a line of JavaScript. It even works with handwritten sites. If you've got one of those check out that scanning tool and find out cuz you wanna meet your compliance goal, improve the experience for your users. Just ask Susan Bennett. The voice of Siri. What she thinks

Speaker 5 (01:54:12):
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Leo Laporte (01:54:25):
Way. It can make a, any website fully accessible and ADA compliant with user way. Everyone who visits your site can browse seamlessly and customize it to fit their needs. It's also a great way to show your commitment to millions of people with disabilities. It's just the right thing to do. Go to userway.org/twit. We've actually got a great deal for you. 30% off user ways, AI power, accessibility solution, user way. Walmart uses it. UNICEF uses it user way.org/twi user way, making the internet accessible for everyone userway.org/twit thank Userway for their support. Thank you for your support when you use that address userway.org/twit a time for picks of the week, let's start with Rene Ritchie.

Rene Ritchie (01:55:15):
So Casey NASDA is probably someone who needs no introduction to many people, but if you're not familiar, he was originally on HBO, part of the nicest brothers. And then he became one of the very early vloggers on YouTube. And he sort of changed the, because his vlogs were just so extra, like he did daily vlogging for for, for days and day hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of days, which is so much effort. It just still Sies me. But he also did things like for Nike, he just ran and then there's videos of him running past the pyramids in the Coliseum in Easter island and just running and running and running. So he is really extra. He goes to the pharmacy and there's like 300 shots in him picking his tube of toothpaste. It is always above and beyond. And he's put together a course on filmmaking and he's, he's someone who's also really focused on the story that narrow of like he lost his drone becomes, is he gonna get it back?

Rene Ritchie (01:56:05):
Oh no, there's a skyscraper in the way. And New York city has blocked bike lanes again. And so it, it's not just, oh yeah. Shooting a video, it's telling a story and he's made a course. It's a $250 course, which has gotten some people recoiling in horror who expect everything on the internet to be free or $10 a month for all you can watch. But it's a $250 course. And in it, it's a 30 day course every day. He gives you another bit of progression towards the goal, which is making two of your own short films. And you know, he's endlessly creative. I'm sure he is not everybody's cup of tea, but it's hard not to be delighted in some of the things that he manages to do also famous for after snowing in New York city, he got, he got pulled behind a, a truck for many, many hours just sliding around there while police and everybody else cheered him on think he

Andy Ihnatko (01:56:51):
Tried well, even at the police car. Hi, Merry Christmas.

Rene Ritchie (01:56:54):
<Laugh> I'm sorry. Point too. I love that to you. It's delightful endlessly creative. And he's gonna show you basically his approach to filmmaking in this, in this course. And they've got a handy gift to button. So if it's not for you, but you have a filmmaker in your life and you weren't sure what to get them, then this is another possible. Do you think

Leo Laporte (01:57:10):
He has many, many, many pairs of sunglasses with the paint chipped off? Or is that all the same pair of sunglasses? Always. He shows

Rene Ritchie (01:57:17):
You this videos on him making them when he, when he needs a new pair, he basically, oh, really spray paints them. And then yeah. 

Leo Laporte (01:57:22):
It's his tray. Mark. Yeah.

Rene Ritchie (01:57:24):
That's his, well, he doesn't want you to see, he looks at the reverse screen on the camera to make sure he is framed, but he doesn't want you to see him looking sideways. So he puts sunglasses on. So you can't tell what he is looking at. Oh,

Leo Laporte (01:57:34):
It's part of the technique 250 bucks. You would know that I just sent a link to my son. He should absolutely do this.

Andy Ihnatko (01:57:41):
I, I just gotta say that. Yeah, he, he, he is one of those YouTubers that my God, he's just such a great filmmaker. He's just such a great storyteller that there, there are so many YouTube channels. I, I got hooked on his site because every single thing, if your YouTube, you used to like blog video, a lot of bloggers will say, hi, here's my YouTube video, where I went and got a cup of coffee. And I saw what I thought was a rabbit, but it turned out to be a squirrel. Okay. I don't know why I would possibly care, but if Casey, nice dad or one of these other creators did, they would make it into such a wonderful story about even something so simple that it's like, are you gonna be posting tomorrow? Or are you gonna do another one today? You gonna do another one today? Yeah. He's amazing.

Leo Laporte (01:58:20):
Very interesting. Good pick. Thank you. How about you, Andy? What are you at for us?

Andy Ihnatko (01:58:26):
Mine is a, a, a tutorial that I think everyone should bookmark, cuz you're gonna need it at some point. The developer Howard Oakley over at his eclectic like company blog has a document that he wrote called how to deal with a site with a broken certificate. This is something that you're, that often comes up with where you try to access Wikipedia and Chrome or safari will say hi. I think that this, the, the, this might be this, this site might be trying to impersonate someone and steal your data and will be a cryptic message underneath it saying a site certificate invalid or whatever. There a whole bunch of reasons why this can happen. But it's frustrating because you think that you've been hacked or so, but no, it's just that a complicated system of trust. There is a, it, it failed one of the trust steps.

Andy Ihnatko (01:59:06):
And so as a result, it doesn't want to load that page. There are ways to, there are a lot of different problems that, that can cause it, but there, if you want to work around it, it will involve basically finding out what site, what certificate is bad and finding out how to figuring out how to either temporarily disable it, which can be dangerous, but it can, you can do it. If it's something you really need to get access to, or install a find and install a new certificate that will fix the problem permanently. This is, this is also very, very relevant because Thanksgiving is over. However Christmas is coming up. So you are going to be like visiting relatives. Some of them will be elderly. And we'll say, Hey, how come I can't access this anymore? And <laugh>, and you will check out their computer and finding out they're still running Mac west, like 10.1.

Andy Ihnatko (01:59:50):
And you say, well, auntie, if you were to upgrade to something more, if you were to upgrade to the modern operating system, it will actually solve this problem. But then they say, oh, but everything's working fine. I don't wanna go through the hassle of upgrading saying, okay, on, I'm gonna walk you through the process of, of, of, of installing a manual websites, manual site certificate and approving it through a terminal command. And no, you're probably gonna have to do that yourself. So again, great document explains. Everything explains, even if you're not fixing it yourself, it will explain what the problem is. You understand what went wrong. It will help you understand fundamental technology that underpins the entire the entire web and, and keeps it safe. Just good reading overall. But again, book, market a year or two from now, you'll have you'll encounter a problem, or a friend will ask you about this problem. And you'll remember, I don't know what it is, but I know pretty much how I can probably solve it. I have to

Leo Laporte (02:00:39):
Say I find us referring again and again to Howard site. This is he's amazing. I don't know. He's got a lot of energy because it's not just about max. It's not just about, I mean, it's about a painting and I don't know what's going on with Don K Hode, but he's got something there, right? The eclectic light company, max painting, and more Howard Oakley obviously doesn't need to sleep. But this is a great, it's one of those things where I think geeks kind of know this. But there are a lot of people who have no idea. And it's so kind of in the weeds that maybe people don't explain it, or so it's just a great inf place. And now this is a place on the internet. It will be year forever. Let's hope, power. Right. And and it'll be reference that people will turn to forever because it's right. It's exactly a useful thing to know. So it's really good. Howard is I don't know how he does it. Do you know him? I, I,

Andy Ihnatko (02:01:35):
I don't know him, but boy, do I love him? Boy, do I respect him? And in many, in many ways I, I aspire to him the way that he produces such great content on such a far range of stuff. It's he, he is something that's aspirational for anybody who believes themselves to have a point of view that they like to share is what this

Leo Laporte (02:01:52):
Is kind of, what's amazing. Amazing, great paintings. Yeah. He does Mac riles on Saturdays. <Laugh> does some great explainers. This is increasingly, this is the site to that we, we talk about fairly frequently on this show. So thank you, Howard. And we should try to reach out and see if we can get 'em on one of the shows I'd love to talk to him.

Andy Ihnatko (02:02:12):
<Laugh> and, and some of his Lumina's free time. He can do our show. <Laugh> well,

Leo Laporte (02:02:16):
You, you, you see these people and you makes you just like such an underachiever, like exactly. I don't understand how he finds time to do all of this. The,

Andy Ihnatko (02:02:25):
The, the ideal is for me, when you see a creator like this is to have them inspire you and see what's possible as opposed to, oh, my stuff is new. I don't, I'm not doing my job as bullet. So I think that he's doing no, let, let this, this I'm I'm I promise you that every creator does not wanna be the reason why you never tried. Every creator wants you to be the reasons why they wanted you to try something you didn't think you were capable of doing. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:02:43):
Make it be an inspiration, not a discouragement <laugh>, which is what I would do by the way, and say, oh, well, never, I, I give up, I give up Alex Lindsay, I saved the best, or at least the most expensive for last <laugh>.

Alex Lindsay (02:02:57):
It's not that expensive, but so one of the things that I, I of playing with that hopefully will happen in the next week or two is I I've been talking to a lot of teachers about how to do use keynote, you know, to talk about things. And I felt like, oh, I need something that I can do that I can do all the time. And I decided, okay, I'm gonna use keynote to like build little something. And I decided I'm gonna do Mac break picks in the next couple weeks where I do every Mac break pick, there'll be a video on YouTube or whatever that is like, this is what I did. You know, this is why I think it's interesting. And I, the prop I had, and I have a lot of respect for Renee. I always, but, but even more, when I think about like reading all these teleprompt stuff in like reading all that data, I was like, oh, you like, what do I do? And I use teleprompters a lot. Can't use them by myself. And I'm not sure what Renee uses. I started testing this thing called prompt smart, which I like a lot. Have Renee, have you used this at all from a, I have not. I've used

Leo Laporte (02:03:52):
Teleprompter plus plus, but you know, that's, it's an aging product,

Alex Lindsay (02:03:55):
Right? Well, this one, so this one is what it does is it actually listens to you talk, oh, so, so it listens to you talk and just moves along with

Leo Laporte (02:04:03):
You don't need a no or something. It just 

Alex Lindsay (02:04:07):
That's, that's the thing that, that now you have to get used to it, cuz it jumps, you know, it kind of jumps to the next thing and you get, but you get used to that. And once you get used to that, all you do is you turn it on and you can stop. You can say a couple extra things. You can do whatever you want. But when you start talking in the text again, let me see if I can make this work or, and we'll see if this works or not. Let's see here, if I cut to this, I hit the wrong thing. Hold on. If I cut to this and say now we are engaged in a great civil war testing, whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can and long and endure, we are met on a great battlefield of that war.

Alex Lindsay (02:04:42):
We have come. So you can see that it's actually just cruising along with me by sentence, as I talk sentence by sentence. Cause it knows what, when you think about it, it's a re you're surprised that someone hasn't done it earlier. Recogni. Yeah. Yeah. But it's voice recogni. It doesn't have to guess. It knows what you're gonna say. That's where you're going. And so it has to fit into it. And, and I, and I, so, but without having to, what I, what I found was is that, you know, I tried doing, and I have all the other teleprompter software. I tried to do it myself. Like I'm gonna move up and down. Sometimes it gives you

Leo Laporte (02:05:09):
A knob and you can

Alex Lindsay (02:05:10):
Use your own knob problem is by myself, it creates two minds. Yeah. Yeah. You know, it's what I call it. Like you, I have to do two things at one time. And what I'm saying, isn't as good when I'm trying to think about whether I'm going forward or not. And eventually you can get relatively good at it, but you're never as good as if it just goes right. You know? And so now I'm able to write something down and it just goes as, as I talk, is it as good as a teleprompt operator? We hire a lot of teleprompt operators. No, <laugh> like, it's not, it's not the same as a, as a highly skilled teleprompter operator that said, if you're by yourself, I it's a subscription. I don't think it's that much money. There is a free version. You can try a free version.

Alex Lindsay (02:05:45):
You can try. Yeah. And, and then, and then I got the pro studio, whatever of course, but, but it's but I, but I think that it's, it's, it's working really well and we'll see if it comes out, I'm gonna be again, trying to do these. What I'm trying to do is put together little videos as an exercise thought exercise, and then I'm gonna put up, do them all in keynote. That's what I'm limiting myself to is, do, do everything in keynote, but do the voiceover, you know, with this and just record it in and then put it into keynote and then put it together. So anyway, that's, that's kind of the, the game that I'm playing and this, this is the key piece of it, cuz I was like, I don't know how to do this. Otherwise I tried a bunch of other ones and I was like, well, this is not gonna work. I can't can't do the video. And then I found this and I was like, oh, this my

Leo Laporte (02:06:27):
Prompt pros hated me because I would never follow the script. And so it's not at all unusual. We've even seen it happen. It happened at a, I think a Samsung event where they just they're, they they're lost. And so they're jumping all over on the prompter and and it's, it's terrible for the, the host. I think this is good. I, I generally recommend I'm a fan of prompters at all period. Generally look

Alex Lindsay (02:06:52):
Crazy. But I know, I think that I, I generally am against it, but if I want to say something sometimes that I is like, when I'm in a live show, I am completely against teleprompters. Yeah. Like you should never use them in a live show. Steals all say what you're say. Yeah. The presence. Yeah. When I'm trying to pack a bunch of information into a short period of time and I just wanna say it this way. Yeah. And I think through it, and, and especially when they person who's doing it is writing it. So what's what I'm finding is I I say, and then I edit it. Oh, I don't like the way I said that or I don't like the way I said that. And then I go back and edit it some more and, and it really is this kind of creative process that I didn't didn't expect, but I couldn't do it. I just was just so frustrated with the dialing, the dial thing that does

Leo Laporte (02:07:33):
Anybody, John, does anybody still use the prompter? In our studios? Do they use it for tech news weekly? Oh, but they're at home. Oh, they don't <laugh> okay. So we should mention this when we were in studio, I think tech news weekly routinely used a prompter Burke or somebody would come in and, and turn the no <laugh> but <laugh>, which is you're right. The ideal way to do it. It, I think this is an interesting alternative. Yeah. Except that I, it would immediately screw it up because I wouldn't follow the script and then it would not know what was going on. So,

Andy Ihnatko (02:08:02):
Yeah. Right. I, I gotta say I'm a little bit bumped. I'm a little bit bummed out because right now, oh, wait, seems to work. I've it. I correct myself. I'm now I'm now anti BUMED out. I'm excited. I, I, while you were speaking, I, I installed it on my Mac and it does work. It's an iPad app, but it's not, there's nothing banning it from functioning. And the idea of having this, like, as of right, right now through the furthest chat, I've got like the, the, the, the view, my, my, my Skype window is like right underneath as usual, my, my webcam. So I can maintain eye contact, some sends of eye contact, like while I'm looking at, but at the thing, but now to the idea of dragging this window right underneath that, and being able to pretty well read stuff while also maintaining mostly eye contact on the Mac, that in itself is pretty

Alex Lindsay (02:08:47):
Big. Well, and the, and the workflow that I'm, I'm kind of thinking through is using voice recognition, voice to text, to, to say the things that I will wanna say about a product, or say things of an idea and just record it all. Cuz one problem that I have is that my writing voice and my speaking voice are completely different. Like I am a completely different person when went through my hands. And so and no one likes the person that I type with. And anyway, so, so the so only some people like the one that speaks anyway. So, so the so the idea is to be able to say it ex you know, like say all the ideas that I have and then go back and go, okay, I'm gonna edit it all down. This is what I like. And then be able to read it back as a way to do it. So I, I look at it as kind of a creative process. That's still me, but allows me to be a little bit, pull a little bit of the air out, you know, because I do think that when you're putting out content for people, you want to be conscious of their time. And I think that, that, you know, like when I watch videos and people meander around and I watch 'em very long. Yeah.

Andy Ihnatko (02:09:50):
It's, it's, it's also important. Like I, I have a, I have some, a D ADHD that I, I work with and sometimes it's like, I know that I'm speaking exte when I'm break recording. When I record like the material podcast, it's like, I know I'm speaking extemporaneously, but I'm gonna pretty much write out exactly what I'm going to say, because I know exactly where I'm going with this. I've got a beginning, middle and an end. I don't need to be spontaneous here. So yes, I'm going to, I'm gonna say what I'm gonna say, record that as like speech to text, then take the text and read the text. And some thing like this would be such a boon it's, it's one of the reasons why I don't do it's one of the many reasons why I don't do YouTube, even though I like to experiment with it, partly because I have to think off the top, when I'm all alone, I've got eight hours to say whatever I want. I wind up saying a lot of things, man. And that means, and that requires a lot of editing and that's believe it or not, Alex, this is like, wow, that's actually one step closer to my being able to do YouTube videos. I think.

Leo Laporte (02:10:41):
Nice. Yeah. And this just in, it has stopped, stopped snowing in the Mac app store. So it's, it's, it's not a, it's not a permanent dysfunction. <Laugh> you see? No,

Andy Ihnatko (02:10:52):
No, no, we sure don't be, don't be happy. It's the climate is changing. Like we didn't use to get snow in the store until

Leo Laporte (02:10:57):
January warming. Let me try again, let it snow and see before you even hit search, it immediately starts snowing. But I guess it stops after a little while, so that's fun. Hey, we're done. Thank you everybody. Renee Richie videos are at youtube.com/renee. Richie just did one that I can't wait to see all about these new this new max stuff. It's coming down the pipe. Anything else you got working? What are you up to? I just posted

Rene Ritchie (02:11:29):
My, my big in depth, deep dive into the M one max and M one pro or I get to on, into all the transistors and stuff. And those

Leo Laporte (02:11:35):
Were always nice to do. Yeah. Leak, reactions and detailed analyses of the stuff that's already here. That's youtube.com/renee Richie. Andy and NACO. When are you gonna be on GBH in Boston next

Andy Ihnatko (02:11:50):
Friday as usual, this time 1230 in the afternoon, you can either stream it live@wgbhnews.org, or later that night just go to the same place and you can stream it at your convenience. They usually punch out my 20 minutes of tech news round up with, with the people and put it in the separate file. So nice. If you, if you, if you don't wanna hear about Boston politics for two hours before hearing about me, go for it. Although it's, it's fun, it's, it's a very, it's a nice soap opera sort of thing. You think the real, how wives had a whole bunch of like drama going on Tripo politics

Leo Laporte (02:12:18):
<Laugh> and of course, Alex Lindsay, what's going on in office hours.

Alex Lindsay (02:12:23):
Well, we've got, you know, of course we've been cooking. We moved our cooking to Sunday morning so that I can go back to the farmer's market. But, but so anyway, it was, it was like, I, like my daughter was like, okay, it's it's now COVID is over. We know to move that time. And so it's her time. And so anyway but we're still doing, we're going to Belfast this weekend to, to watch another band set of artists. We have a new host. We, you know Emily Russo took over Saturday. You can see Liberty white here is now hosting Mondays. And so I'm slow, you know, I'm, I'm now a panelist, but not a oh that's, but not a host, which I'm pretty excited about. And they're doing a great job. And then, and then we have you know, we're gonna talk about tomorrow we have neural net and Friday we have a maker pipe, and then Thursday, we have Michael Krasney on. Oh

Leo Laporte (02:13:05):
Yeah, I know Michael. So, so the funny host he's WG, I K Q D K

Alex Lindsay (02:13:12):
Q. He was, he was, yeah, he's recently retired. I was like, the thing is, is that our second hour in office hours is based on forum. Like the way I structure it it's cuz I listened to it for 20 years. Yeah. Love. And so that was his show IED. I, I PED, I PED Michael KRAS. He turns out he like lives in green, you know, he lives, he lives in. Sure. And so I was like, I was, I'll just go over, you know, we're gonna set him up and we're having on Thursday and talk about his interviewing techniques and how we process it. So it it's gonna be 

Leo Laporte (02:13:37):
Is he still a professor at San Francisco state or did he retire? I think he is teaching as well. I think

Alex Lindsay (02:13:41):
He is. Yeah. I think he's teaching. Yeah. So

Leo Laporte (02:13:43):
Anyway, so we're, we're having, that's fun. That's I love the range in breadths of the things that you cover as well as the depths, obviously office

Alex Lindsay (02:13:52):
Global maker, pipe and cookie.

Leo Laporte (02:13:53):
Yeah. <laugh> wow. Places, officehours.global. And of course if you wanna hire Alex, oh nine oh.media, we do MacBreak Weekly every Tuesday, 11:00 AM Pacific 2:00 PM. Eastern, that would be 18, 1900 UTC, 1900 UTC. You can watch us do it. Live on the street, live.twit.tv, there's audio and video streams. If you're watching live chat live, you can do that@ircdottwi.tv or join us in our discord server. This is exclusive to people who are members of club TWI you're you're gonna wanna join club TWI. We've got thanks to aunt Pruit, our community manager, a lot really exciting things coming up RO let's see who Mary Jo Foley did her ask me anything on Friday. So that's gonna show up on the TWI plus feed. You can find me into clubs as Patrick Han. <Laugh> there's also upcoming Mike ELGAN and his wife Amira are gonna talk about their gastro at adventures next month.

Leo Laporte (02:14:55):
We've got Stacy's book group they've decided on autonomous as their next book from Annaly Newtz there's just a lot of stuff going on. The discord is so much fun, but that's actually not the real reason to join Club TWiT. The real reason we thought anyway was for ad free versions and try Racker free versions of all of our shows. All you have to do to get that is $7 a month go to twit.tv/clubtwit. And as I said, there's additional content including I'm having a feeling the TWI plus feed might feature the instantaneous decoration of this studio. Yes, please. By by Burke a grumpy Burke in a Huff who said, right, you want decorations, you got it. And got

Andy Ihnatko (02:15:39):
'Em all I want. I want, I want that video as an electronic Christmas card. That was so amazing to watch at work already on Twitter, beginning people already on Twitter, people say, oh my God, this is the most amazing thing in the world. <Laugh>

Leo Laporte (02:15:52):
Well, I'm sure that will be on the TWiT plus feed along with many other,

Andy Ihnatko (02:15:55):
Did he used to work for NASCAR? Were you once player like, like a pitch crew guy that's

Leo Laporte (02:16:00):
Oh, anyway, he, he did make the woo woo sound. Every time he put something in. So maybe, I don't know, I could be bells do join Club TWiT. We'd love to have you. And it really helps what we're doing helps smooth out the bumps in advertising, supported on casting. And, and we really appreciate it. So this show brought to you as with all of our shows by listeners like you club Twitter is twit.tv/clubtwit. While you're at the website, you can always get on demand shows free of everything we do, including this show, twit.tv/mbw - we edit it down, take out all the swear words, the cussing, the storming out the leaving for a day. That kind of stuff. We just, we just take that all out. So you just get a nice, smooth, easy show. And 

Andy Ihnatko (02:16:44):
Rene, I mean, we, I don't wanna tease anything here, but I mean, the way that you decided to come in 12 minutes late for the introduction party for my new rose, you know what, you know, what you were doing, you knew what you, Andy left the group here. Everybody, everybody focus on me cause I

Leo Laporte (02:17:00):
You're gonna diva when I'm gonna diva disappear. The Liverpool, he didn't come back. He said, I'll see you in the clubs. So let's see, where was I? Oh yes. You can also watch on YouTube. There's a video there. Every show we do, every channel has its own otherwise known as the YouTubes, the YouTube, the YouTubes. Yeah, the YouTubes and best thing to be subscribe in your favorite podcast client. In fact, please do subscribe. Even if you watch live that way, you'll know you have the whole show available for download and listening at your leisure. And if your podcast, client has reviews, please leave us a five star review. You know, one of the disadvantages of being one of the longest running podcasts in the world is, you know, you don't get all the attention from Apple for best new podcast. And so we have to do our own thing to spread the word, leaving a review helps a lot. Thanks for joining us. Everybody. Now get back to work. Cuz break time is over.

Mikah Sargent (02:17:55):
Do you have an iPhone, an Apple watch an iPad or any number of Apple devices? Well, you have got to check out iOS today with me, Mikah Sargent and Rosemary Orchard. We cover all things iOS and helping you get the most out of your devices.