MacBreak Weekly Episode 807 Transcript

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

Leo Laporte (00:00:00):
It's time for MacBreak Weekly. Rene's here, Andy's here. And Alex Lindsay's back. And of course, we're gonna be talking about Apple's big event coming March 8th, still waiting for those invitations. Will Apple call it off due to the war in Ukraine. One thing Apple did might change things in Russia. And we'll talk about a way you can turn your heroes into a little tiny plastic figurines. We'll start with Jim Dori. It's all coming up next on MacBreak Weekly.

... (00:00:32):
Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is TWiT.

Leo Laporte (00:00:39):
This is MacBreak Weekly episode 807 recorded Tuesday, March 1st, 2022. A bronzed Jim Dori MacBreak Weekly is brought to you by Wealthfront to start building your wealth and get your first $5,000 managed free for life. Go to wealthfront.com/macbreak and by zip recruiter, according to research, 90% of employers plan to enhance their employees experience this year. And if you need to add more employees, well they're zip recruiter. Ziprecruiter technology finds qualified candidates for your job, and you can invite your top choices to apply. Try ZipRecruiter free today. Ziprecruiter.Com/Mac break and by cash fly cash is giving away a complimentary detail analysis of your current CDN bill and usage trends. See if you are overpaying 20% or more, learn more@twi.cash line.com. It's time for MacBreak Weekly to show we cover the latest news from Apple Rene Richie here, YouTube phenom. Hello Rene.

Rene Ritchie (00:01:48):
We have news Leo. I swear. I swear. We have news. We have all the news. We have so

Leo Laporte (00:01:51):
Much news. Well, I guess there's really only one question. Has the invitation arrived here?

Rene Ritchie (00:01:57):
No, I, I think the world is too sensitive to do an invitation right

Leo Laporte (00:02:00):
This week. Oh, maybe? Yeah, that might be, oh, Hey. I, I recognize that bustle Broon, Alex Lindsey is in the house. Welcome back. We missed you. I

Alex Lindsay (00:02:10):
I forgot I hadn't been introduced yet and I started adding things to it.

Leo Laporte (00:02:13):
Oh, you're always welcome to do that. Oh, and there, speaking of Bosso profondo is Andy Ihnatko. The whole gang is here. Where have you been at Alex?

Alex Lindsay (00:02:23):
I, I, I didn't leave anywhere. You know, I do virtual events, so I don't have to go anywhere. You just as a busy, busy, yeah, well, no, there was an event. There was an event last Tuesday, but I, I didn't have to go. I was able to manage it from the comfort of my own office. Not quite my own home, but my own office. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:02:37):
You've kind of configured it now this way so that you can oh yeah. Have your tentacles, your wired, your fingers wired. See, I wanna do the opposite and maybe you can help me. I wanna do everything I do on a boat somewhere else in the world. I don't

Rene Ritchie (00:02:53):
In international waters

Leo Laporte (00:02:55):
Beyond the reach waters, beyond the reach of the authorities.

Rene Ritchie (00:02:57):
No pirates. Don't do it. Don't do it pirates.

Alex Lindsay (00:03:00):
I think that that, that the Starlink is getting close.

Leo Laporte (00:03:03):
So's yeah. That's why I put it in, in a or a reservation, cuz they say now it's tied to your residential address so you can't move it around. But I have, at some point they were they'll let you do that and that's yeah. Then I can have, you know, I get on the cruise ship, set up on the balcony, set up my little star link.

Alex Lindsay (00:03:23):
Well, and, and the big thing is getting it to be able to move, which evidently it can move. It just, they just don't let you set it up that

Leo Laporte (00:03:31):
Way right now. Dish MC dish face. Doesn't it have a motor in it. Doesn't it. Doesn't it move?

Alex Lindsay (00:03:36):
Yeah. It, it, it can air correct. It, it EV evident Eric, correct? At a pretty high speed. I, I understand. So so the but it, it but right now I, I, I just got one and it really needs to see the whole sky. Like I thought, oh, I thought this will be great. I just I'll just see this. I have a complete view of the Southern sky. Not enough. No,

Leo Laporte (00:03:55):
No. It has to be the whole sky. Yeah. It has to be the whole sky. In fact, when youre installing it, I know this cuz I, all of the Starlink subreddit. Right. And so I, you know, I've been watching people go through this for a year or so. When you get it, they actually when there's instruc, it'll tell you it'll show you a little picture of the Bush. It wants, it wants the 360 horizon. So you put it on a big pole or something. Right.

Alex Lindsay (00:04:17):
I'm gonna put it on the roof eventually. But right now I watch you wanna see how far I can take it from my house. We have, we have some people in office hours that have taken as much as 10 or 12 miles. So yeah. So it's not like to your address it's to a region around your address.

Leo Laporte (00:04:30):
Yeah. But 12 miles I wanna go farther than

Alex Lindsay (00:04:32):
Well, no, but I wanna see how far I can do it. And then I'm told, and I haven't tested this. I'm told that if you just change your address, it's, it's more about managing load. They're not trying to keep you in one place. They're just trying to manage the load, the server. So

Leo Laporte (00:04:44):
They can't handle, frankly. They can't handle all of the traffic. They would be getting if everybody used it. So they're just trying to spread it out

Alex Lindsay (00:04:50):
Even like, well, and also if everybody used it and they didn't know where you were and they were, you know, so, so the so anyway, so, so I I'm gonna take it to Monterey and take it to other places and, and like, good. Let us know, can I change the address? And can I do that stuff? So that's all coming in the next couple weeks, but

Leo Laporte (00:05:05):
They said, as they have said that down the road, once they get all the, the satellites up and everything that they, the plan is that they would be mobile, that you could use it on an ID or, you know, carry it with you as you travel around.

Alex Lindsay (00:05:16):
The it's definitely being tested right now. There's a variety of organizations

Leo Laporte (00:05:20):
In Ukraine right now, although right. So Elon has sent some Starlink his, you know, adjusted it so that it could be used in Ukraine. And he sent a bunch of terminals. Although OPSEC people have said, you might wanna be careful about using those they're re Russians are very good at using that kind of satellite data for targeting. So it might put a big target on your back. So I mean, yeah, you are, they

Alex Lindsay (00:05:48):
Know you are giving up your information, your location. I mean, we we've done stuff where we've had sat trucks up that we had to keep them up only for a short period of time because it would take, it would only take a half an hour to figure out where they were.

Leo Laporte (00:05:58):
Oh, wow. Where the hell were you then? Was that cost AVO when you were back then in Kosovo,

Alex Lindsay (00:06:03):
It was Southern Southern Turkey.

Leo Laporte (00:06:05):
Oh my gosh.

Alex Lindsay (00:06:06):
That's

Leo Laporte (00:06:07):
Another story for another day. Wow.

Alex Lindsay (00:06:10):
So,

Leo Laporte (00:06:10):
Wow.

Rene Ritchie (00:06:11):
When Alex talks about OPSEC, I just put the muffs over my ear so I can never be sworn to testify.

Alex Lindsay (00:06:15):
Yeah. Yeah. So Southern, but Southern Turkey, if you were gonna project into a country from Southern Turkey you put a set truck at the at the border there and then but you, but you wouldn't stay very long. Right?

Leo Laporte (00:06:26):
Keep moving, keep moving. Exactly. Do you think Apple considering the, the world situation might say, let's not do an event March 8th?

Alex Lindsay (00:06:34):
Oh yeah.

Andy Ihnatko (00:06:34):
I think that, yeah, because you, you don't know what the news is gonna be on March 7th. That if there, I, if this gets a lot darker and a lot more hostile than even now, they're gonna have to cancel anyway. And given that these are probably not things that need to be absolutely announced on March 8th. I wouldn't be surprised if they would simply say, you know what, we'll we'll, we'll be, we'll be at readiness to do put this on on five days noticed, but let's this is still, this is, this is, this, this event is just four days old right now. Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday. Yeah. So it's a, it's a good thing to just be prudent.

Leo Laporte (00:07:09):
Hey Siri, when is Apple's event this spring? What can did you understand that? Hey Siri, when is Apple's event this spring,

Speaker 6 (00:07:25):
You can't get all the details about Apple events on Apple.com.

Leo Laporte (00:07:28):
That's not helpful Siri. Mm. Hey, Siri, is Apple gonna announce a new Mac mini this spring? I'm not sure. I understand Dan.

Alex Lindsay (00:07:41):
She sworn a secrecy.

Leo Laporte (00:07:42):
If coy

Andy Ihnatko (00:07:44):
Mac mini is dead to me dead to me, I say,

Leo Laporte (00:07:46):
Yeah, let me try this one. This is from nine to five Mac. Hey Siri, what is going to be announced at the Apple event?

Speaker 6 (00:07:54):
You can't hurry news. No, you'll just have to wait.

Leo Laporte (00:07:58):
All

Andy Ihnatko (00:07:58):
Right. Let's let, let's go for a little balance here. Hey Google. When is the next Apple event?

Leo Laporte (00:08:09):
Google's thinking. Oh,

Andy Ihnatko (00:08:10):
Nope. Nope. It says here's what I'm, I'm being the, it says Tuesday, March 8th, but not

Leo Laporte (00:08:16):
Its

Andy Ihnatko (00:08:17):
Yeah. See

Leo Laporte (00:08:18):
It says Tuesday, March 8th.

Rene Ritchie (00:08:19):
Shave your eyebrows. Google.

Andy Ihnatko (00:08:21):
No, no, just it's it. It returned relevant relevant information from Apple.com.

Leo Laporte (00:08:26):
Oh yeah. Oh

Rene Ritchie (00:08:29):
That was 2016. Google

Leo Laporte (00:08:31):
I Don suppose I should ask this Samsung galaxy S 22 Al it just, you're gonna ask

Rene Ritchie (00:08:38):
P pick B,

Leo Laporte (00:08:39):
Pick B go. What?

Rene Ritchie (00:08:43):
HP's just gonna ask Google. It's like they have don't they have just a bunch of Google servers at Samsung and they relay the requests. Isn't that? How that works?

Leo Laporte (00:08:49):
Actually Iowas 15. You heard by the way that I am using now, I called it voice number American voice number three, but it has been revealed that it actually was an African-American black person who recorded those there's two black voices, one male, one female. It sounded pretty Johnny. I didn't know really what was going on now. Apple has gone to the L B GT Q plus community. Yay. And, and and, and come up with a voice that doesn't sound like any anybody doesn't sound well,

Andy Ihnatko (00:09:24):
Less, less gendered.

Leo Laporte (00:09:25):
Yeah. Less gendered. But yeah. Well let me play it a little bit because it's it sounds more, I don't know, but you've probably heard this Rene, but let me I'll play it. Yeah. It's very short.

Speaker 7 (00:09:35):
Hi, I'm Siri. Choose the voice you'd like me to use.

Leo Laporte (00:09:38):
Yeah, I guess that's it's neither male or female. It sounds like it might be Lego loss from the Lord of the rings. It sounds like an elf, maybe.

Speaker 7 (00:09:48):
Hi, I'm Siri. Choose the voice. You'd like me to use that

Leo Laporte (00:09:51):
By the way, is the voice that it's whatever you it's, whatever you

Rene Ritchie (00:09:54):
Want. It's whatever it sounds like to you.

Leo Laporte (00:09:55):
And that's the voice I would use, cuz I don't think it should sound male or female. Although I do like that Johnny American voice three, but every, whenever I send something or tell to do something says, okay, it's very, it's very happy.

Rene Ritchie (00:10:08):
It's just, it's an advancement of the technology. Like they started off like when they, sir was the first really process of its kind. And that was the voice that was available. It wasn't just used for Siri. It defaulted to female in the us and male in the UK because a bunch of Satna companies or G GPS companies had done research way back to, to see what the majority of people liked back. Yeah. Way back

Leo Laporte (00:10:28):
When to and stuff.

Rene Ritchie (00:10:29):
Yeah. And now it's yeah. And now it's evolved and you have a choice of voices and also they really wanted to anthropomorphize it at the beginning of, I think the sir on Pixar. Right. But it was like, that was to make it approachable because we feared like not us, like not the four of us, but a lot of people fear technology and they fear like robots and, and Terminator and matrix. And so Apple really wanted to wrap Siri up in like this candy little anthropomorphized Pixar package. And that helped it initially. But as the technology immature, as we become more mature, as we understand things better, it's, it's kind of satisfying to have a degree of separation because let's face it. Like any of these assistants, Googles, Amazons, they would all be fired if they were actual humans. So like if, if you give them just a wide plethora of the human experience to draw from, I, I think it makes them not only appeal to more people, but I feel like more realistic to more people.

Andy Ihnatko (00:11:20):
Yeah. It's these little touches that really put the, the cherry on the top of a piece of technology. Cause you start off with, well, we can only have one voice cuz really that's, that's the technology that we're limited to. We can't have a, we can't even have two voices. That's the limitations that we have. Then we get to levels of sophistication where we're gonna of a different pallet of voices Google assistant doing something that I'm not sure if that was planned or if that was just Google being very academic about things where it's like, no, we're not gonna give our assistant an actual like gendered name. We're just gonna call it the Google a system. And to this day, I just check just to, to make sure you get, you have an option, you have options of like eight or nine different voices, but they're all identified by just a, a, a, a rainbow color.

Andy Ihnatko (00:12:02):
They're not like even given like here is you, you tell us, you decide for yourself what this voice sounds like. And I think the next step is when we get sort of like a character creator sort of approach to this sort of thing where now the voice models are so dynamic that you could basically say that every phone, it will create a voice for you that is unique to that phone and to your ear. So that to, to really lock in that personal relationship you have with this device, this, this isn't one of this isn't generic voice, number three, this is the voice that goes to, and Nacho's iPhone all the way to the point of being able to say auditioning voices and saying, yeah, literal literally like generate 20 different voices, allow five of them to go through to the next round. And then like when it comes down to the last two or three that you like, say, I want that, but I want that to be a little bit more Northeastern in tone. I wish that this were a little bit less aggressive, but more like hard or this sort of thing. So it's, this is the sort of thing that gets people, turns people from treating this thing, like a gadget and a utility to a platform that they rely on to get stuff done that they really don't know what they do without.

Leo Laporte (00:13:11):
It's an interesting debate though, humanoid or not. You're arguing that it should be more like, like your neighbor's voice yeah. Can help you. Let's

Andy Ihnatko (00:13:20):
I, I, I think that, I think that you should get the voice that you want. And I think that it's gonna be, it's gonna be a very, very subtle but important leap forward. When if there, if if if I, if someone does say, Hey, Hey, GMO and four different phones, like on what the weather is, you'll get four different voices because four different people have unique voices on their phones.

Alex Lindsay (00:13:41):
I, I, I want accent. Freeman's

Andy Ihnatko (00:13:42):
The whole plethora of accents too, right? Regionalism,

Leo Laporte (00:13:45):
Go ahead, Alex. I just

Alex Lindsay (00:13:45):
Want Morgan Freeman.

Leo Laporte (00:13:49):
I have Sam the oil Jackson on my Amazon echo. That's pretty darn good.

Alex Lindsay (00:13:52):
Morgan Freeman. James Morgan. Freeman Morgan.

Leo Laporte (00:13:57):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. The more state Freeman. Yeah. Yeah. That's a good idea. Yeah. I don't know if I, you know, I'm I have mixed feelings. I, I, I don't know. I haven't lived with a robot voice long enough to know cuz nobody does a robot voice. Everybody wants it to anthropomorphize. It feels like it's a bad idea to anthrop technology.

Andy Ihnatko (00:14:17):
Well it, the thing is we have been wired up for if we've been human beings as a species for 145,000 years, and our software is written to respond to certain cues and certain audio cues and the idea of optimizing a synthetic voice so that it works with the software we have between our ear is to understand that, Hey look what I'm saying, this this part of the sentence is something that's a little bit preamble to get your attention, but the actual information is right here. Or this is not something that I'm just saying I'm not saying, oh, by the way, there's this other feature you can AC enable if you want, this is actually a weather alert or this is an appointment that you are about to miss if you don't hit it right now. So that's why we really do need to have that kind of sophistication and how well things work.

Andy Ihnatko (00:15:02):
The I've I mean, I, I was the, the potential here is the, the creepy thing would be if we got to the point where air I can if, when you've lost a loved one, but you have lots and lots of video of them, samples of their voice, you can have a synthetic voice created to sort of duplicate what your moms, your cousins, your brother's voice sounded like and make that like the voice of a, of a, of a speaking assistant. That's when things get kind that, that that's when you get into like the graduate studies class, all about this topic where it sounds very, very creepy. I certainly would never want to use something like that because I don't want, I would not want like my memories of my, my parents' voices to be corrupted by a synthetic version that doesn't quite sound like it. But nonetheless us for other people, if this is what helps them get through the morning process and they use it for nine or 10 or 11 months, and then switch to something else, more power to 'em. But it's, this is where we're going in this technology.

Rene Ritchie (00:16:04):
Less creepy than that. I mean, I, I know us a lot of editors now use, I forget the name of the service as a service where you upload your video and it gives you a transcript. You can, it based on the

Leo Laporte (00:16:12):
Transcript. Yeah. The script, the

Rene Ritchie (00:16:14):
Script. Yeah. And it can also deep fake voices. So if you didn't say something you needed to, you can add in a few words

Leo Laporte (00:16:19):
And

Rene Ritchie (00:16:19):
It'll deep, fake your voice for you. And some people just deep fake the entire thing as part of like the pre for their, for their videos or their podcasts. And like, you can tell it's not them. If you know, it's not them. If you don't know, it's really tough if it's not point of out to you.

Alex Lindsay (00:16:33):
Well, and, and one of the futures of dubbing for movies is actually usually deep fakes to have the folks impersonate that person, and then have the, the AI just tighten it all the way up so that it sounds like Tom cruise speaking in, you know, French or whatever, doesn't those spoilers dub anymore.

Rene Ritchie (00:16:50):
I LM did that in a recent episode of something. And, and it did not, it did not sound, it did not sound good. Yeah.

Andy Ihnatko (00:16:56):
It was

Rene Ritchie (00:16:56):
Very, it was very gun county valley. Yeah.

Alex Lindsay (00:16:59):
It's it's well, and, and ILM is still they're not using the deep fake technology that I don't think they

Rene Ritchie (00:17:05):
Did for this. They, they pulled in all these stuff from the 1970s and they pushed it all through a machine learning model. And then they had that do the dialogue, because the actor's way over now. Oh, now,

Alex Lindsay (00:17:13):
And

Rene Ritchie (00:17:13):
It, and they, and it was all like, like eBooks that they'd read and like speeches they'd given and other movies. And so it was the younger voice, but it had no act like not the right level of intonation for anything. So it sounded almost like it was crushed the entire way through.

Alex Lindsay (00:17:29):
Right. Interesting though.

Leo Laporte (00:17:31):
Anyway, even, you know, who doesn't know when out Apples events gonna be, so whatever kind of voice it uses, I

Rene Ritchie (00:17:39):
I'm, Tim knows.

Leo Laporte (00:17:40):
I'm really thinking it's a mistake to anthropomorphize technology that it leads us down a, a, a dangerous path and that we should really, yeah. We should continue to understand that these are machines you're talking about in dun the 

Rene Ritchie (00:17:56):
The Butler and Jaha, and then the thal make no machines in

Leo Laporte (00:17:59):
Demand. Oh, that's that's right. That's kind of a backstory in dun is the war against the machines. That seems to be very common Tropin science fiction. 

Rene Ritchie (00:18:07):
Well, that's a warning shots. We know one day we get killed by the machines. We go up to the Pearl gates and they go, we sent you Terminator. We sent you the meeting we sent you do, what are you doing

Leo Laporte (00:18:15):
Here? Yeah. We told you I, I just feel like it would be good. I know it's, our biology doesn't know about machines, but we have them now, you know, we, we can adjust.

Alex Lindsay (00:18:28):
I do think that there's often to risk. We talk about this a lot around social media in the sense that we have things that we're told. Like, we, we, we think in our frontal lobe that is true. And our, and our lower brain goes, that's not true. Like for instance, we think that social media is giving us that giving us a community. Like we talk about communities a lot. Yeah. Social media's giving community, but it's not. And so, and, and so the one in the front says, this should be a community. And the back says, this is not a community. This doesn't give me the fulfillment that I need. The, the gap, the gap between those two is depression. You know? And so, because our brain is pulling in two different directions, our front is tr working to make something true. And our back, our, our lower brain is going, this isn't what I, this is one I came for, you know? And I think that to your point at when we make things close, but not all the way there, you end up with the situation where your brain is kind of, it actually creates some cognitive load of your brain con constantly saying, that's not, you know, I know it's not real, but I'm gonna treat it as real.

Leo Laporte (00:19:22):
I'm even more concerned. I mean, look at the bots on Twitter, for instance, the disinformation bots, because we don't distinguish them from actual humans. We treat them like human humans. We give them more credence than they deserve. So I'm not even concerned about the cognitive low to this. I'm concerned about kind of misunderstanding the universe because we're not making that distinction. Well,

Rene Ritchie (00:19:41):
Georgia explained it really well, too. She said that like the uncanny valley originated because back in yield days of human evolution, L people would get sick or how like, like the originally don't like the zombie movement or insect toy movement, because it looks unnatural, unhealthy, and it's a warning sign that something is very wrong

Leo Laporte (00:19:56):
With that. You eat something bad, you should

Rene Ritchie (00:19:58):
Stay away from it. Yeah. That's why those Boston dynamic robots send like the, like the chill of destinies. Yeah. Through reveal when you see them walking, because nothing in nature should walk that way. So immediately every alarm be goes off.

Leo Laporte (00:20:07):
Well, it's a way, you know, I mean, no one knows, but the evolutionary S thinks it's think it's a way of avoiding illness and bad food. So if, yeah, somebody's diseased often that makes their behavior abnormal and to protect, you know, evolutionarily speaking, you want to kind of avoid catching that disease. You wanna avoid them. And then if you ate something bad, actually Georgia was talking about this on the Twitter on Sunday, if you this, I, I completely think, think that this is the problem with VR in general is the distance between the focus distance and the convergence distance. If they don't match, then your brain says, yeah, that's wrong. You probably ate something bad. You should vomit it out now. Yes. And now, while we don't know for sure that no, absolutely is, but I think that's the case. And and I think that that's

Alex Lindsay (00:20:54):
Yeah, inter inner inner ear and, and sight is a super important thing to keep aligned. You know, like we think about that all the time with VR or even really large movie screens like IMAX or something like that, if too much is moving and you don't point of reference outside of it,

Leo Laporte (00:21:08):
You're playing too many video games. Even with that. Even if, if you're not wearing a headset, because your brain says, you're not moving your, your eyes see movement, but your inner ear says, but you're not moving. And that dissonance, the dissonance between them is, is more than cognitive load. It's a sign, something's wrong.

Rene Ritchie (00:21:26):
It's the architects. When the architects came and made us build the pyramids and stuff, we remember them. There's like some human history of our alien overlords, and now we don't want them back. So we, we resist anything. That's like them.

Leo Laporte (00:21:38):
I really wish that a architect, that whole architect thing were true. I would really like that to be true. I guess we'll never know, or maybe we will, maybe we'll find an artifact out there and aliens will come back to earth,

Rene Ritchie (00:21:52):
Dude.

Leo Laporte (00:21:54):
So I just bought a bunch of accessories to go with my new Mac mini.

Rene Ritchie (00:22:01):
Well, they're not gonna go to, I mean, they don't have an expiration.

Alex Lindsay (00:22:02):
What did you get?

Leo Laporte (00:22:04):
Well, a lot of stuff monitor well, because I already have the 55 inch monitor. I've still undecided on the KVM. So I did, fortunately didn't get a KVM, but I thought, you know, sometimes that giant monitor's too much. So I got this Dell portable 14 inch monitor that could put to the side so I could have the Mac on that. And then the Linux box and the big monitor or swap 'em. And then of course I had to get a dock. So cow digit has a new Thunderbolt for dock it's back ordered. So I guess, I, I guess it's probably good that I'm not getting a new Mac mini this next week. And but that looks really the Ts four. We were talking about that last week, I think, with doc rock. And so,

Alex Lindsay (00:22:54):
So I so need more Mac minis and I'm just like dying to not, not, I know, buy 'em I'm like I go to this store and I'm like, oh no, no, I can't do that yet.

Leo Laporte (00:23:03):
I know, wait, so this is the, this is the Ts four is really as much for a laptop as anything. And then I just, and then 

Alex Lindsay (00:23:13):
You know, the, the, the one that's really nice also is the one that's the the O WC that that's the same size as the Mac mini that sits right underneath. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:23:20):
It's yeah. Maybe I'll get that. And then actually this was gonna be my my pick of the week, but I'll, I'll give it to, I'll give it to you now. This is for the laptop, cuz Lisa also, I, so I told Lisa, where is it? It's the, oh, is this one, the the 18 port hyperdrive dock thing that you put your laptop on? They just started shipping that Lisa wants to she it's in her mind to she has an old iMac and at first she was gonna use her M one laptop, the old 13 inch. And then I realized, oh, I can't do two monitors on that. And she wants a lot of monitors. She has a 49 inch monitor and she wants to replace the iMac monitor with another. So I did go out and get a monitor for that. And then I realized I, oh, I can't really very easily Dr. I don't want to put a driver on there to drive, but the the new hyperdrive doc, she could put her laptop on that and drive two monitors without additional software. Anyway, I, and then I said, oh, you know what? Let's just get you a Mac mini. So I don't know.

Alex Lindsay (00:24:28):
They're amazing little, little, little machines. I

Leo Laporte (00:24:31):
Just, I think we're really yeah, I'm just really 

Alex Lindsay (00:24:34):
They went from being again, they just went, that's why I'm so interested in waiting to see what happens next, but is that they went from these like little pieces of glue to actual work working machines that we can actually use with the em one. And so you're just really, I'm really excited to see the next one because you know, a lot of us, I mean, I don't know a lot of us, I have a lot of monitors and so a laptop just gets in the way. And so it's, it's great to have these little computers off on the side that do the things. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:24:58):
And then, and it also is nice for me cuz I have a PC and a Mac and I want to have both. And anyway, right. Anyway, I guess I can wait.

Alex Lindsay (00:25:07):
It's hard.

Leo Laporte (00:25:09):
So you think, I really, now I'm really mad at Putin. You think that now that's a bridge too far that Apple's putting off their event because of this invasion of,

Rene Ritchie (00:25:20):
Well, I mean, it's not always a week before, back when they were physical and it was more than a week and last year it was between six and seven days. So

Leo Laporte (00:25:26):
It could be that tomorrow still doing in March 8th and they just haven't. I mean, they don't have to give us a week heads up. They could tell us on Monday

Rene Ritchie (00:25:34):
They could send out a post notification the same day. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:25:36):
Yeah. Hey, come on over.

Andy Ihnatko (00:25:38):
We're dropping some hot

Rene Ritchie (00:25:39):
Burch today. Kids hot, new mech.

Andy Ihnatko (00:25:41):
What? Yeah. All the stuff has been shot and edited by that by now. I mean close, close to by now. But

Alex Lindsay (00:25:48):
Yeah,

Andy Ihnatko (00:25:49):
It would be now not, yeah. Now it's gonna be like buying sh like buying shoes or buying concert tickets. It's like oops. Or graphics cards, like, sorry. Font's already snapped up every single Mac mini.

Leo Laporte (00:26:00):
Oh, please don't do that to me please. Don't do that to me. All right. Let's take a little break. We do have other news to about including of course Apple's response to the Ukrainian invasion. Talk about that just a little bit. It's what a world we live in. Huh? What a, what a world. Okay. Deep breath center. Our show today brought to you by wealth front. You know, when the world events are like this and shaky, you kind of go. And if you're, if you're doing the, you know, diamond hand stomps thing, okay. More power to you. But even on billions last week they said, oh, day traders never make any money. There is a way to build wealth. And I love this idea. You know, it's these days, you know, there's a million investment apps. You can start trading like this, but just cause it's easy to do doesn't mean, you know what you're doing or your social network knows what it's doing or somebody on Reddit knows what you're should to do.

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Leo Laporte (00:28:58):
Let's see here. Let's see. I don't, you know, right now you can't use the app store or the Google store for things in Russia, like paying for the subway. In fact, there's these huge lines now in the subway in Moscow, because you can't use your iPhone to pay because of the banks being sanctioned. I think in, in many ways, Apple pay no longer works should you know Russian minister, a vice prime minister Mahalo federal said Apple should just stop selling iPhones, stop providing any services of any kind of Russian users. I appeal to you. He tweeted stop supplying Apple services and products to the Russian Federation, including blocking access to the app store.

Andy Ihnatko (00:29:49):
That's probably not a great idea. The as, as tempting as it is to additionally put the heat on on the Russian government. The last time I looked into this human rights for saying that the thing is, if you shut, if, if app in an instance like this, if Apple were to shut down access to the app store access to all their products, you're also shutting down a communications tool that citizens would be using to shoot video report on what's going on, communicate with each other, communicate with loved ones. And that couldn't, that's possibly gonna do more harm than good a lot, but there, there are things that they could be doing. I know that the Google play store removed access to the Russian state news site app RT off the it's not, it's no longer available to users in the play store in the Ukraine, but that came at a direct request from the government. And that was a, that was essentially Google the Google place door complying with a legal request to pull out, to pull down an app. So I don't know if Apple has done the same in their, in, in, in the Russian app store, but a lot of the stuff is not so much bravery so much as we have agreed to abide by laws and legal demands and legal demands. We are abiding by,

Alex Lindsay (00:31:02):
I, I think that Apple may wanna get on the right side of this one. I mean, I think that they're yeah, that they, that, that shutting down the stores you know, the physical stores, if there's, you know, or anything that are not, not shipping any more stuff to, to them. I mean, I think that shutting down like iCloud or services, I think would probably be more again, as Andy said, probably impact individuals more, but I think maybe been shutting down the app store for now taking the Russian apps off the, off the off, off the platform. I think would probably be useful. I, I think that there's not, I mean, from, from a, from Apple's perspective you know, if, unless Putin, I mean, unless Putin disappears, like goes six feet under in the next month, which is a growing possib ability.

Alex Lindsay (00:31:44):
There's not gonna be an economy there for years. Like it's, it's gonna be, you know, complete devastation for that economy. And it's not gonna come back anytime soon. So there's not a lot to lose from a financial perspective. There's just an opportunity to stand with the right side of this one wave. Yeah. Cause because the, the Russians are totally screwed. Like, like it is like the Russian government is completely screwed and the only way out is to get rid of Putin. And it's just a question of whether they're gonna do that or not.

Andy Ihnatko (00:32:11):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:32:12):
And it's unfortunate that normal Russians have to suffer, but you know, that's the,

Alex Lindsay (00:32:18):
They are, they, they do have a government that's killing a lot of people somewhere else. Yeah. So, I mean, we can feel bad about the Russians, but the Ukrainians are getting bombed, you know, like, you know, and so the thing is, is that, you know, so the, at some point somebody there has to do something decisive. Yeah. You know, because, because this is getting outta hand, you know, and, and, and it's not, it's not gonna get better. It's gonna get worse. They're starting to increase their, they haven't even used any of their real power yet. Yeah. I know. And so if they, you know, we have, everybody needs to we're everything to try to keep them from doing it this week. Right. So it's super important that everybody does absolutely everything financially. I mean, we should be stopping all gas, all, all oil, everything should be stopping right now because it could get a lot worse than it is right now. And, and Apples. I don't think Apple again, has much to lose, cuz there's not gonna be anything left of the economy if they go much more, much further down the path, the

Leo Laporte (00:33:04):
Rubs a penny. Yeah.

Alex Lindsay (00:33:06):
Yeah.

Rene Ritchie (00:33:06):
Oh, you did see some countries saying no, no, no. We don't wanna stop the, the sale of luxury goods. We still need to sell luxury goods, all

Leo Laporte (00:33:11):
This, you know, honestly, putting the, put the squeeze to the oligarch seems to be the, the short shorts, their

Rene Ritchie (00:33:17):
Yachts are running. Right? Like the people are hunting down the are yachts,

Leo Laporte (00:33:19):
Get the yachts. Yeah. Because that's the shortest way to squeeze Putin, you know? It seems to me,

Alex Lindsay (00:33:24):
Well, and again, we have to remember that we're also, you know, companies are gonna have to in this social world and everything else, companies are gonna have to start looking at how they look and where they are. And I think that this is a preview to Taiwan. You know, the thing is

Leo Laporte (00:33:38):
That think China's worried that they'll set a precedent because what they really don't, they could afford to cut off Russia, but can they afford to cut off China?

Alex Lindsay (00:33:45):
Well, I think the, I think for, I think American companies need to start really thinking about diversifying from China because, you know, Taiwan will be another country like Ukraine, I, where China's gonna try to take it over and

Leo Laporte (00:33:55):
China's watching carefully. I agree.

Alex Lindsay (00:33:57):
And it will be very unpalatable to keep on running your factories in China if it's attacking Taiwan. And so I think this is a, a warning shot to all American companies that they need to start figuring out how to get outta China.

Leo Laporte (00:34:08):
It takes time. Doesn't it? I mean, it does

Alex Lindsay (00:34:11):
People think about it now? I think

Leo Laporte (00:34:12):
Apple has been thinking about it. They've they really wanna diversify their manufacturing.

Alex Lindsay (00:34:17):
Yeah.

Andy Ihnatko (00:34:18):
You know, India's Vietnam, lot of other countries are, have, have sense an opportunity and are making very good offers to a lot of different companies. Apple. However, is the it's is the crown jewel that if you get a contract for mass manufac, if you get a contract to, for world, world manufacturing for Apple, you are gonna get so much other business that it's gonna jeopardize your ability to even fulfill your Apple contract. And they might be late to the game there. But yeah, it's it, it's hard. It's hard to know where to draw the line in a lot of, in a lot of these circumstances. I mean, you you're, it's it it's, I'm very, very surprised at how quickly the temperature of the room changed and how quickly everybody, a lot of people who were operating on a national international level had to read the, and respond accordingly when we have other military incursions, other military actions, other mass slaughters that have gone, oh, well, geez. That's, that's an interesting statistic and moving right along. So

Leo Laporte (00:35:14):
Yeah. Why do you think that is? Is it because Ukraine is kind of a European nation? We can kind of identify with them

Alex Lindsay (00:35:20):
It's because I don't think anyone thinks that Russia, this is the first thing that Russia's gonna, this isn't, this is not the last thing Russia's gonna do. I think that's what everyone's worried about.

Leo Laporte (00:35:27):
A real,

Rene Ritchie (00:35:28):
There is a real nasty streak of these are, are white civilized Europeans that a lot of the countries, a lot of the presidents, all the news coverage, like it's, it's, it's terrible invasion, but see people are using as an opportunity to commit a supremacy at the same time, which is hugely distasteful.

Leo Laporte (00:35:41):
Yeah, no, I agree. There, and there is of course the threat of nuclear war, which is hanging over our heads now. Thanks to Putin. Just, you know, oof. Anyway, we're not here to, we don't, this is beyond my pay grade to talk about exactly all. Yeah, me too. But but I think it is something Apples probably discussing a lot right now in internally.

Andy Ihnatko (00:36:03):
Yeah. Such brackets

Leo Laporte (00:36:04):
For them,

Andy Ihnatko (00:36:05):
It's it, it just goes to show politically her non politically, they put so much of their success in one country. Doesn't matter like what the political situation is in that one country. It was it's. It was an interesting thing to see that Apple really didn't seem to have a plan. Excuse me. They, they, they, weren't showing a, demonstrating a plan B for what happens if everything goes south and we've already seen the difference between China in 2009 and China in 2012 was already night and day. There was a, there was a, there was a blessed said period, up until the current president came in that said that, well, we're, this is, this is going to, this is, this is a relationship that's gonna continue to blossom, continue to be beneficial. Continue to work out really, really great. It seems as though everybody has had 10 years of notice that says that this, this could go very, very bad, very, very quickly. I, if we're relying on one provider of these services, we could wind up in a very, very touchy situation.

Leo Laporte (00:37:06):
Russian authorities last week, warned Google, meta, Apple, Twitter, TikTok, and others that they had until the end of the month, which I guess is, oh, over now to the end of February, I guess to set up legal entities in the country, this, you know, this is the, this is the, the authoritarian move. Well, you have to have offices here. So we have somebody we can throw in. 

Alex Lindsay (00:37:33):
I think the, I think the timing of that was probably not,

Leo Laporte (00:37:36):
Not accidental.

Alex Lindsay (00:37:37):
Well, don't think, I don't think, I, I don't think anybody's interested it and making any more agreements with Russia at this point. Yeah. So

Leo Laporte (00:37:41):
Yeah, the landing law makes the companies and their employees more vulnerable to Russia's legal system and the demands of government sensors, legal experts and civil society. Like the

Rene Ritchie (00:37:51):
Problem with this stuff is that it, like, there's so much nuance to unpack here. And for example, data repatriation and making localized versions of C is like, we see the extremes of those in Russia and China, but a lot of European countries want that too. They either don't trust us servers. They don't like us laws because they have a very different idea of what government should or shouldn't be responsible for like France and Microsoft have been arguing about data repatriation for a long time already. And it's, it's a big problem. Like it's, it's something that a lot of countries feel like they don't have control over their own citizen data. And that's not an unreasonable thing, but it's often fronted by unreasonable activity in Russia and China. And at the same time, Apple has this policy of relentless engagement. Like they believe they can't change something if not involved in it.

Rene Ritchie (00:38:32):
But at what point does that become support like at, and Andy and I have talked about this for a long time, we've all talked about this for a long time. It's an incredibly fine line that you have to thread those, those needles. And we've seen Tim cook do that in China for years. I don't have the same knowledge of what Apple's been doing in Russia for years, but as we become an interna, we were this big international internet. And now it feels like it's being broken back down into national laws, national borders, very different in opposing laws, often in the EU and the us. And it's, it's gonna be incredibly complicated. And I think it's gonna be worse when it's in, in, in Europe because there's no like, oh, that's Russia, that's China. It's like, no Italy wants to, or Holland wants to put Apple in jail because of dating apps. And it's gonna be a much bigger conversation.

Leo Laporte (00:39:15):
You remember that last in January Russian authorities threatened to arrest Apple and Google employees. Yeah. Unless they removed an app, the Naval app, the opposition leader app he's in prison right now. I think Apple complied, Apple says they have in fact complied with the law. This was before the invasion Google has sort of complied. Let me see. There's a list in the New York times of who has, who

Rene Ritchie (00:39:46):
Has it's one guy, you know, in a rent share apartment, and boy, is he gonna be a lot of

Leo Laporte (00:39:50):
Poor guy? That's not a job you'd really want, is it, I know Apple TikTok and Spotify have complied according to Ross com nod or their their internet regulator. Google has taken steps. TWI telegram have not meta and Twitter have complied with some parts of the law, but not others. So meanwhile they're getting pressure from the us Congress, Senator Warman, Warren chairman of the Senate intelligence committee sent a letter to Russia, to a meta Reddit, telegram, and others urging them not to let Russian entities use their platforms to soak confusion about the war. So they're facing it from both sides. Isn't

Rene Ritchie (00:40:32):
It amazing how like the me, like, like you like the Ukraine Twitter account is fighting a war, an ingenious war of memes at the same time. Well, this is like against the disin info warfare

Leo Laporte (00:40:41):
Has changed entirely, right? Yeah. and, and even in 20 years and, and the, the tech companies have a huge role in this, you know, Google maps was being used to plot Russian movements. You know, there is absolutely a disinformation battleground or an information battleground going both ways on these social platforms like TikTok and Twitter and Facebook. It's just fascinating. It's, it's very, a lot of

Rene Ritchie (00:41:12):
Change could change everyone's perceptions. Like that was one of the earlier concerns about TikTok. The algorithm is so good and it wasn't under us control that if anybody wanted to suddenly change perception of Hong Kong or Taiwan, it's, it's, it's a very small algorithm machine learning model change, right? Yeah. I, the

Leo Laporte (00:41:28):
Go ahead, sorry.

Alex Lindsay (00:41:29):
All I was gonna say is that, you know, a war like world war II couldn't have happened, you know, with social media, because you know, the things that happened there and the number of civilian casualties, would've been something that people couldn't handle, you know? And so

Leo Laporte (00:41:41):
That may be one of the reasons that we're, that we're seeing such opposition, right. Is we're seeing it. I mean, that was, I mean,

Alex Lindsay (00:41:47):
I remember

Leo Laporte (00:41:48):
That was the first TV war and that really did stimulate a lot of resistance to Vietnam in the United States. Cause we are seeing the boys being,

Alex Lindsay (00:41:58):
I mean, we, we we're, we're shock, we're having counts. I mean, and, and it's horrible that we're having counts, but I think that it's, it's progress that we are upset about 500 or 300 or, you know people dying or 10 people dying on a missile attack, you know, 50 or, or seven, many years ago we, or whatever, we killed a hundred thousand people in a day. Yeah. You know, and, and that was, and that was somehow okay. And, and I think that it is important to look at the, the fact that, that we're more connected and

Leo Laporte (00:42:23):
More makes us more human. We

Alex Lindsay (00:42:24):
Start saying, Hey, this isn't this isn't. Yeah. I, yeah. That, that isn't that, that these smaller numbers make a difference.

Leo Laporte (00:42:30):
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We all know people. We have listeners in both Ukraine and.

Alex Lindsay (00:42:34):
Yeah. Yeah.

Andy Ihnatko (00:42:35):
Some of, some of those powerful imagery that comes outta these conflicts is when you see mass protests in Russia picked calling Putin a jerk in a country, in a country where that has life altering consequences. It, it makes it, it makes it difficult for a, a populous to be manipulated into thinking that Russia is a mass, some focus towards fighting NATO and claiming territory that they think that they have rights to, even though they historically have not had rights to this thing. So when you see that, when you see that any regime is fragile, it will basically move people's emotions in hopefully in the right direction. Unfortunately, it also moves those leaderships in a, in a very poor direction when they see how, how close they can come when you, when you draw a line in the sand and say, the only way that I'm I'm leaving this presidency is feet. First, you get enough people together to say, we'll take you up on that offer. And that leads that person to do some very, very strange and awful things.

Alex Lindsay (00:43:29):
Right.

Leo Laporte (00:43:31):
Okay. Let's change the subject Jim down Rimple of retiring. This is a huge story everywhere. I know the, our, our great friend the man with the beard who for how long Jim, Jim was at he was at max central in 94. He says, I'm sure he

Rene Ritchie (00:43:52):
Company, the Apple one launch I'm positive in some way. He covered the Apple one.

Leo Laporte (00:43:56):
He started, he started his own publication, the loop in 2009. So he was one of the early guys doing it independently 30 years. Yeah. So I, the loop, I guess, continues. He says after 30 years of reporting on Apple, I am retiring one of the stimulating factors. He's getting married. Congratulations, Jim. Yeah. His fiance Erica has accepted a job in Austin. And so they bought a house on five acres of land outside of Austin. She's wonderful. She's so good for, do you know Erica? Good. Good. Yeah, she's magnificent. Yeah. he says, I'm looking forward to taking more time to play guitar. Haven't played much in the past couple of years. I'm gonna fix that very soon. I will serenade the wildlife on my land with some Azzie songs. So they're getting married in make congratulations, Jim. It sounds like he's gonna continue to do the Dori report podcast with Dave mark. I don't know. Does, does the, he says, if you currently pay for the loop, you could continue that to help support the podcast. He's not gonna be

Rene Ritchie (00:45:03):
Updated, but he's, he's gonna keep it. Yeah. The one thing I'm not sure about is when he moved from Canada to California, Heineke and Canada almost went on a business and I think

Leo Laporte (00:45:11):
Heineken

Rene Ritchie (00:45:11):
Us doubled it sales, but I don't know if they're prepared for like the west coast Heineken branch to almost close and suddenly have like twice a capacity in Texas for him.

Leo Laporte (00:45:20):
Yeah. To be,

Alex Lindsay (00:45:20):
I, I wonder how good his PO is. And have you been to the Heineken experience in, in Amsterdam?

Rene Ritchie (00:45:26):
No.

Leo Laporte (00:45:26):
No. They

Alex Lindsay (00:45:27):
Have a whole pour. They give you a whole, there's a whole pouring. 

Leo Laporte (00:45:29):
It's very important. That's your poor, right? You,

Andy Ihnatko (00:45:32):
I,

Rene Ritchie (00:45:32):
I think just walks around with a keg, like in one hand and straw and he just like cults the keg.

Leo Laporte (00:45:37):
I think it's anyway, we, we wish you the best, Jim. You're just great. Well, yeah. You know, since you're gonna continue podcasting, we'll definitely get Jim on the show more often and he's

Rene Ritchie (00:45:46):
Cooking now. He said we can get him right in the kitchen,

Leo Laporte (00:45:48):
Pasta and sauces. Yeah. You should have 'em on your on your weekend cooking office hours. I know we should, we should show something. I wanna know how Jim's makes his sauces,

Rene Ritchie (00:45:58):
Show you how to make Tim Horton's.

Leo Laporte (00:46:00):
Yeah, yeah. So

Rene Ritchie (00:46:04):
What a legend, what an icon.

Leo Laporte (00:46:05):
Yeah, kind of a, you know, I think I admire him. Retiring is a hard thing to do. It's a scary thing to do. I, I

Andy Ihnatko (00:46:17):
Just, I, I, I just imagine it being like the opening scenes and unforgiven, or you met a good woman. I, I like that. And I like that no more. Yeah. But all, all these people are talking to this crap. I, I didn't like that. No more good mother. God bless her. So put me on the right strike. I love it.

Rene Ritchie (00:46:35):
Old man, Logan, Andy, he's

Andy Ihnatko (00:46:37):
Gonna go

Leo Laporte (00:46:37):
Blow away a saloon at some point. Wow. I never even thought of that. Yeah.

Andy Ihnatko (00:46:42):
We'll see. They said we'll they wrote that the iPhone is a dead end technology that doesn't innovate. No, they put up billboard Grabs. The done

Rene Ritchie (00:46:53):
Work was done. He rode back from when had come and he was Jim

Andy Ihnatko (00:46:57):
Prosper, prospered and soft goods.

Leo Laporte (00:47:00):
We love you, Jim. You know, congratulations. Congratulations of getting married, making more time for yourself. I think you're doing the right thing. I think that's great.

Andy Ihnatko (00:47:08):
Come back and visit because we will miss you. It's

Leo Laporte (00:47:11):
Hard. I, I think all of us will, will, will test to the fact that, you know, basically writing every day for the loop must is a hardship. It's a, it's a burden. Yeah. It's like, and Rene having to make a video every job with him. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So yeah, I, Jimmy, he should have just done what I did, which is hire a bunch of people And then let them do the work. And then I just sit here now and, you know, in, in my chair

Rene Ritchie (00:47:37):
For a while you had like 3, 3, 4 writers, I think, on the loop for a while. And then,

Leo Laporte (00:47:41):
Yeah.

Rene Ritchie (00:47:41):
Yeah. And also it's like, it is still a hamster wheel because you've gotta make sure everything's running and

Leo Laporte (00:47:45):
Operating. It just actually, what it does is it just changes your job to something else entirely. Yeah. I have signed up and downloaded it, but it's not working yet on my Mac, but it will. I'm sure Amazon's Luna streaming gaming service is now launched in the us the idea much like Microsoft's X cloud and guy, Kai and the Invidia GForce now. And all of these services, the idea was, I guess, Google's stadia as well. Let the games run on our servers and you can play 'em on anything. Luna will play on Android iOS, ChromeOS Mac OS and windows. The Luna plus service has a hundred plus games 10 bucks a month. There's a kid friendly family channel for six bucks. If you like Uber soft, there's an Uber soft plus channel for 18, a whopping $18 a month. But if you're an Amazon prime member, there's some free games you can play right now. Play free with prime. There's a, what they say, a rotating selection of games on the prime gaming channel, and then probably games nobody will wanna play. And then and then you can, if you sign up right now for Luna, plus you can get it a founder pricing, they say for life of six by so

Rene Ritchie (00:49:13):
It's not free with prime. That's interesting.

Leo Laporte (00:49:15):
Well, there is some free with prime but not much. It's these rotating. Let me see what the games are. You could play, 'em kind of prime

Rene Ritchie (00:49:23):
Just went up by it's had its first big price

Leo Laporte (00:49:25):
Hike. Yeah. Yeah. You could play in the browser but not, but it has to be Chromer safari. It's gonna be another way to sell fire TV and fire tablets, by the way. I'm sure that's part of, part of all this.

Andy Ihnatko (00:49:44):
Yeah. I want to, I keep trying to figure out exactly. Who's I, I, haven't seen consumer stats on this, on who really is going on on this, because it seems as though you're, you're looking at it, you're looking at an intersection between someone like me who wants to, who, who enjoys top tier titles at a distance, but is not willing to spend five or $600 on a console. If you can get them from scalers or a couple of thousand dollars on a gaming PC. But it seems as though a lot of the who are gonna appreciate those really in depth games are gonna be the ones who are excited about getting the new Xbox excited about getting the new PlayStation. So it's, and, and you have a lot of these people that are like how many they're actually putting sensors on the screen to figure out what is the latency between when I pull this trigger. And when I see something go boom, on the screen, and those are the people that are absolutely gonna Savage streaming platforms. It's like a Apple arcade is, is a great idea because it really goes towards the soft part, the, the soft underbelly of gaming people who are easy to please who have low demands and they wanna see lots and lots of churn. They they'll, they'll be in, they'll be into a game for a couple of weeks and then be on to the next one.

Leo Laporte (00:50:53):
Yeah. I don't know. Yeah. I mean, Google basically has, I think abandoned stadia. They,

Andy Ihnatko (00:50:59):
Well, they, they, they Googled, they, they Googled the ball, they Googled

Leo Laporte (00:51:01):
It. They,

Andy Ihnatko (00:51:02):
They, yeah. It's like, I, I, I'm sorry, I'm sorry that they, the, the, the Google is a verb that they've, they've earned completely through their own efforts. One on making a masterful search engine and also figuring out how to come up with a big splashy product and then say, eh, not so much about, about a year later.

Leo Laporte (00:51:21):
Yeah.

Alex Lindsay (00:51:22):
Yeah. And, and I think that the hard part there for, for Google specifically is that it's just so hard to get people to now jump on, because you just don't know how long it's gonna last. Yeah. You know, there's a part of it that you have to stick with it. Even if it's not working, you have to stick with it a bit longer because you know, you know, it used to be that, you know, people would jump on to stuff that Google was doing. Then you had to do it. You had to prove that you're gonna do it for a certain period of time. But so many people have lost their shirts trying to like take advantage of a new Google product that I think is just really hard to get early adopters and then get any adopters. So that's the real problem.

Andy Ihnatko (00:51:53):
Even we think they're supposed to be good at like, like cloud-based messaging. It's like,

Leo Laporte (00:51:58):
God,

Andy Ihnatko (00:51:58):
If you could screw that, how many times, many times did they screw that up around things

Alex Lindsay (00:52:01):
That Google has something, I mean, Google has a handful of things that pay for everything else, all the goofy stuff like YouTube and, and, and ads, ads,

Leo Laporte (00:52:09):
Search ads, really. I mean, they like, like they can't lose with search ads so they can afford to do a lot of dumb things. Yeah. Yeah. I, but I don't know.

Alex Lindsay (00:52:20):
I mean

Rene Ritchie (00:52:21):
Fire because like they just don't ship. Like they, they, again, they hired like the second guy in charge of Android and one of the best designers ever at Apple to make a phone, never, never shipped the phone. They did it again within the second phone project. Never shipped it. They just canceled their meta OS. Like they, they get to like, they're like Google, but they learn how to cancel faster. I think.

Alex Lindsay (00:52:38):
Yeah. I, I think, I think that you, you want to Apple, Apple cancel stuff and no one even knows it existed. Like it didn't, you know, like that was, it was, I I've, I've talked to people that no, no longer work at Apple that have said, oh, and they won't even tell me what the products, but they were like, there were products in there that I would've bought. I would've paid three times what we were planning to charge for it. And I, it would've been amazing. And he goes, and then we canceled it because there wasn't for whatever reason, it wasn't gonna turn the corner. So like

Andy Ihnatko (00:53:01):
The, so, so, so to, so to spread the, the, the malice around Apple is Apple is like that frustrating chess player that like, I always keeps their finger on the piece of the right. I've gone yet. I haven't gone yet. Wait a minute. Okay. I'm pulling this piece back.

Alex Lindsay (00:53:14):
Yeah,

Rene Ritchie (00:53:14):
No, I think that's Facebook. I think Apple's the one who stares for so long. You want to get up and smack 'em. They just stare and they don't touch their piece. Facebook has their finger on the piece and they're moving around and Google's just like, oh no, that, no. And then they throw the table.

Leo Laporte (00:53:30):
So the reason I mentioned this, I mean, I know it's an Apple podcast is because, you know, one of the wraps against Macintosh all this time has been, oh, it's a bad gaming platform, but increasingly you don't really need to have a, have a gaming platform. You can just play in the browser. So, but

Rene Ritchie (00:53:49):
The nerds want the platform, Leo, the nerds want, they wanna play Elden ring on the metal. Like that's

Leo Laporte (00:53:54):
The nerd experience. And I don't, I, I don't like using windows. I have only one machine that plays windows, but that's where I had to install Elden ring 60 gigabytes later. 

Rene Ritchie (00:54:03):
It says every Mac nerd ever, you that's,

Leo Laporte (00:54:05):
That's just, yeah. Yeah. It's too bad. But I guess it's, I don't know. I mean, I I'm playing now, and this is in the, in a chromium browser. I am playing one of the free to play games. This is called fogs. I guess I'm a Wiener dog. I don't know what's going on. Oh yeah. There's my I've got, oh, Jesus is almost filthy. What's going on here? Oh, it's like a snake game kind of, I guess.

Rene Ritchie (00:54:38):
Is this the new Pokemon? They just announced Leo. I'm very confused

Leo Laporte (00:54:41):
Right now. It feels like it. I don't know. Oh, oh, something's happening?

Rene Ritchie (00:54:44):
This a Swen region.

Alex Lindsay (00:54:46):
Yeah. I mean, the reality is though, is that, you know, casual, you know, if you look at like mobile gaming now is I think it's something like almost 60% of the market, you know, like it's know, consoles are

Leo Laporte (00:54:56):
So Apple arcades, five bucks a month, right? So this is six bucks a month if you sign up right away. So you could, I mean, this, I'm playing this on X, which is, you know, not normally considered a, well, this is probably about how all I'm gonna be able to play. I guess I have to figure out how to can't wake this guy up. I dunno.

Rene Ritchie (00:55:18):
You have to use chromium for the Leo.

Leo Laporte (00:55:20):
Yeah. I had installed chromium on Linnux and then it said, well, I don't know. Okay. You can play it. But we won't. Be's

Rene Ritchie (00:55:27):
Like when they lo when they first forked WebKit they had to say, WebKit like GetGo for support. And now nobody wants to support GetGo anymore. Like you basically had to use it as a compatibility layer. And now, like, nobody

Leo Laporte (00:55:38):
Wants support. Nobody wants everything changes. Its all Chrome now. So this is playing fine. The frame rate's fine. I'm on a very, very fast network at home. I tried to play at, there is a DMG file you can download, which is probably just a browser window for Mac OS. But it was complaining about my internet even though I have plenty of internet. So, all right, I'm gonna, I'm gonna exit outta this. There is a Amazon controller you may or may not wanna buy. It says you can play all of these games in the keyboard. You could see, I wasn't having much success doing that. Are you, you sure you want to quit fogs? Yes, I am sure I wanna quit fogs. I can't even figure it out. I need a kid to help me with that game. I think so. Anyway, it's out just you know, everybody's doing it now. All the kids are all the, all the cool kids are doing it. I think you're right, Andy. I think really the, the market Apple cares about and, and has, and owns this casual gaming and they're fine with that. Right?

Andy Ihnatko (00:56:35):
Yeah. As long as they're open with third parties, as long as they make their platform available to streaming, that's fine. I think there, I think they're, they're always, they're what they love to do is not to take, not to not to necessarily be the most plat popular platform, but to be the most PLA popular platform with the people who brought the checkbooks. Right. And so this could, so that's, they'll take the money of people who want to go launch, put all the effort into launch of their on streaming streaming gaming platform. They'll take the money, the people, people who just want to play, play Teris with a rock beat to

Leo Laporte (00:57:06):
It. Yeah. Yeah. I

Rene Ritchie (00:57:09):
Dunno if that's still gonna be this way, but before the, before the world ended and I was flying every week, almost every time I was on a plane, I would walk up and down the aisle and see people with giant iPads, just playing candy crush, like multiple people per airplane. No, it was so ubiquitous. And that's, that's what the gaming market they had was.

Leo Laporte (00:57:25):
And I think they, and they own it. Mac is not though, you know, I have to say at PCs, a lot of PCs are sold for gaming. There's no reason a Mac couldn't be a gaming platform. That game we were just playing was unity. So you could put that on the Mac I guess yeah. You

Rene Ritchie (00:57:42):
Said the market share. Doesn't like the, I, the market share totally supports it. And they do a lot of really

Leo Laporte (00:57:46):
Interesting games. It's not enough max.

Rene Ritchie (00:57:47):
Like no one wants to make a metal port of, You know, zero horizon, zero Dawn, and set

Leo Laporte (00:57:54):
Up on the

Rene Ritchie (00:57:54):
Max aspire

Leo Laporte (00:57:55):
Apples still around that's the company that for years was best known for porting PC games over to max. There's still a, a going business. Let's see, they have nights of the old Republic out six, which I am playing on a Mac. You can't

Rene Ritchie (00:58:11):
Play on you're going through a time capsule.

Leo Laporte (00:58:13):
Yeah. That's the problem. Isn't it? It's it's it's older stuff so much. Yeah.

Rene Ritchie (00:58:19):
Think the switch streamers are playing with should,

Leo Laporte (00:58:20):
Should Apple pursue a gaming strategy? They go back and forth on this.

Alex Lindsay (00:58:26):
Well, they have a gaming strategy.

Leo Laporte (00:58:27):
Yeah. They actually, they have a very good one. Don't they they're content with what they're content with what they've got. I guess I'm at a kind of AAA desktop, PC Mac gaming strategy. It's just

Rene Ritchie (00:58:37):
Less money, more work,

Leo Laporte (00:58:38):
Right?

Alex Lindsay (00:58:39):
Yeah. It's a shrinking market. I mean the mobile and the other no casual game market is the one that's kind of taking over.

Leo Laporte (00:58:45):
I'm not sure that's true. I think

Alex Lindsay (00:58:47):
UHS over 60% of the market.

Leo Laporte (00:58:49):
Yeah. But I, I don't think that desktop gaming is a bad market. I it's bigger than Hollywood right now.

Alex Lindsay (00:58:56):
It's not a bad market. I'm just saying that if you, if you have the mobile market or if you have a big chunk of the mobile market and, and those things, I mean, building a, I, I think that, you know, the other thing is the Apple TV is capable of a lot more than we still seen, even with most of the games games that's

Leo Laporte (00:59:08):
So Apple's still plenty of room, head room before they need to look something

Alex Lindsay (00:59:11):
Else. Yeah. When they add the horsepower to do high frame rate eight K they're gonna have a horsepower to do any kind of game, you know, like it's, you know, like it's. Yeah. So, so, and, and, you know, and I don't think, you know, I think that game quality is really important over top of necessarily, you know, the really high rendering. And I think that I, I think that the big thing is, is that there's a, a need to make a game really playable and then a need need to, I think somewhere in the future, someone's gonna figure out how to make it broadcast. I mean, I know that broadcast games, but they're really hard to watch, you know, like this is, it's like, I, I know the gamers like watching them, but for an average person watching them, they're, they're convoluted and complicated and don't make any sense. I mean, eventually we'll see games that are really designed not like Overwatch, but I mean, like really designed for broadcast. And we haven't seen that yet.

Leo Laporte (00:59:59):
We figured out our broadcast, chess and poker I'll do that with video games

Alex Lindsay (01:00:02):
Two. Yeah. It's,

Leo Laporte (01:00:03):
It's

Alex Lindsay (01:00:03):
A, But, but again, those aren't, those, those are, those are broadcasted, but they're not like football, you know, or soccer or no, you know, it's but I

Leo Laporte (01:00:10):
Think eSports could be, I mean, it's a lot more action. Oh. And there's,

Alex Lindsay (01:00:14):
I completely, when they move to an arena. Yeah. Which is what all the other big games do. Yeah. Like, you know, the physical games yeah. Are in a, you know, for two and years, we've gone to see people collaborate each other, you know in a big round area where we're also watching. And I think that, you know, I, I don't think that it's gonna change that much.

Leo Laporte (01:00:32):
Let me show you the arena that Dota two had and one of their big events. This is the international Dota two games.

Alex Lindsay (01:00:43):
No. And, and they can definitely fill an arena. It just can, they, can, they do it every week? You know, like this is, you know, sports, the, you know, we, we, we oftentimes get excited about eSports. And I think that, to be honest, I think eSports is gonna replace regular sports. So I'm not saying that it's not gonna happen. I think this is

Leo Laporte (01:00:59):
About to break out, then COVID hit. So, you know, we don't know this is, this was May 20th, 2010 million prize. This is a giant arena. They filled with Dota two fans. These are the players down here. That's my that's. The only thing is I don't know how compelling it is to sit there and watch that.

Alex Lindsay (01:01:18):
But they, and, and again, I, I think that the issue is how much do they pay for the tickets? And, and how, how often could they do that? And, and I think that if they get the right game, they could do it all the time, or maybe they don't need to even do it in arena. I mean, but they can broadcast it. But right now I just find that when I watch them, I'm like, this is, you know, it's, it's, it's great for gamers. It's not, it's not a great broadcast experience.

Leo Laporte (01:01:40):
They need better play by play people. And it may be, it could be, they, well, they, the game, if you know the game, it's very engaging. I'm told.

Alex Lindsay (01:01:49):
Yeah, no, no. That's why you get high, have the high average view times and everything else. But yeah, but the, the, the thing is, is that the, the, that what you need is to, is to have real camera systems and you need to have real, real comment. Yeah. Commentators they've gotta

Leo Laporte (01:02:02):
Work. Yeah. Yeah.

Alex Lindsay (01:02:03):
You know, it can't be dry, mean the, the cameras around with your mice, you know, and, you know, and, and then, and, and not have it all just attached to some person running through and, and all of those things could be done. I mean, a lot of us have worked on things like this for a, for a while. It's, it's, it's all possible to put extra game engine systems in there. It's just that no one really, I mean, the gaming companies don't really get it. And so you just kind of constantly trying to explain,

Leo Laporte (01:02:27):
Looking at it. I think people are really looking at it. See, this is, I mean, it's one of the reasons Microsoft just bought activism, blizzard. I think that right

Alex Lindsay (01:02:35):
There,

Leo Laporte (01:02:36):
There there's the feeling is out there. There's some, the is a billion dollar business and we can just figure it out. This

Alex Lindsay (01:02:40):
Is multi, it was already billion dollar business.

Leo Laporte (01:02:43):
It's oh, I'm talking about the eSport side of it. Yeah. Yeah. This is the Rogers arena, 19,000 people for Dota two.

Alex Lindsay (01:02:50):
I think it's the future Rogers.

Leo Laporte (01:02:52):
Huh?

Rene Ritchie (01:02:54):
That's where Rogers in Canada.

Leo Laporte (01:02:55):
Rogers. Toronto. Oh, wow. I think there's no, that's where Roger is. Right.

Alex Lindsay (01:03:00):
Again, I think that, I think it's the, I think it's the future. I think it's the future. I just think that it's gonna, someone's gonna have to crack a code. I mean, cuz 19, thousand's great. But the Steelers fill 70,000 every week, you know, like every week that they play, you know, like I'm just saying that, that at, at incredible prices and it's sold out for a decade, you know, like, you know, so the thing is, is that that's, but that's the, it

Leo Laporte (01:03:20):
Wasn't that long ago though that you know, it was easy to get tickets to an NFL game and there wasn't a super bowl

Alex Lindsay (01:03:25):
Yet. Well, not those,

Leo Laporte (01:03:27):
Those

Alex Lindsay (01:03:27):
Things, not in Pittsburgh. It hasn't been that way for

Leo Laporte (01:03:29):
30

Alex Lindsay (01:03:29):
Years. So, so the, the, but the but but I think that, again, I think that eSports is they're able to show these great things, but when you talk to sports folks, you kinda like when we talk about streaming, when we talk to broadcast folks broadcast like, well, you know, we would, if, if we had less than 5 million people watching, we would cancel the, Just so you have to realize that they're at a different scale, you know? And, and again, I think eSports is the future. I think eventually that's mostly what we'll watch, but what we'll take it from where it is now to that thing is a actual viewable game.

Leo Laporte (01:04:02):
No, I agree for the killer game league legends, Dota two, these mob MOBA games are very popular. They're just,

Alex Lindsay (01:04:09):
They're just complex to watch. I think

Rene Ritchie (01:04:12):
The, and mark, mark Zuckerberg is gonna be the, or, and the blood bowl. He's gonna be the lead or, and the blood bowl. And we're all gonna sign up to watch him fight against Adam from Instagram. It'll be amazing.

Leo Laporte (01:04:23):
So six weeks,

Rene Ritchie (01:04:25):
No, yeah. Before we go on, can I just tangentially, did you order a steam deck? I was just curious

Leo Laporte (01:04:29):
I am on the list. I haven't gotten my invitation yet. The only thing I'm excited about steam deck for is it running arch Linux, which means that a lot of games, a huge number of games from the steam library will be poured over to Linux. So I can run 'em on my nice Linux gaming machine. That's all I really care about. 

Rene Ritchie (01:04:47):
Yeah. With benefits.

Leo Laporte (01:04:49):
I, I, I think it's a very interesting device. I mean, obviously the Nintendo switch, which is roughly the same, it's the same screen size and a little smaller, but roughly the same idea anyway has done so well. She, during COVID, the switch has been a real go-to device. Yeah. So, yeah,

Andy Ihnatko (01:05:09):
I'm so I'm so tempted by the steam deck. As I, even if, as a guy has just said, I'm into casual gaming, I don't wanna spend hundreds of dollars on device. It, it seems as though we we've all been there where you can tell when someone has a, a, a tech company has a new product or a new thing that say, oh, this is the future of the company. And we've really thought about this, and we're really invested in this and we think this is gonna be a revolution. And you're like, yeah. Okay. 50% discount, discounted percent, two weeks after release discounted a hundred percent, two years after release. But the steam deck, it really seems as though they've really thought out how to make a, a platform for a lot of really cool things. And I'm just as I'm pretty excited about it myself, especially at that price point. Good. Heavens I wonder, I wonder how much profit they're making on each. Wonder what the, what the build, what the, the bill goods was probably minus

Rene Ritchie (01:05:57):
This money.

Andy Ihnatko (01:05:58):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:06:00):
I'm just checking in oh crap. They have a very old phone number. I put down whatever the a hundred dollars deposit or whatever. I was just checking to see where I am in the reservation queue. I mean, I, I have to buy it right. Because you know, for work, I

Rene Ritchie (01:06:16):
Think this is coming Q2,

Leo Laporte (01:06:17):
Do it for the kids. Yeah. They just starting to

Andy Ihnatko (01:06:19):
See, I, I, I, I need a windows PC in the office because you know, for, for balance,

Leo Laporte (01:06:24):
Well, that's why I have a,

Andy Ihnatko (01:06:27):
I

Leo Laporte (01:06:27):
Write PowerPoint. It's it's like, if, if you were to have like a bar graph of how much Linux and how much windows, it's this much Linux and it's this much windows, give windows a few other gigabytes, which I'm regretting now, cuz Eldon ring fills fills it entirely. So it's basically,

Rene Ritchie (01:06:44):
He's not a SD card and apparently it's not terrible off SD card.

Leo Laporte (01:06:47):
Yeah. Yeah. So we, anyway, we'll, we'll see.

Rene Ritchie (01:06:51):
I think that's why a lot of people are waiting to see if Apple actually does announce their own game controller or some sort of game thing for iPad that, or turn it into more of a console. Like you just plug it in and it becomes more of a console. I know there's third party ones, but this, if Apple starts making moves like that and they start, especially as they get into VR and, and VRS gonna have a much bigger gaming focus, just if they could complete that pipeline, I think people will, will. That's when we'll start to, I believe it when I see it basically with Apple and those are sort of the things that I'm looking forward to see how they go with gaming. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:07:18):
Yeah. It is week five of the standoff between Apple and the Dutch dating apps. 5 million euros every week up to a total of 10 weeks has written a letter to R D Rouge authority, consumer and market in the Hague. Dear Mr. Dru Dru this is, this is from Apples, chief compliance, officer Kyle Andi explaining why our, what we've done is, is the only way to do it for one thing to ensure that our app is compliant with Dutch law and that it has not applied Dutch law outside of the Netherlands, Apple had to ask developers to submit a separate binary for the Netherlands storefront. If they intend to use a payment service, other than I, what else could we do? We had to do it. This is the same approach, Apple and developers using jurisdictions, where there are unique legal issues.

Leo Laporte (01:08:29):
This is not costly or difficult for a developer. Dating apps are familiar with process and in fact, engage in it voluntarily. It's, it's simply, it's not simply possible, but common for a developer to do that. Apple believes this solution is fully compliant with Dutch law. We take these obligations very seriously. I understand that we have have a difference of opinion that may ultimately have to be resolved by a court. I hope we can find a mutually agreeable solution that will allow us to stop paying you 5 million euros a week. Anyway, they make their case.

Alex Lindsay (01:09:09):
I still love that this is over dating apps,

Leo Laporte (01:09:11):
Dating apps.

Andy Ihnatko (01:09:16):
Those, those are, those are just the, that's just the company that actually raised a lawsuit. And basically if, if they, if they find a way to settle this, then I'm sure everybody else is gonna dog pilot as well. But yeah, every, every time we introduce this topic, we're talking about Dutch dating apps. I'm thinking about, is that the way that Apple's getting out of getting out, paying taxes on my phones

Leo Laporte (01:09:34):
Or is don't Dutch on those taxes? That's it? You take half or

Andy Ihnatko (01:09:39):
Is it a reverse?

Leo Laporte (01:09:41):
Yeah, it's a reverse touch sandwich. The markup had an article on the location data industry and how location data brokers are getting away getting around restrictions from Apple and Google. It's 12 billion a year market of companies that buy and sell location data from your cell phone entirely legal in the us. However, of course, as you know, Apple would like to stop that they crack down in the SDK, but there's nothing you can do about first party. And so the markup is explaining how information is being collected by these apps and the apps get around it in their privacy policy. You know, Apple's policy requires apps to disclose what data they're collecting and how it can be used and get consent, but it doesn't require the apps to disclose exactly who they're selling the data to. So apps say in the privacy palsy, we may share data with partners to improve your experience. As always as always, the markup was the same same publication that uncovered the fact that life 360 was selling location data to a dozen location, data brokers in 2021. So appears that people are still doing it. They're still getting around it.

Alex Lindsay (01:11:06):
And I think, I still think that we're what we're watching Apple do. I don't know about Google, but we're watching Apple do a slow constriction, like doing it all at one time, just creates a whole bunch of new fights, you know, and, but they're, you know, so they're, they're gonna just slowly pull it all in. And I think that they're just gonna, it's gonna become more and more private and harder and harder to do over time, but they're just not pulling all the strings in and all at one time.

Leo Laporte (01:11:27):
Yeah. So just, you know, it's going on still and these companies are, they basically sleazy companies are, you know, using weasel words to get around it. You know, Apple could stop it. They'd have to watch the data coming and going these

Alex Lindsay (01:11:43):
Apps. Well, if we, if we have a third party app store, they cannot stop it. Right? Like you can kiss. That's a good point point. Like, you know, like, like, you know, like you can kiss all of the, all your privacy and all of your location data. You can kiss it goodbye. If there's external app stores, like it's, it's gonna be gone. Well,

Leo Laporte (01:11:57):
Let me think, is that the case? Okay. Just cuz the payments go through somebody else, the app still has to reside on the iPhone and still has to do all of the things that app Apple requires.

Alex Lindsay (01:12:08):
No, if it, if it's an ex no. Yeah. But, but what, what our, our, our fine Congress is, is proposing is to, for Apple to have other app stores on the app. And if that happens, you won't have any of those protections.

Leo Laporte (01:12:18):
That doesn't mean no,

Alex Lindsay (01:12:20):
That's not other apps, another app, other app stores. Yeah. That's what, that's what,

Leo Laporte (01:12:23):
Okay. So I let's say buy an app from a third party app store. It still has to run on the iPhone and it still has to adhere to Apples policies in the iPhone, regardless of where I purchased it.

Alex Lindsay (01:12:33):
So we'll see. I don't think so.

Leo Laporte (01:12:36):
Of course. So,

Alex Lindsay (01:12:38):
Cause it has the information, it has that it's gonna get that information and it has to be treated as a first party citizen that according to that law, they cannot, they, they, according to that, I think

Leo Laporte (01:12:46):
It's all about

Alex Lindsay (01:12:46):
Payments

Leo Laporte (01:12:47):
Written.

Alex Lindsay (01:12:47):
It's all about,

Leo Laporte (01:12:48):
It's not about look once the Apple, the app is running on an Apple device, Apple controls, what can happen to that? You know what data comes and goes, whether the, what entitlements it's still going through. Apple's API. I I'm sorry, Alex. You're, you're really con

Alex Lindsay (01:13:02):
That's

Leo Laporte (01:13:03):
Straw man argument. That's a completely straw man argument. I don't, you

Alex Lindsay (01:13:05):
Should read the law. You should read the law. Like the law is so painfully nebulous that it could absolutely be construed that they, they, they can have their own app store and that own, they can't and Apple can't can't basically cannot constrict their ability. They have to be treated the same as they were on the other app store, which means they're not gonna be able to do that. Apple's not gonna be able to, to apply those rules to that app store.

Leo Laporte (01:13:29):
All right. We've had this argument before. It's okay. Maybe Apple has great plans down on the road to prevent this, but you should know your location. Data is being still sold without any particular restriction on Apple's part.

Rene Ritchie (01:13:44):
It's a cat and mouse game where the mouse has like 12 billion war chest to, to try and avoid the

Leo Laporte (01:13:48):
Cat.

Alex Lindsay (01:13:50):
Yeah. 

Leo Laporte (01:13:50):
Apple is going to change its policy actually, before we do that, let me let's break and then we'll do that. Because we have a fine sponsor in the shape of zip recruiter. Hallelujah. People are hiring. People are going back to the work. In fact, everybody understands that if you're gonna get people to come back to work, you've gotta make the workplace better for them. We, we did it. We just set up four day work weeks for our employees, according to ZipRecruiter, 90% of employers plan to make enhancing the employee experience a top priority this year. Yay. Yay. More money. That would be a start, right? Make your employees feel more valued. Get them involved in decision making, focusing on company culture, offering learning opportunities, allow for more flexibility and work schedules. I think I saw a survey today that said 92% of employees in the United States would like a four day work week.

Leo Laporte (01:14:52):
We actually, I think the state of California required us to have a vote. So we did. We had a vote a couple of months ago and it was unanimous. Yes, we want a four day work week. Now you're doing the work to make your place a great place to work. Now, when you need to add employee ease, where do you go ZipRecruiter? Right now you could try ZipRecruiter free at ziprecruiter.com/mac break. Ziprecruiter's technology finds the right candidates for your job and then just presents them to you proactively, which means you can look at those candidates, say, oh, I like that guy. I like that gal let's hire them and invite them to apply. And research shows that when people are invited to apply, they apply and they're much more interested in the job as a result. No wonder zip recruiter is the number one rated hiring site in the us. That's thanks to G2 ratings. Find the right employees with zip recruiter. Try it free our special address. Make sure you use this now. Ziprecruiter.Com/Mac break. Zip recruiter.com/m a C B R E a K. It's gonna be gonna be a gray year. Hire the best employees@ziprecruiterziprecruiter.com slash Mac break. Thank you. Zip recruiter. We use them. In fact I think John Ashley, I think we got through ZipRecruiter, some of our best employees, some of our best employees, ziprecruiter.com/me break Apple will soon off her face. Oh

Rene Ritchie (01:16:26):
Yes. Just this just did you get an invitation? Apple is halted. No. Apple is halted sales of online store in Russia though.

Leo Laporte (01:16:31):
Oh, there you go. They will listen to us. They were listening. They were working in real time. They were interesting.

Rene Ritchie (01:16:37):
Sorry for the false alarm on the, no, this,

Leo Laporte (01:16:40):
You got me all excited. Different is good. This is important. Yeah. So, wow. That's huge

Rene Ritchie (01:16:45):
Mac rumors. A nine to five MacBooks

Leo Laporte (01:16:46):
Reporting it. Yeah. Apple halts, all sales and Russian online stores as Ukraine invasion continues. You vice prime minister that we quoted earlier in the show said, thank you, Tim cook. When browsing through the Russian Apple online store, all of Apple's products are now reporting. They're currently unavailable for sale. Oh my gosh. Wow. That was

Alex Lindsay (01:17:12):
The, that was the right thing to do.

Leo Laporte (01:17:14):
I think so. Yeah, absolutely. I think so. Yeah. They've did it before. Apparently according to nine to five Mac, they pause sales in Turkey last year in that case because currencies was going up and down crazy. Yeah. So you

Rene Ritchie (01:17:29):
Is having it.

Leo Laporte (01:17:29):
You could blame it on the Rubal. Yeah.

Andy Ihnatko (01:17:31):
Yeah. There there's stores. There, there there's reports that people were actually people who couldn't get to exchange their rubs, take out cash at ATMs were taking their rubs and immediately buying any high ticket items like iPhones that they kind of want while the, while there's still some value to them before like the replace their stock. And now I iPhone cost 10 times as much in local

Leo Laporte (01:17:51):
Currency. Wow. Well, that's a big story. Thank you, Rene. Thank you. Breaking news, breaking news. I love it. Ramp up the pressure. Just, you know, get, get, get, get it, get into the streets. You, you did it before Russia. You could do it again.

Rene Ritchie (01:18:08):
You seem to see what the crypto angels do because they're getting some pressure too. And they're trying to explain the technical limitations to politicians who really don't understand the technology. Well,

Leo Laporte (01:18:15):
In fact, I wouldn't even say it's a technical limitation. I would say it's part of the promise of cryptocurrency is that no government, no political situation can bypass it. But it does raise an interesting, you know, if, if we've cut off Russia from all of the traditional financial markets, but they could still get payments in Bitcoin, the question is can, what can they do with it?

Rene Ritchie (01:18:40):
But also like refugees are using it as a way to move their cash outta the country when no other feasible financial instrument works. So it's

Leo Laporte (01:18:46):
Yeah. I understand from a, you know, kind of philosophical point of view, why you, if you're a cryptocurrency, you might say, no, no, no, we have to be be, you know, just as Switzerland said, and now has changed its tune. We have to be above the fray. Because that's the whole thing is we don't want to governmental interference,

Alex Lindsay (01:19:04):
But when, when Switzerland stops being neutral,

Leo Laporte (01:19:06):
That's a big deal. Isn't it? You probably need to. Yeah. And card about it. Think, think

Rene Ritchie (01:19:10):
Your life choices,

Leo Laporte (01:19:11):
You think your life choices. I love it. Oh, I finally get this story. Apple will soon off for face ID repairs without replacing the entire iPhone. I don't even care anymore. I don't even care. You have an iPhone 10. So there, if you have a tens or later you can replace the face ID, the, that little, that unit in the notch there the true depth camera. So you have to obviously be an authorized Apple repair facility, but you'll have access to the true depth camera service part, which is all the camera modules. And you can now swap those in. And I think I'm sure there is some sort of process for verifying it. Yes. Right?

Rene Ritchie (01:19:53):
Yeah. There's a lock process. I think one of the things that makes this stuff problematic like over time is that we really don't like just humans. Like us are not good with scale. Like when you talk to anybody who works at Apple or YouTube or Facebook, the simplest of things, when you, when you multiply it by a billion users of anything becomes really, really tough. And for Apple just economically, it was easier to capture the device, give you a new one and then, you know, send it to a Depot and have that all done at, at massive scale. It's, it's much more, it's much less convenient. It's only efficient because they were doing so many at once, but like we eventually broke down the process for doing other things in store. It's a way better customer experience. It just, it takes time and it takes logistics and it takes a lot of maturity in the technology stack and then they can start doing it, but we often just look at it and go, oh, they're being jerks. You know, sometimes there are jerks, but quite often it's quite often, it's just not incompetence is the wrong word, but it's just like, it's, it's a, it's a tough technical challenge with a lot of technical debt and it takes them a while to extricate themselves from it.

Leo Laporte (01:20:53):
So this is the mark Garman expectations segment of our show, not rumors expectations. He expects three new Apple watches. This is not news. Really. We've been talking about this for a while. This series eight, they block

Rene Ritchie (01:21:07):
It Leo. He says like, I think it'd be great if Apple discounted the iPhone se and like, so do I, but suddenly it's like on four blog sites,

Leo Laporte (01:21:14):
An updated Apple watch se already selling it makes sense to update it. And we had heard the rumor before that would be an extreme sports, Apple watch. So he says

Rene Ritchie (01:21:25):
Competitor,

Leo Laporte (01:21:26):
I expect, I think probably he does also say I would not expect any major new health sensors this year. Nope. That's interesting. There, cuz there have been a lot of

Rene Ritchie (01:21:37):
Hard. Like they, they keep buying companies that like the Apples wanted to do a lot of these sensors for a long time. Yeah. And they keep buying pro companies that say we're a year away. And so they buy 'em and it turns out they're not a year away. Like they're as far away as Apple was and a, a lot of, and then of course it's a whole process to get them commercialized. And in some cases like going through, like with the ECG, getting it approved on a country by country health authority by health authority basis. Yeah. But they're trying, it's just gonna take years still to get a lot of them.

Leo Laporte (01:22:04):
This is a tweet it's neither a rumor nor an expectation it's in this assumption, an assumption from mark, mark Garman would assume he says that these would drop on March 8th. He's talking about new colors for iPhone cases. I mean, we're really scrap, scraping the bottom. It's

Rene Ritchie (01:22:23):
Interesting because the iPhone se and the I on the iPad air could be just press releases. Like in 2020, the expectation was there was gonna be a March Apple event and then 2020 happened. And so the iPhone se two was a press release. The the updated MacBook was a press release. The iPad pro with the a 12 Z processor was a press release. Like they changed everything that became just a bunch of, well, look, they're up for sale now on Apple.com. I, I don't like new, like an M two could be that. And they don't think a new redesigned Mac could be that or be a disservice to them, not to have the story told, but there's a lot of things that Apple could do as press releases if they had to, like, if, if things get worse in the world, you know, God forbid, but they had to start moving product.

Leo Laporte (01:23:04):
Well, it interesting cuz this tweet from mark is from Sunday. So he's still saying March 8th as of Sunday, but you're right. They don't have to have an event if it's UNS. It's

Rene Ritchie (01:23:15):
So weird though. Like he knows a date for the event, but he doesn't know which max are gonna be in it. And like there's a, a lot of people know, but like that stuff's all known like that was decided a long time ago, but it's need to know like who knows this, but not that is such a, a, like a, a read the trail sort of an

Alex Lindsay (01:23:30):
Activity. Well, I, I think that it's, it's easier to know when the event is than what's in it because in a lot of, in a lot of keynotes for a lot of different companies, the information in the, you know, is very closed. So, you know, you have a, you know, that there's an event because there's a bunch of people it, or setting up for it and getting ready for it. And so there's, there's some movement there, but the, especially on one that doesn't have a live stage where you don't have to rehearse that information is, can be kept very, very close to the best for a very long time. And you know, usually usually people working on those kinds of keynotes aren't even interested in knowing what it is like they don't like knowing what it is, is just, is just visionable material that you're not carrying around in your bag. And so they're, you know, willfully not interested in knowing, you know, what, I've worked on a variety of different keynotes for a lot of different companies where I was just as surprised as everybody that was watching. Yeah, I was there. I was there for a week or two, you know, like it was like, I, I didn't, I didn't know. I didn't want to know. I didn't have any interest in knowing

Rene Ritchie (01:24:29):
2013 at WWC keynote. I was sitting next to, I think it was Gruber, Dori and Snell. And in front of us were a couple really high ranking Apple people. And that, you know, Phil Scher has asked Mac pro gets put up on the screen and they're like, oh my God. And it's like, they'd never seen or heard about any thing. They were as shocked as anybody else that it just, it wasn't anything that they were working on.

Alex Lindsay (01:24:51):
And again, a company that's secretive, nobody knowing, having information is not power it's, it's a liability, you know? And so so you don't want to have anything that you don't, that you don't have to, that you don't have to

Leo Laporte (01:25:03):
Well, and you don't wanna share anything you don't have to because 

Alex Lindsay (01:25:06):
You,

Leo Laporte (01:25:07):
You know, that that gives away your location.

Alex Lindsay (01:25:10):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:25:11):
I don't know if I like this idea, Michael Douglas as Ben Franklin. I always thought that Andy Ihnatko would be the best. Ben Franklin. I don't know why. Maybe it's a side. Oh

Rene Ritchie (01:25:21):
Yes.

Leo Laporte (01:25:22):
The Turkey source of sus for our forefathers, you would be so good as Ben Franklin Apple TV has apparently an NA Ben Franklin limited series starring Michael Douglas. 

Alex Lindsay (01:25:35):
He's gonna have to gain a lot of weight. I mean, Zach GA Galvan, I guess would,

Leo Laporte (01:25:41):
Yeah, would've been better,

Andy Ihnatko (01:25:42):
But, but also, you know what, in terms of having had lots and lots of indiscriminate sex, he's ran up there with Ben Franklin.

Alex Lindsay (01:25:50):
Oh, there you go. According

Andy Ihnatko (01:25:51):
To his autobiography. So,

Leo Laporte (01:25:52):
Oh, I didn't know that. I don't know. It'll be based on a book which I actually have read for the, for the first time called a great improvisation, which is a history of Ben Franklin's diplomatic visit to France. And it was quite quite a good book. So it'll be about Ben Franklin negotiating with France, I guess. Mm. Anyway gives, gives everybody a chance to practice their French. I don't know. What else? Sky dance sky. What is it? What is the name of this sky dance studios? Yeah. Apple TV has apparently made a deal with sky dance reportedly among the richest. According to nine to five Mac, as the service builds as its movie catalog. This comes from a variety paramount pictures, partner, sky dance media Apple mega deal from varieties, sky dances, David Ellison scores, one of the richest packs in Hollywood. Pretty good for a young man. What does Skydance have mission impossible. The upcoming sequel to top gun. So apparently these will be exclusive on Apple TV, plus I don't know, released first there the deal apparently under the terms guaranteed at least two fully financed feature films a year with budgets up to run roughly $125 million, a payout guaranteed payout of up to 25 million per picture.

Alex Lindsay (01:27:27):
They also did the great movie blush. Have you seen blush?

Leo Laporte (01:27:30):
No,

Alex Lindsay (01:27:31):
It's a short on, on Apple TV. It's really good. It's really, really well done. It's exciting. Huh? Oh man. It's a little animated film. It's a little animated short. It is so good. Like

Leo Laporte (01:27:41):
Variety points out that this isn't such a hu huge amount of money that Netflix paid 400 million for two movies in the Knifes out franchise, Lord of the rings, of course, a billion dollars just to buy the rights. And then they had a making

Rene Ritchie (01:27:58):
Brian Reynolds and the rock are probably getting huge and gal Dole getting huge amounts of money from Netflix too.

Leo Laporte (01:28:01):
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Alex Lindsay (01:28:03):
But I, I heard that the first few of the Lord of the rings thing for Amazon was like 550 million or something like that, which pretty, not huge. Pretty pricey for series.

Leo Laporte (01:28:13):
Well, they paid, they paid a billion just for the rights.

Alex Lindsay (01:28:15):
Right. So, but the first season is like I heard it was like 550 million

Leo Laporte (01:28:18):
Looks good. You saw the trailer. It's what

Rene Ritchie (01:28:20):
The so million, right?

Leo Laporte (01:28:22):
It's a Marin. Yeah. Cuz I, you know, I is funny. We're watching it was on the super bowl or something and we're watching. And as soon as I saw that giant statue, the guy, I said, that's the Lord of the rings. Yeah.

Alex Lindsay (01:28:31):
I

Leo Laporte (01:28:31):
Know. So this is gonna be kind of an origin story.

Alex Lindsay (01:28:33):
It's a pre yeah. Pre pre

Leo Laporte (01:28:35):
Yeah.

Rene Ritchie (01:28:35):
Lord of the rings. Power of the rings. Somebody rings rings, rings, rings all the way down rings.

Leo Laporte (01:28:41):
Oh interesting. No wonder this young man is so successful. David Ellison. He's the son of Larry Ellison.

Alex Lindsay (01:28:49):
There you go. Oh.

Leo Laporte (01:28:51):
Oh, okay.

Alex Lindsay (01:28:53):
I'm sure his dad gave him some good advice. Take his billion dollars and don't waste it. He does

Leo Laporte (01:28:57):
A creative variety. Does not have to capitalize his own movies. You

Rene Ritchie (01:29:01):
Don't have to ship son. All you have to do is take people to the golf course and tell 'em you have a product. They'll give you millions of cars.

Leo Laporte (01:29:07):
Oh, I was gonna say you're doing very well young man. Guess he has some connections. He Ellison developed the old guard.

Rene Ritchie (01:29:18):
That was good. Was it? I liked it. It was like,

Alex Lindsay (01:29:21):
I enjoyed it.

Leo Laporte (01:29:22):
I love her, but yeah. The tomorrow war, which I did like, but I think was not well received. Those were both for Amazon. Weren't they? For prime?

Rene Ritchie (01:29:30):
Charlie's teal was Netflix.

Alex Lindsay (01:29:32):
Yeah. I think Netflix

Leo Laporte (01:29:33):
Elgar was Netflix. Tomorrow. War was Amazon. I'm pretty sure. Oh,

Alex Lindsay (01:29:35):
Darn you. Okay.

Leo Laporte (01:29:36):
The Gemini man leys costly flop the relaunch of the Terminator series, Terminator Genesis and Terminator, dark fate. So some, you know, he does a lot of big science fictiony things, I guess Apple TV plus also I've been watching this

Rene Ritchie (01:29:55):
Newsco modern Caral movies. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:29:58):
Carolco yeah, yeah, yeah. To mane the from yeah. Yeah. their Apple is apparently bidding hard for NFL football and they're bidding against Amazon. It looks like the future of NFL's Sunday night football. The Sunday ticket will be on streaming only next year. Which is

Rene Ritchie (01:30:20):
Very interest

Leo Laporte (01:30:21):
Fair, which is the

Alex Lindsay (01:30:22):
Best. I mean, it is the it Sunday night football is the best broadcast of that's

Leo Laporte (01:30:28):
The one you

Alex Lindsay (01:30:28):
Want. That's where all money is bigger

Leo Laporte (01:30:30):
Than Monday night. Bigger than Monday night.

Alex Lindsay (01:30:31):
Oh yeah. Monday night. Well, the team that used to do Monday night football when they moved it to ESPN or whatever, the team that did Monday night football became Sunday night football. That's the

Leo Laporte (01:30:38):
One you want. And so, yeah,

Alex Lindsay (01:30:39):
So that's, and that team is the one that does, I mean, it's the best graphics, best commentators, best, you know, production. Yeah, absolutely.

Leo Laporte (01:30:47):
Amazon has already grabbed, they're talking to Al Michaels, right. But Al says I wanted, they already got Al's producer. So Al before he signs a deal though, the great, the great Al Michaels who must be in his eighties by now, he's been around forever and ever. He says, I want you to gimme a good partner. So now Hollywood's watching, everybody's watching with interest to see, you know, how, who Amazon can get to work. Is

Rene Ritchie (01:31:13):
That gonna be Ryan Reynolds? No spoilers. Is it gonna be Ryan Reynolds

Alex Lindsay (01:31:17):
Probably be a football player.

Rene Ritchie (01:31:19):
It'll

Alex Lindsay (01:31:19):
Be great.

Leo Laporte (01:31:20):
Be I think it'll be a football player 

Rene Ritchie (01:31:23):
To play a football player. It's Ryan

Leo Laporte (01:31:25):
Reys. Who is I? Where is I reading this? I must be I'm following this.

Alex Lindsay (01:31:28):
Tom, Tom Brady

Leo Laporte (01:31:29):
Somewhere. Well I think, you know, they were talking about Collinsworth

Alex Lindsay (01:31:35):
Who, well, that's, that's who's in the current, the currents, he currently

Leo Laporte (01:31:38):
Works. He's at Michael's he's great. Sunday night is gonna be this year is Mike Toco. He's replacing Al Michaels and I think Cosworth, but then then there's former cowboy stars like Romo

Alex Lindsay (01:31:52):
And Romo I think is, I think he's packaged up for a while with, I think it's is it CBS? Is that right? Yeah. Yeah. He's, they're paying him a lot of money. He's the, he's the, the one to watch right now, like,

Leo Laporte (01:32:02):
Like hundreds of millions of dollars

Alex Lindsay (01:32:04):
For this stuff. He's so much fun. He's so much fun to watch in my opinion to listen to

Leo Laporte (01:32:09):
HES, cause he's recently in the game and he knows, right.

Alex Lindsay (01:32:12):
And he's passionate about it. Like, he just is like, oh my gosh, this is what they're gonna do. You know? Like, like I, I can see it coming, you know? And sometimes he's right. Sometimes he's wrong, but it's just fun to look it's fun.

Rene Ritchie (01:32:21):
So hear me out, we package it up as tos. Like, because you can go to 10 minutes now on TikTok and then people can swipe between plays that way. You have like immediate dopamine, by the way anything happens.

Alex Lindsay (01:32:30):
I will say that. I think that TikTok is ruining, ruining their platform with 10 minutes. Like, oh

Leo Laporte (01:32:35):
Yeah. That's

Alex Lindsay (01:32:35):
Another excruciating. So

Leo Laporte (01:32:36):
They went from 60 minutes, 60 seconds to three

Alex Lindsay (01:32:40):
Excruciating long. They're

Leo Laporte (01:32:41):
Gonna go to 10 minutes. That's really long.

Rene Ritchie (01:32:43):
Yeah. It was supposed to be five then. Yeah. It's not bad. Cuz people watch hours of TikTok. Like it's not a length of people. Like no, no one's gonna watch vertical video for that. People watch it for hours. But the thing like TikTok has trained you, a new experience is only a swipe away. And like the attention span is so concentrated. You want that hit every second and like 10 minute holding attention for 10 minutes on TikTok. I don't know if like Mr. Beast could do that. That's like a very big challenge. It

Alex Lindsay (01:33:06):
Takes a huge, it takes a lot of production value to, to make some, to stretch something over a long, a long distance. And so the thing is, is that the reason TikTok works for people who don't have a, a big production group in, in writers and things and everything else is because short as you start to stretch it out, you know, the, the problem is, is that in the, in, you know, when you go to TikTok, you want it to be snappy and really cool. And the problem is is that you, most people without a budget, can't make it snappy and cool, except for someone like you. And of course us in this show, I mean, we can do it forever, but, but the, but you know, but, but the thing is, is that for that model, you know, I find that like I get into it and I even see the little player start and I can calculate, this is a three minute TikTok. And I immediately just go to the next one. Yes. Like I'm like, this is, I'm not gonna watch this for three minutes. You know? So 10 minutes will be worse.

Leo Laporte (01:33:54):
I did not know this, but guy Kawasaki hired mark Benoff as an intern outta U USC in 1984. The whole story is on guys. Remarkable people podcast. Of course, mark Benioff, the founder of Salesforce worth 10 billion. But well he

Rene Ritchie (01:34:14):
Bought equity in him. Yeah. Well he bought equity in

Leo Laporte (01:34:16):
Him. Yeah. Guy says I was a software evangelist in the Macintosh division of Apple in 19 80, 84. Mark was a student at USC. I gave him a summer intern job in the summer of 84 to write sample assembly language programs. So the developers around the world could see how Macintosh programs were written. Man. I was writing assembly language program. So the Mac in that timeframe, I should have talked to a guy. Dang, Dang. Now I was too old.

Rene Ritchie (01:34:42):
He was, Leo was

Alex Lindsay (01:34:43):
Right down. I was too young. Our timing was off Leo. That

Leo Laporte (01:34:46):
Was bad timing. You should have been a college kid. So mark says I

Rene Ritchie (01:34:52):
Was, I was too much of a Maverick.

Leo Laporte (01:34:54):
He told me my all my, all my first software that I wrote was written for the Mac in a 68,000 assembler. Oh yeah. That was so much fun. I wrote a in fact I, I think I was the first to do a multitasking program for the Mac cuz I wrote a an auto dialer cuz my bill button board was only had two modems. So I had to write an auto dialer that would dial in the background in a Macintosh. This is in 84, 85 and it would do it because on the Macintosh screen there were CRTs. There was a brief period of time as the electron gun repositioned from the bottom of the screen to the top of the screen that the Mac wasn't doing anything it's called the vertical blanket interval. And so what I would do in the vertical blanket interview be just enough time to stuff like two, two characters into the haze, modem, buffer at DT, the phone.

Leo Laporte (01:35:47):
And then it would every, every, I think it was at 60, 60 times a second, right? Every 60th of a second, it would get a little, you know, millisecond to do that. And then it would dial the number, you know, send that and then it would listen for a pickup. And if it did, I had a big honk and cause I figured you're busy doing something else. You want your, you want this to go on? You're doing something else. Maybe you got up, got a cup of tea. You wanna know I got into the bulletin board. So that Q dial, I called it. I think that was an early multitask. First multitask at program I could have been, I could have been somebody instead of a podcaster. Benoff says, I learned while being at Apple that a technology company, a great one is filled with amazing energy vitality and a sense of urgency at the same time. There's a great culture at Apple. Steve jobs had those owed wall juices for everyone and TSU mess serves that were we're going up and down the hallways, keeping programmers, limb.

Leo Laporte (01:36:44):
I don't know if they do that at Salesforce. I don't know if he learned, I'll tell you what I learned about OWA. We used to have when we were doing ZDT when we were doing the site for MSNBC, they did the same thing probably in fired by that they got a big OWA refrigerator and they just gave us OWAS and pretty soon there was just so people were drinking, you know, they buck 50 each so much OWA that they had to, they had to print up some Ola dollars and you got a certain number of OWA dollars a day that you could spend on S

Alex Lindsay (01:37:17):
They made us, made us pay for at Lucas film. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:37:21):
Lucas given away.

Alex Lindsay (01:37:22):
But I, but I had to buy, had to buy,

Leo Laporte (01:37:24):
Are they still in RA? There was a, I remember they had a problem with the E coli at one point.

Alex Lindsay (01:37:29):
Yeah. The green super, the super green one was my, that was the one that I, oh,

Leo Laporte (01:37:33):
Yeah's still around. They probably own Pepsi. Yeah. Yeah. Headquarters. Atlanta, Georgia. Well, let's see who's in. Oh yeah. The Coca-Cola company. Our website currently under construction outta Santa Cruz, California in 1980, but they were good. They were like real fruit. It was, it was good stuff. Super. The superfood one was my favorite. I, yeah, I remember the superfood. Yeah. We couldn't couldn't keep 'em in the stock. I had to get the OWA dollars poor. So

Rene Ritchie (01:38:06):
Your tolerance for for more, for more breaking stuff.

Leo Laporte (01:38:09):
Oh yes. Yeah.

Rene Ritchie (01:38:10):
So this is Apple's statement. They just put out about the sales in Russia. They said we're deeply concerned about the Russian invasion of the Ukraine and stand with all people who are suffering as a result of the violence. We are supporting humanitarian efforts, providing aid for the unfolding refugee crisis. And doing all we can to support our teams in the region. We've taken a number of actions in response to the invasion. We have paused all product sales in Russia. Last week, we stopped all exports into our sales channels in the country. Apple paid. Other services have been limited. RT news and Sputnik news are no longer available for download from the app store outside Russia. And we have disabled both traffic and live incidents in Apple map in Ukraine as a safety and precautionary measure for Ukraine citizens.

Leo Laporte (01:38:46):
Great. Thank you, Tim. It's

Rene Ritchie (01:38:48):
Not just a currency thing.

Leo Laporte (01:38:49):
Thank you, Tim. Doing the right thing. That's good. That's great. Let's let's you know, good time to take a little break. Now we can all celebrate and and when we come back your, your picks of the week, how about that? Our show today brought to you by literally cash, our CDN content delivery net. We couldn't do what we do without cash. In fact, we tried, it was a horrible failure when TWI first started out in the, in the mid two thousands, like 2005, I think first was download the podcast from the website. Oh, that was a failure. Because I mean, there were literally, you know, when you'd put out the podcast and a hundred thousand people would try to download it all at once, then we asked people to please, we're gonna use BitTorrent, seed it. If you would, please help us that didn't work.

Leo Laporte (01:39:47):
Thank goodness Matt Levine, the founder of cash flight came to us. This is back in 2006, 2007 said, come on Leo, you need cash. Let me help. And we've been with them ever since we love it cash because they've got pops all over the world, 50 locations. So that means when you download a one of our podcasts, audio or video, you're getting it from a server that's closer to you. Faster gives you great throughput, great reliability. Now they're doing video. This is awesome. 'em Cash ultra low latency video streaming sub one second latency. And you can go live in hours, not days. So ditch that unreliable web RTC solution for their web socket live video workflow. And man, can it scale millions of users? It's just one more reason to take a look at cash Cash's storage optimization system. We've been using that for a long time.

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Then it's now open to the public. You, you basically store your content on cash, which means you eliminate, you know, those, those bills from your origin servers, your S3 bills, you reduce bandwidth costs and your cash hit ratio suddenly is a hundred percent. That's a great thing. And they have fully managed solutions. If you need 'em with cash, elite managed packages, you get VIP treatment. We always have gotten VIP treatment from day one. They're just a 24 7 support response times in less than an hour. In most cases they'll already know of any issues and they'll be working to fix it before the team goes. I honestly can't vouch for that cause we've never had a problem we've in more than 10 years, never had a problem. Cash light. They're the best the CDN we use. If you, the delivering content, take a look at their ultra low latency video streaming more than a million concurrent users.

Leo Laporte (01:41:38):
If you're doing gaming lightning, fast gaming, zero lag, glitches, or outages. If you've got mobile content, they've got mobile content optimization makes it easy to your site loads faster on any device. And it's a multi CDN, which gives 'em redundant and fail over. They intelligently balance your traffic across multiple providers. So you always get in the shortest route. You, it mitigates against performance glitches. In fact, cash lies 10 times faster than the old HTTPS method we were using. They're on six continents, 30 times, faster than other major CDNs on 98% cash hit ratio. And in the last 12 months, not four nines, not five nines, not 10 nines, a hundred percent availability, a hundred percent. And they've got great. 24 7, 365 day a year priority supports. So they're always there when you need 'em. I love cash. I don't know how many ways to say it. Check it out. If you're not using a CDN, bring your usage trends to cash. Why for a complimentary analysis, if you are using a CDN, find out if you're overpay 20% or more, just go to twi.cash.com twi.cash.com. No pressure. No, no, no, no high high sales pitch. No, none of that, just information. That'll help you make the right decision. Bring your bill, bring your, bring your usage trends to twi.cash.com. We thank them so much for their support.

Leo Laporte (01:43:13):
Let us do our picks of the week. I Alex, Lindsay, you haven't been here in a while. I'm dying to know what do you got?

Alex Lindsay (01:43:20):
So I, I, this is, I, I haven't recommended this one for maybe six or seven years. I looked to look back on Mac break pics, which is very useful for me. I don't know. I don't know who uses it, but it's very useful for me to figure out if I've said something before, like is like the key. If, if MB is ITW picks is.com. If, if people is

Leo Laporte (01:43:36):
That still up? Is that still around? It is. It's still, oh man. He's

Alex Lindsay (01:43:40):
Still every week. He's bless you. So you can

Leo Laporte (01:43:42):
Search for your pick cuz you forgot, but BW picks.com. Never forgets. Wow. I didn't know. He was still doing that. Thank you so

Alex Lindsay (01:43:51):
Useful. Like yeah. Thank you to do it for doing that. Cause that's how I get my, keep myself out of trouble. So I did recommend this one before. Thank you. But I'm gonna recommend it again because it came up a couple times in the last in office hours. And my pick of the week is the D a perfect cue micro. All of the perfect cues are great. This is what it looks like. This is the standard for this is as people start to come out of COVID and they start doing physical events again, maybe this is a receiver and this is a transmitter. And even when, if you look back at the Apple thing where Tim, you know, had to like put, they put a, a, a control, you know, a, a clicker called pickle. Yeah. A clicker you in, in the case, and then they ran out today to get it to Tim. Yeah, this was it. This is what, this is what, this is what they were using. A lot of people have a lot of different clickers. This is the one that everybody uses. Like, like, like everybody

Leo Laporte (01:44:46):
Does, it's so bad if it doesn't work. I, I

Alex Lindsay (01:44:47):
Used and

Leo Laporte (01:44:48):
Remember when Apple came out with you could do your key note slides on your iPhone. Yeah, that's cute. I was giving a speech to HBO in Palm beach and it failed on me. It was so embarrassing. I had to go over my laptop. I had to figure, you need this thing. This is the thing

Alex Lindsay (01:45:03):
You need. So there's a, the one we use in events is bigger. It costs more money. It, it's got a big, big thing that has a big arrow that goes one way or the other so that we can follow along. It's, it's, it's quite a thing that you can see the bigger one there. And I've I've, I, I have those too, but this is the one that I carry my bag, which is this micro cue, and this will go hundreds of feet. It will work every single time you push it down. You can program it to different channels. And so you can program this, these,

Leo Laporte (01:45:27):
So it's wireless switches, it's wireless. This is

Alex Lindsay (01:45:29):
A wireless connection. This plugs wired into your or computer. So this is a USB receiver that then sends, you know, forward back and so on and so forth. And this, this part is wireless. And don't get the one there's ones with more buttons. It's just forward and back. Don't don't do the other ones, cuz it's you, you you'll hit the wrong one in front of a lot of people. So anyway, so so, but this is it's great. It comes in a little pack and I just brought it up because I was like, you know, people keep on asking about, we've had a bunch of people asking about in office hours and I was like, I should probably just mention it again. It's been seven years or eight years or something like that since the last time I talked about it and I still use it, you know, any, I don't, I don't speak in public as much anymore, but, but when I did back in the, before four days it was important. And even in my office though, sometimes I use it cause I wanna sit there and, and talk about something and I just wanna push a button to go to the next thing. Sometimes when I'm doing events or not events, but broadcast where I'm walking around. It's great to, it's great to have there too. So

Leo Laporte (01:46:30):
It's very nice. I see that they must be getting hit by chip shortages cuz their number of the high end products are kind of at

Alex Lindsay (01:46:38):
Yeah. I, I, I noticed that right before we came on, I was going to look at the thing and I was like, well it might be hard to find, but if you can find them they're they're around there's some

Leo Laporte (01:46:46):
And the ones you, you just showed they're available. They're not outta stock. Yeah.

Alex Lindsay (01:46:49):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:46:50):
Wow. Yeah. Thanks to chip shortage, man. That's killing everybody.

Alex Lindsay (01:46:54):
Yep.

Leo Laporte (01:46:55):
Very nice. Q is from DS a D S a n.com.

Alex Lindsay (01:47:00):
They're not web developers go to their website.

Leo Laporte (01:47:02):
Yeah. I love it. I don't mind that. It's very basic, very, very

Alex Lindsay (01:47:08):
Funny thing is, is this is a lot better than it used to be. It used to be just like, it didn't look like they had updated since the late nineties. And what so what we loved about it was is that it just seemed like there's no way these guys could be successful, but this is what you see. Their hardware is what you see everywhere. Like it's just when you're doing events. So you

Leo Laporte (01:47:24):
Use, you use all of these speaker timers and all that stuff.

Alex Lindsay (01:47:27):
I don't. So I, we use the, a speaker, we have a speaker timer or you used to, I used to use a speaker timer and then I use the, that large version of the perfect cue is, is what you see a lot behind backstage. Yeah. And if you listen really carefully, sometimes someone will turn the speaker up a little too high and he goes, boo. And if you ever hear that, if you ever wonder what that is, that's the cuz what happens is you, when we don't connect it directly to computer, a lot of times we don't let speakers actually forward their slides. Right. That big arrow goes one way or the other. And, and then an operator, when they, my clicker isn't working, their clicker is working just fine. Right. The, it means the operator with, you know, watching the basketball game or something like that. So, so the, so the but those, so

Leo Laporte (01:48:06):
If you ever hear a speaker go

Alex Lindsay (01:48:09):
That's yeah, yeah, exactly. That means that means if you hear it over and over and over again, that means the speaker, the, the, the, the, the cue is working. The, the person's supposed to hit the next button is not working so

Leo Laporte (01:48:23):
Very, very awesome D sand now, you know, you know, if you know, you know, no.

Alex Lindsay (01:48:31):
Yep. Exactly.

Leo Laporte (01:48:32):
Andy YCO pick of the week.

Andy Ihnatko (01:48:34):
I've been a little bit distracted for the past 15 minutes. Yeah. Because I, I, I had picked out my, my pick of the week, which is this amazing, like store slash web app called hero forge hero, forge.com, which has this amazing 3d interactive builder that

Leo Laporte (01:48:50):
Lets

Andy Ihnatko (01:48:51):
Design your own, like mini figures, your own like role playing game mini figures. And you think that, okay, well fine. It's an elf. Okay. It's an orange elf. Okay. The elf is having a no, you can customize to such a great degree. And it is so fun to play with that. Like I realize that, oh, I wonder how I wonder how difficult it would take to a Jim do Ruple mini figure during the show. Wait

Leo Laporte (01:49:14):
A minute. And have you,

Andy Ihnatko (01:49:16):
There is, there is a link in the show.

Leo Laporte (01:49:18):
I I'm gonna click the link

Andy Ihnatko (01:49:19):
For, and there's a picture there's a, a, a screen grab. And then I actually took it a link to the actual, like design in the hero, forge.com site. It

Leo Laporte (01:49:28):
Does look like in that's a Heineken bottle. I understand. Yeah.

Andy Ihnatko (01:49:32):
And that's, and then see, and then like, after, but that that's like as of like eight minutes ago, cause I I've continued to work on it, realize, oh, wait a minute. That's not actually a Heineken label. The Heineken label is square. Say, oh, he, oh. And he said, he's getting married. So I should put a wedding ring on his, on his finger. Oh, he should be wearing an Apple watch too. And oh, his, his sneakers, his, he shouldn't be wearing like high tops. He should be wearing like a Steve jobs style. Like and oh my God, it's just so much fun. And so easy to play with this that you will just basically like in the middle of a zoom meeting, just be clicking, clicking, clicking, making mini F figures of everybody in the meeting. And the fun

Leo Laporte (01:50:09):
Thing is hysterical.

Andy Ihnatko (01:50:10):
You can export it as an STL file so you can print it on, on a, on a, on a printer or you can just, or you can order one. So, and if you want the, if you want this, just Jim Dell Ruple mini figure, send them $45. They will send you a painted, like printed version of it.

Leo Laporte (01:50:28):
How do we get this? I guess we'll put it in the show notes. We'll put the link, don't put the image in the show notes. Let's put the, the Link's the Euro forage and, and then, and Andy's hero for, and if you wanna fix it more and do more, go ahead. So you, if you log in, then you have more access to more features. You can give him a background and stuff like that. And then you can buy it. Wow.

Andy Ihnatko (01:50:53):
Right. And again, all the, if you, he ears, of course you can give the person ERs, but get a

Leo Laporte (01:50:57):
Bronze one. It's like, get a, yeah. Yeah. Can you know, I just bought a bronze set of chess pieces for my nice chessboard. Maybe he should be the king. I, you

Andy Ihnatko (01:51:10):
Could, you know, you could, you could do a whole chess sex. I'm sure you could put a crown on his head. Oh

Leo Laporte (01:51:14):
Yeah. I, I

Andy Ihnatko (01:51:15):
Am. So I am so impressed by like how decent and how hysterical, how much fun this app is. Because again there's for, I, I, it's also such a great user interface because if you just want to bash something together are very quickly, you can get like within 75% of the Jim ible mini figure in like minutes, but then like it hides like the, the advanced stuff. So, oh, well, do do you want to actually minute, I just put a beer bottle in his hand. Do you want to minutely pose the arm? So yes, absolutely. Great. Now here's the elbow til the, so I, the beer bottle to be level. Cause of course he doesn't wanna spill any. And so you need a maximum, if you want

Leo Laporte (01:51:54):
An iPad mini in a back pocket. Yeah.

Andy Ihnatko (01:51:56):
It's like, you, you can't, you can't create your own custom objects, but I think that if you were that ambitious, you could spit out the S STL file then

Leo Laporte (01:52:04):
And then

Andy Ihnatko (01:52:04):
Like, and that stuff I was, yeah. As, as I said, I can't just as a thing to pull play with, I am just amazed by this thing. I'm blown away by it. And, and, and I am like, I kind of wanna send them $45 just to see what comes back. Obviously the colors aren't gonna be. They do. They're very, very blunt about

Leo Laporte (01:52:22):
I've added empty beer bottles at his feet. I think that's very important. See exactly. You

Andy Ihnatko (01:52:28):
Cannot as much

Leo Laporte (01:52:29):
You can't, I'm playing with this. O M G Alex. I want a chess set. I think I need a back break. Weekly chess set. I'm

Alex Lindsay (01:52:40):
Obsess. I'm I'm I'm I'm having a hard time. Like, I, I was just like, oh my gosh, I could cuz you could put 'em in a TPOs and then you could actually, I think I could take the models and like re you know animate them. I think, I think, I think we could figure out a way to animate these.

Leo Laporte (01:52:55):
So Jim, go ahead. Retire. We don't care. We've got you. We've

Rene Ritchie (01:52:59):
Got, that's gonna be a V YouTuber now. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:53:01):
Look at that. That's incredible. How, how fun is that

Andy Ihnatko (01:53:05):
Again? My, my hat's off this, this is, this is why this is the har this is a horrible thing for me to have found at like one in the morning when I'm like, oh, I'll just like make more, one more like round trip of like basic searches. And I was up until like four in the morning because I was like, let's see if we can do this. And again,

Leo Laporte (01:53:21):
Very nice.

Alex Lindsay (01:53:22):
Oh my gosh. Hero.

Leo Laporte (01:53:25):
Who's lost Alex hero, forge hero, forge.com. This is their business is printing these and selling them. Yeah. Yeah. 

Andy Ihnatko (01:53:37):
But it cost, you don't even have to sign up for anything to play with.

Leo Laporte (01:53:40):
You play with it. No. If,

Andy Ihnatko (01:53:41):
If you, if you sign up for it, then you can do things like there's, there's a photo booth features. You, you can take pictures of it, so to speak. But yeah, it's it's boy, this

Leo Laporte (01:53:50):
Is great. Oh, I wanna make the problem is you can't really mess with the face that much. Right. So you can't make it look like somebody.

Andy Ihnatko (01:53:58):
Well also also realize that this is gonna be like a mini tabletop figure. So I mean, there's, you're not gonna get a whole, a lot of detailed wouldn't come through anyway. Yeah. In terms of what you're looking at on the screen, right.

Leo Laporte (01:54:10):
You'll get close that these

Andy Ihnatko (01:54:12):
About like yay. Big.

Leo Laporte (01:54:13):
Oh, they are mini. Okay.

Andy Ihnatko (01:54:15):
They are, again, they're like tabletop, but

Alex Lindsay (01:54:17):
You get, you can download an FTL.

Andy Ihnatko (01:54:19):
You can download a shape file and edit it to apparently edit to your card

Rene Ritchie (01:54:23):
And rigging them.

Leo Laporte (01:54:24):
You pay for that eight box for the S STL.

Andy Ihnatko (01:54:26):
Right.

Andy Ihnatko (01:54:28):
You also get them unpainted for like a lot less. So if you wanna, so if you, so if you want, what, what, what if that'd be a great, like family Christmas present where like game tokens for monopoly, like based on like each of each member of the family and the dog, you

Rene Ritchie (01:54:42):
Paint them live on Twitch.

Leo Laporte (01:54:43):
Oh my God. This is great. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. You've given us a whole new show hero. Forge the podcast, Rene, your pick of the week.

Rene Ritchie (01:54:55):
Oh, look, I'm gonna go after a nacho. There's no way to live up to that. That's just, he just, Mike dropped and walked off the actually unfair.

Leo Laporte (01:55:02):
I'm mad at you cuz I just bought the Logitech Brio camera for Lisa. I mentioned she wants to kind of cast set up in her office. Maybe I should have bought, oh,

Rene Ritchie (01:55:10):
Don't have to be madly cuz you can't buy this yet. This is like invite by the beta only. This is like a meta pick because we were talking about pre-show. If you're a, you know, if you're a TWI plus plus subscriber you'll you'll see all our hygienes before the actual show starts and we were talking about webcams and this is like an escalation. This is like just a rapid it's. It is just, it's a webcam, but it's it's got so much stuff built in hundred

Leo Laporte (01:55:38):
Sensor. So it's yes, yes. Okay. So

Rene Ritchie (01:55:41):
Yeah, this is like again a C MK B of webcams. It's just, it's got it's mirrorless. It's really, really fast. It's got, it's designed to look like something that wouldn't really come out of Apple's lab, cuz it's got like it's a little bit fussier than Apple would be, but it looks almost like, like a inspired not whatever the opposite of steam punk is. Future punk. Hope. I forget what the,

Leo Laporte (01:56:03):
It looks pretty cool. Yeah.

Rene Ritchie (01:56:04):
Aspirational brand is. And it's designed to look like really radical sitting on, you know, in your setup so that people can see what a cool setup you have. And it's just looks really nice. The software is really nice. You can't buy it yet. You can sign up to be put on a list of people who may be allowed to buy it at some point. They say it's in private be I've seen some people, you know, a lot of our Twitter friends who are in that space have, have tweeted about like the Casey nice stats and marque Brownley and Ken K and you know, various people like that looks really nice. Industrial design is really nice. Haven't had an opportunity to try it yet obviously, because I'm not cool enough, but it, it does look like if you really want to be like the cool webcam kit on your block, this is, this is your next obvious

Leo Laporte (01:56:45):
And support for the Mac, which is, you know yeah. Nice.

Rene Ritchie (01:56:50):
I mean all, all the cool kids are using the max in these influencer spaces anyway, you

Leo Laporte (01:56:53):
Know, they gotta do that. Yeah. It looks like they don't bother with any other platform. No. Wow. That's nice. This I like it's

Rene Ritchie (01:57:00):
A very aply website.

Leo Laporte (01:57:01):
Okay. Okay. Yeah. 300 bucks is the key. I mean, of course you can use a DSLR. Everybody knows that, but that's, you know, yes. You know, this is, this is something you can dedicate to it for 300 bucks. I I'm, I was almost scattered that the, the vlogger cameras, both Sony and can, and I think make vlog cameras that are only like five or 600 bucks. Yeah.

Andy Ihnatko (01:57:24):
Yeah. I, I love the, I love the Brio. I was, I still, I mean, one of the reasons, one of the reasons why I upgraded my my, my Lius camera was like, oh, I'll, I'll, I'll be like, I'll be like my friends on Mac break. I'll have like a really nice, like, like large, the large sensor frame, mirrorless camera as my webcam. And it's like, eh, can I do it better? Can I get a better signal than this? Not really. Okay.

Leo Laporte (01:57:44):
Yeah.

Alex Lindsay (01:57:45):
Yeah. I keep on testing. I, I have a lot of webcams and but the only one that we bought in ma yeah, I know like I have like five or six different ones within arms reach and I don't have that one yet. But I have but we, the one that we've standardized on for years has been the Brio and it's been really successful. We've probably bought 150 of them.

Leo Laporte (01:58:04):
Oh good. So I just asked and that simples onto the right one. Is that what you're using now, Andy?

Andy Ihnatko (01:58:09):
Yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:58:09):
Exactly. Okay. That looks really good. The, yeah. Yeah.

Andy Ihnatko (01:58:12):
The software, the software's a little bit annoying in that. Like, I'll get it set up. Like the, the software is great because obviously let's you, it has enough, it has enough pixels that you can like zoom in and zoom out and then you can adjust your like you're centering and stuff like that and adjust brightness contrast, stuff like that. The only problem is that I'll, I'll like spend my waiting time. I'll wait for the show to start like getting this. Absolutely, absolutely perfect. And then the connection starts and then it will like reset back to the default I'll to do it over

Leo Laporte (01:58:41):
Again. My, so the only

Rene Ritchie (01:58:44):
Reason I'm using a 70 millimeter is that when you, when I'm using anything that at all wide, especially like if it's 24 or something, I look like Goum just my ears received

Leo Laporte (01:58:52):
Back my wrist,

Rene Ritchie (01:58:53):
Really. I need as much compression as possible. I need to be flattened. And that's what this does for,

Leo Laporte (01:58:57):
That's actually a good idea. That is the argument for you using a SLRs you change find

Rene Ritchie (01:59:04):
The right lens for

Leo Laporte (01:59:04):
Your face. Yeah. Yeah. Find the lens for your face. Yeah.

Andy Ihnatko (01:59:08):
That, that's why, that's why I, I like the idea of having a 4k video, but having it so far back, right. That I'm not getting the sort of distortion effects. So it's, it is a really good, happy, medium. Good.

Leo Laporte (01:59:17):
Well, I guess I ordered the right thing. I also ordered this big cause she wants to have dual monitors. She's gonna replace the iMac with her M one first generation M one. But then I found out as I remembered this and I thought, wait a minute, you can only drive one monitor with the M one. This just came out today from hyperdrive. I have purchased many hyperdrive docking solutions in the past. The, so I know this is a, a Sanho, which makes these a good company. This is a 4k Multiplay docking station for those old 13 inch and 14 inch MacBooks which has two H CMI ports, too many display ports. They say driverless, you can drive. Is, am I crazy? Is this, does, will this work Rene? Can I drive? I have two monitors with my M one, nothing.

Rene Ritchie (02:00:06):
I, I don't know. I don't know enough about this. I,

Leo Laporte (02:00:08):
They say you can, I've seen the hacks that, you know, you install software and stuff. They say no additional software necessary. This is nice. Cuz it's wedge shaped. So it just, you put the, you put the laptop right on it and it's got 18 dang ports. I think we talked about this before. I don't think, but this is now out and available 250 bucks. There's one with even more ports for 2 99 and they say, see driverless set up. I don't know if that means I can, I can do two well I'll, I'll let you know. We appreciate

Rene Ritchie (02:00:37):
Lisa for telling us, for letting us know.

Leo Laporte (02:00:39):
Yes, I will. I will let you know. They are now for sale from hyper shop.com. All right. All right. All right. I think we're done right. All right. Rene Richie, youtube.com/Rene Richie. What you got going,

Rene Ritchie (02:01:01):
I'm trying to do previews like more in-depth views of everything that I think could possibly be coming up this year, especially in the max space, because it's so new and so exciting and also a lot of Silicon stuff, because I think we're on the verge of like four nanometer, three nanometer. I know Johnny Saji is just crushing down those process nodes with his bare hands. Amazing Had that intense stare. He is like, this will go to three nanometers and just like, and it's just, it's so interesting to me in 2010, we went to the a four and 2020. We went to the M one and I'm just, I'm I'm already wondering what this decade of Apple Silicon is gonna do for us. So I'm diving deep into a lot of that

Leo Laporte (02:01:33):
Stuff. Very nice. Rene richie.com/youtube. Thank you, Rene, Andy Ihnatko. W G B H Boston. When's your next appearance?

Andy Ihnatko (02:01:43):
Very, very great news. 1230 on Friday as usual. As most of you will want to just go to w GB news.org to stream at live or later, but after two years away from the, that wonderful open air studio at the Boston public library Boston, Boston public radio is back in their studio. So I'm gonna be actually live from the Boston public library. So if you are in the Boston area or hanging through town, you want an excuse to stop in, buy yourself a cup of coffee at the cafe and watch, watch, watch my look like when I'm trying to be presentable towards people by all means come on in.

Leo Laporte (02:02:15):
Very good. Thank you, Andrew. And if you, you are into this stuff, all of this production stuff, you gotta watch office hours, Alex Lindsay's office hours.global amazing place to learn everything

Alex Lindsay (02:02:32):
We have launched 2.0 office hours, 2.0, is it out? So oh, how exciting it's out. So if you go to the, it, it's AF actually office hours, like, you know, YouTube slash today was us actually Ruth

Leo Laporte (02:02:44):
Was talking about favorite Ruth. I love it. We just pick at each other's background, like, oh, the little light is just a little off and then love it, the background.

Alex Lindsay (02:02:52):
And can we move this

Leo Laporte (02:02:53):
Over? And,

Alex Lindsay (02:02:54):
And so but, but 2.0 is, is you know, we've now instead of streaming natively from zoom, we're now going through this hardware system that that's streaming and it's still, you know, we're still working out a couple of the kinks in it, but what you're seeing now is something that looks much closer to broadcast and it's gonna take us through this year. And so we'll be tweaking a lot of things and we're, you know, pushing the, really the outer envelope of what kind of show you can do on zoom. You know, and but it looks it looks pretty good. That was, that looks like one of the old ones.

Leo Laporte (02:03:25):
Yeah. This is the prepping switch switch. Right. So now we see prepping switch let's to today's show. Should it be in the new sure. New format, right. You can see the yeah. Big. Well, let me see. I have to have to make sure I'm on in H D on YouTube. Yeah. It was limited to seven 20. Now it's 10 80 P

Alex Lindsay (02:03:45):
Now it's 10 80. Oh, look

Leo Laporte (02:03:46):
That. Oh,

Alex Lindsay (02:03:46):
Look. And that's coming in. And, and if you skip around a little bit, you'll probably see the super sources and, you know, like there's a lot more. And, and the thing that's interesting about this is that oops, the production, the production for this is being run by people all over the world. So literally someone's cutting the show on a web page somewhere in the world, you know, and there's a team that's putting together. So the sound is being managed out of the Philippines and, you know, there's all kinds of, and you know, the lower thirds are being generated automatically. So when oh, those

Leo Laporte (02:04:15):
Lower thirds are automatically, those are nice lower thirds.

Alex Lindsay (02:04:17):
Yeah. Those are, so those are generated based on who is on screen right now. So it's actually reacting to the, the system. So it's a, it's a, it's kind of a big brain. There's so

Leo Laporte (02:04:28):
Much nicer than our or thirds look at that. They're so good

Alex Lindsay (02:04:31):
Looking. And so, but that again, and, and, and then when we do the super sources when there's like multiple people on the screen, you're actually what you're actually seeing is the super source gets built. That whole look gets built automatically. Not that one, that one's just a, a, a, a gallery view, but oh, okay. When it, when it builds a super source, it that's being built by who is answering the question. So someone asks the question, people raise their hand, say, I want to answer the question. Then I say, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. To the right people or to the people that in the order that I want them to ask, answer it. And then it tells the switcher what to do. And so like that is being generated automatically. That's not someone didn't have to figure out where it was. So

Leo Laporte (02:05:12):
John, you might be out of a job. John still need someone to cut

Alex Lindsay (02:05:16):
It.

Leo Laporte (02:05:16):
Oh, okay.

Alex Lindsay (02:05:17):
Right. In fact, in fact, the funny thing is we expect probably 30, 40 people by the, by the summer 30 or 40 people, somewhere in the world will be running the show. Like, it's, it's not gonna go, we're not doing less people. We're doing more people because you know, it's a, it's a great opportunity to learn how to run, you know, bigger events. Yeah. You know, so it's so

Leo Laporte (02:05:35):
How do you get, so I see you tube is putting the segment and what the question being answered is at the bottom of it, is that done automatically as well, or somebody have to write that in no

Alex Lindsay (02:05:45):
That's Jeffrey Powers. Well,

Leo Laporte (02:05:46):
It's,

Alex Lindsay (02:05:47):
It's, it's somewhat automatic. So we, our, our question system keeps track of all of those things. So it keeps track of the time, but timeframe type it

Leo Laporte (02:05:53):
In. Yeah. Yeah.

Alex Lindsay (02:05:53):
No, no. They don't have to type it in. They download it and then upload it into there. Oh, that's, it's

Leo Laporte (02:05:57):
Not so

Alex Lindsay (02:05:57):
Bad. So it's not. Yeah. So our Q and a system is keeping track of what we're going to next. And it keeps all the time stamps, and then that's being added, that's being format. It it's automatically formatted. And then Jeffrey Powers who is another YouTube personality takes it and moves it in. And so, yeah. So a lot of that is generated largely, automatically, really. We'll probably use the API to do it later.

Leo Laporte (02:06:16):
Really nice. Very, very nice, amazing office hours, 2.0 office hours. Not global, if you wanna know more about it, and if you wanna hire this genius to run your next streaming event. Oh, nine oh.media. Oh nine oh.media. The rest of us are not for sale. Although I, I might design a hero for you. Here you go.

Alex Lindsay (02:06:44):
I've been working. I've been working on my, my, my, my, my little my little dude here.

Leo Laporte (02:06:48):
Oh yeah. Nice.

Alex Lindsay (02:06:50):
I have no idea what

Leo Laporte (02:06:51):
He is wearing. A kilt

Alex Lindsay (02:06:53):
Ru

Leo Laporte (02:06:53):
Leg rum leg PIP.

Alex Lindsay (02:06:55):
This is if rum leg went back into the past and this is rum SLS. That's pretty cool. It's

Leo Laporte (02:07:01):
About to announce star

Alex Lindsay (02:07:02):
Fox. So fun. Exactly.

Leo Laporte (02:07:04):
So fun makes me wanna pick up Dungeons and dragons just to exactly. Just to have a character that can play with, thank you everybody. For joining us. We do MacBreak Weekly on a Tuesday around 11:00 AM. Pacific 2:00 PM. Eastern 1900 UTC. You can watch us live, live.twi.tv. There's audio and video streams there 24 7. Something's always going on. And usually if there's something going on, people are chatting about it in our IRC, irc.twi.tv. After the fact you can get on demand versions of everything we do at our website, twi.tv for this show, twi.tv/m BW. You can also you'll find a link there to our YouTube channel. Every, every show has its own dedicated YouTube channel as well. Of course, the easiest thing to do is just subscribe in your favorite podcast player and you get it automatically you know, just search for Mac break. We add audio or video, and you can see it every Tuesday. The minute we're done. Thanks everybody. We'll see you next time. And, but now you gotta get back to work because break time is over. Almost forgot it's over. It's cuz you don't want it to end almost that it's in the it's over.

Speaker 9 (02:08:16):
Is that an iPhone in your hand? Wait a second. Is that an Apple watch on your wrist? And do I, do I see an iPad sitting there on the table? Oh my goodness. You are the perfect person to be watching iOS today. The show where Rosemary orchard and I mic is Sergeant talk, all things iOS TV OS watch OS home pod OS. It's all the OSS that Apple has on offer and we show you how to make the most of those gadgets. Just head to twit TV slash iOS to check it out.