MacBreak Weekly 395 (Transcript)

Leo Laporte: It is time for MacBreak Weekly. We have got a great panel, Rene Ritchie in house along, with Jason Snell and ofcourse with Andy Ihantko. We are going to talk about all the latest rumors including a twelve inch Retina Mac Book  Retina. Stay tuned it is time to talk Mac – MacBreak Weekly

Netcasts you love from people you trust, This is Twit! Bandwidth for Mac Break Weekly is brought to you by Cache Fly, at Cache Fly dot com. Yes it is MacBreak Weekly episode 395, recorded March 25 2014

2+Yellow=Sandwich

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It is time for MacBreak Weekly the show that covers your Macintosh World and that world is on this week and so we have got a great big studio audience nice to have you all today. MacWorld starts tomorrow and Rene Ritchie is in town from Montreal for MacWorld I presume?

Rene Ritchie: I came for the weather; Leo MacWorld is the great side benefit.

Leo: It started raining it got cold here the minute you got here.

Rene: This is like summer for me, this is (Presenters talking over one another)

Leo: It is very strangely unseasonal weather, very strange; Jason Snell is here he is just down the road a bit.

Jason Snell: Yes I came all three minutes away.

Leo: We are thrilled to have you always nice to have you in the studio as always and in Boston Andy Ihnatko from the Chicago Sun Times, Andy do you miss coming out to MacWorld Expo, they used to do one in Boston didn’t they?

Andy Ihantko: Yes ever since I was a teenager I was like 1985 and so just taking like three, two buses and commuter rail to get there and then seeing, I was at every MacWorld Expo like 1990 onward and yes I miss it. It is a great scene and I have to be a little bit pickier about how I spend four or five days to fly three thousand miles these days. Yes I do miss it and some point that someone should.

Leo: You know that I do not want to be negative about Mac World and some-body has here to point out that since Apple has left it has shrunk. Everybody says it is about the community.

Andy: I do not want to send a message that it is no longer worth my time. It’s more usually when I commit to like fly again three thousand miles these days I am going to get a bunch of whole new stuff that I can write lots of columns about. So now it is no longer the sort of thing where someone like me goes there to get lots of news stories. But it is the times when I went, last when I went was a year ago or two years ago, it is just a nice little festival for people who are interested in MACs and interested in Apple and interested in stuff that people who use MACs and iPhones and iPads and do.

Leo: Apple is in no way at MAC World, not even with people walking around?

Rene: Half of the employees may go.

Jason: Half of the employees may go but it is not official or in any official capacity. I should say that IDG that owns my company also owns the company that produces MAC World. We are not the same company I do not have any real control regarding over the power of persuasion like what they do.

Leo: You are like kissing cousins.

Jason: Yes we are like cousins. Kissing we will see, hugging cousins (Presenters talking over each other)

Leo: But they can still put a great show together…

Jason: It is a challenge. But first of the trade show business is not very good, the second is that Apple leaves and they are trying to turn into like Andy said more into a festival, more like a fan event, it is more like a comic convention or a film festival or something like that. And I think that they are doing a good job by turning it into that. But it is tough it is a very different business and it is in the business of having soft-ware companies pay you a lot of money for space on a trade show for.

Leo: Yes they do and that actually is a really good point. And you know that it isn’t just MAC World it is everything and in a new media expo this year had a keynote by a hypnotist because he was willing to pay enough money to become a gold or platinum sponsor and then tried to sell thousand dollar books. It really looked like to me and, when you see the MAC World, the massage chairs, and real estate sales you realize it is tough to get the economics to work.

Jason: Yes unless you are in a high-end conference where people will spend several hundred dollars to get access. And there is actually a high –end IT conference that happens I think tomorrow in advance of the show and then there is a conference past that has got lots of content. That is the business that is going on and if you just wander in and take a look at the trade-show yet. It was nothing like what it was and they are trying to make it like not be about the trade floorshow. But it is tough.

Rene: It is a double whammy as well because Apple moved away to host their own event because they now think that they are big enough to run their own events. And the same time you have shows like the CES that has Apple and iPhones that became so popular that everybody wants a piece of it now. So you will go to shows that will nothing to do with Apple traditionally and they have monstrous amount of cases, gadgets and what have you.

Leo: Right, right. You also have said that as they have moved MACWorld later, that it is as latest as it has ever been in March, it comes up closer and closer to WWDC. And now it is even less important than news and views.

Jason: Well it very much non-Apple than WWDC. Part of it is the trade-show logistics. I spoke to Paul Kent and trade-shows reserve conference space years in advance and it is actually very hard to move the dates, and the date that they said they had last year when they were going to do the show was like Super Bowl Sunday. It is a terrible thing and so they got to this stage that they wanted to move away from CES, because it was a big problem, the press did not want to come, the exhibitors did not want to come a week after CES. So now at least it has got some distance from CES and we will see this time how it works for them.

Leo: I have become less interested in trade-shows. You can get so much of this information online, but I do love the community.

Jason: Conferences and meeting people for the interesting content and interesting speakers I mean I see Rene in Montreal every year because there is a great MAC developer conference in Montreal. Guy English and the company put on, and it is called Singleton with a little thing down at the bottom of the C. True and it is very French and I love those conferences and I am going to one in Ireland in a few months. But those are not trade-shows, the economics are really different.

Andy: Yes there are a bunch of developer conferences out there and I am just like Jason that most of my like when I fly to speak it is mostly, used to be mostly like conferences like MACWorld. Now it is smaller like the two-day events of developer conferences or consultant conferences, because there seems to be a good model for that because more and more keep popping up every day. And some of them are being done just exquisitely like Google. I think that the conference that Jason was talking about and it is one of the finest conferences that I have spoken at and it is like and they invited  back but unfortunately I could not make there this year. Bu it was like let us put aside some time and  some money to come back to Ireland because that was such a good time.

Jason: Andy, Andy Bayo does XorexcelSoFast in Portland. It is fantastic.

Leo: They are much smaller.

Jason: And often times they are a labor of love and IDG are running this to make a profit and it is going to be tough. And a lot of these things are break-even propositions for their organizers.

Andy: Jason you kind of put things on the head when you are comparing things to like ComiCons because it is pretty much the exact same model where people of a certain part of the country or the world as though gee there is not a good conference in our part of the country. Let us go and put one on ourselves and we can put our stamp on or our signature on it and they are hoping to break even and it is just not a money making venture and that is what gives them the freedom to put on these special quirky events that only take about a year or two to develop their own personalities and they quickly become legend from something that you have never heard of to gee who do I have to butter up to get invited to go to Excel Excel. Because every video that was coming out of that conference was like Wow! I would like to stay the rest of the day to watch this.

Rene: One thing that is so nice about MACWorld is that CES is not a consumer show, it is an electronic show but it is analysts, buyers and media. MACWorld is meant for the community so you can go there and talk to the developers who make the apps and people who make the peripherals and everything like that they can get that one to one contact where you can air your grievances or give your admiration. Also now in the absence of Apple I remember attending the MACWorld years ago and people were flying for the keynote watched Steve Jobs and Joe Schiller and then fly out.

Jason: They would go to the floorshow; they would walk through the Apple Booth, which was just like an Apple store and leave.

Leo: Right.

Andy: It used to be like that I was like somebody that was all my friends knew that Andy knows someone who is in cold play and he can totally hook you up with tickets if you need them. I think that is almost everyone on this panel, like we would start getting those emails of the recent events. Is there any way that I can get an invite into for the KeyNote in MACWorld? Do you know anybody or do you get any pull but this was another area in which Apple led the way for other companies and used be that other companies felt that they needed to debut a new product or announce a new strategy at a larger conference or a larger trade show maybe because there were so many of those other trade shows out there. Well now how much does it cost to rent a ball-room in NewYork City – not very much so let us launch our new phone in New York City at an event, so that we can choose the timing, so we can control the news cycle that day and so that is the other reason why these huge news mega events are not as important to so many people as they were once were.

Leo: The real challenge is to get a calendar date for these huge events, that everybody is doing these events. HTC is unveiling just as we are doing this show, it is HTC Mark Two MA next door, literally next door. So you can watch that on this is a MAC show so we are not going to spend any time on it. But I will tell you a little bit about it- it is beautiful.

Rene: That is the unpredictability about it now.

Leo: When is it going to be, when will we know?

Rene: Last year at CES we had a tone of stuff, whereas at Mobile World Congress we had nothing. But this year CES there was not very much while Mobile World Congress was jam-packed.

Leo: It was huge.

Rene: It is hard to tell now where it is and when?

Jason: Announcing big trade shows is a huge mistake for most people unless you are so big that you can take the advantage of having all the media there to cover you. But even then media will then move onto the other eight thousand things that they have got. There are always people who back in the Apple keynote days would release a press release of their product announcement- the morning of the Apple KeyNote. That was the dumbest thing in the world because nobody was ever going to talk about that product. They were going to talk about whatever Apple talked about.

Leo: When you release your poor earnings for the past year and not your new product.

Jason: It was HTC or Apple or SAMSUNG who led the way here doing your own event because if you have got enough weight to get the journalists to fly to wherever you are doing the event it is a way better because that is the only thing that they are going to be talking about.

Leo: We do have an event coming up this Thursday. Microsoft is going to do an event in San Francisco and we think that Microsoft is going to be the first to announce their first new public event by their new CEO Satya Nadella. We think that they are going to announce Microsoft Office for the iPad long awaited.

Rene: And it is a week before Bill Oden for timing because they have their show in San Francisco, a week after they are doing this show at this event.

Leo: Well they have got you down there and they will keep you down there for a few days. It is a pain for journalists though you know. Paul Thurrott and Mary Jo Foley are not coming out for Thursday’s announcement because they would have to stick around for a week for Bill because they are not coming out. It is tough.

Jason: It is tough for MACWorld people.

Leo: Are you excited, about Microsoft, as long as I have mentioned it for IOS?

Jason: Oh yes there was time when I would have been.

Andy: I would have been last year.

Rene: Better late than never.

Leo: You cannot wait to too long can you?

Andy: This year because Microsoft has given us about three years to figure out alternatives to Microsoft Office and that has given us time to not only realize that we do not need the desk top version of Office. We need something that is relevant for mobile use, which means that we are going to accept fewer features for better interface design like Pages. But the other side of it is that you have to realize that the Office user is not somebody who particularly cares about the better interface all that they care about is can I get the work getting done on this device than on this other device. So on that basis if it integrates with the world that they have to work with inside the Office where they do not have care about anything, where they do not have to sync anything, they do not have to install anything, they do not have to update anything, just miraculously this nice slim device will do everything that they have to do in Word, Excel and Power Point and Outlook then that is just automatically is a win for them. So it is not necessarily the same market for Office users as it is for Pages users or even a Google Docs User.

Rene: And it is so tough for Microsoft, for instance the licensed exchange Apple and Google and that was great for the exchange team, but it really hurt Windows, mobile and Windows phone and Office you are thinking is that the crown jewel that will help promote more surface sales or is it something that they want to get onto the iPad so their Offices sales go up.

Leo: I am increasingly of the opinion that they just did not have it on time. And they were not ready and they shipped it as soon as they can. And they seemed to be doing joint development between that and their cult project called Gemini, which is a touch forward version for Office Four for Windows, for their own platform.

Rene: By 2014.

Leo: They are trying to do those two together. Then that could explain why that took so long.

Rene: How do you wait so long? Microsoft you are one of the smartest and best engineering companies in the world and it takes you seven years to get a touch optimized version.

Jason: I am sure that if they had wanted to have they could have it done very fast.

Leo: You think so.

Jason: Absolutely. But it was not a priority because it was the other guy’s platforms, because it is (Presenters talking over each other).

Rene: Yes but the surface did not fit with it.

Jason: Yes that is true. I think that Microsoft in the latter years of Steve Balmer were trying out a lot of things and was changing tack every few months and, yes…

Leo: We have had One Note for a while. Now it is One Note on the MAC for a few months now. Is everybody going to stand up and cheer now?

Andy: One Note is a good example though, I mean I think that I would have said a minute ago is that the Microsoft that was structures ten years ago would have definitely rushed out an IOS version of Office immediately because there were like twelve different Fiefdoms, each competing with each other for Microsoft’s attention and resources. Whereas now Microsoft now tries to be a little bit more cohesive in the image that they try to project, I think that there is that great suite of apps that is designed to work together and trying not to be too Game of Thrones about it, in terms of their corporate structure. And when you look at what One Note was like, that was the first app that they really rethought about for their multi-touch interface and it was as far removed from the desktop version as much as possible. And they came up with some really interesting interface design and some new interface elements that took really nice advantage of it and made me interested in what they would be doing for Microsoft Office. But as we said that is maybe irrelevant at this point, because we are expecting something that is so good at this point that will make us again have to link right back to the tools that we are using on the desktop, and do not really care about the alternatives and not have three years of integrity on IOS and I am not sure that it is doable thing at this point.

Leo: Now we replaced the Words for the Microsoft Office for the iPad with the iWatch. Is as an analyst says is time ticking for Apple to announce an iWatch.

Rene: Time is always ticking.

Leo: As Trip Choudhry of Global Equities Research says Apple has sixty days left to either come up with something or they will disappear and I love John Gruber’s take on this. John quotes the Cadie Thompson article on CNBC, Choudhry says it will take years for Apple’s 130 billion dollars in cash to vanish but it will become and irrelevant company(dot, dot, dot). It will become a zombie if they do not come with an iWatch this is again managing director at Global Equities Research, and Gruber says that I guess that the (dot, dot, dot) denotes is when he paused for another line of coke.

Rene: How do they keep their jobs?

Leo: So I guess I gather that the Apple community does not agree that time is ticking.

Jason: People say this all the time about everything that Apple does and sixty days left and that is one of the dumber things. People say a lot of questionable things about Apple. That is so stupid that it defies (presenter unclear). Maybe not that much but it is kind of crazy but Apple releases things on its own time line and we are really impatient and there is so much in the press and the analysts comes out of boredom and impatience because we want the next cool thing to write about or talk about and infact most of these ground breaking products that Apple has done over the last ten years have been things that came in what you would call late, but they were the right product at the right time. And maybe they will be too late with this I do not know. I look at the current amount available smart watches and other wearable’s out there and they are not heamorring customers for other people right now. It is a non-existent market right now and they have got a lot of great many ideas and (Presenters talking over one another)

Maybe it is not the right product yet. And Apple does not tend to do that proof of concept announcement and then a year later you will see a real product. (presenters talking over one another)

Andy: Which is not necessarily the right way to do things. But yes is this not that Apple usually waits for some-one to establish a market so they can take a look at how people are ---- how actual users are actually reacting to these things and buy themselves to see and point and laugh at take certain things and take a few copious notes on some other things about it. Yes it is going to be late this year or maybe even next year when this thing comes out. But it is clear to see though that Tim Cooke is though, something is stressing him out, and you see the same sort of Obama thing going on when he took over as CEO he had this rich head of black, black hair and now you see it go white just over the course of the iWatch

development. And so maybe we are not so wrong about this.

Rene: I would go the opposite to this if Apple were to put out the iWatch before they were ready I would start to get nervous about Apple.

Leo: Apple needs to get it right as opposed to get it first?

Rene: Yes, yes. The iPhones and there were trios and Blackberrys and Windows mobiles years before the iPhone and those tablets and PCs for a decade before there was the iPad. Apple does not move first. It is exactly what Andy that they want to see what is wrong with the products on the market and then see whether Apple can make a compelling solution and if they cannot then they will not go there, and if they can they produce their version of the product.

Leo: Dick Moran who was a former Facebook  guy who created PATH. A beautiful app first for IOS, and, now Android. He wrote an interesting article on Medium and I think it came out today or yesterday, which is called SUPER NORMAL. He says innovation starts with the ordinary, and the key is I think that Apple is right in here to creating a great something is to take that is normal and then add a twist that makes it an innovation. He talks about the MAC, which was the first computer with a Goi, and the iPod was an MP3 player with a clickable interface, the iPhone was a smart phone with a multi-touch. It was those little things that they did to already existing product categories that created the innovation.

Rene: Their innovation is a mainstream technology to make it accessible to a larger market than it has traditionally been.

Leo: It was by removing friction user to interact in a different way, each of these products unlocked massive value. I think that is what Apple is trying to do right.

Andy: That is true. It is more like I think----not everybody has to go in and if you are not in the business of simply selling in volume you do not have to dive in and just jump into any market that seems to have presented itself, because someone else is making a lot of money on NETBOOKS does not mean that you have to start making NETBOOKS too. I have used that example so many times that I do not have to even go into that again. But there should be some comment in this conversation that TRIOS were wonderful and that BlackberryS were wonderful, and if both of those companies had held off with the keyboards are on the way out and these tactile interfaces are on the way out, we are not going to create this market till these things are absolutely perfect, as mind blowingly different from the phones that people have today as possible. We would not have five years of these wonderful devices, we also would not have that information infrastructure that would have made the iPhone possible. So I think that Apple definitely does things the right way for them and they are telling a story with every product that they do and they want to make sure that they are telling their story correctly. Nonetheless, let us not turn this into denigrating Blackberry and PALM for doing things thoroughly with a successful product that people love. Sometimes you do it; sometimes you are doing market research in whatever comes next to you.

Jason: I do not think that we are denigrating them than so much as pointing out that Apple is usually in that place. What turn out in that place was Newton and look how that went right. And I love my PEBBLE but my PEBBLE feels to me very much like my TRIO like my PALM did back in the days--- well this is really cool and it works but this is not how it is going to be.

Andy: It is like TESSLER like device where people who are buying TESSLER cars people who are optimized to that kind of car and are open to different and new things and, are wanting to accept that they have 230 to 240 mile range instead of a 400 mile range. People who actual legitimate PEBBLE owners, right now are for people for whom always imagine that a smart watch on the wrist is exactly that way to do things. They are willing to suffer a little bit if they are not quite perfectly done, and charging time is not what it is likely to be, it is not as slim as what they would like it to be, and if the tools are now not what they would like it to be then this is something that they have been wanting for a long time. I think that things like Google Glasses is also a TESSLER like product. I think that Google WEAR is also very TESSLER like product whereas Apple does not want to build a TESSLER they want to build a TOYOTA.

Jason: I did not even think that Google Glasses was that far along. I think that Google Glasses in its own way is a proof of concept more than anything else.

Andy: I mean in the sense that unless you are a journalist you are not buying a 1500 dollar Google Glasses, because this is something as though I have always felt is this is the way to go and even this is a little bit painful, the alternative is nothing like this. So I am going to go with this.

Leo: As far as debunking Eddy Cue never threw a pen, I mean Steve Jobs never threw a pen at Eddy Cue there was……….(Presenters talking over each other)

Jason: Yes.

Leo: Did he throw Eddy Cue at a pen or did he throw a pen at Eddy Cue I am not sure.

Jason: I have heard through the grapevine that Phil Schiller has never owned a Lamborghini either.

Leo: Oh, really.

Jason: So apparently he was a Porsche man.

Leo: Part of the anecdotes on Haunted Empires are mistaken. I do not know at least they were denied, Eddy Cue denied it in an email Benchman of iMac sent him a note saying that I am slightly obsessed by Jobs throwing a pen in your face. Is the story true and Eddy Cue said, “No, it is not.” Rivalling Jim Dowling (Presenters talking over one another)

Rene: He could have just said,”No.”

Leo: No it is kind of wheels within in wheels. You know that I would deny it too, if if Jobs threw a pen at me, does not mean he did not.

Jason: Why would you deny it? Steve Jobs was famously grumpy.

Leo: He is dead.

Jason: It is a mark of honor.

Leo: Go for revenge.

Jason: The famous Steve Jobs threw a pen at me, and I survived.

Leo: Okay, good.

Jason: I just do not know.

Leo: All right, in his first days as CEO, he took two immediate actions; first he promoted me, Eddy Cue. Cue had started out as an intern. One version of a story he told everyone was that he was plucked by Jobs out of an IT department during a meeting in which he had dared to write an opinion about a topic in hand and had voiced an opinion about a topic in hand and Jobs looked at him and told him to shut up and undeterred Cue spoke up again causing Jobs to throw a pen at his forehead. Cue who by then figured that he had nothing to lose braced him and offered his opinion for the third time. Jobs hired him. In this book Haunted Empires she says that Cue repeated this to everyone.

Andy: Isn’t that how George Steinberger felt that on Steinzfeld?

Leo: I threw a pen at you and you did not blink. You are hired!

Jason: My favorite bit in Haunted Empires that Rene and I both reviewed, this is not a very good book. You like Apple that is why you do not like the book. I read the book and I was hoping to get a really good argument from her about how Apple was haunted by Steve Jobs, but there is nothing coherent in terms of an argument in that book. There are a series of anecdotes much of which are re-reported from other sources and some of the original re-reporting is kind of bizarre. But the one that really got me was the one explaining that Phil Schiller has an aggressive personality because he likes to listen to Led Zepplin and like to play hockey with the San Jose sharks. Hello, hockey pro-aggressive Canada and the entire book….

Rene: Is 2+Yellow=Sandwich.

Leo: Right.

Rene: I am willing to believe that is possible but you have got to show me the math.

Leo: Sure. You have got to show me the math.

Jason: Yes, but there is a good argument to be made and I might or might not agree with it, there is a good argument to be made about Apple losing its way. But first you need to establish is Apple losing its way by following Jobs or by following too slavishly. Neither arguments are made in the book; no actually both arguments are made in the book even though they are contradictory to each other. And sadly you do this as a book instead of on the Web and I think that she wrote this book more than a year ago. IOS 7, which would be an argument that Apple was changed in pro recons, is mentioned in the two paragraphs in the after worth, as it happened too late for the book. Which is why covering anything this current in the book is probably a bad idea. (Presenters talking over one another)

Leo: Now books they are dead, they are doomed. I give them sixty days; they have got to fix that problem.

Jason: They have got to fix that problem.

Rene: The book is so disconnected for example she argues that MAPs were a huge blunder and that……… being hired was huge blunder. He was fired for other reasons than MAPS, and all these arguments are going in so many different directions and there is no structure or reason to rant an anecdote generator and I find some of the anecdotes interesting although not all of them fit you up with what I have heard personally.

Jason: It does not look like it has a lot of perspective on his personality but shakes up the book (Presenters talking over each other). Either EweCara Cane or one of her researchers went through the microfilm of their hometown newspaper and they really wanted to show their work so it is like Tim accepted this award for his high school for a speech he gave.

Rene: It is really sad because she was a well-known Apple beater for…. She had the liver transplant story from Steve Jobs and I was expecting greatness, well not greatness but a really good book and it turned to be two pieces of cardboard with some pieces of paper in-between.

Jason: In the afterwards she wrote that she had never written a story longer than three thousand words before and I think it shows. I think she is good reporter and there is some good original reporting about Chinese factory workers in here. You read two or three chapters and it is a feature story. And I think that is what happened here as she has Apple knowledge, made a book proposal, this was the way to sell the book and then had to try and make the book fit and the concept and the title, which is a great title, and it was just kind of, I was ready to be like challenged by this book and it is just kind of a mess.

Rene: If you were the editor of Posh and say can you make this a little bit more what you care about, because it will sell either way.

Leo: It is selling even more copies as we speak.

Rene: I put no link in my review. I did not put a link in my review. I did not want to put a link.

Jason: You should not really talk about it. I felt that it was a bad book and I feel that the reviews have been so specifically bad in saying it is not very well executed and that I do not think that it is not going to sell as well as it would have if it had been controversial in like as making these cogent arguments, instead it is just a sort of a scatter shot.

Andy: So we are basically saying that this is the Fred Phelps of Apple book, do not give it any more attention, just let it be anonymous and let it slip of into obscurity.

Leo: They did not even sell one copy because of you guys I did not even buy one. The only thing was that the pictures. The only thing that is sad about you being here today I wanted to see your LEGO on your new set that you built. What was it a haunted house?

Rene: It was Lego Batman Arkum Asylum.

Leo: Arkum Asylum.

Rene: I wanted to do interesting thing in the background. I like Lego, I like Batman, I like….

Leo: Have you got Cain’s book in the background in there?

Rene: Well I could have had like Steve Jobs up and stumping…(All the presenters talking over one another).My God I have got kids on is eight and one is five and they love this stuff.

Leo: Ahhhh

Rene: It is an excuse to get them a ton of different sets as well.

Leo: But Uncle Rene keeps the building?

Rene: I got the duplicates and so now they say that this is on my side and yes you can play with that that is fine.

Leo: We have actually hired a full time LEGO builder, here at, when does Jeff Neal start? From June 1^st he is going to be a full time LEGO builder in residence.

Jason: So you are a LEGO brick house now?

Leo: We are going to take a break and come back with more Rene Ritchie, Jason Snell great to have you both inhouse, Andy Ihnatko more about MAC and infact we are going to say goodbye to two MAC institutions, Apple institutions in our next segment.

But first a word from LEGALZOOM.com. I want to tell that LegalZoom is not a law firm, they say you have got to tell people that. It is not its better than a law firm. They provide self-help services at your specific direction and this is national start your business month and what a great month to start your business. Legal Zoom makes its easy, look when we did our LLC for TWIT it was me back in 2005. I was not going to be able to hire white shoe attorney or a law firm to do this. I went online and filled out some forms and got the LLC, boom 99 bucks plus filing. I trade marked the TWIT logo and I trade marked the TWIT name that is 169 bucks plus filing fees and you can also do a Chapter C or SSC Corporation and ofcourse a lot of personal documents too like last wills, trusts and things like that. You might say I do not I had this question LLC and Chapter C and they have the legal plan attorneys that can give you legal advice, they will connect with the right attorney for pre-negotiated flat rate and it is very affordable so you can get the advice you need for your state which is important, read their profiles and unedited reviews from Legal Zoom customers and that will give you a good idea what those legal planning attorneys can do. Absolutely you can fill out that form and I did the LLC and I think I asked Kevin Rose instead of an attorney. It was all right it worked and by the way we have never revised those papers so using those documents here we are eight years later they work. Start your own business Legal Zoom wants to help you start your own corporation or LLC file your DBA get up and running quickly and affordably by more than a million entrepreneurs, including me through Legal Zoom to start down the path of successful business ownership. And this month to celebrate start your national business they have got a special deal of a free three month trial of Quick Books making it so much easier to run your new business and that is 119 dollars in value when you enter MBW in the referral box at the checkout and you also get ten bucks off your Legal Zoom services. LegalZoom.com discount code MBW. It is not a law firm they provide self-help services and can connect you with the right attorney and they are great, LegalZoom.com. Use the offer code MBW.

Jason: Hey Leo, is Legal Zoom a law firm?

Leo: They are not a law firm. I am glad you asked but they can help you do some of  your paper work. For a lot of law stuff you do not need a legal guy at 250 dollars an hour. How much are attorneys, they are like 450 dollars an hour.

Rene: Like audio equipment the price just goes up.

Leo: No but that is how you know that you are getting a good attorney because it costs more right?

Jason: Sure.

Rene: Totally.

Leo: I get attorneys by price---- how much are you ohhhh 350 bucks oh you are not good enough for me.

Andy: Leo that is not the sort of thing you want to say online.

Leo: I just screwed myself, I just screwed myself. (Presenters talking over each other.) So we cannot go to Rene Ritchie’s studio but the next time you are on camera next week but next we will get to see this Arkum Asylum. It loses some of its eerie spookiness when it is made out plastic bricks.

Rene: You think so, actually when it is lit properly it is uncanny valley.

Leo: What is this guy the half face?

Rene: Batman.

Leo: Oh I am sorry I am not up on the Batman. I am really out manned here or out nerded.

 Julio Ojeda Zapata writing in the Minneapolis Twin Cities Pioneer Press sad to say the end of the very first Apple dealer after thirty-five years. First Tech is shuttering its doors. It started in the early seventies, I mean late seventies I should say when Apple started selling Apple twos. So Team Electronics became the first tech, and you know I have seen this happen and you probably remember Tom Santos and Mac Adams in downtown Harrison Street in San Francisco, and I remember him going out of business some years ago I cannot compete with Apple they have their own stores, they give the products much better allocation that we can ever get. You can offer service and support as Tom did for years but eventually people stop going to you.

Jason: It is a different world now. I mean that the Apple retail stores have totally changed that game. I remember this era this was when I got my first Apple Two. It was in the store, I remember walking in the doors and it was in Modesto California and it was like beige carpet and beige tables and beige computers on them and salesmen and it was a different world, and some of those stores survived by adapting. We were talking about Comicon earlier and I hear that comic book retailers talk about this, and their business is a little different but it is also changing dramatically, because people are not buying stuff in paper anymore and the rise in digital retailers is not that different from the rise in Apple retailing. You can survive by building super, by building a community and being super supportive but even then it is a brutal business to be in because the world has changed.

Rene: Or being in an area where there is no Apple store for remoter areas. Look at ? they have machines that you can in the back and just use them, and replace screens on iPhones, you cannot get those machines.

Leo: Here is the video from when the MACINTOSH came out, that features that store, the First Tech store in Minneapolis. This is harking back to 1977 when the first AppleS were sold and there were 5 million machines all sold within minutes. Minnesota the first Apple store, this is really a bit of history. I do not think that Dave Hummers is back though. That was Wayne Wenzlaff, there is the Apple STORE in San Francisco and First Tech had every bit of Apple software, every single MAC program.

Jason: You could go in there and buy software, parts ……..

Leo: Yes and you talk to somebody……

Rene: And you could talk to somebody who was mean and dismissive to you or you could talk to somebody who was great and who wanted to talk to you and buy stuff from them.

Andy: Oh Apple 11, very nice too. But that is part of the problem too………uh silent type thermal printer. This is like from two generations earlier and it is like looking at classic cars and look at what I get.

Leo: Great article by Julio in the pioneer press and you can see it online as well. He sent us a link to that as well. Thank-you Julio for writing that story.

Andy: See the other problem that we are facing is that when stores like that were doing really, really well they were not just getting interactions from Apple but that most people coming in for the first time when they actually had the opportunity to put their hands on a real home computer. And now one of the things that makes it’s so easy to order online is that I know what computers, I know how they work, I know what I want I do not need some-one to walk me through-----do I need a floppy drive or a cassette drive, a cassette tape is going to be okay for me.

Leo: And so another website late lamented called MacFixIt.com is owned by CNET at this point and CNET shut it down, apparently in an article by Ted Landaue was the creator of MacFixIt, it is hard to believe in 1996. It was a site that I used all the time and it was a place what people were doing with bugs and this was a known bug. He managed it for four years and then I think he sold it to Tech Traker which did the same thing for all the computers in 2002. He was editor to 2002 and I think that the last man that is Tofu Kessler who has been the primary contributor to MacFixIt. CNET has started a new site MACISSUES. So the same idea will send people to MACISSUES.com. Yes I loved MacFixIt, I used it all the time, it was the place I would go when someone would call me on the radio show and say have hear about this and I would say let me check and let us see.

Jason: I know this is kind of inside baseball because you have seen that pod Tech Traker because they wanted the version tracker ??? but they wanted especially the tracker software database for software dot com and they wanted to integrate that data. They eliminated a competitor but they also did all that updates, data into their database which was like strategic for them but version tracker stuff less so, and then there was MacFixIt and it was not like the other two things and so they inherited it and they kind of kept going. But I think that this was inevitable, this purchase was never meant to be about MacFixIt and CNET history with Apple base information is not very strong.

Leo: I have got to tell you this although you guys do not run into this problem WINDOWS used to use Downloads.com. Their downloads site is notorious for layering ADWARE upon your downloads, because what you get instead of your original file is the original file wrapped in a downloader which is also a lot of crap. It is so close to Malware it’s that distance.

Jason: Some of my Malware software reviews are in that database. Only because I  worked at ST DAVIES. ST DAVIES software library went to CNET, and I am sure that my five mouse review from you drag things from 1995 is still there.

Andy: We are like Blues Musicians we are getting 150 dollars and a Ripples bottle to record a song and now it is owned by eight companies………..

Jason: Michael Jackson (Presenters talking over each other)

Leo: There will be however a new Apple store in Istanbul, simultaneously by shutting down TWITTER they now have the Apple store. I love the way they are building this, under wraps, literally they have got it all hidden.

Rene: Part of the magic Leo.

Leo: The magic…..Tim Cooke is I think going to go there for the opening, but maybe now with what has been going on in Istanbul it might be inappropriate. April 4^th will be the official opening and it will be interesting to watch. Istanbul is an amazingly beautiful city with wonderful people and it is a little scary to see what is happening there right now. Let us see what else do you want to talk about, where is the good news here in the Apple World. Apple and Google agreed not to poach each other’s employees. It turns out that it was not only Apple and Google it was dozens Silicon valley companies.

Jason: This was a conspiracy.

Leo: This was real. It is an anti-trust violation if we say that we will not try and hire any of your people if you do not hire any of our people. The reason being that the employees are being disadvantaged because they cannot get competitive offers.

Jason: Right either to get a better job or either to get them more money in order to keep them. This is the case of I would say well off tech executives deciding to want to protect the value of their company and they do not care if their employees do not have a free market for their services, and not only is this the rare conspiracy that is totally real but it is so awful. It is just staggeringly terrible and there are lots of people in technical fields who got shafted by this. It is really bad.

Leo: It started as an agreement between Jobs and Google’s Eric Schmidt and then expanded to companies like Dell, IBM, eBay, Microsoft, Comcast, Clear Channel, Dream Works, the London based public relations firm WPP, The Justice Department is focused by basically upon ADOBE, Apple, INTEL, INTUIT, FILMAR, PIXAR, SMOKING GUNS MEMOS GALORE on all of this. They did not really even attempt to hide it particularly.

Andy: Not only that but Smoking Gun Memos Galore from the very top their CEOS talk to other CEOS about what their policies could be, and so there is absolutely no cover whatsoever against the awfulness of this scheme.

Leo: eBay’s CEO Meg Whitman called Eric Schimdt to complain that Google’s recruiters were hurting profits and business at eBay……….stop it……stop it. So Eric Schmidt responds to her with a do not forward, no actually this is his own  hiring team, (Presenters talking over each other), do not forward this email, whatever you do not tell anybody about this, Meg called to talk about hiring practices, this was a rough call from a good friend, and we need to get this fixed, fire the recruiter immediately for cause.

Jason: Imagine that you are a developer who has got an okay job or maybe it is a bad job and somebody at Apple discovers that you are really talented with something you did, or they appeared with you or you were a friend of friend, and go My God we need somebody with your skills and it is much better job and you are never allowed to have it.

Leo: It is horrible. Do you think that it is possible that people did not know how wrong and illegal this was.

Jason: Well, I mean we see Jobs as guy and we say a lot of good things about him, but he is also the guy who refused to drive with a license plate, he just kept getting a new car every six months. I think that it is fair to say the Steve Jobs did not care about some of these rules (Presenters talking over one another) and he thought that he was protecting his company and you did not really care that this was a secret capol that was preventing the freedom of the workers from (Presenters talking over one another)

Leo: Every six months.

Rene: He stayed the hell out of my interviews.

Andy: He would have definitely have taken this thing as I am defending my company, yes by attacking people that would take away my key personnel. And so now my cause is holy and righteous and I will prosecute it to the last drop of my blood.

Leo: And he does not also say that I am not going to go after their employees.

Jason: One of the things that I missed in Haunted Empire was one of the ways that Steve Jobs is truly haunting Apple today is his disregard for a lot of these laws. You see this in the e-Book settlement which he had issues with Amazon’s monopoly on e-Books, but you can see it in the way that they approached that, and you can see it with this story, and you could argue that all of the patent law suits where he said we are going to go thermo-nuclear, these are I think some of the ways that Steve Jobs is really haunting Apple, because they are still trying to dig out from this stuff Apple and paying the price for some of Steve Jobs’ decisions.

Rene: Followed by your book in a second Jason.

Jason: It is a comic book.

Leo: One company that you might expect in this is Facebook. Cheryl Sandburg says that, I was approached by this idea by Eric and I immediately said, absolutely not.

Jason: Tom said that too.

Leo: Yes.

Andy: On of the most Mr. Burns-ish emails in this paper trail was Steve Jobs, with the CEO of Palm saying that I do not feel that I can go ahead with this because I do not think that this right, and Steve saying “Let us take a look and we can fight this out of the lawyers but take a look at Apple’s financial position and take a look at your position, that is what I would recommend that you do.

Leo: My God, that is horrible!

Andy: I kind of quiver when I think about if Steve were still around and had to make some sort of public statement on this Oh My God that would have been an epic statement about--- you are all idiots, you do not understand how business works and I cannot believe that I am even forced for wasting my time to address this. But do not worry fans of Apple and employees of Apple we will defend our integrity against these people who wish to harm our company. Do not worry I will fight the good fight for all of us.

Rene: You want a free bumper, here is  your free bumper.

Andy: Babies.

Jason: You are hiring a pro.

Leo: Apple is in talks with Comcast once again, but this time it is not about employees, this time about a streaming service. We heard before the Com Cast and Time Warner merger that Apple was talking and so is this just continuing talks.

Jason: Seems to be that you need to talk to this guy now.

Leo: Well we have got a new guy in town, although I do not think that merger has happened yet so.

Jason: But they could probably see the writing on the wall.

Leo: They are being pro-active.

Jason: It is smart I mean,  TiVo has got a deal with Comcast that gives TiVo boxes Comcast access to all of the Comcast On Demand stuff. So I think that Comcast makes a lot of money selling Internet services and having it go through Apple if that is a premium ad on like TiVo is. Comcast are happy in the past, look you do not want our crappy box and you want to pay more for TiVo—that is fine we will give all of that  stuff on TiVo too.

Leo: So Apple TV would become a Comcast On Demand service, or would we have a Comcast app.

Jason: Well Comcast Service I just switched to Comcasts six months ago and got one of the new TiVo’s to discover all of this. Comcast has On Demand and they have got a bunch of on line tv channels streams on their apps or on the web so

Leo: Right.

Jason: So if you are a Comcast subscriber you can stream those so you roll off all this stuff that they are bundling that is live, and all of this stuff that they are bundling that is On Demand…..

Leo: And you get their stream cast too which……..streaming like their Netflix competitor I think.

Jason: I do not know because I have not looked into that one, and then it may be that……..(Presenters talking over each other)

Leo: Then Comcast maybe becoming this net forward.

Jason: Comcast own NBC on top of that right. So you could imagine bundling all of that Comcast stuff for all of the Comcast customers under an Apple tv channel even then through Comcast have access to all of the on the demand and all of the streaming live channels that they have got.

Leo: Have they got Channel Four and then can they get Channel Five and that would be the question. I would not need……

Jason: I bet they could get Channel Eleven because they own that but it is an interesting idea and be fascinating to if Comcast said we have such strength in the Internet that we are going to go over the top which you call up when they take the cable box out of the equation and say that we are going to put every channel we can live and recorded on the Internet for our subscribers.

Leo: Yes but you still have to have a cable (Presenters talking over each other)

Jason: But maybe you do not have to have a TV account anymore or something.

Leo: Right. Apple in fact and I think that I have mentioned this before when we were talking about the Netflix and Comcast roo ha ha and there is a lot more than that, and we will talk about that at some point but one of the things that we learned at the time was that the way to watch Netflix is on an Apple TV,  because they host it and they have their CDN but of course we are concerned about quality says you know what we are not going to trust the public on the Internet to bring you Netflix we are going to do it ourselves. They have consistently had the best Netflix quality, imagine if they do with Comcast.

Rene: But the thing is that there are a couple of challenges with this one. One is that no-one knows what is really happening, yet there are some rumors that they are actually going to build the Comcast box and sell it. It feels like the Apple version of the Comcast box, some of this would be an app and it would go on your IOS device or your Apple TV.

Leo: Right.

Rene: But there are questions as to whether they would have the rights to programming, can Comcast give them the rights that they have or do they need separate agreements. And another thing and again this goes all the way back to Steve Jobs all things digital--- they had a deal with ATT which at least covered the country, with this they are going to have to go region by region in America to get the deals just to roll it out. Then they are going to have to you know talk to Canadian cable companies, talk to Lithuanian cable companies, it is an incredibly arduos go to market strategy, and I think that the rumors hitting up are showing how difficult it is for Apple. Maybe originally they wanted to make their own TV deals and get their own subscription service but the cable companies make the sale companies look like they are the are happiest, go-luckiest companies in the world.

Jason: My theory is that because Comcast is that depending on this Time Warner is just gigantic and covers a huge amount of the US that one way you might approach this is that we are going to build with Comcast and that is how it is going be done and it is going to be an Apple TV ad, the other cable companies we will give them our developers kit, they can make channels that do the same thing using be like Comcast do it like that. And that might be the only they can go forward is do it like that is that they are the biggest name make a deal with them and use that as the example otherwise you are right, it would be dozens if not hundreds of different negotiations.

Leo: Comcast is massive, you only have to marry one person and you have got everybody.

Andy: But this is why my main problem with these stories and we have been following these for a couple of years now, sometimes it feels as though Apple is working really very, very hard on a Blackberry style phone. It could be the most beautiful thing ever, the most wonderful thing ever that does not change the fact that people are moving away from phones with mechanical keyboards, that run the way a Blackberry does. In my imagination and I stress the word imagination, I imagine Apple saying why do we want to encourage people to get all of their content from cable companies forever, and if we are going to invest in the next five to ten years lets us create a way and if we are going to burn so many lawyers into mortal combat against each other to make these deals happen then let us make it easier for cable, cable companies to eventually produce content for Apple TV, and they would still have to go through a sign-in through the cable companies group that they have actually created. (Presenters talking over each other).

Leo: So where is the balance?

Andy: Well they could improve that too, therefore then they do not have to make any deals with any cable companies and they can create an API that every single channel will love to use, that will make it so easy and it will give these companies so much help that maybe you will stop using your cable box access because these apps will run it so much better.

Leo: For instant does Comcast want this? They do see the train coming down the tunnel and so this is kind of the way to make that transition to as you said over the top network on the Internet based system.

Jason: It could be as simple as adding an accounts where you log into Comcast.

Leo: Here is what the Journal says Apple and Comcast are not close to an agreement, infact I saw a great conversation on T&T couple of days ago, maybe it was Monday, Mike Elkin had a guy in from Variety and a guy from Arts Technical so you had a guy from the technical and guy from Hollywood and both agreed that this is never going to happen. ‘’Apple and Comcast are not close to an agreement according to the Journal, delivering the service quality Apple envisons would require Comcast to make significant investments in network equipment and other back office technology, according to people familiar with Comcast thing the companies also differ on how deep relationship Comcast should have with customers because Apple wants you to sign on with the Apple logue, they want to control customer data, that sounds right, they also asked for a cut of the monthly subscription fees paid by customers.

Jason: This also sounds like somebody is negotiating in the press.

Leo: Well yes because Wall Street Journal has got people from Apple and from the Comcast side in this article. Comcast says unnamed sources wants to retain significant control over the relationship with the customers and the data and of course they both do. Furthermore Apple and this is the trick  that you mentioned Apple wants to acquire significant TV program rights from media companies and not just Comcast. And Comcast wants to ensure that the price that Apple has to pay to acquire those rights would not cause the service to be priced higher than traditional paid TV. It has to be less or the same.

Jason: Yes that hurts and that is why the most likely thing that will happen is an agreement where you will have be a TV customer of Comcast, and you cannot cut your TV and then it will be something like HBO or GO or something like that and we will have access to the On Demand streaming channels but it will not be cord cutting kind of thing, because that is going to be that much more complicated.

Rene: Now if they do and they have an SDK for games maybe be it could interesting enough that people would be maybe willing to swallow the login stuff.

Jason: Maybe.

Andy: But there is so many ways that you can make the login stuff so much easier and so much faster I would see Apple fixing that as part of the solution to the problem.

Rene: For me it is not the logging into the cable companies, it is having anything to do with the cable companies.

Leo: Exactly.

Rene: I would love for Apple to have a Netflix solution with Apple having rights to the content, like Jason said Comcast owns NBC, they also own the Internet pipes and do we get to an agreement and I mean Apple can buy a lot of the infrastructure because they are paying Comcast the way that Netflix is having to pay some of these companies. There are so many hurdles that these companies can put in the  Apple’s way because they are delivering a direct consumer product.

Leo: So tell me how does this TiVo thing work, because I have Comcast. Their cable box is horrific, the UI is terrible.

Jason: So you buy TiVo and you got to pay TiVo for that and or you got to buy the monthly or lifetime to TiVo (Presenters talking over each other), but you get a cable card and it is one of those I think that I have got one cable card with six tuners on it which is insane.

Leo: So you can record six shows at once.

Jason: Yes six shows at once, it has a giant hard-drive

Leo: We have like eight VCRs in our house.

Jason: And TiVo has got its own streamer and you can put it in other rooms and you can stream off the hard-drive including live. It is not cheap but it is, actually when I switched from direct TV I ended up saving to  pay for the TiVo stuff so it ended up being a wash for me but it does have access to the On Demand stuff that you would not expect a third party cable box would not have because TiVo made a deal specifically with Comcast. To me that shows that Comcast is at least open to making some of these deals, if in the end people who are getting are still getting their money basically, you are still paying them for your box. (Presenters talking over each other)

Rene: My cable box still has an SD Interface that looks like it was developed in Soviet Russia. I have gone from s TRIO to an iPhone Five, there is just no innovation.

Jason: There are still screen in the TiVo ROMEO that are pristine there are few that are baffling.

Leo: Should I go to TiVo to get this story or Comcast?

Jason: TiVo, if you want to get it.

Leo: Then I have to talk to Comcast to get the cable card?

Jason: Yes, I waited and waited for my local Comcast office for ten minutes and they handed me the card I plugged it and that was it.

Leo: I have to go to the Comcast office.

Jason: Do not have the guy come to you.

Leo: Or, on the phone.

Jason: No, no, no

Leo: I have a Google voice number which has a Baltimore area code so they keep routing me to Comcast Baltimore, I am in Baltimore that is just my phone number.

Andy: Any way I through a twenty minute story that is collapsed down to I rearranged the furniture in my living room and suddenly it became an awesome place to watch TV. There you go that is the whole story, but then I thought that I should actually get a cable box installed and now this is place where I like to hangout and watch TV, but I put that off for a month and then I realized that all the shows that I really, really like are on Google Plus and I do not need that. The shows that I watch in Clip form I get through You Tube and I do not need that. I have got the Slink Player APP on my Roku so I do not have to transfer something from the cable box upstairs and I really think that I am so close to saying that I do not need regular cable TV anymore and I am a middle-aged old man and not one of these young hipsters Gucci and slam down the mountain do and riding the skate-board or whatever the kids are doing these days. I am just not convinced that in making cable TV work better is the solution that any forward- thinking company is going to be pursuing very, very hard at this point.

Leo: By the way if you get your TiVo from Weak Knees you can get an eight terabyte drive in there, so I would rather record 1280 hours.

Jason: You would literally record for a while then drop of the grid. (Presenters talking over one another)

Andy: I do not know how you do this Jason, I am stressed out enough like knowing that there are at least four different cable series on Netflix that I can see. I still have not seen House of Cards, but oh man I would love to see and they are all there and how am I going to get through the stress of watching all of these shows with my five or six shows all recording at once. As it is I still have not seen this week’s Amazing Grace.

Jason: Six tuners is outrageous but it means that there are never any kind of conflicts which is kind of nice, especially if I am recording sports. I have not even filled the hard-drive even half-way and not to plug TiVo here but their Netflix app on TiVo is actually very good and that is how we watch Netflix also from the TiVo. (Presenter talking over each other)

Andy: The Roku version kick Apple TV’s butt, it’s like, so far behind at this point.

Leo: Would you stick around after the show and help me buy a TiVo.

Jason: Sure.

Leo: Okay Thank-you. And if anybody wants to continue to watch we will do a special.

Rene: Helping Leo buy TiVo.

Jason: Well you know it is click the buy TV button.

Leo: It is that easy. Did you get on Amazon or?

Jason: I think I got it straight from TiVo but…..

Leo: I am glad that they are still around, I thought they were dead.

Kevin: They have a lot of patents, and now they’re making deals with cable companies.

Leo: Good.

Kevin: So, yeah.

Leo: That’s the key. Anything not to use that crap box.

Rene: And they never had good luck in Canada because they just couldn’t…. we have no cable cards, we have very limited access for them, so it’s still hard.

Kevin: They’re moving to the cloud now, their idea is they’re going to be able to run their software on the cable companies systems. So you’ll be able to do all the…. It’s like internet DVR over cable companies, so they’re finding ways to stay in business.

Leo: Good for them.

Kevin: Yeah, box is great!

Leo: They always did have a better UI than anybody else.

Kevin: Yeah.

Leo: Okay, this is TWiT special #173, Leo buys a TiVo, coming up next! (laughs) Our show today brought to you by Gazelle. You’ve got an old gadget, they don’t buy TiVo’s, or unfortunately, Scientific Atlanta set top boxes. I wish they would. But they will buy your old IPhone, your old IPod, anything from Apple! They’ll even buy broken IPad and IPhone, because there’s really a market for those. Gazelle.com. We saw some beautiful gazelles when we were in San Diego at the Safari park, and they do have horns that look just like that! With those Thompsons Gazelles. I can’t remember, I think they were. Gorgeous. A Gazelle is not only a beast that runs fast across the African Plains, but a place to go with your old IPhone. They will buy old black berries, you’ve got an HDC1, and you want the new one? Sell it there! You’ve got a Motorola, Nokia or android phone? Sell it to Gazelle! Now here’s how it works. You’ve got 30 days on that quote. So maybe you’ve got an iPad 3, and you want to get the new Apple IPad 4. Which they’re now offering. Let’s get an offer on my… $165 bucks on my decent condition 3^rd generation iPad. Now here’s the beauty part, I don’t have to sell it today. I have 30 days to take advantages of that. Even though it’s pretty safe to say that anything you sell on here is going to be worth less in 30 days. You lock it in for 30 days. When you’ve got enough stuff in your gazelle cart. And I suggest you go through all those drawers and everything, get everything together, pull the trigger, and check out, they’ll send you a box, prepaid postage and everything. Pile it in there and if you forget to wipe your data, don’t worry Gazelle will do that for you, of course. And then they’ll send you a check or PayPal credit, or if you buy a lot of stuff on Amazon, and who doesn’t? You can get an extra 5% with the Amazon gift card. Gazelle.com. Go there now to get an offer for your iPhone, your iPad. Or any one of your old junky products. Gazelle is incredible! They’ve paid more than 100 million dollars now to 700,000 customers. It’s free shipping, it’s fast processing. It’s the way to sell all your gadgets. It’s a… who’s got…. I mean, this is the way to do it. Who’s got an old gadget? I bet you do. Gazelle.com, try it today, you’re going to love it! Rene Ritchie is here from imore.com a Mobile Nation’s site! The editorial director at IDG Jason Snell, he’s editor, editorial director for both Macworld, and PC world. Go figure!

Jason: And Greenbot, which is our new Android site. So… crazy!

Leo: Greenbot?

Jason: Greenbot. Yeah!

Leo: Gee, you know, what’s nice is all of you are kind of agnostic nowadays. And Tech Hive, which is great. We love tech hive. Greenbot? Oh I get it! Because Android is a little green bot.

Jason: Oh see! Yeah!

Leo: Took me a while! You’ve already got a hands-on with new HTC1 there. Nice!

Rene: Love those names, you know IPad, you’ve got to put something in the bracket so people can tell it apart from the last one.

Leo: This drives me crazy!

Rene: Yeah.

Leo: It’s just nuts! We have to say 4^th generation IPad, because they decided not to make a distinction. We have to say it!

Jason: I kind of like that better than it being IPad AO139…

Leo: Well that’s true.

Jason: 9. Right? Just say the year or the generation and let it go.

Rene: We got my mom one of the new iPad for her birthday, and she just kept searching new iPad case. And it was the most irrelevant results possible.

Leo: Right! Well the HDC1 is the M8. The old one is the M7 but they call it the same thing. HDC1, so that’s got to be confusing for consumers, I would think.

Jason: I really like how on… Did they add in mavericks if you go to more info about your MAC it now says, 11 inch mid 2013? It’s actually on there.

Leo: Mid 2013! I’m getting a mid 2013.

Jason: But a least that’s what Apple calls it, so you can be like, tell me what it says there! And then you know.

Rene: One of our writers, Derek Kessler, he went through a thought experiment of actually going to the store and trying to buy one. He says, “I want the new one.” “Which one?” “The new one!” “HDC1?” “I don’t know, the new one!” “The new Samsung?” “No the new one! My friend said the new one!”

Leo: The new One! One, one! Yeah, it’s like….

Andy: I want the phone, yep! I want the new phone! Yep. What do I say? Get the new phone, the new one! That’s the one I want. What do you mean? The new one!

Leo: I have to say it’s a little depressing though, when you have the brand new MacPro and they call it the late 2013 MacPro. It’s already out of date! It’s already last year’s MacPro.

Jason: You ought to buy a new one Leo.

Leo: If they had one.

Andy: Okay, there’s a gold one coming Leo. It’s Champaign. It’s not Setrepio gold.

(Laughs)

Leo: Apple and Google agree with Microsoft and Yahoo that it’s okay to read your users’ emails. Actually the Microsoft story is not a particularly scary story, although I think people interpreted it that way. Probably because of all the Microsoft Scroogle ads. In which they assert that Google is reading your email. And then they read the email of an employee who is stealing company secrets. And it scares everybody to death, but if you look at the terms of service in all of these online services, ICloud, Gmail, yahoo mail, and of course, Microsoft outlook, it says, under certain circumstances, we can read your mail.

Jason: Right. I think the question is people have always understood that might be like a subpoena or something, but in Microsoft case there was a writer who received Microsoft intellectual property, it’s absolutely true. And they’re like “Oh! That’s one of our sites! Let’s read his mail!”

Leo: Yeah, Hotmail, at the time. Well the foolish thing is they were using MSN messenger, Hotmail, and SkyDrive to share all this stuff, stolen from Microsoft.

Jason: Clearly, iMessage should have been used.

Leo: Yes! Then you’d have to get a subpoena.

Andy: Gmail…

Leo: Microsoft says, and I think this is good. That from now on, they will have a process that will duplicate the subpoena process.

Rene: It’s like a quads eye legal process.

Leo: They will have a review by a former judge, General counsel, who will review this and see if it steps up to the level that you’d have to submit to get an actual subpoena. And what I’d like to do, is hear Yahoo, Apple, and Google to do the same thing. Now Apple I trust. For some reason you trust Apple, right? They seem to be working hard to protect privacy.

Rene: Also the fallout from this kind of thing. You’ve got to imagine that Microsoft didn’t think about the fallout, but now everyone is going to be thinking about the fallout of this kind of activity.

Leo: Right. Well, this happened, and we were talking about this yesterday, or maybe it was on TWiT, but this happened before the snow in revelations. This Microsoft thing! And I think in post-NSA revelations, everybody is now a lot more aware of this issue, and had that happened in the last few months Microsoft probably would have been a bit more careful.

Andy: Also and the language in the Microsoft terms of service was a lot more explicit than Google or Apples. Where it’s saying that… You would expect these services to say that, please don’t expect that your mail will never be read by anybody inside, because it’s possible that for customer service purposes, we’re going to have to make sure things are working properly. It’s possible that whatever we’re doing with your mail to keep the service running meets some legal definition of, ‘we’re looking at your mail,’ and so that’s what we’re doing. In Microsoft there’s actual explicit language saying, we will look at your mail if it’s in defense of Microsoft interests.

Leo: Right.

Andy: And it’s like, “Yeah, lets red flag that one and circle around when we’re talking about whether or not we’re going to use the service or not.” So I love that there is, if there’s not this term as in the social conversation that becomes like a standard, Russian dash cam video. This is your basic Russian dash cam video accident, yeah, you’re getting confidential information from Microsoft via a Microsoft free mail account. Yeah, let’s reshare that 40 times because that’s going to be epic.

Leo: When Tim Cook said we’ve got products coming out in some brand new categories, we thought he was talking about the iWatch. Maybe he was talking about a 12 inch Macintosh.

Rene: I would like one Leo.

Andy: Is that a new category though?

Jason: I’m not sure that’s a new category though.

Leo: Oh come on! Give me a break!

Rene: In the broadest, most possible definition.

Andy: It’s a very Samsungy thing. They’ve got 11 inch, the 12 inch, and the 13 inch.

Leo: Yeah!

Jason: I somehow think if they have a 12 inch MacBook, they won’t necessarily have the 11 inch, or the 13.

Leo: Well first of all, this is a rumor!

Andy: I think the 13 inch would go, because they’ve got the 13 inch MacBook pro. And they’re now thin and light enough, and the battery life is now similar enough, you have a lot of people confused about do I want the air, or do I want the Retina? So if this is true, I would guess, I would put my money on losing the MacBook retina.

Leo: This is a leak from a forum. Actually it’s a forum post on weiphone.com it’s a Chinese site WEI, and although the author of the post has posted leaks, and legitimate leaks, and photos in the past, so has some credibility. The poster says there will be a new MacBook pro line. As well as the 12 inch notebook. The MacBook Air updates are coming soon, he writes. MacBook pro updates won’t occur until September.

Rene: Like last year.

Leo: New 12 inch notebook, without fan assembly. Comes with a new track pad, the design that doesn’t include the mechanical button. How would…? Oh, you tap instead of click.

Rene: Uh huh.

Leo: I don’t mind that. Because I actually do turn on tapping.

Andy: I hate it! That’s one of the first things I do, I turn off tap and click because that gets so many bad clicks. And also, what’s wrong with that, actual having mechanical feedback, the report indicates they’ve got something to actually represent the sensation of mechanical…Some sort of tactile feedback that says you’ve just clicked something.

Jason: Like a finger trampoline.

Rene: Well the interesting thing is 12 inches…Jason’s got an 11.6 inch screen, because Apple just rounds these things.

Leo: So that’s almost a 12 inch screen.

Rene: So who knows what 12 inch would be. 12. Something. But they’ve been trying to do a retina MacBook air for a while now and…

Leo: See that’s what I care about is the retina, not the size.

Rene: Absolutely, but they just can’t cram enough battery in and if you look at, retina is always a compromise. The Retina IPad 3 had to get thicker and heavier. The Retina IPad mini had to get slightly thicker and heavier. If they have to get slightly bigger to make a retina IPad Air, that goes from 11.6 to 12.X I’m okay with that because it’s hard to go back from Retina. You start getting sandpaper on your eyeballs, it’s just…

Andy: I haven’t had the same problem.

Leo: No sandpaper?

Andy: I hear lots of people say that, I respect that opinion, but I have a problem with a non-retina phone screen, I have a problem with the non-retina iPad, but I don’t keep my face 8 inches away from my laptop screen. It’s far enough away that I certainly notice the improvement in a retina display. But I would not have bought a MacBook Pro, specifically so I could get a retina screen. It’s not that big of a deal breaker for me.

Leo: Well I do go back and forth.

Andy:  And Rene is right if they have to compromise anything that’s good about the MacBook Air to get a retina display in there, it’s not worth it. It has to be the $999 machine that gets 41 hours of battery life, and weighs as little as a second thought.

(laughs)

Leo: This is the lightest Air we’ve ever made.

Jason: The thing that scares me about that report is the fanless thing, because okay, these processers can generate some heat, and that sounds kind of like a gimmick, because well fans make noise and we don’t like noise, so we’ll take the fan out. And ask somebody who has that original MacBook air that overheated and turned off a core so you couldn’t use it. It was running but you couldn’t use it! That scares me that you end up with other heat problems for something that I’m not sure why it does it need to have a fan.

Andy: Exactly, it’s a solution to a problem that nobody is complaining about.

Jason: And maybe they’ve come up with a clever way to do it, and that’ll be great but I get worried that that is a bunch of problems waiting to happen.

Rene: It’s 12 inches because there was going to be a slip stream in the middle of the computer. Like Leo’s MacPro.

Leo: Like my MacPro!

Andy: It’s like the McClair, it’s going to make a little wing that pops up in the back, and signal that it’s going faster than…

Jason: The spoiler.

Rene: So there were rumors for a long time about Apple working on an arm based MacBook air. And Broadwell looks like it’s going to be good enough that they won’t have to make the sacrifices that arm would mean.

Leo: How much rewriting would they have to do though?

Rene; It’s probably already done. In the same way they had Intel running.

Andy: Exactly, that’s what I was going to say.

Rene: For years…

Andy: I bet they have it working.

Rene: Yeah.

Leo: But what about apps? They’re going to have to all be rewritten.

Rene: It’ll be as painful as the Intel transition was.

Leo: Right.

Rene: But I think with Broadwell, with the ability to do what they’re doing now, they sort of don’t have to make that switch.

Leo: What’s the Intel emulation like on a Broadwell chip?

Rene: Well Broadwell is Intel, so Broadwell is going to be their next, whatever.

Leo: I’m sorry I shouldn’t have said Intel, I mean what’s the X86 emulation like?

Rene: That’s going to be a question.

Leo: Yeah, can you do it?

Rene: But I think the power savings, computers have gotten fast enough, all of us can do anything we need to do on a modern computer. So Apple is changing tactics and doing battery life now, and power efficiencies, display, yeah. So these are the things that are increasingly important. And Intel was in trouble there for a while with their CPUs, but now with Haswell and Broadwell, I think they’re getting to a place where everything that, an arm based Air could have done.

Leo: Same leakers says, Iwatch not for a while. Still just prototype. Maybe not even until 2015. Late 2014 at least.

Rene: I would rather they take their time and do it well. I don’t understand Apples not doing new categories. Apple needs a watch. 60 days or they’re dead. I do not want a bad Iwatch. I would pay good money not to get an iwatch until it is ready.

Andy: I think if anything all the movement on the inward side, the Pebble side this year, if anything it buys Apple some more time. Because no one, there is interest in it, there are people who wear pebbles all the time, who like them, but there’s not that kind of real consumer support that would tell Apple, “Oh my god, we really have to ship this year or else we’re going to start missing that boat.” So, I have no inside information on what their timeline is on a watch, or excuse me a wearable device, but maybe four months ago I would have said 2014. Now late 2014 at the earliest, and I wouldn’t even be surprised to see 2015.

Leo: If you watched Jimmy Fallen and Billy Joel duet using Loopy on an IPad, perhaps you’re curious about the technology used. I’ll jump ahead a little bit here. It was pretty cool, they each had handheld microphones. They had an iPad between them, and they would sing the loops. I’m sorry, from Apple insider.com, the story of how they did it. So they’re recording the loops and then singing over on top of it. But it turns out they had an apogee quartet as well, connected to the iPad mini. That allowed them to have standalone microphones. I have to say they’ve, the loopy app is now half price on the app stores marketing move. And I think a lot of people downloaded it immediately, and found out you actually have to have talent to use it.

Andy: Somebody went from deciding that perhaps next year I’ll replace my 10 year old car to lets buy that cabin cruiser boat next week. That was a gift.

Leo: Well the iPad is only 4 or 500 bucks. The apogee quartet is $1,400.

Rene: You’ve got Billy Joel there, you’re going to want him to sound good.

Leo: Yeah, I think it’s perfectly fair to get the… so I haven’t used this, anybody used this? It’s a multichannel audio interface for the iPad, which is a very interesting idea. 4 analog inputs, so it has mic preamps and phantom powers. That means you can use any mics you want. Good mics. Low latency monitoring. USB 2.0 audio, 24 bit, 192 kilohertz A to D and D to A. Good quality. That makes an iPad pretty much like a recording studio.

Andy: Pretty impressive that the iPad is a device that can actually exploit audio of that high bit rate too. That’s saying… And keep up with it. If anybody is looking for a story 0h, of course you can do that with an iPad if you have a 1500 dollar device. Bu the source is no, if you have a really good audio, the iPad is not going to dumb it down, it’s going to actually treat it like really good audio.

Leo: Yeah, pretty cool.

Rene: It’s the same thing with the IOS devices becoming interface, it’s another thing with so many cool parts becoming technology.

Leo: Yeah. Great article by, again, Mike Allegan, Mike gets more bonus points here, on Cult of Mac about a technique that is built into IOS 7, we’ve known about for a long time, called mesh networking. It allows an IOS 7 device that has no access to the internet, to get to the internet by another IOS7 device. And there’s an app, and by the way I downloaded it, and don’t it’s stupid. Fire Chat.

Rene: Consider it a proof on concept.

Leo: It’s a proof of concept. Thank you! Because boy the chats I was watching was, wow!

Andy: Can deliver an emoji con in a way that’s never been done before.

Rene: Remember those little cartoons of one guy jumping across the river one crocodile at a time? That’s sort of what you’re doing here. Its multi-peer. So here’s a little bit of Wi-Fi, a little bit of Bluetooth, and a little bit of WIFI, trying to find your way to someone else.

Leo: Yeah, and you see everybody else along the way, which is a little weird. But I could set it up, I’ll install it right now, I’ll put it on here. It’s an IPhone app, but I can put it on my iPad. Fire Chat. So tell me about the mesh networking. You know, Mike says this is a feature that can be used in a lot of other ways and it can be very significant. Airdrop uses it I guess.

Rene: Yeah. It sort of brings a lot of things together, so you have these Bluetooth 4.0 low energy, who are sort of already piggybacks on Wi-Fi. You have these devices that do peer to peer networks. Add hock Wi-Fi Networks. And what this basically does, is if neither of us are connected to the internet, but you know, there’s another device maybe I can get to that device, maybe he’s connected to the internet, I can do a short hop off of him. And then find a Bluetooth connection to somebody else. It’s sort of like, literally, you’re in a space suit pushing yourself from asteroid, from asteroid, to get to another planet. You’re not relying on a highway or an infrastructure to do it.

Leo: Yeah.

Andy: The big deal is that it makes communications possible even If you don’t have line of site. How many times have you been in a hotel, like at a conference and you’re the only room that doesn’t have access to Wi-Fi, or can’t get a signal on the phone? But that’s okay, because there are a hundred other people inside the hotel who also have the same sort of device, running the same sort of operating system. So long as you can reach the iPad in the room next door. The iPad can reach the iPhone 2 doors down. You basically have this snaky sort of route that gives you internet even though you’re basically in the Econolodge dungeon.

Rene: Yeah.

Leo: Mesh networking is the next big thing especially with a lot of wearable devices. As you move around the idea that you can then connect to something that you can connect to the internet is great.

Rene: Yeah, there won’t be an LT radio or watch for a while now, but also in third world countries or in places where people are interfering deliberately with traditional internet, it delivers communications that might not be as outstanding as we’re use to in our broadband soaked world. But we’ll let you have connection in this hostile circumstance.

Leo: Meanwhile Fire chat feature brings back the old AOL rooms. Because I tell you, whatever is going on in here… Can you see that Chad? I don’t know if you can.

Jason: I was told that there was very inappropriate things that are going on. So…

Leo: Go ahead and show it. If there’s anything inappropriate I’ll hide it with my hand. But its things like Hey guys. How are you? Yo, I’m alright. You? Good! Vancouver, Saint Louis, Indianapolis, Union City, There’s also nearby and there’s somebody, a couple of…

Andy: Hello, I also have mesh network? Do you have mesh network? I have mesh network.

Rene: Again, proof of concept.

Leo: Yes. And anybody who’s watching the show wants to join me in fire chat, I don’t know how you even type…

Andy: Whatever you want, it’ll be right in the feed!

(Laughs)

Andy: It sounds like it’s going to be a problem, but I’m sure everybody is going to be nice and polite.

Leo: Oh look! Anybody watching TWiT.TV. Yeah, it was in the Indian Ocean. Oh! That’s another subject. Don’t hurt, so there’s a bunch of stuff going, on. I don’t even understand what the point of this is. It reminds me of one of those AOL. Hey! Hi IPhone, good to see you. Everybody in our audience is now trying to get on fire chat. So I guess I could then, if I knew somebody else was on, I could add them, right? I’m Leo, if you want to say hi!

Rene: Maybe things like Airdrop, and other applications that come up that take advantage of multi-peering.

Leo: There’s a good... It’s nice, so if you don’t have to be on the same Wi-Fi network, I don’t have to be on the same Wi-Fi network as you, to use Airdrop, we can share files just using…

Rene: I’ve done that in the airplanes. MS hipster had a good article on the multi peering technology. Just in general and its’ something that developers, that’s the nice thing it’s not just proprietary air drop, Apple made an API, so any developer can use it for their products.

Leo: Yeah.

Andy: I was talking to someone on Twitter about this when they’re suggesting if Apple wants to collect fitness data, wouldn’t it be a cool idea to have a restaurant that, when they give you your check, wouldn’t it be a cool if there was a way to download the nutritional information of what you ordered. And I had to debate with a couple people because everyone was saying oh it should be Bluetooth, it should be Bluetooth, and I was saying maybe if it was just a QR code then they could take the receipt with them and they could actually make it work. Because one of the problems of wireless communication is there’s always that first step of making the connection, and making sure they’re both on the same wave link. One of the benefits of technologies like Mesh is that it’s your configuration. It’s just the fact that these two are simply in the same, consuming the same about of oxygen means that they have the ability to talk to each other.

Leo: (laughs) I’m just having fun chatting!

Kevin: Are they saying something rebel?

Leo: I put a selfie on there!

Rene: It is dangerous to have this app open while Leo is trying to host a show.

Andy; I’m not sure this is worth $1.94 a minute, Leo. You promised you’d us the goods!

Leo: It’s really a strange experience to join a chat room where people are not talking about anything in general and they’re all just…

Rene: It’s like chat relets

Leo: Yeah, it’s like chat relets. I’m just going to leave it running and we won’t show it on the air but… (laughs)

Andy: Leo, this would be a good time to have the monocle in your eye so you can kind of pop up when you see something.

Leo: What? As badly as the Apple 5C sold, and I think everybody is saying it sold badly. It beat Blackberry, It beat Windows phone, it beat every Android Flagship in the fourth quarter, and it still was a flop.

Rene: Well by whose definition? Maybe my Medias definition it was a flop but my man of phones from 5S sold, it’s not the same, but a lot of companies would give their eye teeth to have that sort of sale.

Jason: Although, there have been some sort of reports that Apple maybe made a lot of these and didn’t sell them, and had more inventory than it expected. So maybe Apple thought that this would be a bigger hit.

Rene: Well they said that, right?

Jason: Well I know people buying them. I know people in my family, and friends, who’ve bought them.

Leo: I have one, I like it.

Jason: …Instead of the 5S because they don’t need the 5S and they want to get the cheaper model.

Rene: My Mom reviewed it for Imore last week for me.

Jason: My mom is going to get one when she’s visiting us in a couple months.

Leo: Kiss of death. Moms IPhone.

Jason: It’s another iPhone!

Andy: I really get tired. I’m sorry.

Jason: Go ahead, Andy.

Andy: I was just saying, I really get tired of conversations like this, because unless you are running Apple, what do you care how much the 5C, or how well or poorly the 5C is selling? So long as it’s making profits for Apple. What do you care that it’s quote ‘dog’ or quote “it’s a failure.”? And even on the other side of it, what do you care that it’s outselling the Galaxy S5, or any other phone?

Leo: Right. Alright.

Andy: You should not care about this.

Leo: I’m sorry I brought it up.

Andy: I’m not saying to you, because you are rational. You’re at least willing to exploit this story for content. So I can respect that. But when people are saying, you know what, I’ve got this to say to all the Apple haters out there, you’re so called failure phone is actually outselling your precious little windows device.

Rene: The only reason why I care is I want the HDC1 to sell enough to make an HDC2. Because that company doesn’t have enough money as Apple. Apple will be just fine regardless of the sales of this phone, but I do want them to make more experimental phones.

Leo: So what you’re saying is if you love Apple, you should all go out and buy the new HDC1.

Rene: If you love the HDC1. I’m going to get one because I love HDC. I’ve liked them since the trio approach.

Leo: I’m going to get one. Starwave. It’s the sentrio starter. We’re just supporting them to continue doing their fine work.

Rene: Absolutely. Here Intel, you can have my money.

Andy: So basically documentary about Scobband tapes and HDC same sort of emotional response.

Leo; Same thing, exactly. Hey good news if you use Apples ITunes. And I think Apple is going to try to promote the fact that this thing exists, because you know what? It’s great, but I don’t think anybody knows it even exists, right? Because it’s kind of hidden away in the music app. And you know, I’ve got, you know, you’ve got Spotify, or google music, or whatever you’ve already got working.

Rene: US and Australia only still.

Leo: Okay, sorry Canadian.

Rene: I would use it!

Leo: One rumor is they’re going to separate it out, and make it a standalone app, which I think is a good idea. They’ve added some new channels including by the way NPR now, so this isn’t music, which I find interesting. You can listen to a stream of NPR talk, news shows.

Rene: Wow.

Leo: Yeah! They’ve got a great play list under the featured stations. You can create your own stations.

Rene: I’d like to see a TWiT channel…

Leo: So what do I need to do to get a deal like NPR? So now you zoom in chad! What do I need to do to do that?

Rene: That’ll be interesting if they do that to see….

Leo: Who their partners are.

Rene: Who their partners are, like SIRI and NTV, or if they open it up a little bit.

Leo: Yeah, let me turn it up and see what they’re talking about now on NPR.

Rene: It’s quack work!

Leo: Of course, it is

Andy: The system is down, the system is down.

Leo: It’s music show. Yeah, because the last thing I heard was talk so this is part of the problem, you can’t tell what you’re listening to.

Rene: Station Break.

Leo: Yeah, station break or something, but anyway.

Rene: That would actually be great if they started using, you know, some of these features for podcasts and things like that, you could shuffle through those.

Leo: Yeah! Apple! I take back everything I said.

Rene: Put me on your radio.

Leo: Put me on your radio. Alright, we’re going to take a break and when we come back you Pics ladies and gentlemen get it together. Give me something! Something you can use in Canada.

Rene: Yes! And Petaluma.

Leo: And Petaluma! But first a word from Audible.com. Audible is our wonderful, wonderful source of audio books. More than 150 thousand strong, of all kinds. Read by some of the best readers. These books take life in your mind, and whether you’re in the car, or at the gym. Whether you’re walking the dog or doing the dishes, audible is just a fabulous way to read. And it’s pretty much the only way I do books these days. I know Andy and Jason are big audible fans so I won’t steal their thunder. What are you listening to Jason, these days?

Jason: I just finished a book, that’s actually nominated for the nebula award. Which is from the Sci-Fi writers association. It’s from a local author, she’s in Berkley. Named Helene Wacker, I believe it’s pronounced. The Gollum and the Jinni, and it’s really great. It’s set about in the late 19^th century New York City. And it’s about immigrants, and among the immigrants is a Jinni who is trapped in human form. And a Gollum who’s been made kind of by a renegade rabbi as a wife for a guy who dies during his passage to North America. So she’s trying to make her way in the Jewish society of New York, and the Genie is trying to do it in the Middle Eastern society. And of course they meet, and there are interesting things that happen. It’s a lot of fun and a really good book!

Leo: It sounds like an Isaac Bishea Singers story that went wrong. Horribly, horribly wrong.

Jason: It’s funny. It’s got a little feel of maybe even Cavalier and Clay…

Leo: Oh I love that! That was a great book.

Jason: And, it’s really good! I liked it a lot!

Leo: And George Woodall narrates. I just love his voice, he’s a great narrator. Let me play a little bit of it. This is the Golem and the Jinni.

Golem and the Jinni: Knocked on the door and waited. After some minutes he heard a shuffling step, the door opened a hands width, revealing a man of perhaps 70. He was bald, save for a frizz.

Leo: You see you listen to this and you go, “wow! I just can’t wait to hear more of this!” This is a drive around the block book! The Golem and the Jinni. There’s a pick for you. We’re going to get one of these for you for free. I like to give you some choices though. Andy Inhakto what are you listening to?

Andy: Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. About a really, really special set of recordings. This is the radio drama that was starring Sir John Gielgud as Sherlock Holmes, and his long, long time acting partner as Sir Ralph Richards as Watson.  And the rest. And oh boy! I have bought a couple of different versions of Sherlock Holmes stories, like in my day. In my using of Audible. But as soon as I clicked on, I heard about this and I clicked on it. This is Sir John Gielgud, speak like this and it was very simple. It’s like Oh goodness, I want to listen to that! I want that on every device I own that can play audio. I even want that on devices that can’t play audio, just so I’ve got that touch of class in my wallet at all times!

Leo: 16 episodes. 7 half hours. Let me play a little bit of this.

Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: Which he wrote some time ago to a perilous young fellow in the country. Only imprudent mind you, but would be quite sufficient to break of the match. And your coalition to meet him. And make what terms I can. I think he’s hear Watson will you let him in?

Leo: These are great, so these are radio plays.

Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: Will you come in please?

Leo: I’m going to listen to this and then I’ll start talking like that from now on!  Wow, that’s great!  These are from the mid 50’s, with Sir John Gielgud, Sir Ralph Richardson, and yes, a little Orson Welles as the evil Moriarty.  Perfect casting; I knew Moriarty was an American!  Alright; how do you get this for free?  Here’s how:  Go to audible.com/macbreak you’ll be signing up for the gold account. That means you get a book a month plus the daily digest of either the New York Times or the Wall Street journal. You’re first month is free, so you can cancel anytime in those first 30 days and you won’t pay a penny, but you will keep your book, whatever book you choose. I think you’ll want to keep doing it because every time I get a new audible book I start listening to it, & I just love it, I’m such a fan. They have these old radio shows too which is great, including the original radio plays of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy which are a must for everybody’s collection.  Get it free, audible.com/macbreak.  All right, Rene, your pick of the week, Sir.

Rene: My pick of the week is not a new app, but a new version of an app called Transit.  Now Apple’s famous ---iOS6 dropped transit directions, bus directions, train directions, Metro directions or subways, depending on where you lived, so Transit app has been trying to fill that void.  Full disclosure, it’s a Montreal company; so I’m affectionate with them to begin with. It’s a small shop; what they just released is their iOS7 updates.  They made a lot of waves in the beginning because they had almost a Windows metro like look for their app that was very elegant, very well done.  Now it’s still not exactly the way iOS7 is, but it’s got a lot more iOS7 feel to it. They’ve been adding more places all the time and originally launched with I think two or three cities, but they’re adding to it.

Leo: 62 cities now.

Rene. Yes, and it’s an arduous process.  If anyone is wondering why Apple didn’t do it the first year, you have to go to Municipal authority’s or data companies and one by one get the rights to use their data.

Leo: Well there’s a standard, an open data standard. This is the thing that kind of irks me. A lot of principalities have decided that this should be a profit setter for them so they’ve released their own apps, or they don’t support open data and that’s very frustrating. I think it’s frustrating to Apple and Google both as they would like to include this transit information.

Rene: Absolutely; this is a phenomenal looking app, it works great, I use it all the time where I am, and it supports I think you said 67 cities now.

Leo: A lot of Canadian cities too.

Rene: Yes; a lot of American city’s too. And it’s not only a beautiful way to get around, but a beautiful and great way to get around.

Leo: That’s nice; really good. It’s the transitapp.com and it is an android version if you’re forced to use an HTC1. Jason Snell, what do you have for us?

Jason:  I have an app that full disclosure was written by a guy I’ve known since college, it’s called Romantimatic, it’s an iOS app, it’s $2.00 it’s by Greg Knauss.  Romantimatic got a lot of press coverage. A lot of really blistering negative press coverage by people who like to judge other person, which is people, on the internet. Here’s the great thing about Romantimatic. Romantimatic is not a fake out for people who don’t love their partner.  Romantimatic is a reminder app that reminds you gently that you might want to send a nice little message via text to your significant other telling them that you love them. Now it doesn’t send it for you on a timer, it just reminds you that you need to send it. It does provide some suggestions of things you could say. You can set your own messages, you can use one of the pre-stock messages which includes I believe, a I love you in cling on, and elvish, & some other obscure made up language that it’s got a Mogees and then you can also set up your own. It will even tell you how often you’ve sent various messages so you can vary it. It is a tool for people with iPhones who maybe don’t take the time they should for their partner. To have their iPhone say “Hey, you should stop for a minute, take the time to say something nice to your partner.”

Leo: Yeah, don’t tell your partner that!

Jason: Oh she knows.  I have to sometimes say this isn’t Greg’s app, this is me.

Leo:  Ha-ha, really! That’s the drawback! I actually have a python script that does that.

Jason: One of the pre-fab messages is; “This is a totally an original message” But you know, it’s $2.00 and some people really get up on their high horse and say “oh well if you need to be reminded to tell your significant other that you love them, there’s something terribly wrong with you and I’m judging you” OK, whatever. I think sometimes we get our heads down & we’re working on stuff and time passes & so that phone just reminding you, hey just take a moment; I think it’s nice.

Leo: It makes it easy to choose your sweetheart; change your sweetheart—

Jason: Should you choose to, I suppose, and it’s got a very nice set of pre-sets.

Leo: Can I write my own?

Jason: It’s got a sense of humor, and yes you can write your own.  It’s light hearted; it doesn’t take itself too seriously. $2.00.

Leo:  I like it. Romantimatic by Extra Moon LLC for iOS.  Andy Ihnatko, your pick of the week.

Andy:  We’re talking about Apple making deals with Cable Company so I thought I’d plug two things.  My favorite cable channel; Turner classic movies and also the watch TCM app, which to my eye, is exactly how you should do a mobile viewing app for a cable channel. It’s really well designed for one thing, but look at the features it gives you. You get the East coast feed so whatever is actually being broadcast on TCM right now you can watch it live. So if you’re watching it in your bedroom cable box and then you start walking thru the house, whatever scene you left at is going to be where you’ll pick off from right here, because you’re getting live stream.  You’re getting the East coast feed and the West coast feed so if I came in half way thru a movie I can catch the rest of it later on in the day, but also not all, but most or many of the movies that they are currently playing area also available on demand.  I was disappointed that I could not see Zardoz on demand, but….

Leo:  Sean Connery…..IS Zardoz.

Andy:  This is exactly how you should do it, I wish every that single channel did it this way instead of saying “oh, I’m sorry, that movie or episode that you wanted to see has not been unlocked yet. You can see the episode from season 2, five years ago, and it’s interrupted 3 times with commercials that you can’t fast forward thru.  The philosophy seems to be that if you subscribe to Turner classic movies, and you should because it’s the most awesome channel on the entire cable dial, they’ll say nope, if you want to watch it, whatever, whenever, they’ll thank you for your money, say please continue to give us money for our channel, here; have a nice real cool free app.

Leo:  Thank you.  Kim Marks gave us an ear warm this week on google last week that I want to spread now to every other person that hasn’t seen that show. It’s called 2048; have you played it? You showed us three’s, this is like three’s only it’s two’s.

Jason: I had to delete three’s, it was ruining my life, I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t do anything.

Leo:  This is web based, same thing, you’re matching up numbers.  It’s subtly different and I’m not sure how it is.  There are a lot of implications. This is the definitive. If you just google 2048 you’ll find the web implications.

Jason:  what you need to do is play the Dr. Who addition.

Leo:  There are infinite…..You have a Dr. Who two’s?

Jason: Yeah, I started with the first Dr. makes the 2^nd and you can go all the way up.

Leo: What’s the URL for that?

Jason: I just put it in the chat room.

 Leo: OK, that’s awesome.  It’s: gamesusvsth3m.com/2048-doctor-who-edition. This is fun, and I don’t even watch Dr. Who! The point of these games is you don’t really need to know what you’re doing. You just keep pressing buttons until something happens.

Jason:  All you need is something better you’re supposed to be doing instead of this!

Leo: That’s exactly right. All you need is a column you’re on deadline with and this will seem like the best game you ever played.

Jason: You’re watching “Leo plays games on the internet”.

Andy: My only disapproval is there’s only one game I’m interested playing called 2048 and its Robotron 2048

Leo: That’s a different one, another good one though.  All right Ladies  & Gentlemen; this concludes this portion of “Leo plays games on the internet”. Coming up; “Leo buys a TiVo on the internet”, a very special edition.  I want to thank everyone for being here, especially our two in studio guests; it’s so nice to have you and Rene.  We see a lot of you! Especially despite the fact that you’re all the way diagonally over there!

Rene: I’m trying. Get some nice weather once in a while.

Leo: We love having you! Rene Ritchie’s at imore.com which is really the definitive place to figure out what’s going on in the Apple world. Thank you for doing that mobile nation also. Crackberry, etc.

Rene: Can I get a quick plug in for a show? We’ve been recording Debug lately, we’ve done an interesting art, we had the guy on who did the NT port to deck, and then we had dot net and then we had Miguel de Icaza for mono. From that we went to Siracusa arguing about mono versus objective C and then we’ve just recorded, which won’t be out for a couple weeks; Ken Ferry who did auto layout and passbook at Apple and now has his own app coming out.

Leo:  You really have good people on, where can I find the debug?

Rene: it’s iMore.com/debug

Leo: You guys have too many shows! imore.com/debug

Jason: Rene has more podcasts than I do and I have a lot of them.

Leo: You too? This podcasting thing might take off.

Rene: I have to listen to yours and Leo’s and mine.

Leo: What do you do, Jason Snell? I know you have the incomparable, which is fabulous,

Jason: We have the incomparable, go to incomparable.com, we have a new spin-off called total party kill where we play dungeons & dragons; on the internet for your amusement, incompetently I might add. That seems to be a thing, and then we were doing clockwise on Techive which is me and Dan Morin and a couple guests every week.

Leo: Wow, you are a busy busy boy. And of course he is also editorial director at IG which apparently requires no oversight whatsoever. McWorld.com.

Jason: Nope, runs itself.

Leo: So you can do podcasts!

Jason: Sure.

Leo: Good man, I like that.  Andy Ihnatko also has a 5x5 podcast; Ihnatko’s Almanac and is a regular here on MacBreak Weekly.

Andy: Yes, absolute 100 coming up in a couple weeks so we’re preparing for that, if you want to check it out. My blog has been rather fallow for a couple months as I’ve been trying to figure out how to create WordPress themes that don’t stink. I decided to throw some money at the problem so now there’s a new theme and I’m actually blogging a little bit more often there too. Ihnatko.com. The rite of passage is that you have to know how to spell my last name correctly.

Leo: I have no idea how to spell it!

Andy: And those of you who hated me last year for switching to Android and for the three part-er that I wrote for TechHive for the reasons why, there’s going to be a follow-up coming in green blog very very soon. It will help renew your hate for me, so what I’m saying is bring it on! Whatever it is you’ve been kicking, it’s now shriveled like a fig so you can’t hurt me there anymore. So I now have the strength again to tell you how it’s going.  Hopefully we’ll be doing some more stuff. I’ve been on a semi-sabbatical for a few months that has now ended, so it’s like “How many of these 18 things that I want to do this week am I going to get to.”

Leo: I think I’m going to start referring people to Ihnatko.com because it’s all there. You’re writing your podcast as you’re speaking.

Andy: Yes, I’m fixing up as I go along which is really embarrassing, it’s just that I’m the guy that wrote his own blogging software in the mid 90’s because none existed and I kept thinking PHP; I can learn PHP and I can learn CSS but there are people who are doing nothing but writing great blog software with that stuff, and I can’t,  I stink at this and my heart is in the right place and I’m learning the right stuff but I’m just not as good at it and you’re telling me that for $40.00 I can just buy something that Good?  OK, here’s $40.00. I’m an old person. I don’t have the time or energy anymore, I just want things done.

Leo: Thank you all for being here, we do MacBreak Weekly every Tuesday 11:00 a.m. pacific, 2:p.m. Eastern; 1800 UTC on twit.tv. Live is always good, but if you can’t watch live we’ve got like Tivo, we’ve got on demand audio and video after the fact, Actually you can watch us on Tivo as a matter of fact.  All you’ve got to do is go to twit.tv/mbw or subscribe in your favorite pod catcher including Tivo if you want to do it that way. Thanks for joining us everybody, now back to work or MacWorld expo; break is over!