MacBreak Weekly 428 (Transcript)

Leo Laporte: It's time for MacBreak Weekly! Our Veteran's Day version and a salute to all of our arms forces members. Past, future and present and our thanks to all of you for your service. Coming up, Alex Lindsay, Rene Ritchie and yes Andy Inhatko, we'll talk about the latest Mac news. No, you don't have to worry, iOS is not completely boned. That's coming up next, on MacBreak Weekly.

Announcers: Netcasts you love, from people you trust. This is TWiT! Bandwidth for MacBreak Weekly is provided by CacheFly. That's C-A-C-H-E-F-L-Y dot com.

Leo: This is MacBreak Weekly Episode 428, recorded November 11^th, 2014.

Big Boy Pants

MacBreak Weekly is brought to you by Audible.com. To download a free audiobook of your choice, go to Audible.com/macbreak. And by SquareSpace. The all in one platform that makes it fast and easy to create your own professional website or online portfolio. Now introducing SquareSpace 7 with even better site management tools and other improvements. For a free two week trial and 10% off, go to SquareSpace.com and use the offer code MacBreak. And by Personal Capital. With Personal Capital you'll finally have all your financial life in one place, and get a clear view of everything you own. Best of all, it's free! To sign up, go to PersonalCapital.com/macbreak. It's time for MacBreak Weekly, the show where we cover the latest Apple news of which there is little, but we'll find a way. We'll always find a way. That's because we have some of the best gab fest mongers in the biz. Starting with Andy Inhatko, Andy I have no idea, Inhatko.

Andy Inhatko: Don't know if you just called me a gab fest mongrel, but it is accurate and I will embrace it.

Leo: (laughing) Great to have you, what is that picture behind you that says “note?”

Andy: Oh, that's a from a research lab in the Boston public library. It's like a very very old call slip box, and if I zoomed out on it...

Leo: Wow.

Andy: It's like this beautiful, it's been there since like 1963.

Leo: It looks like it's done by a 1930s cartoonist, that exclamation mark particularly stylish.

Andy: We used to know how to do good handwriting back then, and if you were a librarian who liked to have thing in numerical order, like 80,000 objects in precise numerical order, line spacing, kerning, these are important to you.

Leo: Yes.

Andy: So I didn't go to the library to photograph that, but I was looking up some stuff like, oh that's just a beautiful object, and I wonder if... if I hear one complaint about oh jeez those old filthy boxes, I'm just terrified. I'll go to Amazon, I'll buy some new boxes if I can take one of those.

Leo: You've been getting some great pictures in Boston public buildings of late.

Andy: I give a talk at Mac Tech for about an hour about some of the stuff in the Boston Public Library. It is just a real palace and the best thing, whenever people ask me “Hey I've got one afternoon in Boston,” I always say Boston Public Library is what you do. Fenway Park is nice, the Museum of Science is nice but I think you want to go to the Boston Public Library.

Leo: Unless you're in Montreal in which case you want to see the Montreal Expos. Rene Ritchie.

Rene Ritchie: No. No, Leo. We lost to Kansas, we lost to the Royals in Kansas City, we lost the Expos to Washington. We have no more of the baseball.

Leo: (laughing)

Rene: We even lost the Nordiques to Colorado, we're not doing too well.

Leo: That's kind of cruel. That's kind of cruel of me, I'm sorry. I apologize.

Rene: They even took the hockey.

Leo: They even took our hockey. But you know what, they didn't take Rene Ritchie, he's still there. iMore.com, great to have you Rene.

Rene: Good to be here, Leo. Even if it is already going dark outside as we speak.

Leo: (laughs) No, really?

Rene: I mean I can see the sun setting, it's abysmal.

Leo: Wait a minute, it's 2:22 in Montreal. In the afternoon.

Rene: It will be dark by 4:30. It will just... yeah.

Leo: Wow.

Rene: Vampires love it, but the rest of us are kind of bummed.

Andy: As a matter of fact, I normally have these black out curtains next to here to keep out the sunlight, now I just remembered with daylight savings I can probably open these up because you're right, it's not sunset yet but the sun has decided “Yeah, I'm out of here. You guys have fun I'm going elsewhere.”

Leo: Back from his jaunts around the world, Mr. Alex Lindsay at the Pixel Corps. Great to have you in the studio with us.

Alex Lindsay: Good to be back.

Leo: Yeah, you've been doing some interesting things of late. I don't know how much I could talk about.

Alex: I'm actually allowed to talk about. I'm not allowed to talk about details.

Leo: You were at the Air and Space Museum.

Alex: Yes, last week.

Leo: Last week for a hang out for a movie.

Alex: Interstellar.

Leo: I watched it.

Alex: Yeah. How did it look?

Leo: It looked stunning. Is that the first time they've done... it must be the first time they've done a hang out there, but do they ever do any TV there?

Alex: They actually, it's kind of cool, the Air and Space Museum, this was in the beyond earth I think area, and they have actually this little stage and they have cameras that come down from these big risers, our cameras were little different from theirs so we figured we'd use ours, but we added lights and cameras and actors and all kinds of other stuff. But yeah you should definitely check it out, it's the Interstellar, I think you can just go to YouTube and search “Interstellar Hangout.”

Leo: It's really worth it, Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain. Really great.

Alex: I thought it was a really fun conversation. It was a really good one, and Matthew McConaughey is pretty intense.

Leo: Crazy.

Alex: Yes.

Leo: Alright alright alright.

Alex: He pays very good attention, I don't know if he was always like that.

Leo: Very focused, very focused.

Rene: Some people think he's a pessimist but he prefers to think himself as a realist.

Alex: Anyways, definitely worth checking out.

Leo: And a good movie. Did you guys see Interstellar yet?

Rene: No.

Andy: No, not yet.

Leo: Bring a lunch. Bring a lunch, it's long.

Andy: It's Chris Nolan and he's on my list of okay I've got to see that movie. I'm also now encouraged to see it by all the bellyaching I've been hearing. “Science isn't accurate, you know that that's not nearly safe. That astronaut suit isn't nearly warm enough to protect so and so.”

Leo: This is a little different because they ... there it is, see how good that looks. And then you can see the Air and Space Museum behind whoever that woman is.

Alex: (laughing)

Andy: Someone got in a tuxedo for this?

Leo: My imaginary girlfriend. Yeah.

Alex: They were all YouTube stars. So Cheryl Lazar was on and...

Leo: Yeah, great hangout members including...

Alex: Astronauts.

Leo: Yeah astronauts, physicists and people who could really talk about the science. The guy who worked on this worth the Nolans, because it was Christopher Nolan but I think is that his brother, the co-author?

Alex: Yeah.

Leo: He's a Nolan.

Alex: Yep.

Leo: Jonathan Nolan, worked with Kip Thorne, a physicist. In fact, the movie was inspired by Kip Thorne's work on black holes and Thorne himself did a lot of the calculations for how black holes, it's a spinning black hole which is apparently very unusual and the physics and calculations involved are much more complex. But you were telling me, was it you who told me that Kip Thorne was saying “Seeing the visualizations made for the movie, actually taught me. There was some science that I learned from that.”

Alex: And I'm not surprised, I think a lot of times- I hadn't heard that, but I think that Neil Degrasse said that this was the most accurate space film he'd ever seen.

Leo: And none of them are perfect, because as everybody says, story comes first in a movie.

Alex: Absolutely, but I think that Christopher Nolan is more committed to that, he's just a geek. So he really wants it to be as right as possible. But I think that, when you ground it as much in science as much as you can of course it just feels more real when you're watching it, but I think that one of the things that's really important is that visualization, I know that there's a lot of things around data that you learn very very quickly when you can see it real time or just see what your ideas are visualized. I think a lot of these physicists don't usually have access to tens of millions of dollars to visualize their ideas so they don't get to see what that is, and I think that that's the...

Leo: Here's a little clip from the movie, I think you'll enjoy this.

(clip begins)

Leo: This is not a clip from the movie.

Alex: Nope.

Leo: This is actually the live footage from the European Space Agency, the comet landing is coming up momentarily.

Alex: I'm afraid I'm always the paranoid one like what could possibly go wrong, you knock the comet off of its orbit and next thing you know it destroys Earth.

Leo: You know...

Alex: Not that I'm a Luddite.

Andy: Totally dissimilar to the first act of many movies. Totally dissimilar.

Alex: Yeah the problem is I watch too many like Deep Impact.

Leo: I think you'll enjoy Interstellar. I enjoyed it a lot. I think it's going to be a science fiction classic.

Alex: I can't wait.

Leo: Here's an interesting story. Let's move right into the Macintosh and the Apple news. You know that yesterday, Singles Day in China. Apparently their version of a Hallmark holiday. There has always been Children's Day and Grandparent's Day but there was never a Single's Day.

Alex: Is there a Valentine's Day or just a Single's Day? Like we don't care once you get married.

Leo: You know, the Chinese New Year is February 19^th so I'm wondering maybe this is in lieu of a Valentine's Day, so they have Single's Day and Ali Baba recorded huge sales. Partly because of this guy. He bought 99 iPhone 6s to form a heart in which he proposed to his girlfriend.

Rene: That's why there's a shortage.

Leo: She is surrounded by, and I've been telling you, in China 99 iPhone 6s, well anywhere. That's a lot of money.

Alex: The number may mean something but the bottom line is you've got to be lucky if you can afford 99 iPhones.

Andy: I'm sorry, I call BS. They've got the boxes. It seems like such a natural stunt for promoting iPhone sales. Let's set the scene, where you're this person's girlfriend, you've gotten to the scene and he's inviting you to step inside this big wall of like heart shaped iPhones, I don't think that any woman has been surprised by a wedding proposal and would she say, would she walk in, let him get through the entire thing and then say no? Or would she just say, “Tell you what, why don't you step out with me, and let's face away from the cameras and let's have a talk.” I don't...

Leo: Because she did, she said no.

Rene: If it had been 100 iPhones, she would have said yes.

Andy: That's how you make this into a viral sensation and I don't...

Leo: Oh you are just ruining my day.

Andy: I am here to drill holes in your rowboat Leo.

Leo: Next thing you'll tell me is that the Rosetta landing is just being staged.

Andy: Not staged, they're using mostly digital effects now, so they don't need to do a sound stage. I don't think they're doing a bunch of green-screen stuff that's mostly waterworks.

Leo: That looks real, come on!

Andy: I'm sorry, I should have said spoiler alert.

Leo: Now that you mention it, this is a little too perfect. It's two year's salary for this Chinese programmer, to buy 99 iPhones.

Alex: That's a good salary in China.

Rene: What does he do with them afterwards? What's the plan here? You have 99 of them, and then... does she get them? Is he giving them away?

Andy: China has the relationship with the United States where people come here to buy iPhones and sell them at markup, is there a place that's even more China than China where they can take those 99 where they can take them and make even more money off of them?

Rene: Japan?

Leo: My suspicion, now that you say it is this does seem like a promotional vehicle. Not necessarily for iPhones but more for Single's Day and go out and spend heavily. Single's Day is only a few years old, and I think created by Ali Baba.

Andy: Be a good consumer.

Rene: Ali Baba getting 99 iPhones seems realistic.

Leo: Yeah. Alright, I thought I'd mention that.

Rene: We're terrible people Leo, we're sorry.

Leo: Terrible people! I'm going to tell you how Interstellar ends Andy, and you'll be sorry!

Andy: Big Hero 6 is a lovely lovely movie, it's a very heavily pro Mac shop, there are Disney animation...

Leo: You're going to be... speaking of pro Mac shops you're going to be so jealous, when you see what I've done to my keyboard here.

Andy: Ooooh.

Leo: Killer Duck decals, these are all comic book characters. Oh wait a minute, I showed you that last week. Never mind!

Rene: There was no Andy last week.

Andy: I wasn't here last week, you're all one week smarter than I am.

Leo: Oh that's right, you weren't here. Okay. Okay. I already had to get...

Andy: Is Tim Cook still gay? I don't know, because I wasn't on the show last week.

Leo: We don't know! We had to get Rene to go through these to tell me who they all are. Some of them are obvious; Batman and Green Lantern. But I didn't know Punisher, for instance. Alright, let's take a break. When we come back, there is some news, finally a solution for those folks who moved from iPhone to Android and can no longer get messages. But first, a word from Audible.com. I like starting the show with Audible because we are big Audible fans, we listen to a lot of audiobooks on Audible, and goodness knows there a plenty to listen to. If you to Audible.com, you'll notice 150,000+ titles, the newest stuff, look they've got the new Stephen King. It just came out today. A terrifying masterpiece, Revival. “In a small New England town, over a half a century ago, a shadow falls over a small boy playing with his toy soldiers. Jamie Morton looks up...” This seems like I've read this before. “...to see a striking man, the new minister.” Anyway, if you're a Stephen King fan you know this is a big event when there's a new Stephen King novel, this one is 13 hours and 24 minutes, and I'm going to tell you how you can get it free in just a moment. Audible is a great place to go to find the latest stuff, I just started listening to, and I'm really enjoying it, David Byrne the lead man on Talking Heads has written a book about music.

Jason: Oh isn't it great?

Leo: You listening to that Jason?

Jason: Yeah I listened to it a while back, loved it.

Leo: This is the first chapter and already my eyes are popping.

Jason: Yeah because it's kind of half autobiography, half just his random musings on what it takes to be a creative musician. It's really fascinating.

Leo: Fascinating. I bet as a musician, Jason, you really got to love it.

Jason: That's pretty much exclusively what I listen to on Audible, music related audio.

Leo: Me too. Graham Nash's book is awesome. I'm listening to that Beatles book you recommended some time ago Andy. This is good, for Veteran's Day. All Quiet on the Western Front, a classic anti-war movie, but also the novel. That it's based on, by Erich Maria Remarque. Helmet for my Pillow by Robert Leckie. The Things They Carried, if you haven't read this, this is an amazing novel of soldiers in Vietnam, that I think anybody who's ever read this will just agree, it's a must read. And Bryan Cranston narrates it. So you know this is going to be very beautiful. Cranston of course, we all know as the father on, no... as Breaking Bad guy.

Alex: He is a father in Breaking Bad.

Leo: He's also a father in, what is the show that he...

Alex: Oh, right.

Leo: Malcolm in the Middle. I've got it on audio, are you hearing it? This is Bryan Cranston reading The Things They Carried by Tim O'brien.

(audio begins)

Narrator: In the accompanying letter, Martha wrote that she had found the pebble on the Jersey shoreline, precisely where the land touched the water at high tide, where things came together but also separated.

(audio stopped)

Leo: Oh I want to listen to this. I want to re-read this, I read it as a book but I'd love to get it as audio. And that's what's great about audiobooks from Audible.com, they come to life. You're hearing them and really seeing them on the movie screen in your brain. It's so powerful. So here's the deal, you can get a free audiobook right now if you go to Audible.com/macbreak. One audiobook, you might consider the Stephen King or perhaps The Things They Carried or perhaps one of the classics. They have lots of classics, science fiction, I just got the newest Peter Hamilton novel, I'm a big fan of Hamilton's. Just a fabulous place if you love reading or if you wish you could get back to reading but just don't have the time. Get in the car, hook up the iPhone or the Android device or the Windows phone and start listening, and I think you might drive around the block a few extra times just to hear another chapter or two. What are you listening to these days, Andy?

Andy: Well, I finally got around to reading The Martian, and then as...

Leo: Oh you loved that didn't you?

Andy: Just like you say, now I've got to kind of like get the audiobook because I was also heavily recommended, we were plugging that book for months and months and months. I would like to say that most of my books are lofty novels that you'd have to be in post-graduate English theory in order to read and understand, a lot of them though are just like show business memoirs and Martin Short has a new one that came out last week.

Leo: Ohh.

Andy: And it's really really funny, and what really attracted me to it was that on the Audible edition, he actually narrates the thing himself. And so when you have a comedian who has like 30 years’ worth of stage performance telling stories about his own life, goodness gracious, that's just like you know what? Maybe I won't fly to Philadelphia, maybe I'll drive the whole way because that seems like a good way to spend 4-8 hours.

(audio begins)

Narrator: ...after questioning both candidates, the interviewer declares: “Your credentials are so darn equal, I don't know how to decide. I can't make up my mind.” The male candidate proposes that the matter be settled by arm wrestling.

(audio stops)

Leo: I Must Say: My Life as a Humble Comedy Legend written and narrated by Martin Short. That is nice.

Andy: Good stuff, you've seen him on talk shows enough, that you've heard at least 20% of his life, but there's stories about, if you're a fan of comedy there are new stories about second city, and the TV show and the stage performance about the 70s, the early SNL, it's just really terrific stuff.

Leo: And then as always with Audible it says “People who bought this also bought...” and then you see all these other books you want to listen to like Dick Cavett's memoirs, read by Dick Cavett. Sophia Loren's memoir Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow: My Life, Neil Patrick Harris' autobiography read by Neil. Bob Hope. I mean I could go on and on and on.

Andy: That's a really interesting one, that is actually next up the next one I'm going to use my credits for. The Bob Hope biography. Because enough time has passed by that it's possible to do like a scholarly biography of a very very major figure who has had an incredible career and also touched a lot, had a lot of experiences, a lot of lives and now it's okay with 20 years worth of perspective to say, okay but he did cheat around a lot and his politics were like this and he was nice, but he wasn't all nice.

Leo: Right. I can't wait. And this is the problem with Audible. I want more time to listen, in the car, at the gym, walking the dog, doing the dishes. Audible.com/macbreak there's definitely a book for you, get that first one free. You get the first month free in our gold plan which means a book a month and you can cancel any time in that first month and you get to keep that first book forever, but I don't think you'll cancel. Audible.com/macbreak. We thank them for their support. And I thank you, Andy because you always have great Audible recommendations. Now there's 8 more books on my... you know I've been going through my Audible list, and there's books that I haven't listened to going back five years, you know, I'll buy it and then I don't get around to it, and so I can't wait until I retire.

(laughing)

Leo: I'm just going to listen to Audible all day.

Andy: Time, time time. There's time enough at last!

Leo: There's so many good books in the world. Don't you wish you could just... I just love it. Read and read and read.

Alex: That's been actually, I've been because now I live in Pittsburgh and now I go back and forth to DC a lot, you're right on the edge of is it better to...

Leo: Do you take the train or the plane?

Alex: There's no train from Pittsburgh, only from Philadelphia so I have to decide whether I'm going to drive or fly and it's been half way, but I'm now leaning towards more and more driving just because I get to listen to books.

Leo: Not to sit in the airport, I hate sitting in the airport.

Andy: Plus you get to keep your knife!

Alex and Leo: And I get to keep my knife!

Alex: I don't even like to relax and put a knife in there, because you know I'll forget it. I've gone through, I don't know how many of them.

Andy: I lost my last knife on the last trip last week.

Alex: Yep.

Andy: Because I was in such a rush, I didn't know if I was going to make my shuttle so I had to buy it... god. You just never feel so dumb as when TSA holds up a knife and says “Is this yours sir?” it's like yes it is, I'm just kidding. It is no longer I suppose, thank you very much.

Alex: I had one in Zimbabwe where I had a little mini Leatherman and it was a domestic trip just to Victoria Falls and the guy says you can't get on I said can you keep it here? I'm going to be back in the evening, just keep it here. I had already gotten caught with it. And he's like I can't do that. And I said but this was a gift, I can't. I don't want to give it up. He looked at me and he goes here, you can have it. But don't do anything bad with it.

Leo: (laughing) That's encouraging.

Alex: I was like I'm really happy to get my knife but it makes me very worried. It was a very tiny knife.

Andy: Let me tell you about the time I was at the park and ride, the $20 shuttle from like satellite parking and the half hour ride into Logan and I'd forgotten to like leave my $80 Leatherman Wave at home and it was in my pocket, and I'm waiting for the bus. Going to leave in about 20 minutes and it's like damn it! There's no way out, it's just going to be lost and I thought well if it's going to be taken away from me at the TSA anyway, I have nothing to lose and so I waited to see like if everyone else was leaving the place to go to board the bus, got on my hands and knees and hid it behind one of the vending machines and then walked away and said okay in a week's time it's either going to be still there or it's not going to still be there and a week later yes it was still there.

Alex: (laughing) That's great.

Leo: That's clever.

Andy: The entire place wasn't shut down because a suspicious man hid something, a possible explosive device in a waiting area.

Leo: Yeah, you hope there wasn't any cameras on you doing that.

Andy: I'm a shifty person, I've had that said about me a lot. I'm a very shifty person.

Leo: Shifty fellow. We saw that in Inhatko. So trouble in paradise, the end of the line for ... no it's not, but The Verge said the end of the line for iPhone and iOS users the days of...

Rene: Maddening.

Leo: Yeah, it was so bad.

Rene: The Reuters was terrible yesterday, Reuters was just abysmal yesterday.

Leo: What was the Reuters headline? Do you remember? Let me see if I can find it.

Rene: It was about mask attack.

Leo: Mask attack, right.

Rene: Yeah. But all of them, the headline, they care so much about getting to click that they don't care at all about scaring people needlessly about malware attacks that are both not new and also do not target 90% of the people who are reading their site.

Leo: Yeah. New malware mask attack targets iOS, replaces apps to steal data. So there have been lately a number of exploits exposed. There's that exploit that you get if somebody can get to your computer, he can escalate to administrator.

Rene: Rootpipe.

Leo: What is it? Root... root?

Rene: Rootpipe.

Leo: Rootpipe. But somebody has to be sitting at your computer to Rootpipe you.

Rene: Well they have to exploited you previously and gotten remote access. It's a secondary attack.

Leo: They need remote access. Yeah. Mask attack, mask short for masquerade. FireEye discovered this, they say hackers exploited a flaw...

Rene: They did not, it's like two years old!

Leo: Oh, never mind.

Rene: They claim they discovered it. Jonathan Jidarsky wrote about it months ago and people have been writing about it for months longer and it's not an exploit, they're using enterprise certificates which is functionality Apple provides for enterprise to deploy apps to masquerade as other apps, so they have to first get you to download an enterprise app outside the app store and then click through all the warnings saying do you really trust this developer and then you install it on your device. They also have to make sure the app they're emulating hasn't got any encryption on their end, otherwise the information is still not available to them.

Leo: But... but... but The Verge said that the iPhone has lost its perfect security record!

Rene: It's ... it's...

Leo: (laughing) That is the worst headline.

Rene: The one The Verge is writing about...

Andy: It never had a perfect record to begin with.

Leo: A: There isn't one...

Andy: It was just so difficult to hit that it was no point in even trying.

Leo: There's so many things wrong with this, first of all it doesn't have a perfect security record, there's been malware in the app store for a long time, of course Apple removes it immediately but we know about it, so what you get here is well as you know The Verge is kind of is a fan of iOS and so you get here and like a fanboy suddenly realizing and then saying it's lost its perfect security.... there's nothing in this headline that is accurate.

Rene: No.

Alex: Link bait.

Rene: Nor the Reuters one nor most of the other blogs.

Leo: What about Wire Lurker?

Rene: Wire Lurker is almost the same thing, it also uses enterprise but what it does is if you go to a certain pirated app site in China, if you want to get wares and then you download a pirated app and they usually make it like a very popular expensive game or something, you download it and then you again blow past all the security, do you want to trust this app because it's not from a signed developer and then you install it, if you're jail broken... they can... sorry after you install it on your Mac it waits for you to connect an iOS device, and if the iOS is jail broken it can start taking things off the device because you've removed all of the security Apple puts on the device during the jailbreak process. If not, it can try to copy some information off depending on how secure individual apps and things are.

Leo: And in this case you would get it mostly because you're using a third party app store in China.

Rene: To steal apps. It's the same thing when people used to put viruses inside movie downloads on muse net.

Alex: So the real world analogy would be if you leave your keys in the car and the window down and you drive into a bad part of town, someone may... you know... you may actually have your car stolen.

Leo: But I should point out The Verge isn't completely wrong, this is in fact only the second known time a malware attack on iOS has come through OSX using USB. So they're close.

Rene: (laughing) And Apple can revoke the permission for any enterprise certificate they find to be abusive, yes.

Leo: And they have by the way. They have. So bottom line for us, is there anything to worry about Rene?

Rene: If you do go to that specific Chinese pirate app site, download apps and install them, especially if you are jail broken you should worry and you should take all the steps that we'd be telling the article about, how to find out if you're infected and how to remove the infection. If you're just a regular person using the app store you have absolutely nothing to worry about. Glory days are still with you.

Leo: You know, what's interesting to me is that mobile devices in general seem like they'd be ripe pickings for bad guys because there's so many ways you can make money on a mobile device, you know sending text messages to paid to text message sites in the Bahamas and getting $25 or just all the data that's on... it just seems like ripe pickings. For years we really expected that all these devices would be just compromised like crazy, and they've both, and I have to say this is true of Android as well and Blackberry and Windows Phone, they've all proven much more robust than one would expect given how ripe a target they are.

Andy: But there's an obvious reason for that, it's because that because the functions that you try to attempt on these devices are so limited the OS developers can create such aggressive firewalls and such aggressive sandboxes to make it a really really hard thing to do. If you were to try to sandbox a desktop that way it would just be absolutely useless as a productivity tool.
Leo: I think also that these operating systems are much more recent than desktop operating systems, and as a result they have been designed with security much more in the forefront, have they not?

Alex: I definitely think so.

Rene: Absolutely.

Andy: But imagine a computer where you can't plug anything into it. And imagine a computer in which you can't extend anything, you can't add capabilities to anything because every app is designed to be just absolutely walled off from everything else and even getting information from one app to another is going to be a hellatious trial. That is a reason why but for a lot of people that really doesn't bother them at all, it doesn't interfere with their ability to do email, to write a term paper, to do all this sort of stuff so it's really a pointer to how great the future is for mobile devices if you want to switch from a laptop to an iPad say.

Alex: And I think we're going to see more and more security as we do more and more biometrics. I think the thumb, the little thumbprint...

Leo: TouchID is great.

Alex: TouchID is the beginning of that but I think we're not that far away from...

Leo: Except, let me point out something. TouchID is no more secure than a four digit PIN. It's just more convenient.

Andy: I wouldn't say that. You can't copy a fingerprint. You can't shoulder surf a fingerprint.

Leo: So somebody... okay, alright.

Alex: For instance if I go to an ATM there are people with infrared cameras, and if I do my PIN at the supermarket, they can see the heat marks which is why I tend to do more...

Leo: I stand corrected. If you're spied upon, you're right. You can see somebody's PIN, you can't see somebody's fingerprint and steal it.

Andy: The other cool thing is that people are not going to choose a fingerprint that's easy to remember. You know?

Leo: It's so funny because Apple doesn't let you choose a PIN that's, quote “highly crackable” like 2222. Except by doing so, reduces the 10,000 possible choices significantly. So in a way, it's kind of not exactly what you want, because now hackers don't have to try 1111 and 2222. Because Apple won't let you use them. So I think there's an open question about whether that's a good practice or not.

Rene: You can switch to a password if you wanted to.

Leo: Right, or make it a password. So barring looking over your shoulder, I don't think a four digit PIN is less secure than a fingerprint. But the over the shoulder attack is genuine so.

Rene: The print was 1 in 80,000 and the pass code was 1 in 10 or 20 thousand or something.

Leo: Ten thousand. 9999.

Rene: If someone was a dedicated CSI they could come in and make a mold of your fingerprint and put it on plastic, I mean it depends on how valuable you are as a target.

Leo: Yeah, yeah. I mean and you can always, and should, set your password attempts to ten, and then erase after that.

Rene: Unless you have young kids.

Leo: So yes I agree with you, fingerprints is more secure because of that scenario but these are secure. These devices are secure.

Alex: Yeah, they're very secure. But I think we're going to only see more security. I think that there are a lot of things that have been floating around in a lot of other places for a long time, whether it's facial recognition as well as voice recognition and it's not that any one of those is accurate or any one of those is more secure, but if you start adding things up for things that really need to be a high security, like I have a four digit code, and I have my thumb and I have my voice, and for enterprise I think that becomes very useful.

Leo: And we should point out I guess that a judge has ruled as we expected that the fingerprint is not protected by the 5^th amendment, it is not, in the same way that a password is.

Alex: I thought that was really interesting.

Leo: So you can be compelled to offer your fingerprint by law enforcement. Because that's something you have. The 5^th amendment according to this judge, and I think many people have thought this all along, this just confirms it. The fingerprint is like a DNA test or... which you cannot refuse, or a blood test which you cannot refuse. And the password is something in your head, and you can plead the fifth and say I reserve the right not to self-incriminate. And that is a right that you have. So in that regard I guess if you're worried about law enforcement a PIN code would be better.

Rene: And you can choose in iOS whether you want the TouchID to unlock your phone or not, you can just turn that off and leave it on for purchasing.

Leo: Ah, that's a good idea. So you can still use TouchID for Apple Pay and everything else, just not to unlock. But who's going to do that? It's so nice just to hold the phone.

Alex: But the other question if you think you're in a situation where you're in trouble, turn it off.

Leo: Or get your attorney to stall for two days, because if you don't use the TouchID within 48 hours it requires a PIN code.

Alex: Or literally in seconds you can just turn it off and then someone asks for your phone.

Rene: Use the wrong finger four times and it will lock.

Leo: That's what some people have said but I think that that's not quite fair. Just say oh yeah here, oh I guess it doesn't work anymore no it's because it was this finger... never mind. Alright. In any event it's clear that despite these overblown stories about exploits and malware that mobile devices, not just the iPhone but generally mobile devices are safer. More secure.

Rene: There was that one thing too Leo, where they said that if you have a significant other who may be curious about your activity, they can't get a password from you but when you fall asleep they can still put your finger on the TouchID.

Alex: I never thought of that!

Leo: If you are sleeping with somebody who would do that, might be time to move out. I'm just saying.

Alex: (laughing)

Leo: There has been for years a complaint by people who moved from iOS to Android that iMessage is too dumb to figure that out and your friends who use iPhones will continue to send you messages that you can no longer read, Apple has finally responded to this. I wish they had done this sooner, they've always registered it as a known bug. But it's not a known bug, here's how you do it. You can de-register iMessage. There now is a page at self-solve. I didn't even know Apple had this, selfsolve.apple.com. This is what you can do, if you have your iPhone you can do it within the iPhone, the issue is more people who have abandoned the iPhone and are now on Android and they're missing messages because their iPhone using friends have them entered into their iPhone as iPhone users so it uses messages to send the SMS instead of SMS, now Apple will give you a way to de-register your phone number and say look.

Alex: I've had people that I've sent lots of messages to and I'm like wow they don't like me anymore, and it turns out they weren't getting them anymore.

Rene: Now you can pop the blue bubbles.

Andy: I'm still terribly confused by messages, after all these years I don't know what rules apply that will make sure that I won't get a message from one person or not another person, whenever I register a new device, is it in my best interest, is it in my best interest to register new email addresses and phone numbers to it or is it in my best interest to say no no, only use this put a contact first of, and whenever people ask me about it, even when I'm using it myself I have to go to reference sources to confirm that what I'm guessing is actually true, and what I guess is usually not true.
Leo: Okay, well let's have a little... this would be a good game show. iMessages, does it do this? True or false. I have now, because of continuity, I feel like this is a little bit better than it used to be. I do love it that I can now use messages on my Mac to send what looks like text messages to my iPhone wielding friends. That's nice.

Alex: I think the two winners for me are Messenger and Hangouts because I can go to any web browser...

Leo: Hangouts is the same thing but Hangouts is cross platform.

Alex: And so is Messenger.

Leo: Messenger? AOL?

Alex: Facebook Messenger.

Leo: Oh Facebook Messenger.

Alex: Facebook Messenger and Google Hangouts are the two that I use probably the most.

Leo: Because they're cross platform.

Alex: And because I can go to any web page, I can go to any phone, you know, it's anything. And having something tied up in one OS or one phone number, I'm kind of over that. But those are the two for me that...

Leo: So I always, maybe I'm wrong, but I always when I register, when I use new iOS or OSX device say yes add that to the messages pool, add that email address, add that phone number, it's a very long pool now.

Alex: Mhm.

Leo: Of phone numbers and email addresses that it's supported. There doesn't seem to be, by the way, any good way to remove it, I guess maybe I can now use this tool to remove old phone numbers. But that seems okay because now when my phone rings or I get a message, all my devices go off and I can use any one of them to respond, is that right?

Alex: Or all of them.

Leo: Or all of them.

Alex: A little overwhelming at times.

Leo: So, that seems, yeah. But that seems, Andy isn't it better now in the age of continuity.

Andy: I'd say so, but I still don't have that sort of absolute blind trust that I have in like let's say text messaging, which is why I just will not, I will always use that as my preferred method of contact for everything else because I know that it's a system that everybody has access too, there's one pipe and it won't necessarily go to every device that I have but it will definitely work with this one device if I keep it handy with me, as Alex was saying, the most terrifying thing is when you're using Mac A for like two days, and your laptop has been in your bag since you got back from wherever and then finally you pop it out and recharge it and suddenly it lights up with like 100 messages over the past two days that did not route to the copy of messages on the other machine saying “Okay make sure you get here by 3:00 because remember, George Lucas is giving you 20 minutes, he wants to talk to you about some important stuff!!” It's like nothing terrifies you as much as people who want to get in touch with you but messages are not getting to you.

Leo: Right.

Alex: And it's hard because there's also just little things both with messages and for some reason I do a lot of text, all over the world so I use all of these message machines. Like Whatsapp is better than Hangout Messenger or Messages because it sends, as you're typing, it's sending everything to the other side, and then when you hit done it just pops it up. And so it's... while you're typing...

Leo: You can send messages to the other side?

Alex: No, Whatsapp is sending when you're Whatsapping from someone to someone else, the message is being sent as you type it...

Leo: Oh, that's weird.

Alex: ...and then when you say send, it actually makes it available to them. That's why it's so fast. Compared to...

Leo: Oh that's clever.

Alex: ... so when Hangouts and iMessages do it, it hits it and then they start figuring it out.

Leo: That's very clever.

Alex: So it's... Whatsapp is a little bit more efficient. That's why they've got $19 billion. I think it turned out to be more, right?

Leo: It was $22 billion by the time all was said and done because the Facebook stock went up.

Rene: Blackberry is still crying.

Leo: That's more than Blackberry is worth right now, right?

Rene: Like six times more. Maybe seven.

Leo: But I do feel like Apple's missing a little bit of a bet. Wouldn't it be good, and maybe this is a first step, because let me tell you, this is not a Steve Jobs type of tool. Steve would never admit that anybody is leaving the iOS universe and going to some other phone. So the fact that, I mean this is an admission that... it says “No longer have your iPhone? Then you can do this.” That's something that is part of the new Apple, which I appreciate. Now to take the next step, can we make Messages cross platform?

Rene: Leo cross platform and services are two things Apple does not do well, so putting those two together...

Leo: I guess you're right.

Alex: They try.

Leo: iTunes for Windows is pretty god-awful, you're right.

Alex: Didn't they used to support AOL Messenger or whatever and it never really worked?

Leo: Oh that's right, they did!

Rene: A web interface would be nice though.

Leo: A web interface! There you go!

Alex: Yeah a web interface would be great.

Leo: I could use that on anything, on my phone. That would be great! At least it would give me access to those messages if I don't have an iPhone. I think that's fair. Or a Mac device.

Rene: At least for two weeks because after that they destroy them, but if you get them any time in two weeks you have access to them.

Leo: Oh that's interesting. So if you do register, you're never going to get those messages you missed back. Because that's it.

Rene: Yeah, it tries to deliver them for two weeks and then they're gone which is why if you ever wipe your phone and put them back it doesn't download your entire message history, it just starts sort of from that date.

Leo: Yeah. Interesting because Apple is getting into enterprise. That's another big story of the week, we'll talk about that in just a moment. But first a word from SquareSpace. I love SquareSpace. It is, I should explain kind of a little bit what SquareSpace is and we'll talk about some of its benefits. It's hosting. The best hosting in the world, never goes down. Plus software on top of the hosting. To give you the best possible web experience. So for you and, not just for you, really what's more important is for your users. SquareSpace 7, the all new SquareSpace 7 is out with lots of great features, and you know what's really nice? If you have an existing SquareSpace page, you go to the settings tab and you can activate all the new 7 features. Completely redesigned set of creative tools that allow you to do things, for instance, like work on your page, wizzywig. So as you're changing the design, you're actually seeing it live, which is fabulous. You don't have to toggle any more between site manager and preview mode. That gives you a really great sense of what you're going to look like. They have instant access to stock photography from Getty. Purchased right from inside the platform, Getty Images $10 each. Instant branded email set up with Google Apps. You can have branded email automatically when you sign up for that SquareSpace account. The templates now for a variety of professions whether you're a chef, an architect. Check out if you're a musician, check out the horizon template, it's kind of pre-done for bands. Featuring tour dates, music player, merch store. All of that built in. They have a fabulous developer platform, if you are a web developer and you use CSS and Javascript you can use their incredible tools including a special editor that has a syntax coloring and all that. E-commerce is available on all subscription plans, but best of all is you can try it now for two weeks just by clicking the “get started” button. Just go to SquareSpace.com click “get started” and you'll be working in SquareSpace, setting up a page at no cost, you don't even need to give them a credit card. I just feel like this is a no-brainer if you're creating a new website, even if you're importing from your existing site. They have importers, by the way, for all the blog APIs. This is a much better place, as little as $8 a month when you sign up for a year, you'll also get the domain name for free. And by the way, if you ever want help, they have a spectacular help portal that has not only webinars, a knowledge base, workshops, community answers, a forum. But you can also get email and chat support 24/7 from these great folks in the SquareSpace offices. This is not outsourced. These are the people who work on SquareSpace, they can help you. Great apps too like portfolio, note, metric, and blog. By the way note and blog now available on Android as well as iOS. The best hosting. The best software. To make the best site.

Alex: We're in the process of redoing our website because nothing has changed for a while. Which it's on SquareSpace, but I couldn't believe in how much better it's gotten.

Leo: It's so nice.

Alex: It's just like oh my gosh I can't believe all this stuff is here, it's really really awesome.

Leo: SquareSpace is phenomenal. I want you to go to SquareSpace.com, check out the pricing. As little as $8 a month. Try it for free, just click that “get started” button but if you decide to buy, 10% off when you use our offer code MacBreak. MacBreak is the offer code at SquareSpace.com. The place to make your next website. Apple has said it's going enterprise. Remember they did a deal with IBM. Again. The new Apple, I think we could. There's so many things you can point to, and I think this is great. It has to happen with any company, but I think Tim Cook has really taken Apple to new areas that are very exciting and enterprise is a very interesting place to go.

Alex: It almost seemed like Apple had ceded enterprise for a long time to Microsoft. Like it was good at enterprise but it was never really focused on it. This is new for them.

Leo: I think part of this, also, is that with sales of the iPad lagging a little bit, this is an opportunity to find a new market. You've got China. They're going towards China, but they also go to enterprise. They've done deals with a lot of companies now. They have, they're working with start ups like ServiceMax, Plan Grid. These are specifically for enterprise. There's a mobile app, Plan Grid is a mobile app for construction workers to share and view blueprints.

Rene: It's exactly what you said Leo. They thought China mobile was the big thing everyone wanted, and then how do you keep adding addressable markets. They were broad in enterprise but they were never deep and the IBM thing is trying to get instead of just having 99% of people trying it or having enterprise they want to have every department in every enterprise having many of their devices deployed.

Leo: ServiceMax is... is that a CRM? I'm trying to figure out what... ServiceMax apparently they're, they say about 95% of their customers already use Apple devices. Oh ServiceMax is field service, so it's field repair service. That kind of thing. So since their customers are already using Apple devices it only makes sense to get apps on those devices. And go deep. IBM apps, how many IBM apps, there's quite a few.

Rene: The SDK for Apple is really good at the frameworks are really good, they make it easier to deploy things. We were talking about the enterprise certificates before but part of their power is that an enterprise can just make these apps and distribute it to the workforce. It's a good system.

Leo: They're going after HP, they're going after Dell. They're going, when it comes to desktops, I mean we buy Dell for the business side of the business. All of our hosts use Apple. But everybody in our business side of our op, our office, it's just a small enterprise but it's an enterprise. They want to use Windows. They want to use Dell. Alex: Just tell them not to use the webcams.

Leo: Yeah the webcams are terrible.

Alex: Horrible, horrible.

Leo: You know what, the Apple built in webcams aren't great either.

Alex: They're not, but I've got to tell you, we test probably 30 or 40 people a week for online stuff, and you can literally, someone just pops up and goes “So, are you using a Dell?” because it just looks like 1950's television.

Leo: The good news is that you go out and buy a Logitech and instantly you're much better.

Alex: Oh yeah yeah.

Leo: And it's not that expensive. But I have to say the same thing. I have three cameras on me at all times at home because I get lonely. And I just can't live without multiple cameras pointed at me at all times. I also have the chatroom going at all times. But I can switch from camera to camera, and the built in display cameras, on the thunderbolt display and the cinema LED display are terrible compared to the Logitech in the middle. I have to say, there's just no... you know immediately.

Alex: And last week when I was in DC, that was a Logitech C920.
Leo: Looks great.

Rene: Yeah.

Alex: And I think Andy's is a 920, right?

Andy: Yep.

Leo: I mean these look so good. People were saying to me last week, why don't you do whatever Alex is doing for the whole network.

Alex: Right.

Leo: Me. He said you looked better than me. (laughing)

Alex: Why thank you. I spent a lot of money on that studio and I only use it once a month.

Leo: Unbelievable!

Rene: You looked better last week than this week Alex.

Alex: (laughs)

Leo: You know who's going to, I think, is going to give Apple the biggest challenge. It's not HP, it's not Dell. It's not Oracle, it's not SAP. I think it's Microsoft. And maybe Samsung. Samsung is kind of at a par with Apple kind of trying to get, move from that mobile space into the enterprise and they have knox, they have some stuff that enterprise really likes a lot. But I've got to think that it's Microsoft that's really gotta be the people you've got to...

Alex: There's still the inside, and we can talk about Apple making inroads to enterprise but Microsoft is still...

Leo: They own it.

Alex: 80-90% of the market.

Leo: Why do we buy Dells? Excel.

Andy: As I'm fond of saying, they're like the water and electric company. They don't make products that are incredibly sexy, they don't make products that let you go in front of a white backdrop and talk about design, but they're what keep the lights on and keep people healthy day after day after day. And now boy they seem to have over the past five years they seem to have found the car keys to something good. After rummaging through the sofa for about ten years, because now they're making consumer products that are actually quite nice. I don't know if you've tried the Microsoft band, the fitness thing that they came out with.

Leo: The shackle? Yeah.

Andy: Yeah the tracking cup. But it's nicely designed, it's not designed to do 100,000 different things, it's designed to be just a really awesome fitness band that also enhances some stuff on your phone. But it's nicely made, it works really great. I know a couple people who are actually fit individuals who are using it and enjoying it a lot. I've just started using their new mobile keyboard, another very nicely engineered, very nicely put together thing. And these are not things that, and this is the same company that came out with the Zune player within living memory. And so...

Rene: Zune was good though.

Andy: ...you're not associating Microsoft with making really good consumer electronics but they're becoming a pretty decent consumer electronics company.

Rene: The Zune was good, it just was way too late, it had no shop. It was still a good, they've made good consumer products, they just never time them right.

Andy: It wasn't good because I still remember trying to get it working on an actual Windows notebook and it was like an all-day affair and even then it just barely sort of worked, it was just ugh.

Rene: Okay the Zune HD was good. Maybe not the original.

Andy: By the last generation they came out with a device that if they had kept it around for another couple generations it might have competed very very well with what Apple was doing at the same price point. That was the first time they had rolled out their new mobile interface design, which even at the time I thought oh this is really nice. This is a very good way to articulate a very complicated set of functions through a very simple screen. They figured some stuff out.

Rene: Yeah, Ben Thompson had a good piece on this though saying that you know, you make a really good product, even if it's 80% as good, even it's better, you're not guaranteed that percentage of the market share. And that seems to be their problem, they make wonderful stuff but they just can't get the market share for it.

Leo: Well latest results from Good Technology's mobility index report, these are enterprise numbers. Apple made up 69% of enterprise device activations in Q3. That's up 2 points, Android activation share dropped 2 points to 29%. Windows Phone 1%. So while Microsoft may own the desktop, Apple absolutely owns mobile.

Rene: That does not include Blackberry because because Good doesn't support Blackberry.

Alex: And I think a lot of this also cuts through consumers buying low end Androids as those kind of fill up a lot of those numbers and you really see what... when companies are making a decision. And I'm kind of curious, I mean right now that's kind of just raw data but I'm curious why they pick iOS, because I think for a long time I think iOS was resistant to that, even to iOS.

Leo: Do you think...

Rene: That reminds of a story, I forget what company it was but they ran out and bought, when they saw the data briefs they ran out and bought iPhones and Macbooks for all their executives and called them their secure implementation.

Leo: (laughing)

Alex: I guess they said right about the same time that Home Depot had that huge hack that turned out to be some kind of Windows flaw that they went out and bought all the executives at Home Depot ended up with iOS and Mac within like a week.

Leo: Apple Care enterprise is online now and it has on site support which is what enterprises demand. We're not going to pick up our computers and bring them into the Apple store. So this is Apple Care for enterprise, there's a website. Enterprise grade Apple Care for IBM enterprise customers. You get an Apple Care account manager, personal Liaison with Apple Care, one hour response time for urgent issues, IT level support available 24/7. Apple Care for enterprise customers can also replace 10% of damaged iOS devices, so one in ten get to be damaged and we'll replace them.

Alex: They're actually really good at that. We work with Apple Enterprise.

Leo: Do you?

Alex: Yeah we have a lot of machines.

Leo: I guess you would.

Alex: And the service is amazing. Just what we get from almost any Apple store that we walk into, as soon as they look down, it's one of those things like “I'm Pixel Corps” and then we get a lot of attention because we don't need to buy a lot of machines but you're in enterprise and you're moving into the enterprise model and it's something that is a huge priority for them, to make sure that enterprise customers are... and if you have a company by the way and you're buying lots of Macs, you don't just have to go in and talk to retail. You can say I'm a business customer, I want to open a business...

Leo: We have a business rep.

Alex: Exactly, you have the rep you have... and they are, when you want to ...

Leo: You don't get a huge discount but...

Alex: We have big lease agreements. So we don't buy all our machines, we lease them all so we rev them and everything else, it's not that you get huge discounts, you get little discounts but you get great service. You can make phone calls and get things sorted out. You're not just a customer that's walking in. Everyone gets treated well, but definitely as a business customer...

Leo: You get a little bit of a...

Alex: Some extra because...

Leo: You know it's almost just like sales. It's like...

Alex: Yeah but it's, you know.

Leo: You get your own salesman. It's nice.

Alex: But they do a lot of legwork for us. Like we want to do X, Y and Z. We had to have tens of computers show up and one time and the Apple store in Santa Rosa lifted heaven and Earth to get them to us on time.

Leo: Let's talk about big boy pants.

Rene: (laughing)

Alex: Put em' on.

Leo: Put em' on!

Alex: I sense a title.

Leo: Put on the big boy pants. The Squiller memorandum, which is not like The Bourne Identity, it's something different. Though it feels like this should be a novel by Grisham. The Squiller memorandum was revealed on Friday. The judge did, against Apple's wishes unseal it, and gives us a little bit of an insight, a little bit of a picture into the agreements Apple makes with its suppliers. You remember the story is GT Advance, which they were a sapphire furnace maker. They sold sapphire furnaces, Apple leant them almost half a billion dollars to build a plant in Mesa Arizona with GT, furnaces, but with GT running it to make sapphire for an as yet unnamed Apple device.

Alex: These guys hadn't been making sapphire.

Leo: They had never done it.

Alex: They made the machines that made sapphire.

Leo: Right. And of course, remember most of Apple suppliers are probably not in the US I would guess. They're mostly in Asia. But I guess the same template is applied to them. Squiller, in the memorandum says Apple never really entered into negotiations. Telling instead the managers they should not waste their time negotiating because Apple doesn't negotiate with suppliers. We don't negotiate with terrorists, and we don't negotiate with suppliers. According to GT, after the company said “Wait a minute... we've got...” Apple said look. These are our terms for other Apple suppliers, and you should, quote: “Put on your big boy pants and accept the agreement.”

Alex: And by the way, we worked with a lot of Fortune 100 companies and that's a pretty standard thing. When you talk about Apple being that way, but most agreements we get, we have the choice of either doing work with them and signing that contract or we're not going to to do any work with them.

Leo: Yeah.

Alex: That's a pretty common thing.

Rene: Were they wearing Darth Vader suits when they negotiating Alex?

Alex: What?

Rene: Are they wearing Darth Vader suits when they negotiate?

Alex: (laughs) No, no. They just... really mean emails about why... yeah.

Leo: Yeah.

Andy: At the closing meeting, we're going to have to ask that each person bring in one tire from their car, and give it to us. We don't need it as a part of the deal, we just want to make you know that we can make you do whatever we want.

Alex: Exactly.

Leo: And yeah, I mean, I think that most people would be so happy to get an Apple deal that they'd go “Yeah, whatever you say!”

Alex: There's a lot of carcasses along the road that have made big deals with these companies and this is one of them.

Leo: GT is one of them.

Alex: We've almost been killed by big contracts, and it is a...

Leo: But I guess you can't expect Apple... I mean, should Apple be a kinder, gentler Apple?

Alex: No, no.

Leo: And say “It's okay, you couldn't make the sapphire, it's okay.”

Alex: But if you're a little company... not at all...

Leo: You're doing a deal with the devil, you're saying... that's where Squiller really does need to put on his big boy pants and say, look, Squiller you're the COO, chief operating officer, you shouldn't have made this deal. If you didn't think you could do it, you shouldn't have made it. It's like going to Vegas. I'm all in.

Rene: Yes.

Alex: Yep. And the thing is that you definitely have to accept, when you sign these contracts, and the reason we're so particular about our contracts is that when we sign that contract, we assume that they mean everything in it. Like they'll tell you. “Oh we're not going to ever do that.” Well you're talking to one person, you don't know how it's going to turn out some time later. And so if you think that there's a problem, you need to, as a CEO it's your job to make the decision. And we walk away from business because the contracts don't work.

Leo: And I think GT should have.

Alex: I can't do that, I can't make that work.

Leo: So we're just in the car wreck that sometimes happens when a company bites off more than it could chew.

Alex: I mean they're offering you half a billion dollars, I mean it's a little company. It's very clear why they did that.

Leo: So let me tell you what went wrong, because we know from the memorandum. We know the first thing, we already knew was a $50 million penalty if you breach confidentiality. Per occurrence. We knew that. That had been out already. This is, eh, maybe you should have looked twice at this Mr. Squiller. No manufacturing process can be modified by GT without Apple's prior consent, but GT must immediately implement any of Apple's suggestions.

Alex: That's kind of giving up your company. You're wondering why Apple doesn't just buy you and build the stuff themselves at that point.

Leo: Even worse; GT must fulfill any purchase order placed by Apple, on the date Apple picks. Or you have to buy substitute goods at your own expense.

Alex: Yeah that's not a great contract.

Leo: So if you don't have the sapphire on the date we want it, you better give us some. In addition, the plant was built without input from GT.

Alex: That I don't understand. I mean here's the deal. I get that Apple pushes a hard bargain, but this was not a smart move.

Leo: This is a really hard bargain.

Rene: I think this was folly.

Leo: The plant was built for instance, without backup power generators because Apple deemed them too expensive. But now remember if GT can't deliver on date and time, then so if the power goes out they're screwed. Apple also embedded its own employees at the Mesa plant who quote: “Assumed a level of authority” end quote, had to be reminded not to order GT employees around. So you're right. They should have just bought the thing.

Alex: If you're going to have that much control, nobody have enough control to make it actually work.

Leo: Squiller said Apple initially wanted to purchase the sapphire furnaces from GT but ended up offering this different deal, a new structure where GT borrowed money from Apple, remember this isn't a gift, borrowed money from Apple to purchase the furnace components with the sapphire crystal. Apple also prohibited GT from doing business with other manufacturers or suppliers working in consumer electronics. They have an exclusive. Squiller called Apple's tactics a classic bait and switch strategy, and described the final agreement as onerous and massively one sided. On the other hand, you signed the deal Squiller.

Andy: Yeah, that's exactly it.

Leo: Making things worse for GT, if Apple decided not to use sapphire crystal in its upcoming products, which they in fact, did, GT would be required to repay the loan fully in cash. And so this is all unsealed as part of a settlement in which Apple agreed that GT could sell the furnaces and whatever they got, would be sufficient to settle the debt with Apple. In other words Apple said all right, we are not going to get all of our money back. So end fact I think Apple, you could make the argument that Apple did the right thing.

Alex: And both of them were throwing a long bomb, both of them wanted a cutting edge technology. GT wanted the big contract; Apple wanted to have this new thing that nobody else has, and they both took a big risk.

Leo: I think really they should put their big boy pant on. Not Apple but GT, look you guys made a long bet and you lost. There is no time, this is not the time to start saying well it was an unfair deal. I didn't like the bet.

Rene: Play the Kenny Loggins music Leo. Play the Kenny Loggins Music.

Leo: Which one?

Rene: Kenny Rodgers. The Kenny Rodgers music

Leo: You have to know when to hold'em, know when to fold'em

Alex: Now in saying all of that, you can see that the tactical thing to do is exactly what GT did. Which is: declare bankruptcy. I mean there was no way they were going         to be able to do anything else. So while it sounds like they are complaining now, I think more of it is they are making a legal argument that says we can't pay that.

Leo: I think Apple could reasonably complain saying look, we're getting pennies back on           our investment.

Alex: But I'm saying, we can all complain but what we are watching here is legal. This is              legal backfill.

Leo: You're saying this as the son of a litigator.

Alex: I'm just saying that, when you're not going to be able to make all the bills you're going to have to declare bankruptcy. In that you're going to say these are the things that happened and these are the things. Whether you were right or wrong, the bottom line is you are in a position where the only way for them to leverage themselves out of it was.

Leo: It is a chapter 11 bankruptcy. Which is essentially reorganization saying to creditors, we can't give you all the money back.

Alex: The primary creditor being Apple.

Rene: There was a stock sale that was interesting before this.

Leo: Okay, so the CEO of GT, the day before Apple's iPhone announcement

Alex: I thought it was a month before

Leo: No, it was the day before. Sold like one hundred million stocks.

Alex: Was it that much?

Leo: I can't remember. Should I look it up?

Alex: I thought it was like one hundred and sixty thousand.

Leo: CEO stock sale

Alex: I think it was one hundred and sixty thousand dollars of stock.

Leo: He sold your right, one hundred and sixty thousand dollars in stock. He said it was part of an ongoing stock dump. I've been dumping the stock for years. But the fact that it was the day before the announcement, and the announcement at this point he knew was not going to include Sapphire screens.

Alex: Hopefully he was doing that regularly, because otherwise that’s

Leo: Well I'm sure if there is any irregularity that the SCC will investigate.

Alex: He'll end up in jail or a big fine

Leo: He says that it was part of a pre-arranged plan that was established in March. Probably, you know.

Alex: A lot of CEO do that and most of the CEOs that size. A lot of CEOs will set up a payment of every month or every week or even every day.

Leo: Maybe that’s what it was. If you thought that

Rene: I would sell them the day after the Apple announcement.

Leo: I would say that most cases you would sell the day after a big announcement involving your product unless you knew.

Alex: And again a lot of CEOs will do it regularly all the time, specifically not to show any irregularities.

Leo: We are talking about Apple's enterprise ambitions; of course Microsoft has some as well. I think this is no surprise, they have announced that they are going to make office for iPad and iPhone free, Android too. In the past you have had to have an office 365 subscription to use office. You could always use it as a read only tool: Excel, Word, and PowerPoint. Now you can edit with them. You can effectively use almost all of their features for free. They also announced.

Rene: All the simple stuff.

Leo: All the simple stuff, interestingly some of the high end enterprise stuff. They also announced a strategic partnership with a drop box, so that you don’t just have to use just one box or just one drive to store. You can use a drop box to store your documents without paying Microsoft anything at all. Is this Microsoft's way, a shot across the bow, to Apple?

Andy: No, Apple would love to think that they are a threat to anybody's Office suite. This is really a way to blunt Google Docs because remember that there are two advantages to having students and early professionals using your product. One is that if you can get them to buy it for ninety nine dollars, okay that is ninety nine bucks you didn't have. But what you really want is for them to really learn how to use this product, and for that to be the tool that they want to use for the rest of their carriers. And I think that Microsoft is a little more concerned that the more people who are using Google Docs, that makes a lot easier for the next generation of IT people, and the next generation of people who are setting up the infrastructure for companies to say, you know what we are going to standardize on Google Docs and not on Microsoft Office. And given the amount of money that they make off of enterprise versus the amount of money they make off of students and off of just casual users. This is just like easy money. It seemed like an easy decision let’s just give up a small amount of money with the idea that this is going to pay off big time in the long term by making our entire echo system a lot more valuable.

Alex: As we start getting new in the company, it is far more likely that they are going to            know Google Docs at this point than Microsoft or Pages. You know we have to usually make them use Numbers.

Rene: Does anybody use Pages?

Andy: There is no bigger fan of any group of people of Apple than me. The only Apple iWork doc app that I use is Keynote.

Leo: Keynote is awesome, and you use it specifically as an antic dote to PowerPoint

Andy: But the complication there is that I've been trying to use less of the flashier features. It seems as though the more content I actually have, the less I need to say what if I do a magic move to have these text swap positions and then more from one picture to another. It would not be that difficult for me to switch to PowerPoint, and if I worked in an office where I had to collaborate with other people and they said its okay if you want to develop something in Keynote but at some point you are going to have to convert this to PowerPoint. I would gripe for maybe twenty minutes but I don't think I would have trouble making that transition.

Alex: We work for a lot of, we are either running presentations for people in big halls or           working with people and pretty much the thing that you see in every professional, high end, presentation company that is doing the PowerPoint type stuff is Keynote. Everybody, if they are doing a presentation and they are serious about it; the next step after Keynote for most presentation companies, most corporate presentation companies, is what's called a Spider or an Encore system which is an eighty thousand dollar piece of hardware. But, before that they are using it. When you get used really, to pushing Keynote, I think that if you go back to using PowerPoint, and definitely that presentation thing that Google does. They are just very rough as far as the speed in which you can put things together that looks nice. Keynote is definitely a nice thing that they have. I think that Numbers is. So, Numbers is not good a heavy duty spread sheets, but when it comes to organizing stuff, doing basic budgets, that sort of thing it is just much faster. I worked in Excel for a long time and I don't use the Google one at all. I do, at the last step to save it out to it to send it out to a client but it is horrible.

Rene: I cut and paste into Google docs a lot but I use Keynote and Numbers. I don't use Pages I use PBI mostly but I'll cut and paste into Google Docs when I have to.

Alex: We are in Google Docs every day, the presentate. I don’t know how we could run our business without it at this point. Without Google Docs, there are just certain apps that I don’t like.

Leo: Microsoft isn’t really threatened then by the alternatives, this is just.

Alex: I think they are defiantly threatened by Google.

Leo: Except Google.

Andy: I think they understand that you need to have a really good, at least superb, free product. I think this was an easy decision for them to make.

Rene: I think that it is not just Google. I think there are so many smaller apps now. If you look at IOS, they have iA Writer, there are tons of apps that can do basic presentations, and it can do basic writing. It’s the sum of all of those things. I’ve used this analogy before, it terrible, and I still think its appt. If you’re in a mixed martial arts fight and your being over whelmed, you can just cover up and try and whether it or you can cover up and drop down and try to take the person and change the fight. It’s not clear which one Microsoft is doing, but they are defiantly sort of reacting to the market and covering up a little bit. This is Microsoft is a company that Bill Gates stood up for and proudly says, you are steeling my software. They made their billions selling software and now they are giving away office for free and that is an enormous key changed.

Andy: And I agree, but they are not giving away office for free. They are giving away a mobile version of Office, that doesn't have the full fighting power of this fully operational battle station such as Microsoft Office. It would be different if they had.

Leo: It has as much as Google Docs doesn’t it.

Andy: I would say that it is certainly competitive with Google Docs.

Leo: You’re not going to give away more, maybe not much more capability than the competitor.

Andy: I think that what this must say is that they've looked at how availability Microsoft for IOS has effected for Microsoft 365 subscriptions. They figured out that people are not subscribing to Office 365 specifically to get this product. So therefore we may as well use this to our advantage differently. I guess as Rene says, I'll hijack your analogy to change the fight, that we will now use this as a promotional thing to enhance the value of Office 365; the thing that we really, really, do want to sell on other platforms.

Rene: But it does put in people's minds that Office is free. It’s not always free. It’s not free on the desktop. It’s not free for the enterprise, but it does start putting that idea out there. And if someone wants to pay money for good mobile software, there is just one more arrow in the heart of paid mobile software.

Andy: That ship has already sailed. Apple already torpedoed development of third party productivity software, by giving away iWork for free. They also kind of cut the legs off of that beast by making it really, really difficult to make it a superlative text editor with inline text editing and stuff like that if you’re not an Apple brand word processor. I feel as though that ship already sailed. I don't think that it is as significant as it might be on other platforms.

Leo: Google drive, not to be left behind off of the platform, is off letting you open and save files using other apps. Gets touch ID and video downloading. Big upgrades for Google drive as well. I think this is a great battle for consumers.

Alex: And it is heating up. We are seeing, behind the scenes we are seeing this huge push for all three companies to go after this market. They are all fighting. This is not anything that they are just going to kind of doodle with. None of these are just hobbies for any of these companies.

Rene: As a sanity check, are they all making software for IOS now and none of them are making software for Windows including Microsoft?

Leo: Isn't that funny? But you can’t get Microsoft Office for Windows

Andy: Google just has some sort of thing against Microsoft.

Leo: They just have something against Microsoft software.

Andy: It is not even a thing where the vote does this make sense for us from month to month. It is that they have taken the stand that they are not going to support a Windows phone when they don't have their two most important products available for it; products that would be very, very simple to adapt to windows phones. Yeah they have something. There is something on some white board that says this is the third rail. Do not even talk to Surgay about this. Microsoft burned his daddy's farm to the ground when he was a little kid, and now this is how he stops justice by night is he is a crusader.

Leo: Its interesting because it’s one of the things that keeps me off of a Windows phone is because I’m so invested in the Google universe. The lack of Google apps kills me. YouTube, that was the bell weather, and the fight that Microsoft and Google had over the YouTube app. YouTube got mad at Microsoft because they allowed you to download videos from YouTube and Microsoft said alright well you do it and Google said no. And then finally really the YouTube app on Windows phone, which I think Microsoft created is basically the web page. And Google has never done a YouTube app. You don't do a YouTube app on phone you are pretty much saying there is something going on there. We don't want it.

Rene: My shoe has a YouTube app now.

Alex: Also I think Microsoft right now is one percent of the market.

Rene: They are paid by IPhone that is one percent of the iPhones they are just giving away.

Leo: I think Google can afford it. You can say that for a lot of companies. Ok we are not going to do a Windows phone version. Google has enough engineers they can do a Windows phone.

Alex: They could, but it’s one percent with a company that has not been following the rules.

Leo: I think it is a purely economic decision, but it feels like it is more than that.

Alex: I think it’s a combination, if Microsoft were fifteen percent

Leo: If they were twenty percent

Alex: Exactly, if they were fifteen or twenty percent they would definitely do it. At one percent of the market Microsoft doesn’t have the leverage, they need to be nice. And that is what they didn't quite get.

Andy: I think your right but, let’s also acknowledge the fact that when one of their own comes up with this idea: what if we had independently flying hot air balloons that simply fly over the landscape, and provide free Wi-Fi. They got the money to build those. They have time to take part in those

Alex: It’s not that they don't have the money.

Andy: When it comes down to we could extend the usefulness of Google apps and services to Windows phones. It doesn’t matter that we are talking about a few hundred of users as opposed to a hundred million users. They don’t have the time or priority for that. I think that’s a significant data point. That’s all I’m saying

Alex: I think that it's not that they don’t have economic that they would make more money with it. It's just that Microsoft doesn’t have any leverage.

Andy: I'm saying that Google has the ability to pursue any project they want to do. They have the time, the money, they have the resources. I think the most important thing is they just do not have the interest in supporting Windows phone. Not even the infinite, decimal time that they had. I wonder if someone said I want to make this my personal project. You said you let me take time off to do any project that I want. I want to port YouTube to a Windows phone. I wonder what kind of meetings there would be as a result of that.

Alex: I think that part of this was that Microsoft decided that they wanted theirs to do a whole bunch of things that Google doesn't want it to do. And so the thing is that Microsoft obviously did read the Art of War which is never fight a battle up hill. You know you wait until you are at the top of the hill until you start fighting those battles. They just fought them too early.

Leo: You can lead a pundit to surface, but you cannot make them click. CNN made a deal with Microsoft to use surface tablets for its mid-term election coverage. At least for some of the pundits, they were used as an iPad stand. Here is one pundit, thanks to Adam UCF who got this steal. She looks happy that is because she is not using it, she is using an iPad. Here is another analyst.

Alex: You are talking about people on a live broadcast in front of millions of people and asking them to learn to do something new. That was nuts. Microsoft has the same problem with the NFL, where they kept hand all of these coaches their tablets and they still just want to use their iPads.

Rene: It's not smart in the end.

Leo: What Microsoft paid for was what it got, which was a bunch of surfaces lined up on the table. What happens behind the surface stays behind the surface.

Alex: I think; I feel like anything they were going to buy into this, got lost with these behind the scene photos.

Leo: For the Apple fan boys, we all knew but I don’t think anybody else did. Most of America thought they were using, Most of America was like what are they using.

Andy: I think more to the point, most of the people who are not in the fan community were like of course I often have a computer in front of me and a phone in front of me as well; this is how we do things. It’s only those of us in the fan clubs that are like total fail, losers. You couldn’t make them use the Microsoft surface. It’s like what are you talking about I'm doing a pod cast and I have two computers in front of me and one of them is not a Mac book. Is it a fail for my Mac book that I happen to have an Android device next to me right now to keep up on something else?              

Leo: No, it’s exactly the case.

Rene: It doesn't look natural the way they are doing it. It would behoove them to have someone who is good at sort of set decoration going in and judiciously placing surfaces so that you can see them but they are not obnoxiously in your face.

Leo: I think they should have put a logo on them. Because I think the only people who knew those were surfaces, were the same people who knew they were using iPads behind them.

Andy: The other difficulty is that they should have, if they were really being smart about this they would have made them different colors or put different cases on some of them. They really look like the set designer broke out a box of these that were shipped from the Microsoft shipper and put them up there like place settings.

Leo: With that much commitment to the whole thing.

Rene: It’s funny on CBS; they always use these Microsoft computers that I’ve never seen. They have the Windows logo in the back instead of the Mac logo and they shine through them.

Leo: There has never been a Microsoft or Windows computer with a Windows logo where the Apple logo is on the Apple computers. But that is what you’ll see almost always on TV and that why you know what it is.

Alex: And you can always tell if you see one that looks exactly like a Mac but it is perfectly silver. Your like, somebody didn't pay for that.

Andy: or there is a Windows logo over it. On the Big Bang Theory, Raj has put a round sicker exactly on the cut out part of the Apple logo so it looks like an Apple logo but you can't see the little leaf on it. I wonder why he decided to put exactly there.

Rene: Raj wants to get paid.

Leo: Same thing happened in the NFL. Finally, Fitbit has been dropped from the Apple online store, another indicator that Apple may someday release a watch.

Alex: That is never going to happen.

Leo: Crazy

Rene: They kept all the other fitness bands though. I wish people would look at these stories more. If it was just because they had a band they could drop Jawbone and they could drop

Leo: Here is why: Fitbit has already said they have no plans to integrate with Health Kit.

Rene: There you go.

Leo: Fitbit has its own software, which is quite good.

Andy: It makes perfect sense, because Apple doesn't want customers coming back and saying hey I can’t make this work with the Health app on my iPhone.

Leo: Right

Andy: it’s easy to think they are trying to be strategic here, but in fact it’s like how much stress do we want to invite into our lives and how can we avoid it.

Leo: Both the Jawbone Up and the new Up24 support Health Kit. Nike fuel band does, Withings does. I use Withings stuff; they are Health Kit compatible as well. In fact Withings tweeted: “We believe your data is your own and you can do what you want with it. Welcome to the free world and enjoy #Healthkit". Which is a little hard to understand but I think with some explanation it makes sense. So I think that is probably why if it doesn’t work with Health Kit then we are not going to carry it.

Rene: They don’t have to carry everything. Walmart doesn't carry everything; it’s a store buyer decision.

Leo: Fitbit CEO says: "The number one selling connecting device with year to date sixty-nine percent market shares. Fitbit is sold in forty-six countries, thirty-seven thousand retail stores, blah, blah, blah." You can always go to Amazon to get it. I like Fitbits. I am actually very interested in a Jawbone Up. But, I am not buying anything new until I see the iWatch, the Apple watch.

Alex: Which is why they announced it way ahead of time.

Leo: Way ahead of time. Let's take a break and then we will come back with your picks of the week. Are you ready gentlemen? Our show today brought to you today by Personal Capital. Personal Capital is such a great choice. I am sure; you know when the Android Wear came out Personal Capital immediately made its software available on the Android ware. I would be shocked if they don’t do exactly the same with the Apple Watch. What is Personal Capital? It is a great place to go to find out what is going on with your money, to plan for your future, your investments. Personal Capital if free, it's secure. It will just take you a minute to get into your accounts and assets. You'll see them on a single screen on your computer, your phone, your tablet; real time intuitive graphs. It will tell you what you're over paying in fees, how to reduce those fees, how to rebalance your 401K if you don't know what that means you need it. You can even get tailored advice on optimizing you investment. Personal Capitol, bring Wall Street to your street. It will just take a minute and as I said you get it absolutely free. I've been using it for two years now and I am very glad. You can do budgeting with it and lots of stuff, but really the main thing, focus, I think at least for me because I getting on is planning for your future so that you have enough money to retire on. If you're waiting, if you're hoping that the government will, I can't even say this with a straight face; take care of you in your old age you better get Personal Capitol. Personalcapitol.com/MacBreak, make better investment decisions free, secure, easy. Personalcapitol.com/MacBreak. Time for our picks of the week, let’s try Rene Ritchie your pick today.

Rene: My pick it Tapbot makes the cute little apps for, calling them cute is maybe a disservice, but they are cute. They make Tweetbot most famously for IOS.

Leo: Love it must use.

Rene: and they made Calcbot for IOS for a while, they haven't done much work on it lately but they have just release Calcbot for the Mac. It's just as you would imagine a Tapbot app would be it has great sound, great animation, very simple it does just calculations and currency conversions but it does it very, very well. It has some interesting concepts, for example instead of memory it has favoriting. Because everyone in used to social networks now and favoriting. You can favorite results of your calculations or results of your conversions. It's not a widget because they don't believe that widget space is a good place to put a calculator even on a Mac. So, it is an actual full OS10 application. But, it is small, it's compact, it can hide the tape, it can turn into a scientific calculator, and it just sort of sits there and does its job when you want it to. It does it very, very elegantly and very well.

Leo: You can also see, this to me is very useful, you can see the whole expression that generated the number. Because, you know when you are entering a long list on numbers even just adding them, did I get that one? To be able to see the whole process and then the result is really, I think hard to believe, really useful. Why should you pay five buck for a calculator when you already got one, that’s why.

Rene: It’s a good experience. You know, that comes up over and over again. It’s the same reason I pay for Tweetbot, I'm sitting there eight hours a day using it, every day and its fractions of a penny. I was on the beta test for this; I've been using it for a while. If you don’t need one of those fancy full blown RPN, or something calculators, this will suite you very, very well.

Leo: PCalc would be the one if you need full RPN or you need scientific, PCalc is a great choice. So you get two choices: Calcbot or PCalc.

Rene: Some people like Soulver, which has a really differently it's not really a calculator. Because some people don't believe that you should take a regular calculator.

Leo: It's not digital native.

Rene: Soulver does it differently if you are looking for something totally different.

Leo: It is spell Soulver like soul-ver, soul-ver. Yeah I bought that. It is expensive though, it is like twelve bucks. But it does kind of make more sense; it is like a note book where you would write your calculations.

Rene: It is almost like word processing your calculations.

Leo: Yeah it does make sense; because we don't have buttons it’s a screen. Alex Lindsey you pick.

Alex: I have one pick and one unpick.

Leo: Okay

Alex: So my first pick is, WireCast 6.0 just came out a lot of great new features. If you haven't use Wire cast, it's pretty much like, in my opinion, we do a lot of live streaming and this is for live streaming if you are corporate, education, that type of thing. This is really a great tool for you. There is where you can hang out on air and do a live stream pretty easily, after that you start moving to WireCast. This gives you the ability to play back video, do lower thirds, now they’ve added social media feed so you can latterly be pulling in Tweets into your show that you are putting together.

Leo: That’s weird, really?

Alex: Which is a big part of when you are doing live shows, its like hey use this hashtag. Well you can be searching that hashtag and be putting it into it, directly into it. It is now 64 bit, it's just a great, it's that next step up. $995 for the Pro version $495 for the base version so it's not a $50 app or a $10 app but it does a lot of stuff. This is where we started, really we did and we still do. This is what I use at home, so I have elementals that we use for the big stuff. But what I use when I'm at home when I'm doing my own personal little live streams, Ask Alex's and all the other stuff. Is actually WireCast, because it's got a whole bunch of things that I can do on my own really quickly because I can edit between shots. The one thing is that it's kind of virtual you can actually get four cameras into your Mac using a break out box, if you can get eight in, it will see eight. So you can do a lot

Leo: So this is like a TriCaster in software really.

Alex: It can be absolutely, it's not as dedicated because typically you are using it with a computer that you are using a lot of other things with and it doesn't have a control surface the way that the TriCaster has.

Leo: It's for beginning video podcaster.

Alex: Absolutely, I think that when you want more than the HOA, and you start adding stuff, adding your lower thirds, graphics, playbacks, bugs. You can do a picture-in-picture, where you have one picture that is kind of turned in 3-D and one picture down below.

Leo: You can use your iPhone or iPad as a source over Wi-Fi.

Alex: you can over Wi-Fi, or Teradek.

Leo: I think this is how I'm going to do my show when I retire just out of my house.

Alex: It's a really great application.

Leo: Not cheap, five hundred bucks.

Alex: Or a thousand.

Leo: Or more.

Alex: Or more if you really want to. $495

Leo: For the Pro version.

Alex: so if you are thinking about how do go next, I highly recommend it. Then the next step after that is looking at Tricaster and after that is Elementals and big stuff.

Leo: Black Magic has some switchers that are pretty affordable.

Alex: I got a couple of those.

Leo: what do you think?

Alex: Well, Black Magic has the switcher but you're still going to have to stream it with something.

Leo: Yeah the streaming.

Alex: And it does the graphics, so if you want to play back a video or do a replay or do all those other things. Those are things that Black Magic won't do on its own.

Leo: Are there any solo video pod casters, just sitting in their house using this kind of thing? Doing amazing shows out of their basement?

Rene: We used the Firm stuff for a really long time; the only problem was when it crashed we lost the video. It was hard

Alex: Because you were using it to record as well.

Rene: Yes.

Leo: $495 not $4.95, its two thirds of an Alex.

Alex: Exactly

Leo: Also $995 for the Pro version, but then there are add ins that can add up as well. You can spend a lot of money.

Alex: When you think about it like a Teradek cube, being able to see it in WireCast means that you could have it anywhere on the corporate network going back to the receiver or not even going back to a receiver just a transmitter and it will see that feed so there is a lot of.

Leo: That’s right Breshwood uses that, he has always used WireCast.

Alex: I thought he used VidBlaster.

Leo: No he, is it VidBlaster?

Alex: Yeah, VidBlaster, Brian Breshwood uses VidBlaster.

Leo: What do we use? Because we also use software on top of what we are doing, is it WireCast?

Jason: Before we had the Elemental, now we are using WireCast.

Leo: Now we are doing it with the hardware, alright. I see Crane cam, oh wait you had a disrecommendation.

Alex: I'm getting rid of my 6 plus.

Leo: Your phone, your giant phone, you don’t like it?

Alex: no I can't deal with. So people keep asking me what I got

Leo: So what did you get instead?

Alex: I'm going to get the 6. It doesn't fit in my pockets, I need the pockets.

Leo: It's not that for me, there is not enough that takes advantage of the real-estate.

Alex: I just feel like, I love when I'm working out to have the bigger screen to watch little movies or whatever, but at the same time I would just rather go back to my I pad mini and go back to the 6. The 6 plus is just, what happened was I was changing my behavior because I wasn't fitting stuff into my pockets. So I was putting it in my outer pockets so I wasn't getting calls cause it never rings because I don’t let my phones ring Because I'm on the air all the time

Leo: You weren’t feeling the vibe?

Alex: I was not feeling the vibe.

Leo: Because it was in the wrong pocket.

Alex: Not feeling the vibe dude. So people are asking me and I'm going to go back to a 6 and figure out what to do with this phone.

Leo: Rene, are there more apps taking advantage of the real-estate or is it just big?

Rene: it’s a two prong problem and I still don’t understand fully why. The smaller more independent apps are updating much faster and they are doing the split view controllers and they are doing the special views. The large apps, the apps that are from the big companies, they are not adding that stuff at all very quickly.

Leo: So just to me it looks like you don't get more real-estate, you just get bigger things.

Rene: You get more accessible apps.

Leo: Which to me is not a reason for a big screen, I want to get more stuff on that screen.

Rene: And the other problem is that Apple doesn't let developers individually target specific devices. So if they wanted to do something completely outlandish, like for example I would love to see Paper by Fifty Three on the iPhone 6plus but, they can't not do it for the other iPhones. So there is some policy and problems.

Leo: Andy so the disrecommendation, we've gone back to the iPhone 6 and a recommendation Telestream's WireCast 6.0 out now. Let's go over to Crane cam 3000 the future of video pod casting.

Andy: Thank you very much, I actually have two recommendations. For a second there I thought Rene was going to scope my calculator recommendation. My recommendation is the Craig 454 digital calculator.

Leo: They've stuck with a button metaphor I see.

Andy: It is sort of a fake leather top here but it has four functions, count them one, two, three, four, and floating point arithmetic. And also it can take notes so long and the note you want it to take is the word boobies or shell oil or anything else that can be done by holding the display upside down. A little bit hard to come by, also it is a bit of a hand full, so if you don’t like the 6 plus you're probably not going to. If the 6 plus came with a caring strap, maybe it would be a little bit more useful. It's also historically funny, there is a metal plate on the back that explains how to use all of the registers. This is the sort of thing that I happen to have on a shelf in the office.

Leo: it has the manual built in

Andy: Here is the actual pick of the week which is Logitech keys to go ultra portable standalone key board. I really have been doing deep dive into every kind of key board that you can get out there. This is, I'm starting to get attracted to the ones that have one really; interesting and useful ability about it and the thing about this is you think that it is a chiclet keyboard. But, what it is an ultra, ultra thin mechanical keyboard that is covered in its own rubberized skin. So you could conceivably spill seltzer all over it like that.

Leo: It's like a Ronco add. My God, I can't believe he's doing that. How much do you pay for it now? Can you drink it from the key board?

Andy: Drinking from the key board of a $500 a night Bluetooth device. So that's not going to create any problems for you what so ever.

Leo: Can you eat sushi off of it?

Andy: Just like Elton Braun says you want to get things that can be multi taskers. So this will not only be the keyboard you travel with. Like you're in the hotel room you need something to set your drink down on so it doesn't create a ring, this will also work as a coaster. Let me just wipe it off, fortunately I wore a flannel shirt. But the idea is that it is super, super thin, that battery lasts months on a single charge, and has all of the function keys for iPad and iWare sort of stuff. And it is so thin and so flexible that you wouldn't necessarily attach it to an iPad but if you want to carry it around under your arm, you can easily just put it inside here and close the cover over it and you have one nice little compact package. I'm not sure if that is the ideal way of carrying this around. If you are worried about overstuffing a bag, I don't think you would want this crushing into the screen. But as one little compact thing to carry around this works just fine, plus remember you have that easel stand here so you don't have to worry about propping it up on anything. It's not too expensive; we talk a lot here about this sort of stuff as relevant tool pads but, let's not forget that you have the Apple TV that can use Bluetooth. You might have even your Mac mini some place that is being used as a server. You want something that you can have in the living room it doesn't matter if you are eating pizza and you need to do a search for YouTube to find something and you want and you have pizza sauce all over this thing you can just hose it off and it will work just fine. Is it absolutely the greatest mobile keyboard in the world? I certainly wouldn't be using it, I certainly wouldn't be recommending it as the keyboard you should get if you need to travel a lot and do a lot of writing on your phone or on your iPad because the keyboard is certainly very useful but you can't get your full speed out of it. But as something that you need to be able to kick around, let's say you need something that can get damaged, greased up, wet, and all that sort of stuff. Not only that; but you always want to have a keyboard inside your laptop bag, or inside your accessory bag. This is a good thing to just toss in there because it is just going to stay in there forever its perfect for its intended use. Its seventy bucks which is not terrible to spend on a keyboard like that and available in an array of fashionable colors.

Rene: You guys are always so expensive for me.

Leo: This looks good. I have no use for it, but I'm going to buy it anyway because I can eat sushi off of it. You guys live like frat brothers; you still have pizza and sushi on your coffee table.

Andy: Living the dream. Seltzer party and I have a third of a tub of hummus dip that I'm going to finish right after this show.

Leo: Do you want to do your other pick? They Might Be Giants fan club.

Andy: Yeah, I want to make this quick. I'm a They might be Giants fan for $98 for next year and I just want you to enjoy this, it is like a really good infomercial. You scroll down you start seeing for 98 bucks you get 52 songs. They are going to release a song every single week. That's cool, like every single Tuesday I get a song. Let's keep scrolling, oh and two tickets to an upcoming concert, that’s good cause I would like to see, and CD I would like, oh and another CD, oh and a third CD. Yeah you know I really think I should buy this. Oh and I also get a t-shirt, and I also get a DVD of. Oh and I get free airplanes. Somewhere 1/3 of the way through this I think I'm going to spend $98. This seems like a very attractive package of thing to get for $98. You can get Flood on vinyl. You can get for even less money, I think for only $40 you can get just the song a week. This is just great when it feels like your life long fandom of a band is repaid in the form of that band continuing to be awesome in brand new ways as you age right alongside of them. They are not the sort of band that will say we're going to try to make you buy a $500 music player just so we can sell you $30 copies of our albums again. They want to give back, that is what I'm getting at.

Leo: That's awesome, I love those guys.

Andy: I don't know if that is relevant.

Leo: Back in the screensavers days, remember they've always had dial a song but it was always on a dumb old answering machine. They said we wish we could put it on a computer, we could change the MP3s and stuff. I coded up for them on a Leonex box, a cheap Leonex box. I wrote a bash list, that they could enter a CD and it would add it to the dial a song play list. I don't know if they are still using it. It was kind of cool, it answered the phone, it had a US robotics voice modem on it so it would pick up the phone. I doubt they are still using it.

Alex: I remember you asked them, when we interviewed them in 1991 when Flood came out and you asked them why their lyrics are so absurd. They said well they are not absurd if you know what we are saying. I was like okay never mind.

Leo: They are not absurd. We had them on the show quite a few times.

Alex: Flood was the best, they were my favorite.

Leo: Flood was the best one?

Alex: My favorite album They Might Be Giants' might be my favorite.

Leo: I should give them $100 because that is a lot of great stuff.

Andy: That is a lot of great entertainment for $98. What really attracts me is the idea that every Tuesday morning I would get an e-mail with a brand new They Might Be Giants song. That seems like a great way to spend 2015.

Leo: My pick, you know that I have misgivings about Kick starter. I have bought so many things and never received them. There is one thing from kick starter that I was very excited about, as a matter of fact it was on this show I think somebody maybe you told me PonoPlayer is on kick starter. That very same day, I immediately went over and laid, plunked down my contribution. They raised with 30 days, they were looking for $800,000, they raised 6.2 million. This Neil Young’s project to make this portable player, not exactly an iPod, but a portable player that could play back high res music, in high quality using very high end digital to analog converters and so forth. April 15^th of this year, they funded it in here and low and behold, here we are November 11^th, only a few months late, my PonoPlayer has arrived. I haven't listed to it, so I'm not giving you a review yet. Maybe the review is that it is a little bigger than I expected.

Andy: You don't want to put that in a back pocked because if you fall down it is going to hurt a lot.

Leo: This is more for the desk and look it has Neil Young on it and if I put it on the desk facing out it might look like I'm Neil Young.

Alex: Everybody is Neil Young now.

Leo: So the PonoPlayer is out and actually my pick is something that you can get now is the Pono software. I'm kind of impressed with; this is maybe what iTunes should have been. As soon as you install it, you can get it for free right now. It does expire; these are beta versions of it. Yes, you are getting an early version of it. Yes, it does have quite a few weird bugs. One of the things that I really like about it, it will on your Mac play back high res music just fine. But more than that, and it has, I think a very nice interface. It will also play to DLNA players, including your Sonos. So, I have been able to pick Sonos, play back high res music from my Mac to my Sonos that is pretty sweet. It will import all kinds of music not just high res music; it will let you see only the high res music if you want. And of course it is what you need; actually it is not what you need to export out to the Pono. The Pono has a little micro SD card, so you just put it into your computer and copy it that way.  But, this is pretty cool. It's called Pono music world, it is free right now from ponotemusic.com. As we keep looking at iTunes and keep saying when is Apple going to redo this? And most people are not going to make a music player for the Mac because there is iTunes. So I'm glad to see a new music player, I imagine this will work on Windows as well which does some really interesting new things including play back high res music. I'm really glad to see it available on Macintosh.

Andy: I also kind of dig the idea of a music company that is underscoring the importance of the entire album. Because I've been kicking myself because only in the past couple of weeks I've realized, when was the last time that you sat down and  listened to an entire album from start to finish, instead of just cherry picking the two or three inside a play list. Just yesterday I listened to Sgt. Peffer start to finish and it's been years. It was like okay there are more songs to this than just the three hits.

Leo: It has playlist creation; it will import your playlist automatically from iTunes when you first install it. It has a lot of interesting advanced tools, some of which are not implemented yet. It does rip CDs; it does play back flack, as well as the other standard formats. I feel like it is pretty exciting.

Alex: Almost makes you want to go out and get a good pair of head phones.

Leo: Yeah, well that is the other thing; I will have a review for you of the PonoPlayer. In preparations for this, I've been buying high res music from HD tracks. But now, there is the Pono world music store as well.

Rene: What head phones are you going to use Leo?

Leo: That’s a good question. I have Etymotic, good quality Etymotic that would probably be      fine for this. I've been using a very, you know my home stereo head phones, the Hifiman headphones. They are $900 headphones they are really nice

Alex: We expect to hear some comparison on those.

Leo: I will probably listen on those, I guess I have to use an adaptor because it has a mini jack it doesn’t have a phono plug. I don't know that’s a good question. We'll see if there is a difference between that and the Etymotic. I also have some high end Surahs; I have a variety of small high end headphones. I am just excited, this is a great story. There is still a lot of argument whether high res music is going to make any difference at all but, it's here.

Alex: You just got to have the whole chain.

Leo: Well and that is why they did the store right? And presumably, Neil Young is able to go to artist, it's obvious that he is able to go to artist and say I want to put out your music as high res. We have a player; we have and echo system and so they got a lot of albums. They are going back and in time to with older albums. So this seems very similar in selection to the HD tracks which is where I have been getting my high res. By the way what high res means is a standard CD is 44.1 kilohertz sampling rate that is 44,100 times per seconds at 16 bit. All of the high res stuff here is atheist 24 bit and the sample rate is usually higher, whether it is 92 kilohertz or 192 kilohertz. I don’t know about the higher sample rates but certainly a higher bit rate makes a significant difference. I asked Joe Walsh for instance; when you record do you record. You know I'm sure most artists now record on compressed PCM. But I say what bit rate do you use? He says well we always use 24 bit, we may not use that higher sampling rate. We might use 16.

Alex: I've accidently recorded in 192, 24 bit on a sound device is 788, and it was funny I screwed up the volume on a pod cast tonight and it was way low.

Leo: There was no hiss was there?
Alex: I had to pull it up from like negative 40 or 50db. I just pulled it up and it was all still there, it sounded just fine.

Leo: I am old and I admit it, and I probably don't hear the difference, but I think I do. It makes me feel better. Most of these albums are not much more expensive than they would be, we are talking about some are. Kenny Rodgers: The Gambler for some reason is $30, but Taylor Swift’s 1989 is $20 and it is flack, so its high res flack. So, actually is this is 44:1 24 bit so I bet you this is how it was recorded, this is a brand new album. Some of the older analog albums are actually in much higher bit rates; much higher sample rates because they are sampling from analog so they decided to go higher. So this is my pick, definitely get the Pono music player go to ponotemusic.com and put that on your Mac. I will give you a further review down the road on the Pono, the giant PonoPlayer you ain't putting that in your pocket. You think your 6 plus was big in your pocket, yeah that’s a big pocket. You could use that as personal defense. They tell me the reason it is so big is because they are using high quality jacks for headphones in here and they wanted to have the room for it.

Alex: Tubes

Leo: There are no tubes in here. Listen to flack and shoot'en Ross as run with scissors that is kind of my motto. Thank you Andy Ihnatko for the Chicago Sun Times it's always a pleasure.

Andy: Always a slice of heaven here. Thank you very much.

Leo: If you want more Andy, and who doesn’t he does two more pod cast on the 5x5 network on 5.1 TV including Analco's Almanac. In which he talks about anything he damn well pleases.

Andy: Exactly, whatever noises with my mouth that I have not used in these two hours I then defer to these pod cast.

Leo: We also thank Rene Richie for being here. Imore.com is the place to go, a great place for Mac news but he also does some fabulous pod cast for more listen to the debug more pod cast, it is a must listen every week. Thanks Rene always a pleasure. Alex Lindsey shows up when he s not doing more important things which is most of the time.

Alex: I get here pretty often

Leo: I love it.

Alex: I’m literally walking off this set, going 20-30 feet away onto the final cut virtual user group.

Leo: Good, how do we get in there?

Alex: bittle/fcpvirtual4 fcp virtual because virtual and then 4

Leo: Do you have to pay to get in there.

Alex: No, it's free. If you want to ask questions, you can vote on questions, we will answer them. Who I think are the experts in final cut sitting at a round table that we built.

Leo: And you are already late so get in there.

Alex: And I’m already late, but come check it out. I had them slip the clock so I have time.

Leo: I’m sorry you should have told me. Alright for those of you who want to know about security, Steve Gibson is next on this network. But for those of you who want to know about final cut, bittley/fcp

Alex: fcp

Leo: Virtual4

Alex:Virtual4

Leo: Thank you everybody for being here, we do MacBreak weekly at 11am pacific 2pm eastern time, that’s 1900 utc on twit.tv. Please join us live if you can, but if you can't on demand audio and video will always available at twit.tv/mbw or wherever you get your favorite stuff. A couple of extra little plugs for you: Jason reminds me we are doing the best-ofs this year as we do every year for the holiday week and we would love to know what you think were some of the best moments this year in MacBreak weekly. Twit.tv/bestof, twit.tv/bestof, as much information as your can give us. It says time code; you don’t have to give us a time code. If all you can give us is in January something cool happened, Jason will do his best.

Jason: Help make my job a little bit easier please.

Leo: Do this for Jason, twit.tv/bestof. Another place to go, we have brand new shirts great for holiday gifts. In fact we were looking for something that we could sell that you might want to give the TWiT fan in your family. Now if you're watching this you are already the TWiT fan, what you do is drop a hint and tell your family to go to tspring.com/twit. We have two different choices we have a button down shirt a standard dress shirt, and we have a polo shirt. You can chose a variety of colors and styles. We haven’t been publicizing this and that is my bad. You have until November 30^th, but we promise to get them in your hands in time for the last day of Hanukkah or the first day of Christmas. Whichever comes last. Are black helicopters flying over right now? I think they are, the NSA has arrived.

Andy: It’s a good shirt to wear if we were ever to do a TWiT infomercial.

Leo: It looks good doesn’t it? It has a nice TWiT logo, it can help with an investment plan for you and your community; teespring.com/twit and you have till November 30^th. Thank you Jason for reminding me about that. We are out of time, Security Now up next. Thanks for joining us. Now get back to work because break time is over!