MacBreak Weekly 437 (Transcript)

Leo Laporte: It's time for MacBreak Weekly! Adam Engst joins Andy and Rene to talk about what we saw at CES including HealthKit, HomeKit and CarPlay. We've also got the latest on Thunderstrike, the attack on Macs that takes advantage of the Thunderbolt port and a whole lot more. It's all 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 437, recorded January 13^th, 2015.

My Carbon-Based Brother

MacBreak Weekly is brought to you by SquareSpace. Creating and editing your website is easier than ever. Using the redesigned interface, SquareSpace 7. Now with Getty Images, Google Apps integration, 14 new templates and more. Try the new SquareSpace at SquareSpace.com. Don't forget to enter the offer code MacBreak at checkout to get 10% off. And by Harry's. For guys who want a great shave experience for a fraction of what you're paying now, go to Harrys.com, get $5 off your first purchase by entering the code MacBreak when you check out. And by LegalZoom. Visit LegalZoom.com to save on your legal needs and gain access to a network of legal plan attorneys for guidance. LegalZoom is not a law firm, but provides self-help services at your specific direction. Visit LegalZoom.com and use the offer code MBW to receive $10 off at check out. Time for MacBreak Weekly, the show where we cover the latest Apple news. And just back from CES, Mr. Rene Ritchie of iMore.com. You look good, you don't look too exhausted, I saw your cleanse on Instagram.

Rene Ritchie: I put the Retina iMac here Leo so I'm using that for podcasting now so you should have 5k of Rene right now.

Leo: That actually, I wasn't going to say anything. But it does look good. It does look really good. It looks better.

Rene: It replaced a Haswell.. sorry a Nehalem Mac Pro so you can see how far we've come.

Leo: Wow.

Rene: It's actually sitting on top of the carcass of a Nehalem Mac right now.

Leo: I like it, it looks good. Anyway welcome back, we'll get your CES report in just a second. Andy Ihatko is also here. Snowbound in Boston. Hey Andy.

Andy Inhatko: Icebound, but that's okay. We're hardy pioneer stock.

Leo: Yes. Indeed. And he's also at the Chicago Sun Times. And look, to fill in for Alex Lindsay this week, Adam Engst from TidBITS is here. Hi, Adam!

Adam Engst: Hey, nice to see you Leo.

Leo: Nice to see you. You're in upper New York State I want to say?

Adam: Yeah, upstate New York, Ithaca, New York so essentially isolated as our bumper stickers say.

Leo: Is that an actual penguin in there or is that just a replica?

Adam: (laughing) If you don't have a 4 foot penguin in your office, something's wrong.

Leo: I want to point out, that is not a fake tux penguin. That's an actual.. that is a real penguin model.

Adam: Ironically, it was brought to me by an Australian friend from Australia.

Leo: Is it an emperor penguin?

Adam: It is.

Leo: We must get these..

Adam: Life size scale. Perfectly anatomically correct.

Leo: Look under its feet, see if it's harboring eggs. Because you don't want more, that's for sure.

Adam: There's nothing worse than an infestation of little penguins.

Leo: Actually that would be awesome. So awesome.

Adam: This time of year, they'd be so happy here.

Leo: I want penguins for the twit brick house studio. I love that idea. Little fuzzy little penguins.

Adam: Mr. Popper's Penguins.

Leo: Right? I grew up reading that, as a kid. Adam, TidBITS is 24 years old, celebrating the longest 10 year I think of any Mac publication going..

Adam: I don't know if it's... oh wait, that's right we lost Mac World.

Leo: We lost Mac World so you now are the king.

Adam: Oh.. well, there is Mac Tech too. They have some claim to it, but I definitely have the oldest internet publication.

Leo: Yeah, and Mac World is now an internet publication so yeah. Oldest internet publication.

Adam: They're not completely gone.

Leo: Did you ever do a paper version of TidBITS?

Adam: No.

Leo: No. You were no fool.

Adam: Technically the first two issues of TidBITS were laid out in paper back when Tanya was working at Cornell and sort of the initial idea was to help some of her coworkers keep up with what was happening in the Mac world.

Leo: Really?
Adam: Yeah but the page maker version lasted for two weeks, so..

Leo: You thought better of it.

Adam: The rest were at 1254 weeks?

Leo: Wow. Yeah, you knew.

Andy: They got wise to wow, why is this one printer in this one office generating 8000 pages every two weeks?

(laughing)

Adam: Yeah but it was actually one of those.. you know, the line feed printers with the holes in the side?

Leo: TidBITS is a must read. If aren't subscribing to it, do, it's free but do support them with a little premium subscription. Throw a little moolah their way.

Adam: Thank you.

Leo: So CES and you at TidBITS referred to Philip Michael's wonderful piece in 6 colors.

Adam: Oh that was just so perfect. I mean Phil really really pegged it in terms of just the appropriate, frankly, mocking of CES. Because CES is such an institution that it deserves a certain level of mocking as well as some people to go and prostrate themselves and ruin their feet as I'm sure Rene probably had to do.

Leo: He writes “CES, which stands for 'Come on Everybody, Stuff' is the largest gathering of the tech industry outside of a 4chan chatroom. Companies both large and small hoping to grab headlines on the latest gear and gadgets. How important is CES? Well it's the launching pad for such innovative, disruptive products as MySpace TV, Lady Gaga's Polaroid sunglasses camera, a transparent washing machine from Haier and glass-up smart glasses.” None of these products came to markets, beside the point, tech journalists get to see demos of them. And if you've ever caught a glimpse of a unicorn, wouldn't you want to tell people about it? It actually is.. they show Michael Bay's abandonment of the Samsung presentation last year. Nothing bad like that happened this year, I don't think. But yeah, this is.. and this is before CES. He wrote this up kind of to prepare you. He was right about a few things, there were a lot of drones.

Rene: Yep.

Leo: This year, the drone demos move indoors as we embrace our new drone-centric future from high above the CES show floor, drones will swoop down on the attendees below giving people a birds-eye view of the sights and sounds of CES while also capturing the up-close reactions of surprised onlookers and unaware passersby. There will be no survivors. So, nice article. But Rene actually went. And.. Mobile Nations teamed up with Geek Beat TV and Tom's Hardware and you had round the clock coverage.

Rene: Yeah, we took your old spot in South Hall, put up a stage and broadcast every day for five days. We survived Leo.

Leo: And Serenity showed her star power and her stamina.

Rene: Absolutely. Yeah, we had Georgia, Serenity, myself and Anthony, our videographer from iMore. Then we had Android Central, Windows Central, connected lee. A whole bunch of..

Leo: Yeah. So is there.. I mean Apple doesn't go to CES. There's always been a..

Rene: They.. do.

Leo: Oh they do?

Rene: But they don't.. not officially, so they have like store buyers will go in to see what they might want to put into the Apple store next year. There's people who go there doing competitive analysis.

Leo: They go there to see what the other folks are doing, not to announce stuff.

Rene: Well and to see.. I mean everyone is interested in seeing trends, or see like there's a lot of accessory people there. This year particularly there was CarPlay there was HomeKit there was HealthKit and they probably will want to sneak a peek at what the people are doing with those technologies.

Leo: So there were, so there actually was a lot of CarPlay stuff at CES. I know you were looking for that. Tell us about that.

Rene: The CarPlay.. so I'm of two minds about the CarPlay stuff. I really love it because, and I've told this story before, my car I can't upgrade. No matter what I do, I have to buy a new car to improve the in-dash entertainment. The infotainment system in it. But once I get a CarPlay car, every time I update my phone and every time I update iOS that's going to update the functionality of the infotainment system. If I get overcast on my phone, I can have overcast on the CarPlay system. And it means that I don't have to learn a new system every time I get in a car. It's just all my data, all my content, all my stuff and an interface that I'm familiar with. And we're getting to the point where they're starting to implement that well. They're getting better touchscreen technology, some of them are still using knobs, but in general from car to car to car, if I'm an iPhone user I just get an iPhone experience, and I think that's hugely valuable. Because cars never have consistent interfaces. You can get two cars from the same manufacturer and you have to learn how to use them every time you get into one and that can be perplexing for people, and I think it's great if we can just have our stuff with us.

Leo: There were.. I know Alpine and Pioneer had a pre-announced aftermarket CarPlay. Were there other aftermarket.. so if I don't have CarPlay in my existing car, I can add it. Although it looks like it might.. it's kind of a nonstandard dashboard implement.

Rene: I think you have to have a two high. I forget what it's called, but a double high unit in order to put it in. But we're going to test some of those. Yeah those are coming out. Some people find them expensive, but again it's basically the price of connectivity at this point, and hopefully as people upgrade their cars, the CarPlay stuff is going to.. I like the HomeKit stuff frankly much better this year.

Leo: That I want to hear about a lot. In fact, didn't we say please go over to the home automation pavilion and see what's up?

Rene: Yeah and I mean so a lot of them were sort of uhh we're waiting on Apple, we're not sure but there were several people like Incipio, I was blown away. We went to the Incipio booth and they were like hell yeah, HomeKit is awesome and they picked up an iPhone and they said “lights on” and the lights turned on. And they said “outlet on” and the fan just pulled up. And they said “Incipio off” and everything connected to their system went off and they said it was great to use because now instead of having all these little fiefdoms of different home automation technology and a folder full of apps they just made their app compatible with HomeKit, you can go into it, you can set up homes and rooms and zones. And activities and I have this dream, Leo that I'll be able to pick up Siri one day and say “Crash the compound” and everything will slam closed around me and I can just watch TV and drink my beverage in peace.

Andy: Yeah. Nest just announced some really good connectivity with certain automotive apps. So now your Nest at home will be aware that oh, he's driving home right now, I need to start warming up the house because he is.. according to his current ETA he will be home in exactly 18 minutes, it takes 15 minutes to the house to get up to temperature so I'll start cranking up the heat right now. And that's the sort of stuff where..

Rene: And fluff your clothes! And now it will make you.. the Nest will make your dryer fluff your clothes for you when you're about ready to get up.

Andy: It also makes like the lamps in your bedroom just sort of dim down and then up again to alert your spouse that perhaps it's time to get the UPS driver back on his way. Make sure the truck is out of sight.

Adam: I'm going to be really interested to see some of the stuff, we actually just replaced a 19 year old car and a 13 year old car so we've gone from having the technology in our cars being cassette players to a full bore forward collision warning and avoidance and all that kind of stuff. And it has been just a huge huge learning curve to figure out all the different things and look for the settings and figure out how to get the map pointing the right direction and all that kind of stuff. So but CarPlay has been, it has been fairly inscrutable up to this point. So we're really curious to see what that ends up looking like. And the HomeKit thing for me, I'm not so interested actually in the specific commands, I want to see a lot of proximity things go on. So you know, when I walk into a room with my phone in my pocket, turn the lights on. So I don't have to.. you know, if I have to pull my phone out and say “Siri, turn the lights on” it's easier to turn on the light switch.

Leo: There's a tech, I've had a rundown of every HomeKit compatible device they saw at CES. Elgato, a long time Mac stalwart has a new line called Eve, the Eve door and window sensor. Bluetooth LE battery lasts 6 months. I don't really want to have to go around the house and change batteries on sensors. But..

Adam: (laughing)

Leo: That's really grim.

Adam: You do it for your smoke detectors and every other device in your house.

Leo: Yeah.

Andy: Leo, Leo, see that's where you're wrong. The beauty of this is it runs on AC power. So all you need is to have an outlet underneath every single window.

Rene: There was a great story from eCoby, they do something very similar to Nest but they have sensors in every room so as you move to different rooms in your house, you can adjust those rooms automatically for you. And it keeps track of the people in it and the guy, the spokesperson who we were interviewing said that at one point he was out of the point and his eCoby just showed more and more people entering into the rooms and he called home and he said honey, dear, are you having a party? She said, no no I swear dad, no.

Leo: Well what was it?

Rene: It was a party, absolutely!

(laughing)

Leo: Uh huh! Busted! There's a new use for sensing.

Andy: But you have to be aware, this is going to be a marketing problem. Like their demonstrations absolutely prove how wonderful and how sophisticated this technology is but none the less it creeps people the hell out.

Leo: I think also people see.. it seems like a good idea, people aren't going.. you think people are going to really do this?

Rene: They'll do it for the entertainment stuff. Like they'll get the lights, they'll get the Sonos system, the home theater stuff and then slowly as that proves valuable to them they'll get into the more boring things.

Leo: It's always kind of a stretch like oh I want the thermostat to turn up on my way home or I mean it's.. it feels like a stretch, like something you could live without.

Adam: You could just schedule it. I mean.. this stuff.

Leo: I do schedule. I have a, like an old fashioned thermostat. And I schedule it.

Adam: Right. And I mean, or for instance we have geothermal heat with a radium floor so we set our thermostat to 69 and leave it there all winter.

Leo: Right. It's efficient.

Adam: So it actually is extremely complicated, we just never change it because.. you know.

Leo: Schlage which does automated locks will have a HomeKit compatible lock.

Adam: Proximity.

Leo: So you walk up, Bluetooth LE will unlock the door for you.

Andy: But think about how you've been replacing LED light bulbs around your house, you didn't decide to simply swap out everything all at once, it was like..

Leo: Gradually.

Andy: Exactly. I start up with this one light that's in the kitchen that has to stay on all the time and now pretty much.. every time a bulb burns out I just replace with something else, it's.. HomeKit is going to be like that where I think the first thing that people are going to buy is something like a Nest thermostat because it will save you money, it is easy to use, it's very cool to interact with and then over the course of five or ten years every time you buy something brand new if it has that HomeKit functionality and it's within $10-$20 of whatever else you're considering that costs $200, maybe you'll wind up with this wonderful network of just incidental purchases over the next 5 years.

Adam: I actually did a lot of this stuff back in the mid 90s. Friend of mine named Keith Ronholm in Seattle had actually started a company that did a lot of, he had a box that when Mac software and you could attach sensors to it and he had software that you could control all the sensors and you could control X10 devices. So you could do all the home automation stuff. And you know, he gave me one of the boxes to play with and I got a bunch of sensors and a bunch of X10 devices and it was fun to play with but you know, honestly when we moved and the software sort of.. I mean I think it was gosh, Mac OS8, I forgot. It never moved forward. It completely fell by the wayside. It wasn't something that I ever missed.

Leo: You don't need it. Yeah, I have Hue lights and when we moved I had a Hue and a Nest. When we moved I just didn't bother hooking them up.

Andy: It really is up to peoples comfort level. It was really great once I got my first like smart lights and just the ability to turn on certain lights at sundown and then..

Leo: Yeah I loved that.

Andy: On at sundown then back again, but I always come back to this.. my favorite story about people adopting technology and finding their own comfort level has to do when I'd taken over the Christmas decorating at my mom and dad's house and of course I like switched over to after two or three years to like X10 lighting because I could just leave this remote on the nightstand and they can just push one button and all the Christmas tree lights came on, the window lights came on, the outside stuff came on and the first time I set this up my mom was so excited about it she thought it was the coolest thing ever, I didn't want to have to go from window to window and plug it all.. oh this is wonderful! And so I tentatively said well you know mom, and I know that I'm entering the danger zone, I could set this up so that it turns on automatically at a certain time and then turns off at late at night and that's the point where she was like.. she was out. That was the.. the house will burn down if I have a computer turning this on and off, she lacked that ability to push the button herself and do that.

Leo: iDevices, I use their iGrill which I really like. Has invested $10 million in HomeKit, first product is a connected plug, the switch.

Adam: (laughing) Aim high.

Leo: Game on, man.

Rene: The switches are interesting, Incipio has them too because you can take any gadget you have like a fan, like a portable heater, like a..

Adam: That was X10 twenty years ago, so..

Leo: Yeah.

Rene: Yeah but you know my little 6 year old godson is not going to use X10 but he's very, he loves Siri, Siri is his best friend, he'll talk to Siri all day long. So you know, that kind of stuff.

Leo: Shipping in April, $50 for the switch. Let's see what else. iHome we mentioned, iHome the Smartplug, same idea. $39, second quarter. Blue Maestro, the tempo environment monitor.. oh lord. Keeps track on temperature, humidity and barometric pressure. Does it change a lot in the home? I guess it does. So you can keep tabs on conditions in the nursery. Oh my god, the pressure has gone up in the nursery, quick get the baby out.

Rene: It seems like a lot of stuff will be turbulence and way too much and wackiness and silliness for a couple years, then it will stabilize and there will be a bunch of really elegant sort of things.

Leo: You know, smartwatches have kind of won me a little bit. I was very skeptical. So maybe, you know. Maybe.

Andy: Yeah. It's all part of everything you buy being able to enhance, be another brick that builds a much bigger system. Once you start wearing a smartwatch and you realize oh it would be really nice if I'm walking through a room and I realize that oh that light's been on for 3 hours to simply do this as opposed to pick up your phone and do something like that.

Leo: Is there a killer app? Because that would do it, right? The killer app that gets everybody to buy the hub and get in, then you can slowly gradually upgrade. What is the killer app? A garage door opener?

Rene: It's good, but.. there's going to be a killer app, it's going to be a confluence of many other little things when you finally can do that thing like Siri goodnight and you know for sure your garage door is closed and your lights are off.

Leo: Yeah but how long do you have to do that before you get up every time just to make sure. Right?

Adam: I think actually Andy's got it though. The smartwatch may be the trick. Because if you have to pull your iPhone out of your pocket to talk to Siri to turn on the light you're not going to do it. Even if you have to walk across the room, it's just easier to walk across the room. However, if it's on your wrist and you can just say turn on the dining room light. Maybe that is enough easier that you will actually do it rather than taking the extra 3 steps.

Rene: Also it does action..

Andy: Also also if the fact that you have a low power Bluetooth beacon on your wrist gives it the granular to say that not only is Andy in this room but he is sitting down in this chair where he often does reading so I will gently turn down the light.

Adam: Proximity, I think proximity is going to be huge. If it can really tell where you are you can say whenever I do this, turn on a light, again turn on the light if I walk into this room between the hours.. you know, when my sensor outside tells me that it's sufficiently dim, that kind of thing.

Andy: It's not that just.. I'm sorry, did I interrupt? I'm sorry.

Adam: It's just basically, it's going to do what I want, not what I tell it.

Andy: But the killer app I think is going to be something like Google now functionality. Where I don't have to program it to say well if I'm inside this room between 4 and 8 and I'm sitting in this chair, it should be gee every.. it's 7 out of 9 times that he sits in this chair at this time of day he winds up using the watch or the phone to turn on this light, so if I sense that he's making his way from here to there, I'm going to gradually turn that light on and he can easily turn it off if he doesn't want, but if he doesn't turn it off then I will also learn that yes, we should definitely have this light now waiting for him when he enters the house. Stuff like that, where just magically you didn't tell it about the things that you really want it to do. It just figured it out on its own. Just like you don't hire somebody because they're really good at doing the stuff you tell them to do, he's a good hire, or she's a good hire because they figure out what needs to be done in this office without you telling them every single step.

Rene: One of the really nice things about it though is with HomeKit you can do actions and you can string actions together so for example I can have an action that I can say Siri game on and suddenly my speakers come on, it goes immediately to the Xbox channel, the lights go red and silver, anything that would take several discreet actions, especially for young kids. I was talking to a friend of mine who was babysitting and she was like the kids wanted to watch Netflix, and I don't have that. And I'm like yeah you do, it's on 19 different boxes attached to your TV and she's like I don't know how to find that, when you could just say to your watch Netflix time and the TV goes to the right channel and everything. For normal people computers and home automation are still horrible interfaces and we talk about accessibility and yeah, it's great, you can have people who are blind finally use this stuff but it can also be people who aren't familiar with technology finally have access to the stuff and I think that's where natural language interfaces. The kind of simplicity and  uniformity really pay off for us.

Andy: The other problem is that I, maybe you guys have had the same sort of experiences that I have, that the one way to make somebody think, convince them my god this person is an absolute Mac genius, I had no idea such things were possible, he's some sort of wizard, is when you introduce them to automator and say here's how easy, show me something that you do that takes several steps that you do at least once or twice a week. Great, within 10 minutes I have now automated that process for you. It's one of the most brilliant things that's inside the Mac OS and it's something that almost nobody, no real civilian really uses. I think that points to you can make an automation process as easy as pie for somebody but if they're still within, still the mindset of I will just do A, B and C myself because.. programming my computer to do it is going to be too complicated.

Adam: It's totally true. We did a.. Joe Kissel wrote a book for us, Take Control of Automating your Mac. And if you, if you don't think about it like oh you have to program, you're automating things. There are so many ways you can automate things. And it's been fascinating seeing people go oh, yeah. I could use keyboard maestro, I could use hazel, I could use Automator, I could use text expander. It's all doing more things with one action. And just getting people into that mindset, that book has a whole big chapter on getting into the mindset. Because you really have to do that. You have to get past that sense of oh it's really easy. I just do X, Y and Z. Well what if you just had to do X? And all this Y and Z automatically happens. You've got to get people to realize that.

Leo: A couple of disabled people in the chatroom battle cam web 4000 who point out this is great for them, and I certainly agree. If it's hard to move, get around, being able to do this automatically.. but you know this has been around for a while now and I'm really glad to hear that the clapper has now added HomeKit compatibility.

(Ad for The Clapper begins)

Rene: Siri clap on.

Leo: Siri, clap on.

Andy: I suddenly have an idea for a brilliant like, Arduino or Raspberry Pi project. One servo and like one pair of hands could just simply (claps).

Leo: That's what I need, I need a pair of hands!

Andy: Send the command and now you can control anything that's controllable by clapper.

Rene: America made a HomeKit, Russia just made hands.

Andy: You could just make a speaker make the sounds but that's just not as fun as just two giant.. and we put giant three fingered cartoon gloves on them.

Leo: Withings.. who's done.. I think Withings has done some really great wi-fi enabled things like scales baby, monitor.. heart rate monitors, I'm sorry blood pressure monitors. They have a Withings and a new, by the way the new watch looks great. I'm very interested in that, it's kind of a mechanical watch with smartwatch features. This is a home camera, IP based but it also has environmental sensors. So it can tell you when the air in the house is bad. It's interesting. Detects motion too. Velvetwire, I'm not familiar with them but apparently they make an interesting iPhone charger, they now have the next generation Powerslayer Blu. That's, oddly enough my Warcraft handle. This has Bluetooth and an app so you can get a notification on your phone when your iPad is done charging. I'm done. Or you..

Andy: I’ve got to throw a flag in this play. You don't get to call something the Powerslayer and color it in cheerful iMac colors. That's mixed messaging.

Leo: It looks like a cyan cable with a nice red something. I don't know what that is. So anyway, it's a smart charger. Thanks to Suzy Oaks at tech high for writing this and saving me.. this is why I didn't have to go to CES. Chamberlain. This is a garage door opener, in fact there were believe it or not, some home kit garage door openers. This is the MyQ $130 MyQ garage kit, can app open the..you.. I don't.. you need a wi-fi hub and a door sensor and then you can see if your garage door is open, from anywhere!

Adam: Or you could just push the button.. I'm sorry.

Leo: Yeah, nope. Insteon, this is Microsoft's been pushing this one. This is a hub that will be HomeKit. I'm sure all the hubs, I'm sure smart things as well, in fact I think Samsung announced that smart things will be as well. This is, this is if you've got a hub, HomeKit is another.. there's the Incipio. The smart outlet, the smart lamp adapter. And the power strip. And one more. One more. The Honeywell Lyric, this is kind of to compete with Nest, right? But Nest is also going to be HomeKit right?

Rene: I don't know.

Leo: Maybe not. It's Google right? Maybe they don't care.

Rene: Well a lot of people, a lot of the bigger companies say that they have their own ecosystem and that's their priority and they want to be the central hub and it will probably take a while to shake that out.

Leo: This thing uses an app, will use your Apple Watch. So you can get a real time snapshot of your home system with glances. And the watches geofencing feature will let you engage out of town mode with one tap when the watch leaves the range of your home network. Or if somebody steals your watch it gets really cold at home.

(laughter)

Leo: I'm freezing, did somebody steal my Apple Watch? The Lyric thermostat is available now. In the Apple Watch when it comes out.

Adam: We'll be compatible with something that doesn't yet exist.

Andy: That really could be something that helps sell the Apple Watch again. The ability to say here is a specific user, he is here right now because a lot of things that I've really enjoyed about the latest Android updates is the ability to set up geofences that are related to my physical presence and getting someone to spend $350 on a category of hardware that they don't even think they need is not going to be a one $350 reason but I think people can come up with 30 or 40 $30 reasons to justify their purchases.

Leo: We were, I was speculating. Maybe it's just me. That a new Apple TV would be released as a hub for HomeKit, The Verge says..

Rene: The current one works like that, as long as you have the latest release of the Apple TV it'll work as a HomeKit hub.

Leo: Ah.

Rene: So the one they released a couple years ago, yeah.

Leo: Okay.

Adam: It still seems that the Apple TV 3 is getting a little old in the tooth, but..

Leo: Yeah.

Andy: Yeah.

Leo: Third generation Apple TVs running software 7.

Andy: You speak as if it still has any teeth left in its mouth.

Adam: (laughing) I think it's gumming its food.

Leo: So what can I do with the Apple TV? How do I..?

Rene: It's remote stuff, so let's say you're in Europe and you suddenly realize you want to do something at home, you can say Siri turn on my lights so people don't think that I'm on vacation any more.

Adam: Siri I'm at the airport and I forgot my passport!

Rene: Yeah, Siri I left the stove on.

Andy: I hate gossip girl but I want to binge watch it anyway, could you just binge watch it for me while I'm safely out of the house.

Rene: No Andy, I'm afraid we can't do that Andy.

Leo: Does MFI, made for iPhone, iPad, does that include HomeKit now or is it going to be an MFH or.. is there a certification program for HomeKit compatibility?

Rene: Yes but I don't know if it's called MFI.

Andy: I don't think it's.. yeah. I'm trying to figure out why that would come under that spec.

Leo: They have been mentioning MFI, right?

Rene: Well because a lot of them run on the iPhone too so maybe there's some component.

Leo: Right. Oh yeah, of course. According to The Verge, the licensing program for HomeKit is just getting started so nothing that you saw at CES is Apple approved. So people are saying we're going to be HomeKit because we've got the SDK but Apple says yet to have a certification program for that.

Andy: That does feel like good news if they're building stuff and then simply making it compatible later on as opposed to we're building something specifically to take advantage of HomeKit, that's the sort of stuff that will change an entire market as opposed to we're going to make an iPhone accessory. No, we're going to make a home accessory and if you have an iPhone that's great but we don't necessarily need you to do that.

Leo: And that's been the problem with home automation all along. You've got Zwave and Zigby and X10 and..

Rene: Fiefdoms.

Leo: You don't need another one, what you need is something that will do.. that you know, is going to play nice.

Rene: Right now I take my iPhone out, I open the home folder I tap the Hue app, I adjust the Hue lights and I leave that app, I bring the Sonos app up..

Leo: It would be nice to combine all that, I agree.

Rene: It's so much work, Leo!

Leo: Yeah. You're a single guy, do you have a round rotating bed as well, does that help?

Rene: No, is that the thing? Am I supposed to do that?

Leo: I think you.. okay so now I'm just thinking. The drapes draw, the bed starts to rotate.

Rene: The automated drapes were cool at CES, a lot of people had those.

Andy: Leo, do you have any idea how much torque a motor needs to rotate a round waterbed? Come on Leo.

Leo: It's going to sound like you've got a drone in the bedroom. Nothing unusual. (makes buzzing sound)

Rene: One of the more popular things, they had drones that were on your watch and would take off from your watch, take off and fly around and come back to your watch.

Leo: Wait a minute, what? You mean on my wrist watch?

Rene: Yep.

Leo: A little mini drone?

Rene: Yep.

Andy: You know those little birds that like fly behind hippopotamus ears? So now you can actually without, no pickups necessary, launch a micro drone and it'll go..

Rene: My joke for CES was that they were 3D printing drones that would take 4k video that would play on your dishwasher. That was like CES summed up according to my experience.

(laughing)

Leo: Oh lord.

Andy: So disruptive though.

Rene: They had some really cool HealthKit stuff too. Like Atmos has these shorts and shirts for men and women and you put a little module in it and it reads what happens with your muscles, so how much you're tensing your muscles, whether your muscles are in balance or not and you can have like a personal trainer watch while you're doing it or you can review it afterwards. So like you're favoring your left side. It's really good for physio therapy or people who are trying to do injury prevention.

Adam: I'm still trying not to go with this one. Is that module in your shorts or are you just happy to see me? I mean just...

Rene: You can put it in your shirt too.

Leo: I like that, actually. You know, one of the nicest things about the Kinect on Xbox One is it can somehow tell your heart rate, I guess because you're turning red as you're exercising and if you're not exercising hard enough it'll actually say step it up or if you're doing too much it will say slow down big boy. So that's kind of cool, no one uses this by the way. So I think it's kind of cool. Atmos huh?

Rene: Well it's cool because again for someone doing physio therapy you know it's the same like your tires can go bald because your axle is misaligned and it's really hard for physio therapists to diagnose but if they can see that there's a muscle weakness or a muscle overload then they can give you exercises that will help you walk again or do all sorts of awesome things.

Leo: This is a category we've been talking about for a long time, the idea of smart clothing. Neat.

Andy: It does point to how one of the.. some of the greatest things that Apple's working on, the things that really get me excited aren't a specific technology but how well all these pieces can fit together. Because here we're talking about home sensors, about how a wearable device that knows where you are. But imagine just if you have someone who has a health problem or is elderly, just the ability to have HomeKit talk to HealthKit and say okay you have only been in the bedroom and the bathroom adjoining the bedroom for the past 3 days, acting on your instructions I'm going to let your son and daughter know that you haven't been leaving the house for the past week and..

Leo: This is great, this is grandma...

Andy: Data like that that really is useful for something like that now.

Leo: Grandma has motion detecting pants.

(laughter)

Andy: Something as... oh god.

Leo: You think I'm making that up.

Andy: That's so ripe for abuse. Oh boy. You want to make sure you want two factor authentication on that device because.. yeah.. you don't want people making great sport of the data they're taking out of your underwear.

Rene: People with wearables are not.. yeah.

Andy: I don't know what he's liking about the Lego Movie but I'm definitely going to 1 hour and 10 minutes see what he's enjoying so much about the Lego Movie.

Leo: We did kind of.. I mean this is what the Nike stuff was with the iPod, right? In a way that's what that is. You put a sensor in your shoe. Makes sense to extend those senors to T-shirts and other..

Rene: And to make wearables wearable, not just watches or not just bands but actually do other things with them.

Leo: But it.. I presume makes the article of clothing very expensive, hard to wash.

Rene: It's $100 for each article of clothing and it's typical sports wear, the kind of stuff you would get at Lululemon or something and then the module I think is $150 or $200 but you can take it out of one and put it in the other. So you can use it in multiple articles if you want to.

Adam: I'd be curious to give that a try, I actually participated in a research study some Binghampton professor a couple of years ago, actually a number of years ago at this point was working with local runners and using, attaching sensors to our legs and you know having us run and seeing what he could, what information he could read about the muscular contractions in different parts of the leg and different parts of the body, but it was really finicky to get the stuff on and get it reading and all of that. So I'll be curious to see how well the clothing actually performs.

Leo: I had David Pogue on Triangulation yesterday, it was great to see David again, he had been on MacBreak many times years ago. And he actually had a great insight that kind of a light went on for me. I was asking why drones were so popular and he said because we're ants on a tablecloth. We live in an essentially 2D world and it's really thrilling to suddenly expand out into 3D and see ourselves and he said that's similar to this wearable stuff because we're learning about parts of ourselves that we don't know normally know about. We're logging our sleep, our heart rate, our muscular activity. And it's the same kind of thing. It's this new view into what has been up to now a fairly limited view of ourselves. And I think that's true.

Rene: It's Athos Activewear A-T-H-O-S, not Atmos.

Leo: Athos like the Three Musketeers.

Rene: Yeah, Athos Activewear.

Andy: I really think that a watch is going to be a lot more important for fitness than stuff like that because you have to make the decision that you want to have this tracking device, that you want to have clothing that takes advantage of it. Nike Fit was really useful but you have to buy the special shoes. If you're just buying a watch because it's cool and you like it, but it also happens to have these fitness features in it, I am now using a step counter, I'm now more aware of how many steps I'm taking every day because that happened to be a feature of a watch that I happened to like, so it's when these things become ubiquitous, when you have them accessible to you, whether you make the choice to have them or not and you can choose to see that date or not, that's when people really will get the benefit of these health apps.

Leo: This is a smart, this Athos stuff is a smart market because there are performance athletes serious, like hardcore athletes who do want this information and are willing to spend money for it, that's why Polar has been so successful with very simple heart rate monitors. I think this is a specialized niche market but a very good one.

Adam: Yeah, I run with a Garmin Forerunner 620 for instance.

Leo: How much was that? It was hundreds of dollars.

Adam: Oh yeah, it's like $399.

Leo: Yeah.

Adam: With the heart rate monitor. But it tells me things like cadence, contact time, vertical oscillation, so you know it's.. it provides some really interesting data. I will say that when push comes to shove, what's most interesting about it is the near logging. That I don't actually wear the heart rate monitor all the time, I don't look at the data because it's a little hard to know how to act on it yet. That it's more about collecting data than being able to tell you what to do with it. So you know I can, to say that my cadence is 180 strides per minute during a speed workout, but what does that mean? I was trying to run fast. Of course it was going to be faster. So again, hard to know quite what to do with that information sometimes. But I think the first step is to always get that information, then you can decide later on or you can have a coach or someone who knows evaluate it for you.

Leo: I could totally, I think this is.. I think Athos is smart. This is a market where people spend a lot of money for this kind of information.

Rene: Well they want to know if their squat fired 100% of their quadriceps, Leo. It's not 100% it's not good enough.

Leo: Look at it, it's kind of wild. I wish it looked.. so the ads show like you look like something out of Tron but in fact you just look normal.

Andy: Tony Stark 4.0.

Leo: I really wish it had all those lines and glowing things. It would be much better. But yeah this might be, this might actually be a smart.. and by the way it does not chafe. So that's good.

Rene: I just like that we're going there, that we're trying these things.

Andy: Aw I love the chafing!

Rene: A lot of them will fail, a lot will be silly but we'll get somewhere.

Andy: Chafing is my favorite part of working out.

Leo: This is very cool. So the shirt has 14 EMG sensors, which measure muscle activity, 2 heart rate sensors, 2 breathing sensors. This is.. you know what, if I were going to invest I'd invest in this. This is smart. This is a market.

Adam: Of course the real problem is you're going to have to wash the silly thing every day so you can wear it to the next day's workout.

Leo: Well you need two. At least you can swap the core in and out right? So the most expensive piece can be swapped in and out. And these, they say.. and it looks like kind of like under armor, any kind of compression wear. So it's pretty standard. Interesting.

Rene: It is interesting, yeah.

Leo: Of course only Adam Engst is an athlete here so.

Andy: I was about to say it's like you have to be at a certain level where that data is.. you have to be so good at what you're doing right now that you need information like that to make you better. For me it's just like how about this week you go out and you do your 5 miles.

Leo: My shirt would just say eat a salad you fat.. no. Alright..

Andy: I knew you were thinking it!

Leo: You know where I was going.

Andy: I knew you were going to say it!

Leo: Anything else from CES? New iPad cases and accessories.

Rene: There was a lot of cases, there was like a battery case for $800 that had manta ray skin on it. But the thing that was interesting to me is we got to interview all the.. they announced 4k HDR Blu-ray at CES and for me the high dynamic range, the high color gamut stuff is more interesting than just the 4k but I got to interview them one after the other and one was like our quantum pixels are the best. Another's like no those are stupid, it's the yellow pixel that's the best.

Leo: Yeah I've done that. I've done that interview.

Rene: No your 4k, we're 4k beyond! And they're just.. all the arguing about stuff that there's no content for I thought was just an amazing encapsulation of CES in general.

Adam: Cage match! Put em' in a ring.

Leo: Yeah. Cage match. It's Sony vs Panasonic in a fight to the finish. Actually it kind of is.

Rene: Yeah.

Leo: You know, all these companies are struggling.

Rene: And Samsung announced SUHD. Not just UHD, and I asked them. It doesn't stand for Samsung. S is the letter they put in front of anything that is spectacular beyond the norm.

Leo: Beyond the norm. But they will be the first 4k sets to be standardized with this new UHD alliance.

Rene: Which is not 4k. UHD is actually lower resolution than 4k which blows my mind.

Leo: Well it's because of the aspect ratio is different, right? It's.. I don't know.

Rene: I know. It's a big TV.

Leo: I don't care. You know what Polk said and I think he's right. Don't rush out to get one, but just like everything else every TV will have it in 5 years or 4 years, and when you get your next TV it'll have it. But there's no reason to go out and get a new TV just for that right now. Especially if you don't sit 3 feet from your TV.

Rene: Just to watch upscaled to cable.

Leo: You're going to be watching upscaled content. There is as you mentioned a Blu-ray, new UHD Blu-ray will be out in the fall as well. But these things will be expensive. It will be an early adopter will get them, somebody with a home theater. And the rest of us, it's like 3D. It will just come with the TV, and then it won't because nobody wants it.

Rene: I asked the Sharp guy about all of these displays, like the 4k displays and things. And how high can you go? And he said he stopped counting. We can do like 600, 900dpi now. There's no point any more.

Leo: Oh they're on 8k and 16k.

Rene: Yeah, I was talking about smartphones too. Because you know now that we have like 400 dpi and 600 dpi and he just said you'll forget about it. We'll just make those displays so dense you'll need math skills to solve that stuff.

Leo: Yeah. We're going..

Adam: You'll need math skills just to look at the screen.

Leo: We're going too far at this point. Anything else? I just want to make sure we've covered the Apple angle on CES in its entirety before we move on. So HomeKit, HealthKit, CarPlay.

Rene: Those are the big things.

Leo: Those are the things we have looked at.

Rene: Lightning, I mean a lot of people are getting Lightning adapters in their accessories now because Apple opened up the program, but because they opened up the program there's an incredible demand for Lightning chips so they're hard to get, so it's one of those things where..

Leo: Oh so you need a special chip to make a Lightning cable.

Rene: Yeah because there's a lot of intelligence in the chip, it can switch signals and do different things so it's a specific chip that controls it. And now that it's open to anybody, both of you can put a Lightning charger instead of a micro USB in their case but they need the Lightning chips and everyone is trying to buy them now so they're trickling out slowly.

Leo: Who makes the Lightning chips? Samsung probably, right?

Rene: Probably, it's probably a couple factories.

Andy: I was trying to think about how the new really cool rotation dependent USB 3.0 micro connector changes the map for Lightning. That it seems to do pretty much everything that all the business stuff that Lightning connector would do. The idea of being able to not have so much tied into the cable itself and the idea that you won't have to just use it with Apple stuff. I mean, I'm already kind of sick and tired of making sure I'm packing two different kinds of cables when I leave the house. I know that the rumored 12” Macbook Retina uses, the again, speculatively uses this new connector instead of Lightning. But I wondered how that might change the map in the future if Apple might sometime, not in the next generation but maybe the generation after that say well hell if we have to support this new connector just to support other peoples cameras and other peoples devices we may as well just use this on phones as well.

Leo: Right.

Rene: People will be so angry with all their Lightning accessories they bought.

Leo: So according to chip works which tore these cables apart, there are 4 chips on a Lightning cable. There are 2 transistors, an NXP NX20P3 and a Texas Instruments, unpublished Texas Instruments chip which they think is a security feature for authentication. So this is.. look at that. That's crazy. You've got a motherboard in your cable. Crazy!

Rene: Well I mean if you look at the old dock connector it had 30 pins but then some of those pins became obsolete and they had to reassign them and older cables did Firewire and new ones, and it just became a bit of a mess so they really wanted to be able to dynamically reassign all of those pins.

Leo: Yeah. This is a computer in a cable. Golly. So TI makes at least one of the chips on there.

Andy: Did you want to try to put Minecraft on it?

Leo: There's an EPROM on it. Erasable programmable read only memory with either 64 or 128 bits of storage.

Andy: See now I'm certain. I refuse to believe that no one has tried to create a version of Minecraft that runs on that chip.

(laughing)

Rene: Doom. It's running Doom.

Andy: First Doom and then Minecraft. It's the two rules you have to have it running everything.

Adam: The real news we saw Thunderstrike this week are we going to have Lightningstrike?

Leo: Lightningstrike. We'll talk about that actually.

Adam: Someone hacks into the Lightning cable?

Rene: That was juice-jacking right? They've had that for a while.

Leo: We'll talk about Thunderstrike, we'll talk about other Mac news including more speculation on this new Retina Macbook Air. Particularly because the other big announcement, one of the big announcements at CES was these new Intel chips and that means now the other shoe has dropped, the Broadwell-U is here so that's coming up as we continue on MacBreak Weekly with Rene Ritchie from iMore.com, Andy Ihatko from the Celestial Waste of Bandwidth, also the Chicago Sun Times, both equally important media outlets. And Adam Engst, the man in charge at TidBITS.com along with Tanya his wife and that giant penguin. I'm sorry, life sized.

Andy: You're ignoring the coolest part. He has a copy of every edition of Internet Starter Kit behind him.

Leo: I saw that. He's got boxes of internet behind him.

Andy: Unless he's still fulfilling orders I think.

Adam: That's every edition and translation. That's what that stack is.

Leo: When did The Internet Starter Kit come out?

Adam: 1993. It was the fifth internet book. And we were only 5^th by a week. There were 3 that were out for a long time. They were out for a year or so, and then Mac Internet Tour Guide beat us by a week but we had all the stuff you needed.

Leo: Oh my god, ahh!

Adam: Yes! Excellent!

Leo: It moves!

Adam: I need that on my.. can you get that doing on my computer too?

Leo: I remember going to the very first..

Adam: (laughing)

Leo: What is he on a stick? You've got a penguin on a stick?

Rene: Flying shadow.

(off-screen, indistinct)

Leo: Jason Howell on the keyboards there, hitting on the keys man, that's amazing.

Andy: Do you mean that every time that I've tried to fill time by making something that sounded halfway intelligent you could have just put on an animated adorable penguin that people would have enjoyed twice as much?

Jason Howell: Only if YouTube has a version of that animated adorable penguin on top of a green screen, then yes I could totally do that.

Leo: It's all about the green screen. We've got Shutterstock, don't forget. Shutterstock can give you a lot of good stuff. You get the watermark but that's okay. Actually we have a subscription you could actually buy those. I remember going to the first internet expo, which is since gone.

Adam: Oh that lasted like three years.

Leo: But it was so fun because it was tiny right? And there was like 10 people and I remember O'Reilly there with a pile of Internet in a Box kits, so this was actually a little later than your starter kit but this actually had disks because you got.. I don't think you got Netscape, I think is earlier than that. I think you got Mozilla or no.. what was it, no Mosaic.

Adam: I was going to say CSA Mosaic, but we shipped, the first web browser we shipped with I believe was Mac Web, which was actually the first one for the Mac.

Leo: Mac Web. That was based on Mosaic as I remember, right?

Adam: No it was actually completely separate, it was done by a guy named Robert Cailliau at CERN. He worked with Tim Berners-Lee and it wasn't a very good program, but it was the first web browser for the Mac and then yes, then CSA Mosaic and after that Netscape. And we actually never put Netscape on a book, the disks we had had all the software you needed which is why the book did so well but the problem with Netscape was they wanted $5 a copy. Which was insane. And so remember at the time Internet Explorer was the underdog so we went over to Microsoft and they said sure you can have Internet Explorer for free. Okay that's a hard decision not to make.

Leo: Yeah that's when Netscape went under I think.

Adam: Pretty much. That was the cause of it. Because they were greedy. But bundled with all the books they would have been there.

Leo: They wanted to charge for Netscape and along comes Microsoft and the first IE1 was terrible and 2 was terrible but 3 was okay. 3 was usable as I remember.

Rene: Always 3.

Leo: Yeah always isn't it! That's probably where that started.

Adam: No, Windows 3.

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Rene: Can't start the new year until the old CES is over.

Andy: Or rather until you recover from the cold you picked up at CES.

Leo: Adam mentioned Thunderstrike. You know, somebody's.. so this is a category of attacks that have been around for a while. Anything, including Firewire or eSATA that gives you direct memory access, DMA, to the internals of the computer can be used to read the memory of the computer. So Trammell Hudson who's a security guy found out that yes, Thunderbolt can do that as well. But the attacker has to have physical access to your Mac and you have to.. it's actually kind of complicated, you have to re-install firmware and so forth.

Adam: Well this is a little bit different actually, this is not a direct memory access attack.

Leo: Oh it's not? Oh I'm sorry, I thought it was.

Adam: Well it's a category is how it gets started. But what's interesting about Thunderstrike is that you can plug in a malicious Thunderbolt dongle and.. I just like the concept of a malicious Thunderbolt dongle.

Leo: I love that. MTD.

Adam: Clearly a band name. Reboot the Mac and it will rewrite the firmware, the boot firmware of the Mac.

Leo: And change the key so you can't fix it.

Adam: Right. Precisely. This falls into the category of, the only way to fix this I suspect would be to replace the motherboard.

Leo: Holey moley.

Adam: And this is a proof of concept, it's not done. It's not like oh he showed you could actually.. he showed that the attack worked and that he could do this but he didn't actually write new broke firmware code that was malicious.

Leo: So he's not using DMA to read RAM he's actually somehow..

Adam: No.

Leo: But you're writing RAM right?

Adam: Nope, no RAM. It's only dealing with the boot ROM.

Leo: Wow.

Adam: And that's what's fascinating about this. Because all you have to do is plug in this device and then reboot the computer and you own it. Because your code is then at the firmware level. You can't stop this with software because software is never loaded. The operating system comes later.

Leo: So theoretically you could create a malicious Thunderbolt device, right? Like a Thunderbolt USB key. This is like bad USB and give it to the person and say just reboot before you use it and then oh.

Adam: (laughing) Yeah, I mean basically..

Leo: You don't have to have physical access, you just have to get them to plug something into their Thunderbolt plug.

Adam: This is probably not so much a social engineering situation as what I believe in the security industry is called the evil maid problem. You know, you leave your computer in the hotel room, all they have to do is plug this thing and reboot it, and you can reboot any computer by you know, holding down the power key.

Leo: It's easy.

Adam: So either that or if you are traveling internationally at customs, when they can take your computer away and do whatever the hell they want with it. It doesn't matter what kind of passwords you've got, firmware passwords do not help. Obviously nothing you can do at the operating system level helps. So what it comes down to is the only protection against this sort of attack, and this one isn't an attack yet, just a proof of concept is maintaining physical control of your computer at all times. And when you are in the kind of situations where you as a corporate executive or a tech person for a big company or a government employee could be targeted. This is a very directed attack.

Leo: And we have seen this, people coming into the US and other countries. They can legally take your stuff, briefly.

Adam: Even if you're a US citizen.. when you're at customs you have no rights.

Leo: They can say hey we'd like to look at your laptop briefly. And come back with it.

Rene: So boring that no one would ever want anything that's on my computer. So so boring.

Leo: But.. so let's say it's happened to you. What kinds of things could they do? They could have it behave normally right? Except that every days it sends all the keystrokes back to the home office.

Adam: Anything in theory that could be fit into this boot firmware code.

Rene: Up to the skill of the programmer.

Leo: Obviously, yeah.

Adam: Basically what the guy said was that it was very easy to imagine this being weaponized. Was the term.

Leo: Well and we've seen NSA attacks of this kind.

Adam: Or Stuxnet! Stuxnet, I mean.

Leo: But also bad USB takes advantage of the fact that there are EE proms in all USB devices. So it's the same idea. These are electronically erasable programmable read only memories. That's the boot ROM. That's the EFI ROM in the Mac.

Rene: The juice-jacking attacks that we saw where people would plug accessories in.

Andy: That's why it's a bad idea to use when you see public charging stations, to use any of those. There's also, I was talking to some people a couple of years ago whose job it is to harden hardware for travel to places that they're expecting, like business travelers who are doing really really high profile deals where they have a reason to expect that a government will want to get access to their date at some point and they talked about 3 different things to do. One of which is from low level stuff like you can buy security tape that, like tamper tape that you simply cover your ports with it so you will at least know that okay this person had no, there's no reason why the seal over my USB port should have been broken but there it is broken, I need to now not trust this computer to special cases for phones where you will simply block all these ports saying you have to again physically break this thing off and you cannot put it back on again to do something like that. But the third thing which was the most interesting is to say that if you are really transacting on that level, buy burner, not just burner laptops but they recommend Chromebooks where it's a very low profile sort of thing and basically you just simply set fire to it when you leave. They actually have mentioned things like you can secure wipe some of the data and some of them actually use these old things like almost as gratuities when they leave. But the idea is that here is what you remove, here is what you do but do not even consider taking a device you have introduced into a foreign network and I mean by another country and then taking it back home and introducing it into a network that you're using. Very scary stuff.

Leo: Is there a fix for this? Has Apple patched this?

Adam: Apple is aware of it, absolutely. And in the newest Macs, the Retina iMac and the new Mac Mini it is partially addressed and Apple has told Rich Mogul, a security editor that they are working on firmware patches for other Macs.

Leo: That's kind of interesting because the 5k came out last year, so they've known about this for longer than we have.

Adam: Well and I think this guy is a legitimate researcher so when you're a legitimate researcher you tell the company in advance.

Leo: Before you tell anybody else.

Rene: They also have security teams that just in general work on hardening things as well.

Leo: Is it possible to back patch the firmware, prevent this? It seems like you need a hardware fix almost.

Adam: Yeah as far as I know you would sort of have to do the same thing in reverse. I can't really imagine Apple doing that; it strikes me as much more like you would want to do something where, basically Apple's opinion was just come in and get a new motherboard.

Leo: Wow.

Adam: They know how to do that. It was funny when I was editing this article I remembered way back in the day, when I was a student at Cornell, we had a bunch of public rooms with LaserWriters and people may not know this but LaserWriters all had passwords built into them and you could change the password with a post script program. The passwords were always 0 so the printer driver knew to basically send password 0 to be able to print to the LaserWriter; but some student at Cornell figured this out and changed the password on one of our LaserWriter. There were 32,767 possible numbers and it took 11 seconds to do a try on a number.

Leo: Oh wow.

Adam: So we calculated that it was going to take 3 months or something to run a program to find this. Even worse, it was an EEPROM that had 10,000 rights so you would kill it 1/3 of the way through.

Leo: Oh wow.

Adam: So basically what we were faced with was replacing the motherboard in this LaserWriter; then finally either the guy, a friend, or someone kind of let us know what the password was and we were able to change it.

Leo: Did he just want to have that printer be his own and no one else could use it.

Adam: Yeah basically because the printer would sit there, it would have a down sign on it, he could walk up at any time and use it.

Leo: Holly cow.

Andy: That was fun, if you have    access I think Adam and I probably have shared experiences in our respective computer labs during the 80s. Where if you had access to the red and blue books of Apple that Adobe published, you could do all kinds of things. I remember one time there was a fellow who thought hey look a laser printer I know I will print my own letter head. And rather than print 2 or 3 copies and then photo copy them he would print page after page after page after page and didn't understand why after the second time that he tried to do, it would always bork itself after page 11. Because okay, I'm on the network now looking at this input cue and going no he doesn't get to do that.

Leo: We should point out that this does require, even though it is not DMA, it does require the kind of access that Thunderbolt or maybe FireWire has not USB.

Adam: Yeah I'm full Thunderbolt, but just in case anybody doesn't know what Andy was talking about.

Leo: Oh look at that, I love it.

Andy: Those books and Beneath Apple DOS, those were like having The Necronomicon.

Leo: Postscript programing nice, nice. I think I remember writing one bit of code in postscript and then I stopped, I thought better of it.

Adam: I had a friend who actually wrote some of another friend's resume in postscript. This was before we had decent MacWrite level programs and he actually programed her resume.

Leo: That is like using Tech or something, you are just writing at a very low level. Is postscript gone by the way?

Adam: That is actually a good question, I was wondering that recently too.

Leo: What is in those LaserWriters by the way?

Adam: What do printers do now?

Leo: Yeah what do printers do now a days?

Adam: I haven't owned a printer in like 3 years.

Leo: There were other, there was like GDI; there were other ways to write images to a laser printer, but I don't know what printers do these days; I have no idea.

Adam: HP had something in their own language.

Leo: Yeah, PCL.

Adam: PCL yeah it was a PCL printer language.

Rene: The display was postscript which was awesome.

Leo: Well then PEFs are still in postscript I think. Aren’t they?

Rene: PEF is based on postscript.

Leo: Yeah, that's display postscript and then the next famously displayed in postscript as well. Right intsead of BOS. Speaking of BOS

Adam: Yeah.

Leo: It feels like we are always talking about BOS for reasons I don’t understand.

Adam: BOS and a watch.

Leo: That's it.

Rene: Web OS.

Leo: Was it web OS, BOS would be better. I'm just saying.

Adam: BOS is working.

Rene: I need a work bench on all watch.

Leo: I'm fascinated now, I'm going to do some research into postscript.

Adam: It is interesting because we got an Epson AcuLaser, I don't know like 10 years ago something like that; our last LaserWriter 6 select, 620, or whatever it was finally became too hard to keep it on the network via local talk bridges. So finally got rid of that and got an Epson AcuLaser but that is postscript, I just don't know what happened after that, you know I have completely lost track of the entire technology. The printer keeps working so I can't justify replacing it.

Leo: Right. I think, so postscript for people who; what was postscript? It is basically a programing language.

Adam: For display.

Leo: Of Vector for display; for Vector Graphics.

Adam: And basically everything; so that is where we got the entire concept of fonts as algorithms.

Leo: TrueType was because Apple couldn't license postscript for font so the did the TrueType.

Adam: And Microsoft.

Leo: And Microsoft right. I'm just looking through the Wikipedia article to see if anybody still.

Adam: Tell us please what's happened to postscript in the last 10 years.

Leo: Yeah. Here is a "hello world" in postscript, yeah.

Adam: I wonder has come of them.

Andy: There is a guy by the name of Don Lancaster, who was the first real pied piper of postscript and he would like publish these postscript programs that would cause your printer to eject a beautiful piece of Vector line artwork. Because Adobe Illustrator was not available back then it was like holy mother of God, what magic has just happened? A 300 DPI picture of a cat swinging a baseball bat.

Leo: I just want to point out that you can still find Don Lancaster's Guru's Lair: PostScript library online. It has not been updated since 1995 I think; look at the layout.

Andy: It's a good thing to read through while you’re going through you DAC International industries catalog.

Adam: Group A kaplan for the win.

Rene: David Golfman on d-bug a couple of years ago and he talked all the way through Adobe, to display, to postscript, to cuff, to airprints and it was fascinating technology.

Leo: Wow so you have covered this.

Rene: Yeah well the Apple facing aspects of it.

Leo: Wow.

Rene: But it was fascinating.

Leo: But this is like learning, I don't know, LaTech or something. We don't need it anymore thank God.

Adam: It is like, Don Lancaster's stuff is a little bit like those old mainframe things. Where you would run this program and it would spit a picture of the Moon landing to your line printer.

Andy: It was definitely the sort of thing, you would have to be nedesem or nedesem type in order to get into this.

Leo: It was a 1K file that generated a 300 DPI image of the Moon landing, it's amazing. So this is an Apple page and I am wondering Adam, could you put FirmWare password protection.

Adam: Apparently according to Trammell Hudson that does not help.

Leo: Does not help.

Adam: It's below that.

Leo: Good Lord.

Adam: Yeah, this guy I don't know him I've just been sort of reading about him a little bit; he is like a tech guy to hedge fund. He does this stuff in his spare time.

Leo: Yeah.

Adam: And he is good, he has found some other fairly high profile vulnerability.

Leo: He is some sort of gainful employer.

Adam: Yeah that is just it he has this day job and apparently they are totally cool with him doing whatever he wants.

Leo: Speaking of money, lots of it, the app echo system has really, is really a rich echo system. Apple says that it paid 15 billion dollars last year to app developers and of course got their 4.5 billion dollar cut out of that. That is nothing for Apple but it is a lot for Apple developers.

Rene: How much of those were your Simpson's doughnuts Leo?

Adam: How much went to each app developer?

Leo: Well their Apple.

Andy: Apple is always so proud to reveal their number but they are never proud to reveal a chart of let’s see how many of these are game in app purchases and how many of these are individual apps.

Leo: And of course it is probably the top 10 developers that get 90% of the money right.

Adam: Yeah I would love to see that chart.

Leo: It’s all in Candy Crush Saga.

Andy: I’m not even sure it is 10.

Leo: Really? Well you got to figure.

Andy: I would say it is closer to 5.

Leo: Clash of Clans, Candy Crush.

Rene: EA.

Leo: EA because they do the doughnuts thing yeah I’m curious how much of it is first sale money and how much of it is in app purchases.

Andy: If Google and Microsoft really want to bring Apple down, all they have to do is set financial investigators on their case to get the number. Here is how much Apple paid to the Kardashians last quarter.

Rene: I don’t know if Google Play is any different though.

Andy: They would never recover from that disclosure.

Rene: I don’t think Google Play is any different though, I think people making the most money there.

Andy: That’s fine, let Apple investigate them back. Anything we can do to break the Kardashian head over in app purchases.

Leo: Didn’t they say, I want to say, yeah the IOS echo system all told has created more than half a million jobs.

Rene: Apple put up a new site, well the new updated site, about.

Andy: Citation needed.

Leo: Well I think it comes from.

Andy: Citation needed.

Leo: The Apple press release, that’s the citation.

Rene: There is a whole site that Apple.

Andy: I’m going to need to see their math on that.

Adam: What counts as a job exactly?

Andy: These is 5 people making millions of dollars can now afford to buy a third or fourth boat and those boats need crews and they need people to wash the boat.

Leo: Well they have a whole page.

Andy: You think they are going to raise their own kids? That is another 8 jobs.

Leo: Apple.com/about/job/creation they have a whole page. Over the years Apple has driven incredible job growth and created entirely new industries. In fact our products and innovations have led to over one million jobs from our engineers.

Rene: Sorry.

Leo: One million, I don’t have the hair for it. One million jobs from engineers and retail employers to suppliers, manufactures, and app developers. These are one million US jobs. 620,000 to the IOS echo system, 334,000 jobs at other companies resulting from Apple’s spending and growth, and 66,000 actual Apple employees. 380,000 members of the Apple developer program paid $99 each.

Adam: That’s good money.

Leo: Yeah. Of App Store income earned by developers, 8 billion plus 78% of companies making apps are located outside Silicon Valley; it’s interesting. It is interesting that Apple has made this page.

Rene: They did it a couple of years ago when they were being pushed about bringing jobs back to America.

Leo: Right.

Rene: And they showed that yes, though factories in America like the, back then it was the Gorilla Glass.

Leo: Yeah it is not just factory you know.

Rene: They were trying to show the human were the developer.

Leo: Yeah and I have to say, I think it is probably the case, we know a lot of people coming out of college who say I’m going to do apps. I might even start my own business, I might not even go somewhere to do apps.

Rene: Solomo, moloso.

Leo: What?

Rene: Social, local, mobile. Mobile, local, social.

Leo: What? Are you speaking English there? Is that kep wa kwa?

Rene: Silicon Valley, that’s Silicon Valley.

Leo: Oh yeah, right which is coming back I’m happy to say. The new Cooper T-Note Campus created 41,100 jobs.

Rene: And that is just building the Mario Kart track underneath.

Leo: That’s just the Mario Kart.

Andy: That’s just to cover up all of the environmental impact cover ups.

Leo: 12,600 full time.

Andy: I’m joking, I’m joking.

Leo: Construction jobs for 3 years.

Adam: They should have a linear or a synchrotron underneath that.

Leo: Oh there is so much that you could do with that circle and if you look at, we showed it last week, of the drone footage of this. The circle is there, it really is there I mean you can see it being built. Apple data center; U.S. based customer support 19,000 Apple care jobs, 8,000 home base Apple care advisors, 28 call centers in 18 states. Wow.

Andy: So what they are saying is that their software is really, really faulty and they need a lot of people to walk them through it.

Leo: Andy Ihnatko, you have always been an Apple hater.

Andy: I’m just a troll, I’m sorry. It is like the classic Beatles song where Paul is singing the lyrics that are all positive and John sings the things that are wryly negative and that.

Leo: Life is very short.

Andy: That is a classic.

Leo: And there is no time.

Andy: Catching up for all of the time.

Leo: Life is short, you’re going to die.

Andy: And so this is Christmas, but what have you done?

Leo: But what have you done? I am still reading that in tune Apple The Beatles History, it is so great.

Andy: I just go to the end of it sometime in mid-December.

Leo: It is so good.

Andy: I had to do it in chunks it is so big.

Leo: Oh yeah so big.

Andy: And now it is like when is the next one coming out. I want to find out what happens to these loveable pop artist.

Leo: Yeah, are they going to make it? Are they going to the top of the pop Johnny?

Andy: You know I hope that John Lennon finally finds his female soul mate because I really think that is what would create a dynasty.

Leo: I’m at the point where they have signed their first autographs on a tour of Scotland. In fact they signed these auto graphs because the van they were touring in had a horrific crash, severely injuring their drummer and a bunch of girls noticed that the van was an entertainment and come running out of their little Scottish hovels and go are you entertainers? Here sign this and Paul McCartney was not using the name Paul McCartney, he signed Paul Ramon.

Adam: Oh that’s where the Ramons come from.

Leo: Yeah.

Andy: And then he learned a fourth cord and he was not allow to call himself a Ramon anymore.

Adam: You’re not a Ramon anymore.

Leo: Isn’t that weird? Alright, I don’t know where we fell off the track here. Apple maintains Mac sales in a momentum in holiday quarter.

Rene: Projection.

Leo: Projection, this is Gartner Group we take these all with a grain of salt. Apple shipped  according to Gartner they estimated 2.1 million Mac in Q4. Up from 1.9 million in Q3, I’m sorry Q4 of last year; marking and 11% increase.

Adam: So here’s the question I have about these numbers. Every time Apple gets on stage and talks about their numbers they talk how the industry as a whole.

Leo: Right.

Adam: Dropped by 6% but Apple is going up by 20%.

Leo: Right.

Adam: I didn’t have time to look up all of the specifics but these numbers don’t quite jive with what Apple tells us do they?

Leo: Well there is numbers and there is numbers.

Adam: There is lies, damn lies, and statistics.

Leo: Overall, according to Gartner, PC shipments 18 million units in Q4 that is an increase of 13%. Actually I think that the PC market was dying for the last couple of years and has kind of come back.

Rene: It is coming back or it is doing that surge that happens before you really dye.

Leo: Where you take that last breath and you twitch a little bit yeah, but then they go.

Rene: But it does look like a renaissance because as PCs are getting smaller, thinner, lighter, longer battery life. So everything that we liked about tablets is now becoming part of a PC.

Leo: This is kind of interesting, this is Apple U.S. market share and of course most of us come from the dim, dark days when it was in the single digits. You know 3% 4% and even though it goes up and down, it has been trending up now about 11% of the, 11.5 11.9 something like that, of the overall computer market. That is pretty good.

Rene: There is a lot of Alex Lindsey buying Mac Minis and iMacs.

Leo: Well that is a big jump from those early days.

Andy: Especially as some of us have; it is a little bit difficult to maintain the faith. As you see those pie charts of how much money Apple makes on things that are not related to the Mac.

Leo: Right.

Andy: To wonder maybe Apple is going to discontinue the Mac or make it more like an IOS device. So it is really great to see a line like that, that indicates it’s a growth product for them and it will continue to be an independent, free and independent nation.

 Leo: By the way, we should celebrate, it was 8 years ago Friday that Apple unveiled the iPhone. That is pretty exciting.

Rene: Wide screen iPod, internet communicator, and it is a break through revolutionary mobile phone are you getting it

Leo: We should play that clip, I love that clip. We play it all the time but it is 8 years ago that Steve Jobs gave probably his best keynote, and certainly now that we have seen the behind the scenes of how tricky that was to get that prototype to stay alive we appreciate it even more.

Adam: Yeah.

Andy: For context I think it really had everything to do with radios because I held one in my hand and used it that afternoon. It was perfectly stable except for the one app that was just a jpeg but of course it wasn’t connected to Wi-Fi, it wasn’t connected to the network. So I think the stability had to do with the radio system.

Leo: Yeah.

Rene: It had to do with the order of stuff that you did too. Like if you did something after something else it wasn’t good but if you did it after something else it was fine.

Andy: Right, actually I’m sorry, I question that too; they didn’t walk me through anything. I latterly told them, there is like a little banquet with like coffee; I literally told the person that I’m not going to name just go over there, enjoy a snack, I want to play with this for 5 or 10 minutes. They didn’t tell me not to do anything, they didn’t tell me to stop doing anything, as I’m trying to remember. I’m trying to remember, I might have even used the web browser so it might have been connected to Wi-Fi although who’s to say that they didn’t make sure it wouldn’t access certain content that it knows it can’t hit. I’m not saying that I’m questioning that account, all I’m saying is that I had a free play experience with it that lasted for half hour to 45 minutes that at no point did it crash, at no point did they say don’t touch.

Rene: I think it was the multi-tasking part that the music fades out, then you take a phone call, and then you do an e-mail, and then the web browser, and then come back to the phone call.

Andy: Right.

Rene: And then back to the music, and they wanted to make sure that that part got nailed on stage.

Leo: What book is that? Is that in the Apple Google book: Dogfight? It is a great story.

Rene: Yeah.

Leo:  New York Times repeated it but it is a great story from one of the iPhone engineers about how they were taking a shot in the front row of Moscone Center every time Steve got through another part of the demo. Oh my God he survived.

Andy: It was still, anybody who was there.

Rene: The golden path.

Andy: Can tell you.

Leo: Let’s watch it.

Andy: It was one of the greatest live shows I have ever.

Leo: Let’s watch it.

Andy: Seen in my life.

Leo: Let’s just watch a little bit of the magic of Steve Jobs.

Steve Jobs: It is a wide screen iPod with touch controls.             

Leo: I remember sitting next to Scott Borne and Alex Lindsey during this; Scott was so excited. So this is their announcement.

Steve: Second is a recolutionary mobile phone.

Leo: He says we are announcing 3 things. Now everybody is thrilled because we had heard.

Andy: That is the thing that we were all expecting.

Leo: A phone so a wide touch screen iPod, a mobile phone; 3 new products from Apple.

Steve: And the third is a break through internet communications device.

Leo: The audience is puzzled by that one.

Andy: Wait what? Go back to the phone.

Steve: So these things: a wide screen iPod with touch controls, a revolutionary mobile phone, and a break through internet communications device. An iPod, a phone, and an internet communicator.

Leo: Now they are starting to get it; I’m getting chills just watching this.

Steve: An iPod, a phone. Are you getting it?

Leo: Yeah.

Steve: These are not 3 separate devices, this is 1 device.

Leo: And by the way that is not just Apple employees cheering at that point.

Andy: Yeah.

Steve: And we are calling it iPhone. Today, today Apple is going to re-invent the phone.

Leo: And it did.

Rene: Yeah.

Leo: Re-invented the computer January 9, 2007. He let 1 little joke slide in there, there is an iPod with a dial.

Steve: Actually here it is but were are going to leave it here for now.

Leo: Oh he’s got it in his pocket.

Steve: So.

Rene: Steve Jobs at the height of his powers.

Leo: No one ever, no one before, no one since has ever been able to do that. I mean just a showman but a technology genius; it is exciting to watch him at the height of, exactly, the height of his powers.

Andy: Not only that but being able to see the absolute glee on his face.

Leo: Yeah.

Andy: Showing this off you’ve seen a lot of different tech keynotes, some of them for really important products. You never see the level of genuine excitement, the I can’t believe I finally get to show people this thing that I’ve been dying to show people for the last year and a half.

Leo: Yeah and I would have been in his shoes knowing now how risky this demo was going to be. I would have been a little nervous but he wasn’t.

Andy: If I were Steve Jobs I would know I’m not going to get fired if this thing crashes.

Leo; Well that’s true somebody else will lose his job. Yeah. By the way Apple suppliers announced record December revenues as iPhone sales soar so in fact TechCrunch had a story that said the bigger iPhones are actually hurting Android sales a little bit; iPhone 6 and 6 +.

Rene: There were so many people, when I was using my iPhone 6+ at CES that came up to me and said oh iPhone 6 +; I just switched to that I love it.

Leo: Yeah.

Rene: I used to have a Note and I hated every minute of it.

Leo: Yeah.

Rene: Now I’m using my iPhone.

Leo: Yeah.

Andy: I’ve got to say I read that article; I don’t think they shared the information that justifies the headline.

Leo: Android’s market share dropped in most European markets and the U.S. This is January 7, 2015 from Kantar which is Kantar Worldpanel Comtech which is, I presume, an analyst group, Comtech. Impact of the iPhone 6 and 6 + continue to run up to Christmas with IOS growing it’s marked share in all surveyed countries except Japan. While remaining the dominant, this is probably the key phrase, while remaining the dominant global OS Android’s markets share dropped in most European countries and the U.S.; it declined first in December 2013. A decline in market share does not necessarily translate into bad news for all of the echo system players, choices of brands, and devices in the echo system powers consumers and drivers to different fortunes.

Rene: It is also context. I know people have been waiting for a large screen iPhone for a long time, it is not hard to assume that people who were waiting jumped on it. So you see a surge in that and as it goes 6 months, 9 months, 12 months into the cycle.

Leo: Yeah and it is important Android in Europe for instance is 70% of the market well that’s down 3%.

Adam: In India, I think, Windows phone is  still huge.

Leo: Windows phone is still huge, that right.

Rene: Blackberry is big in Sri Lanka I think it depends on where you go.

Leo: Yeah.

Andy: Sorry I was thinking Android; it is just a headline reaching the conclusion that the iPhone 6 is causing people to not buy Android phones as opposed to their huge corral of people who are rushing to get this phones.

Adam: In fact the article even says that; that most of the time it is not Android that is getting hurt, that most of the time it is coming out of other places.  I have to say that, much as I am certainly glad that Apple introduced the 6 and the 6 +; after using the 6 since it came out man give me my 5S form factor back.

Leo: Oh, you don’t like the bigger phone?

Adam: It’s just too big, it doesn’t fit in my pocket, I hate the side mounted power button.

Rene: I have a 5S on my desk and when I pick it up I cant’t believe that phones were ever that small.

Leo: Teeny-weeny. What is this teeny phone?

Rene: Yeah.

Leo: These are 2 6 inch phones and this is now the standard for me; Adam I think you are going upstream on this one.

Rene: Look at that.

Adam: Well on the other hand there is a lot of people who are; my is fairly small and she doesn’t like it at all. She is like this phone is just too big for me.

Leo: Right.

Rene: There are giant Android phones being used by small people all the time. You do, I asked Android Central how many people want a 4 inch Android phone because I figured everyone who owns an iPhone; there were a bunch of people who were lamenting the loss of smaller phones. That happened to Android a year or 2 ago. They started making I think the HTC mini was twice the size of my iPhone and they said no one cares, no one wants smaller phones; they are used by tons of people of all shapes and sizes. It is really weird to see the difference in those 2 echo systems.

Leo: I think the mistake is calling it a phone. The phone is no longer a big part of this thing.

Rene: Yeah it is an app.

Leo: Its and internet device, it’s a wide screen iPod; the phone is less thatn 1/3, it is 1/10 of the functionality of these devices now. Right?

Adam: It is an interesting question though. I wonder if anyone has done actual time study, installed an app to see how much time the phone is used versus the other kinds of apps.

Rene: Messages is the most popular function of IOS.

Leo: Yeah messages make sense.

Rene: Yeah.

Adam: I never use them, I uses the phone 15 – 20 times a month.

Leo: Well you are in upper New York State that is.

Rene: You’ll get the phone any day now.

Leo: Some day you will understand.

Andy: There is also walkie talkie up there, AM radio.

Rene: Hey down the road there.

Adam: We just tap into those wires as we go by.

Leo: You still have party lines up there right?

Adam: Hey I grew up with a party line.

Leo: Yeah see what we are saying? Alright.

Andy: I’m not making a prediction.

Rene: Calling line 451.

Andy: I’m not making a prediction for the fall but I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple made a compact phone. I think that it is not just a case of fashion, I think that a lot of people feel like they are being left behind again if you have a smaller hand, that is pretty much endemic to being a woman and not a man. It is not like you have an option now of choosing a smaller phone. Now you have a phone that is kind of too big but you can deal with it and the phone that is way, way too big. Unless you want to go back to an iPhone 5C or a cheaper last year’s model. I just feel that it would be a very Apple move to say that because we have such robust software, because we have the ability to tell our developers what to develop we are also going to have a return to the old 4x3 form factor a tiny, tiny, tiny phone. So that people don’t feel that they are being left behind by virtue of the fact that they have smaller hands.

Adam: It is a situation in part when I sort of watched my wife working with it that it doesn’t fit in her pockets; if she goes running she has a shorts pocket. She can’t even fit the 5, the 5S into those pockets; the 4S was the last one that worked for her in those. It is just frustrating she has a bike bag which goes under her bike seat again the 5S barely, barely fits she had to really cram that in; so the 6 no chance it is just not going to fit.

Rene: I just wonder what do people who use Android phones do. I mean there are just not small Android phones.

Adam: Oh there are.

Rene: They just got used to it.

Andy: You can get them, maybe you can’t get them at your AT&T store but.

Rene: They are usually low end.

Andy: Samsung and HTC, especially Samsung they basically go we have 3 inch phone, we have a 3.25 inch phone, we have a metric 30 centimeter phone, we have a 33 centimeter phone; they have a very, very large product line. At least it is out there particularly if you are willing to buy an unlocked phone off contract.

Adam: I wonder if it’s one of those.

Andy: It is the responsibility of Apple, is that they are the only source of iPhone.

Rene: Right.

Andy: Of IOS compatible phones.

Rene: Right.

Andy: So if they don’t make it, you can’t get it anywhere. Which I think to their point of view we now have a responsibility.

Adam: That is a good point.

Andy: To people who are physically different; now I am not talking about smaller hands as a disability, I’m talking there are an array of people who use. It is the same reason that Apple.

Leo: Oh it is a disability let’s face it.

Adam: You can’t palm a basketball either.

Andy: It is the same reason that Apple was that company that said you know what when we have human faces they will either be light blue or dark blue, we are not going to get into the skin tone game.

Leo: Yeah.

Andy: Because we don’t want people to think that our representation of a user and of a user icon is going to be someone of a specific skin tone. I feel as though.

Leo: Didn’t we have.

Andy: I feel as though it is a very Apple move for them to do.

Leo: Maybe we didn’t excoriate Samsung for doing this, but that is kind of what Samsung has done is they just kind of made every size possible.

Andy: But that is always what they have always done and it has been quite successful. I don’t think anybody, when they came out with the first Samsung Galaxy Note, I don’t think anybody could have made a use case for a crazy, stupid, big phone. But they said we have the manufacturing capability; we will make a crazy, stupid, big phone and if it fails we won’t make it next year.

Leo: Right.

Andy: It surprised the hell out of me, it surprise the professional analyst, and it surprised the hell out of the industry that there are people that are actually really, really into it.

Leo: Yeah, It’s just like the screen on my computer.

Adam: I think the thing here is that it is true of the Android phones is that, my experience that the people who buy Android phones a lot of the time are doing it more on price. So they are not as involved with their phones as iPhone users usually are and so they may be willing to compromise more. Oh yeah, that is what they had at the store, it seemed fine so I got it. Maybe they would be happier with a smaller phone but that wasn’t an easy option so they didn’t get it. You know, you buy what you can get easily and what is cheap.

Leo: I think globally that is why.

Rene: Samsung Mini is 4.3 inches.

Leo: Yeah. I think globally that is why Android does so well but in the U.S. I’m not sure that’s the case. Half of all phone sales, so Apple has 47.4% of phone sales.

Rene: The bigger challenge is.

Leo: The other half is Android for the most part.

Rene: Yeah.

Leo: I would say very close and I don’t think all of them are buying it for price; I think a lot of them buy it for functionality as well. I buy it, I’m an Android user for functionality.

Rene: The bigger challenge is how they are going to price it for example the bigger phone is $100 more; the iPhone 6+ is $100 more. If they make a smaller phone that is $100 cheaper than is it the same price as last year’s models.

Leo: Boy look at that difference. Is that the new 3GS compared to the 6?

Andy: No that is the first generation iPhone.

Leo: That is first generation.

Andy: Compared to the iPhone 6 +.

Rene: Right.

Andy: And then you compare that to, here was the leading smart phone before.

Leo: Right.

Andy: Before the iPhone came out.

Leo: Look at the size of that screen. What if they did a flip phone? What if Apple did a flip phone? Come on that’s what people want.

Rene: No it is interesting because Apple; it is easy to say Apple could do a smaller phone but would it succeed then? Because they would use a plastic to say yes it is $100 cheaper not just the size but it is a less premium product.

Leo: Right.

Adam: It could be. I guess what I’m saying is a lot of time what I’m seeing; again this is upstate New York I am not in Silicon Valley I am not in a city.

Leo: Yes.

Adam: When I see people buy Android phones a lot of the time I’m seeing it because they are cheaper. That is a simple fact, this is not a rich area and people are not interested in being the latest and greatest; they just need a phone and that is what selling does.

Andy: That is a really important thing to point out because I am one of those people who, probably mostly because of my job, that when people are using phones I am trying to sneak a look and see what kinds they are using.

Adam: Yeah.

Andy: And if you go to, there are certain places where you see nothing but iPhones but if you are waiting for a buss you will see a lot of Androids out there. If you go to a Chipotle, which is a place where lots and lots of people of all economic classes, levels, come you will see a much wider variety of devices. If you to, again I am talking about hoyty toity places; if you go to a Panera Bread you will that most people are not using MacBooks they are using Dells, they are using ASOS, they are using Acer machines and they are very, very happy with them.

Leo: Yeah.

Andy: So it is.

Rene: It is probably self-select thing; if you go to Starbucks with a MacBook you would probably see other people who have gone to Starbucks with a MacBook.

Andy: If you’re going be shown fake, not writing your screen play you may as well be seen fake not writing on the best laptop available.

Rene: It was funny at CES, I went into encore and I saw a lot more, most years you see a wide variety. You see people with purple flip Blackberry phones and this year, especially just going around the hotel I saw mostly iPhones and not even new ones; they were iPhone 5 and 5S and things like that.

Adam: Okay so speaking of the iPhone 5, another one of the things we were talking about in preshow stuff links with the most popular camera on flicker is still an iPhone 5.

Leo: Yeah, I don’t know why.

Adam: Not the 5S?

Leo: But doesn’t that include all previous postings or is it just for this year? I should look at that number.

Adam: Yeah.

Leo: Is that all total because then it would make sense.

Adam: No for 2014.

Leo: For 2014.

Adam: that is what they say.

Leo: Okay.

Adam: It was different, they say the iPhone 5 was up from 2013 for top mobile camera. I just thought this was fascinating because you normally expect, yeah the old ones will drop of slowly and the new ones will replace them. And I could see the iPhone 6 not being on this list because it came out later in the year.

Leo: You would think to find this, this would be the dominant.

Adam: Right.

Rene: Next year Leo, next year.

Leo: So there is a 1 year lag maybe.

Rene: Also people tend to, I forget where I heard this; people tend to hand down their iPhones a lot.

Leo: Right.

Rene: Not a lot of people get rid of them or put them in a drawer.

Leo: That is true.

Rene: They give them to other people.

Leo: That’s true, I finally got rid of a 4S because everything later than the 4S ended up going to somebody.

Rene: But I mean is flicker a good barometer now? We have to find out what the Snap Chat numbers are to really gauge the photo use.

Leo: Let’s take a break.

Rene: Do most people still use flicker?

Leo: We’ve got a great panel. We’ve got Adam Engst from Tidbits.com the longest running internet Macintosh publication which you must get if you are not already a member tidbits.com and you know what it is free but give him some money, throw him a little money. Of course Mr. Rene Ritchie from iMore.com and Andy Ihnatko from the Chicago Sun Times. Do you guys shave?

Rene: Only on New Year Leo.

Leo: I just want to tell you about Harry’s, it is not too late to join the shave revolution. Harry’s a great shave at a fraction of the price. Holidays are over now we just have to save money and groom. Grooming is so important, shaving I have to admit is not fun but I can’t grow a beard I don’t want to grow a beard. I like having a clean shaved face so I’m going to, I am willing to spend money on a good clean shave. That is why I was spending $4 a blade on my Gillette Fusion till I found Harry’s. Harry’s is a better blade for less money. I chose Harry’s not because it saves me money, although it does; I chose Harry’s because it makes the best blade. They are fantastic they engineer them for high performance and they can do that because they own the factory in Germany where the blades are made. They guarantee your satisfaction and a Harry’s kit is a great deal. There is the Winston, I have several Winstons that is $25, the Truman is $15 and with ever kit not only do you get the great handle; I mean really the handle is really the big difference between the Winston and the Truman. Winston has a nice engraved metal handle. I think actually the plastic handle on the Truman is pretty nice; Steve Gibson chose that one because he likes the feel of it in his hand. You might want more than 1 of Harry’s razor kit they are so affordable. With each kit you get 3 blades, the Harry’s shave gel or shave cream your choice, and by the way I love it is seems a little thing the Harry’s travel cover it is really great. There it is, there is my Harry’s and the travel cover, so when you are going to put this in your dop kit. Don’t throw that out, you may think oh that is just something to hold it. No this is great it has got little ventilation so the blade dries out, I protect you from cutting yourself this is actually; I’ve never seen this before I love it. Thank you Harry’s. Free shipping for orders over $10 anywhere in the U.S. or Canada; you can chose from the foaming gel a lot of people like that it is more like the gels you would see in the store. I personally prefer the cream it comes out of a tube, that is what I use every morning but I do love my Harry’s blades. Change your blade regularly, you absolutely, absolutely want to get a Harry’s kit and then sign up for a subscription. And they have a new aftershave moisturizer that protects and hydrates skin I’m putting this on my head because I needed something to protect my bald head for a while and this is great. Harry’s, harrys.com; get $5 off your first purchase with the offer code MACBREAK. Harrys.com use the offer code MACBREAK get $5 off. That makes the Truman set $10. You just put that right on there and rub it in, it’s just nice smells good too. Awe it feels so good. Harry’s, harrys.com do it, do it, do it. Alright.

Rene: I just want everything to be like Harry’s Leo. I want a Harry’s for every product they are so fantastic.

Leo: You know I think that is the internet world we dream of and we are slowly getting there because there was Warby Parker kind of changed the way we buy glasses. In fact many of our advertisers are Casper changed the way we buy mattresses; coffee Tonx Coffee we have many of the advertisers on our network are people who are going after the early adapters of forward thinking, technology enthusiast.

Rene: I saw Casper at CES and yes they let us jump on their bed it was amazing.

Leo: It’s nice isn’t it?

Rene: Yeah.

Leo: There you go that’s a mattress at CES.

Rene: Yes.

Leo: That tells you something. Apple watch do we have a date?

Rene: It will be like the iPad, it will be like the original iPad.

Leo: It will be ready when it is ready. Is that what you are saying?

Adam: You want a date with the Apple watch is that what you are saying?

Leo: I do want a date; I have a date with the Apple watch it is just when.

Rene: It’s a new gold one, he is just eyeing it

Leo: I want to know the pricing too. So according to Marc Germain 9 to 5 Mac, how often do we say that on the show according to Marc Germain 9 to 5 Mac, March and the retail training is set for February.

Rene: He came back from vacation with a vengeance.

Leo: This guy I tell ya; it’s because he is young. You remember being young.

Rene: It’s called stamina.

Leo: He’s got stamina. Senior vice president of retail Angela Ahrendts has been telling employees the launch will occur in the spring after the Chinese New Year. We mentioned that but now he’s got some more concrete information. 1 or 2 representatives from many Apple stores in the U.S. will be sent to Cupertino or Austin to get training fist hand on the watch February 9^th and February 16^th between February 9^th and 16^th that is 1 week. In the couple of days preceding the watch release, these employees will then train other employees in their respective stores. You can wear it on the left wrist or you can wear it on the right wrist.

Adam: Your crowning it wrong stop that.

Leo: You are crowing it wrong. In the months following the device introduction in September, Apple has been polishing up the OS and putting the devices battery through more extensive testing. Come on you’ve got your ear to the tracks Rene Ritchie. Have you heard any rumors?

Rene: A lot of people are trying them, I think people throughout Apple are working on them.

Leo: You see people wearing them now right.

Rene: Yeah people are wearing them, they are trying all the different features out and they are going to get some real life measures. I think that is why Apple was careful not to announce a specific battery life.

Leo: And Marc even hedges this he says unexpected delays could always push the watch back and no one is saying battery life hours.

Rene: Yeah nothing is real until Apple holds it up on stage.

Leo: Right.

Rene: Everything else is just criminology.

Leo: We know $349 for the cheap sport model, the one you don’t want.

Rene: I think a lot of people will like that. In fact a lot of people have told me, that are getting the gold one are also getting the sport so they don’t have to wear the gold one every day.

Leo: I know Adam Engst will because he is a sporty fella.

Adam: Well I will honestly because if we are going to have to be getting one of these every year.

Leo: Aye yai yai.

Adam: Or 2 years I’m certainly not spending more than I have to every time.

Andy: The pricing of the stainless steel one I think is going to define the entire line because you can definitely say the $350 is the minimum buy in for the sport edition, the “cheap one” and the cheap one is $100 more expensive than I’m sorry $250 more expensive than its 2 biggest competitors.

Leo: Right.

Andy: If the stainless steel one is 7 to 8 to $900 okay you are clearly.

Leo: That is a little much.

Andy: Not about a consumer product because we know that the gold is, I’m sorry I should correct myself. We don’t know how much the gold one is going to cost; when you talk to anybody who makes watches that simply says that quantity of gold means it’s up to multiply, many thousands of dollars. I really think that Apple is going to have to be very careful about how they price the stainless steel one.

Leo: Rumor sites are saying $500 for stainless. That would be okay right?

Andy: That is within reach; see I’m so glad that I have had so much experience with the Android Ware because so many things that I would never have guessed about my beliefs about wearable smart watches were just completely wrong. Among them that if this were for just $250, this watch I’m wearing right now, if all it was, was a source of really cool digital time pieces and it had a few nice functions on the side but basically I’m still wearing it as a watch. It would not be ridiculous for me to spend $250 for a watch that has really cool watch faces that I can keep swapping out. It makes double sense when you talk about a $99 device like the Pebble. So I could certainly see if all Apple manages to achieve is a really cool stylish watch that has some impeccably designed watch faces and there are new ones coming out every single month. There are a lot of people who would spend $350 for a watch like that. I spent $250 for my last, my first and last really nice mechanical watch so I could see that happening. Then of course it will do much more than that. Pricing I think, $500 for a stainless steel watch especially something that looks as nice, that has the presence of that stainless steel watch; that was one of the watches I was able to try in September. That is a nice thing to have on your wrist; that doesn’t seem ridiculous. If it is going to cost you the cost of a MacBook Air to put this on your wrist, that is something else entirely.

Adam: But you can’t put the MacBook Air on your wrist.

Rene: He’s got pictures of the Companion air app up.

Leo: Okay let’s see.

Rene: There’s a bunch of new features in there too.

Leo: And then the other thing I want to talk about before and just run over to 9 to 5, whoops I just went to 9to5.com which is not what I was hoping for. Don’t go there children; 9to5mac.com, that is more like it. Companion app this is the one that would be.

Rene: It would be on your phone.

Leo: On the phone.

Rene: There is home screen management, communications preferences, and monograms you can monogram the watch if you wanted to.

Leo: This is nice, a lot of features. Also some health features like you can be reminded to stand up if you have been sitting.

Rene: Yep.

Leo: The first 50 minutes of an hour.

Andy: There are so many little details though. I know a lot of people who do keep their watches set like 5 minutes slow or 5 minutes fast so that they feel as though they are always ahead of schedule.

Leo: Right.

Andy: So it will be interesting to see if it will let you say please set the time automatically but give me an extra 5 minutes.

Leo: Right. So the watch will have grey scale and success ability features, voice over that’s cool, zoom.

Rene: Yep.

Leo: Push alerts from phone, monogram is weird. So that is on the color watch face.

Rene: Your initials, it will put your initials on the watch face.

Leo: Leo it’s nice having a 3 letter name or 4 letter name Rene.

Rene: Yeah.

Leo: You could fit it on there and here’s the activity stuff. Okay cool. So the other thing that happened of interest to Mac users at CES was Intel announced its new Broadwell chip, this is the talk in the tip tops I hear. A 14 nanometer processor they announced the mobile parts. Typically when you hear an announcement like that, Apple is first to the table with a laptop based on it; they have been very close to Intel but it is Dell that gets pride of place here with the new XPS 13 which interestingly is basically a MacBook Air but a lot thinner, they claim 15 hours of battery life you know that is what you would expect with that generation.

Rene: Is that the one with the fancy sharp screen?

Leo: Yeah they have 2 choices they have; you can get the non-touch screen for $799 or let’s say $800 - $1,000 but if you want the touch screen, you can get a quad HD + they call it. Which is, let me just quickly get the resolution of what the hell quad HD + is.

Rene: Well they were coring at CES about some exclusive deal with Sharp about high density super power displays.

Leo: It is probably 2550x1440 but let me see if I can find. I don't know if in a 13 inch display, if you really want that kind of resolution but you can get it.

Rene: It was supposed to be a 13 inch display that fit in like an 11 inch or 12 inch chassis.

Leo: Remember we saw, look at the size of the bezil on this.

Rene: Yeah.

Leo: Remember we saw these mockups of a new 12 inch MacBook Air and I think the fact that Broadwell has come out that other manufactures are making and selling computers within it. To me in the next few weeks I would think that we will see an update to the MacBook Air with potentially, this QHD or whatever they call it.

Rene: It depends on Apple's cycles. I mean they updated it last WWDC.

Leo: You don't think they are going to sit on this one?

Rene: I don't think they will rush just because Intel has finally pushed out Broadwell.

Andy: Also there is the iPhone 6 effect, where there is so many people who have been delaying buying a MacBook Air because they know a retina model is coming out.

Leo: Right.

Andy: They know they are going to have to come through with quantity immediately. So I don't think it is going to happen really immediately quickly.

Leo: So you think June.

Andy: I would say spring; the Apple watch announcement kind of throws a monkey wrench in things. Because if Apple makes their first radically different MacBook since the total redesign since retina really, that is going to be something they don't want to slip it out in a Wednesday press release. They are going to want to show it off in some way shape or form but they certainly want to have enough air around the watch so that everybody's attention is on that instead. If I were to guess I would say April.

Rene: It's amazing.

Andy: But that really is a guess.

Rene: It really is amazing how we all said there is nothing is coming from Apple, nothing is coming from Apple especially in the spring time seasons and now there is the watch, the new Apple TV, the iPad Pro.

Leo: Right.

Rene: The new MacBook Air

Andy: Spring has always been at least a half likely time for them to introduce either new notebooks or updates to notebooks because that is when a lot of orders have to happen for later in the school year especially for school systems. But of all the things to try to pin down, Macs are just; if anybody tells you they know a schedule for Apple's releases.

Leo: I want this.

Andy: They are trying to get you to buy them a drink and tell them something.

Leo: I'll tell you I was so close to pushing the button on this Dell and then I though oh well no, there will be a MacBook Air with these specs. So that is disappointing to me it is 3200X1800 which is 276 pixels per inch at 400 nits, it is very bright as well. It is also super light, it is 2.6 pounds.

Andy: Yeah.

Leo: And some people who have seen this it feels flimsy it is so light but it is a new magnesium process; this is, it is too bad.

Andy: It doesn't run OS 10.

Leo: To bad it’s running Windows because I really think this is a great laptop. Apple is a little bit missing the boat if they don't come up with.

Rene: It depends what they come, they might be waiting on just one component that they just don't have or that isn't ready for them. It will be easier to tell when it actually comes out and you can compare them side by side.

Andy: But also look at the pricing, that is not in any way a cheaply made laptop and it is $800 for a 13inch that is close to a retina display without the touch.

Leo: Yeah, nice alright.

Andy: It is a terrible responsibility Apple has. I don't envy them what so ever to have to attend to every need of every consumer to buy and to build everything. It is just such a hard position.

Leo: Can I hackintosh this? Seriously.

Rene: They are being push by competition though, that is best for everybody.

Andy: Absolutely, that is a good 2:10 in the afternoon topic discussion not one minute before 4. So I will simply say I agree with that, I do but it is a really good topic for discussion.

Leo: Can I hackintosh this? Is this still possible out in the world?

Rene: You have to wait for the kids to get a hold of it Leo.

Leo: The kids, once the kids get it.

Andy: You have to wait for them to find a flaw or for somebody to make that happen. So good luck finding a driver for that display.

Leo: Maybe I'll just have to live with Windows. Okay, I'll live with Windows; I'm using a Widows phone now. So why not I'm going to go all Windows now I think.

Rene: They need to know that Ed Bott and what's his name left.

Leo: Right Ed Botts is now driving an Android.

Rene: Tom Warren

Leo: Tom Warren price; they need me.

Rene: It is only Paul Thurrott and Daniel Rubino left.

Leo: That’s right.

Andy: That is a great move because.

Leo: Cortana says hey brother anything I can do? I like that; I had cortana call me brother. Brother from another mother.

Rene: My carbon based brother.

Leo: My carbon based brother. Alright we are going to take a break when we come back your picks. I don't know, Adam, if we warned you but you've done this before; something cool, something neat, something like that.

Adam: I think I can come up with something unusual.

Leo: Something unusual would be nice. Maybe that internet starter kit.

Adam: You know I think the internet; it is going to go somewhere.

Leo: Yeah I think this is the time; jump on that.

Adam: You should really check it out

Leo: Jump on the wagon. Our show today brought to you today by legalzoom.com not a law firm but better. Legalzoom helps you get your legal work done at a very affordable price. You will save on your legal needs, gain access to a network of plan attorneys so you can ask questions, get your life organized it would be a great to start your New Year with but where do you start with your family if you don't have a will, yes; take control of your family's future with a living will of trust. It is inexpensive, it is easy to do. We just got the will kit it is so cool, easy to do, a nice beautiful binder, and all of the paperwork it is so great. You can also take control of your financial affairs. Ready to start a business you should really go to legalzoom.com to do the LLC thing or the chapter S or C corp.; if you already have a business trademarks. Although there is all sorts of stuff, I love it. For over 10 years now legalzoom has helped millions of people including me get the personalized attention they need. I have been very happy with the service, the support, the price at legalzoom.com and you know what is nice that I haven't used before, they just recently added, if you need more help they can connect independent attorneys in almost every state. They have pre vetted these you can read their online profiles and even reviews from users under the reviews from users so you can find the one that is right for you. Legalzoom it is not a law firm, it is better; don't let another year pass before getting your life in order. For legal help you can count on for your family or your business go to legalzoom.com if you use our offer code: MBW you'll get $10 off at check out and they will know where you heard about it and that is important to our panel and me. Legalzoom it is how we pay the electric bill; legalzoom.com use the offer code: MBW, you will save $10 and we will be able to keep the lights on a little bit longer. Legalzoom. Aright, you got something weird, you got something different? Let's hear it Adam Engst of tidbits.com.

Adam: Okay so this does sort of actually does sort of come from the kids that I heard it from my wife's niece and nephew, her aunt's kids that are high school, college age. It is not an app, it is not a program, it is not something you use on your computer; it is fiction, it’s online fiction. It is called Worm and it is super hero fiction for those of us who were always more into the stories than the art. You know I can read a comic book in 5 minutes; it’s really, it just goes way too fast. But this is, lets me image it all in terms of what is going on. The guy is a new writer but he is pretty good, he gets better throughout it. I guess it took him a couple of years to write this it is all blog post it comes doing it twice a week I guess for those years. I have to say it is a pretty compelling story you get into it and you want to read the next chapter.

Leo: Neat.

Adam: I have been reading it all on the iPhone and use the reader mode to get it up to a nice size. I recommend it for people who like comics so it is worth trying.

Leo: Is this, this is a Patron.

Adam: Yeah.

Leo: That's great.

Adam: I just ran into it recently.

Leo: Yeah.

Adam: So I am not even done with it; I'm just like this is really cool, I'm really enjoying this. So it is just something a little different this time.

Leo: For all the negatives we talk about on the internet, this is really what it is all about; that somebody can do this is so great and maybe live their dream and you get great stuff.

Rene: Awesome.

Leo: I love it, so the website for this is parahumans, parahumans.wordpress.com; that's the actual url but I bet you there is a short one. Is there a short one? Nope.

Adam: That is the only way I found it.

Leo: Google Worm online fiction maybe that will help. Not wurm although that would have been good; worm not vurm, worm. Andy Ihnatko your pick of the week.

Andy: I have to call an audible here from yesterday because I bought an app for the iPad over the weekend that came so highly recommended by a friend of mine and I was really excited about it and then it failed on me miserably yesterday.

Leo: Oh no.

Adam: Oh.

Andy: So I'm going to keep on working at it to see if maybe I screwed something up or if something happened. So in the mean time I'll pull an all-star out of the archives which is a shirt pocket software SuperDuper disk utility because that one really came through for me last week where it is a backup utility that, unlike time machine; it is a good companion for Time Machine because whereas Time Machine makes incremental backup and puts it into a form where restoring a hard drive into a workable condition. It takes a long time and it is hard to have multiple backups. The SuperDuper will take your entire drive, it will give you a disk image file that will be open able with any version of the operating system that works with the disk utility, and it is easy it just simply puts you right back where you started from with a bootable drive. Even taking an internal drive and cloning it onto a bootable external drive; anything you want to do it will help you with it. My problem was that I am putting away an older Mac that I already have a backup of somewhere, but I said well I haven’t really used this for about a year let’s just make one final backup. The reason why I was finally really putting it away was because the drive was starting to throw off bad sectors; so it was still working but occasionally it would crash. SuperDuper is not a disk repair utility but it is written so well that when it fails it is absolutely verbose about what happened. No sorry data could not be written operation failed. It will here is a button, here is everything that I was doing for the entire 6 hours I was trying to backup this drive and here is the thing I tried to do that caused things to fail. So that became really, really easy over the course of 6 or 7 different backup attempts to identify those very, very few files that had been affected by this; delete or move those files and then finally have a complete backup minus 5 files entirely. So yes there are $100 utility that will fix damaged and diagnose stuff; that was not going to be necessary. I was glad that this $27 utility, that I rely on every single day to backup really all of my critical data; was able to be generous enough to help me fix a problem as well. And the great thing is that $27 is what you pay to unlock things like scheduling features and bonus stuff like that. Anybody right now can go to shirtpocket.com, download this app for free, and press that one button and backup their hard drive with it. It is not a time limited thing; it is like the core feature which is to click a button, create a disk image which is a bootable disk image of this drive that I’m pointing you to is completely free, and it is just $27 for the stuff that makes it a daily, daily use utility. Great stuff.

Leo: You know you feel like anybody who has a Mac by now should know about SuperDuper but I think it is still often people don’t.

Andy: Yep.

Adam: Apple is so.

Andy: A lot of people will say I have Time Machine so I don’t need a backup utility. Again it is a good companion for those two because they work with each other very well.

Adam: Oh totally

Leo: Yeah.

Adam: I was going to say I use SuperDuper all the time except for the fact that I never see it because it kicks off at 9:22 at night, backs up my machine, and goes to sleep; it disappears I never see it at all. It’s like oh is that still running, I check on it oh yeah look it’s still running, and check in on it. It’s great stuff.

Rene: Also David Nanian is an amazing phone and computers fan of all different platforms.

Andy: Yeah I should also mention that whenever I talk about both this and bbedit, I have to say that David Nanian is one of my best friends, I had dinner with him over the weekend but one of the reasons why we became friends is because I was having a problem with SuperDuper and he immediately started replying and we had a conversation why does it do this? It should have a progress bar that gives you time and he said that would be great, unfortunately this is why it is difficult for us to do that sort of a feature. And anytime that we are making plans to see a movie, it is like okay I have to answer these 130 customer emails first but then we can go. Again great guy, great product.

Leo: Awesome highly, highly recommended. If you have a Mac you have to have that program. Rene Ritchie your pick of the week.

Rene: So I have a tip more than a pick. When I was at the, I think, iPhone or iPad event I was talking to Dieter Bohn who is currently the managing editor of The Verge and we were talking about how you could cover events with just iPhones. And he had the idea of using hyperlapse from Instagram but using it in 1X mode; so not using it to speed anything up, just using it in real time mode, and because it does all of that fancy sensor derived auto stabilization he thought it would do a really good job of capturing. Sometimes when you’re by yourself and using and iPhone it is jitter or it moves around a lot.

Leo: Right.

Rene: So we tried it out at CES. There was a time when all of the cameras were out and we had to go run and actually film some of the home kit stuff and all we had was a couple of iPhones. So we used one as a microphone, and we used the other as a video recorder, and we used hyperlapse in 1X mode and it was really solid; it was no jitter even if our hands moved a little bit, hyperlapse compensated for that and then we just air dropped all the files on to the same Mac and put it all together in Final Cut pro and it worked really, really well.

Leo: I want to see it do you have a link?

Rene: If you go to imore.com it is the incipio video it should be right at the top

Leo: Oh good. That is, I’ve always thought why do we always bring all of these big cameras? We’ve got these great cameras on our phones but I think improving the quality to the point.

Rene: You don’t get the depth of the field and some of the other things that you get with.

Leo: But wait a minute, this was shot with an iPhone in hyperlapse?

Rene: Yep.

Leo: Wow, you know what it looks like a Steadicam. That is awesome.

Rene: It is not perfect because I was a little bit jittery, especially at first; and she is recording all, when you see her talking into her iPhone, she is recording all of the audio onto her iPhone as well.

Leo: I have to say this is every bit as good as the $1,500 a day camera package intruder we pay for.

Andy: Rene if you ever get into manufacturing, I’m going to give you a million dollar idea. An iPhone case that makes it look like.

Leo: A microphone.

Andy: An old timey sort of news broadcaster microphones.

Leo: Yeah

Rene: She had just gotten a case from someone who was making pan tone cases so she slapped it on her phone and didn’t think about it and then we ran out. But if we had our time.

Leo: So this just; did you notice there is a significant smoothing of the video from hyperlapse?

Rene: Not especially; the one problem that you have with hyperlapse is if you don’t pay attention you can accidentally save it in 6X mode and then you’re stuck.

Leo: Right.

Rene: You can’t go back and undo it.

Leo: Right.

Rene: So I have a couple. I took a picture; I went to the Canon booth and look at all of their magnificent, glorious glass, and this long stretch. And I took a video with it in hyperlapse hoping that it would be super stabile and then accidentally hit the 6X button.

Leo: Whoops

Rene: And then tried to slow it down and it was like a series of stills.

Leo: Yeah.

Rene: So you have to pay really close attention and there is no second chance but if you really need to use it, it does a really good job.

Leo: This is remarkable. Hyperlapse is free from Instagram. If you have an iPhone you have hyperlapse and by the way as to date still no Android version. Although they said it was capable with lollypop. Wow.

Rene: I should point out the zoom was done in Final Cut.

Leo: Oh I saw these great zooms I thought you were going like this.

Rene: No the zoom was because yeah, me stepping around would not be good for anybody.

Leo: Oh I was impressed. Hey I have a quick recommendation and it ties into the next show because if you’ve seen The Imitation Game you already know what a great movie it is, Benedict Cumberbatch plays Alan Turing. It is a beautiful, well made, brilliant movie that highlights, not only the guy who helped probably single handedly, with the help of his team, beat the Germans in World War II by cracking their code machine enigma but also really laid the foundations for the computers we use today. It was horribly persecuted by the British government afterwards because he is gay and ended up committing suicide. At the end I’m kind of teary because they say that he invented computers and it just didn’t really get acknowledged until last year when our friend John Gram Cumming created a petition which persuaded the British government and the Queen of England to pardon him and apologize for the persecution. If you haven’t seen this game yet; I don’t know have you guys seen it?

Andy: I saw it, a beautiful, beautiful, beautiful movie.

Leo: I loved it.

Andy: Between that and the theory of everything.

Leo: Yeah.

Andy: What a great season for movies about smart people.

Leo: Yeah.

Andy: I love this movie.

Leo: I was a little worried because I had read some reviews that said awe here we go again they are going to portray the mathematician as this sort of weird, nerdy guy. I think this was actually pretty accurate portrayal of Turing. It is based on a complete biography of him and I think Cumberbatch is amazing.

Rene: Steve was raving about it all week.

Andy: One of the things that I love about it is that one of the tropes that you often see is that he is a mathematical genius. You see him bouncing a ball and.

Leo: Right.

Andy: Suddenly the ball bounces and wait a minute that’s it.

Leo: That is what I don’t like.

Andy: But this doesn’t do that.

Leo: Yeah.

Andy: He is cranking on this problem for weeks, and weeks, and weeks and then he and his team get the first tiniest enkeling not that this is working but oh it has now failed in such a way that maybe we think this actually will work. Oh just such a great lesson that.

Leo: Yeah.

Andy: Success comes or is the daughter or son of just hundreds and hundreds of little failures.

Leo: And I do look forward to reading, seeing not reading, Theory of Everything the Steven Hawkins story because I hear very good things about that too. So a couple of good movies for geeks out in theaters today.

Andy: I went to the advanced screening and I have the commemorative advanced screening glass ware.

Leo: Oh nice, nice.

Andy: I don’t know what that has to do with Hawking but I have a free cup; I don’t have to run the dishwasher for yet one more meal.

Leo: The Imitation Game, highly recommended. Thank you everybody and the reason I mentioned that is because on our next show on our recording schedule. Steve Gibson is going to explain how enigma works. I think this should be fun so. Security Now is coming up unless Security News has prompted a change of schedule which sometimes does happen. The secrets of enigma coming up on the TWiT network. Thank you very much Adam Engst for making some time for us in the bitterly cold north east.

Adam: I got to stay inside, then it is perfect.

Leo: He brought his penguin and we are glad to have him. Everybody must go to tidbits, tidbits.com and sign up today.

Adam: Thank you Leo.

Leo: Must read, it is where I get all of my Mac information and have for 24 years.

Adam: Yeah coming up on 25 in April.

Leo: That is so awesome.

Adam: We do not yet know what we are going to do but something’s got to be happening.

Leo: Yeah.

Adam: 25 years, Jesus.

Leo: That’s nice, thank you Adam really appreciate it; we should have you back more often, so great. Rene Ritchie from iMore.com a regular on the show always glad to have you; glad you survived CES without any noticeable wear and tear.

Rene: Or no plague also.

Leo: No plague your right.

Adam: Is that possible?

Leo: That is beating the odds. I don’t know how you do it.

Adam: He was actually wearing a gas mask the whole time.

Rene: Hazmat suit

Leo: And Andy Ihnatko of course always great to have you from the Chicago Sun Times. What a great team we have on this show. We do MacBreak Weekly every Tuesday 11 am pacific, 2 pm eastern time, that is 1900 utc if you are watching anywhere around the world; that’s the live version. It is probably a little confusing to people because this probably looks like a television station. Basically what we do is we turn on the cameras and you can watch as we produce the shows. There is stuff before and after, sometimes produced, sometimes hap hazard, sometimes just a long shot of the studio sitting there but if you do want to watch live we love having you here because that is the only way you can interact with us directly via our chatroom and irc . If you can’t be here live its fine. We have on demand of all of our shows audio and video available in this case at twit.tv, our website, twit.tv/mbw for MacBreak Weekly or look for MacBreak Weekly, since this is one of the oldest podcasts in the universe almost 10 years old. I’m sure you can find a copy anywhere podcasts are aggregated or use our great TWiT apps on IOS and Android devices. Thanks for being here now back to work because you know what, break time is over!