MacBreak Weekly 1003 Transcript

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

Leo Laporte [00:00:00]:
It's time for MacBreak Weekly. Alex Lindsey has the week off. Andy and Jason are here. So is the snow. We'll talk about 26.2, some new features and very important security updates. Apple loses in court and in Japan. And we'll talk about why you probably should be backing up your data right now.

Leo Laporte [00:00:20]:
All of that coming up next on MacBreak Weekly. Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is Twit. This is MacBreak Weekly. Episode 1003 recorded Tuesday, December 16, 2025. The intersection of greed and delusion. It's time for MacBreak Weekly, the show we cover the latest Apple news on a freezing cold December day with the. The sun has disappeared for the next few months.

Leo Laporte [00:00:59]:
Let's say hello to Andy Ihnatko where it really is.

Andy Ihnatko [00:01:02]:
Col. We had, we've, we've had a bit of a couple of days as a matter of fact. So I, I've been, I, I've, I've been not feeding the squirrel so much as like I've got a gift basket that involves walnut that has a can contain walnuts. And I thought actually, you know, I'm going to keep like, I'm going to like leave a walnut like at this, on this little rock on the way on my walk, like to the library. And every day like I leave it when I come in and then when I come out, it's gone for the past two days. However, Monday's walnut is still there. So it's too cold. Even for the squirrels.

Leo Laporte [00:01:33]:
Even for the squirrels. Aren't you.

Andy Ihnatko [00:01:37]:
I could have put like a little red bow on the top of it and it. And yet it was like, no, no, no, we're good for the. At least until it gets into the high 30s. Perfect.

Leo Laporte [00:01:46]:
Our cold squirrel lover. Now here Jason and I are in California. Jason Snell of sixcolors.com.

Jason Snell [00:01:52]:
Hello. And even what I like to call California cold, it's California cold, which is when I walk the dog, I have to put on a jacket. The heavy hoodie is not enough. I have to put on an actual jacket. And that is, that is not when you know that it's in the 40s in San Francisco. It's a damn cold.

Andy Ihnatko [00:02:13]:
But from LA Story where Steve Martin plays a weatherman and he's talking about the brutal cold snap he talked about. Oh, so you're saying that it was so cold that you actually had to let the cats back in overnight. Yeah, there's a, there's a Struggles to recover.

Jason Snell [00:02:32]:
There's a line in 30 Rock where somebody tells Liz Lemon that she's. That she's moving to the Bay Area. And Liz is very angry about it and she says, have fun carrying a light sweater everywhere you go.

Leo Laporte [00:02:43]:
It's like, yeah, that's a good line.

Andy Ihnatko [00:02:45]:
It's pretty.

Jason Snell [00:02:45]:
Pretty, right?

Leo Laporte [00:02:46]:
That's really accurate.

Jason Snell [00:02:47]:
That's about it. But anyway. So, yes, it's, it's a. It's jacket weather, but we're not built for this. So, you know, thin blood.

Leo Laporte [00:02:54]:
Thin blood.

Jason Snell [00:02:55]:
Yeah. We just leave our windows open all year long and usually it doesn't matter, but now it's real cold. Should have put in closable windows, I guess.

Leo Laporte [00:03:05]:
Well, Apple gave us a little gift over the week, 26.2 for all of the things.

Jason Snell [00:03:12]:
Yeah. Got to ship that before you can go on your Christmas vacation.

Leo Laporte [00:03:16]:
You think that probably that's what happens, right? They. Yeah, they're running out the door and.

Jason Snell [00:03:20]:
They did put out a 26.3beta, but I suspect that's more like as a placeholder of. And this cycle will now begin and we'll see you next year.

Andy Ihnatko [00:03:28]:
There were a couple interesting things in 2063. We'll get to it. But like, there were especially like, things where it's like, if you are not 100% invested in the Apple ecosystem, thank the EU for the following two features that have already been spotted. So it's pretty good. I have to admit though, I'm a little bit gun shy and I'm like, I'm going to wait until, let's say Saturday at 2pm before I install 26.2 on all my devices because I kind of like the fact that my devices are all kind of stable right now. And I kind of like to keep that mojo going if I can.

Jason Snell [00:03:59]:
I mean, why not? Why not do that? I mean, 26. Two is, it's, it's small, but. Because actually, it's funny, a year ago we were talking about big updates happening in Point one and Point two because remember, Apple kind of over promised and underdelivered. And that's an understatement. And this year they really basically just announced features of WWDC that they thought they could ship in point. Oh. And so these Point one and Point Two releases have been minor, I'd say. I think the biggest story here is just that they added a whole other set of iPad multitasking features.

Jason Snell [00:04:33]:
So when the very good multitasking iPad feature shipped in 26, we heard from a lot of fans of Slide over, which lets you dock an app on the side of the screen, either side, and then Just sort of like swipe it away and then swipe it back in while you're working on another app or other apps. It's a really nice feature. They didn't implement it and I don't know whether that was an oversight. And they were just sort of like, well, you don't need that. Just make a window. They brought it back. And a lot of what's in 26.2 on the iPad is about dock focused multitasking because you used to be able to use the dock for a lot of stuff and that kind of went away in 26. So they brought it back.

Jason Snell [00:05:11]:
So now you can drag an app out of the dock, an app icon, and put it all the way on the corner on the edge of the screen and it goes into Slide Over. So you don't need to mess around with other ui. You can just do, I think a very intuitive. Put this app over there on the side and it does it. You couldn't. You used to be able to switch apps in Slide over and you can't do that anymore. And so they added a feature where you can drag an app icon out of the dock onto Slide over and it changes into that app, which is not quite the same, but I think it's pretty good. And then if you don't use Slide over, it's still pretty good.

Jason Snell [00:05:45]:
You can drag apps out of the dock to make windows. And it's got a. If you like Split View, which is another thing that basically went away, you can tile two windows to be split and it acts like Split View, but it mostly has been oriented toward like floating windows like the Mac. Now when you drag an app out of the dock, if it's toward the left or the right side, not kind of out in the middle, you'll actually see the preview icon change shape. And what it's doing is it's changing into one half of a split view. So actually a couple of swipes will put you directly in Split view out of the dock. And these are all features that my guess is they were thinking they would do them, but they weren't ready for point zero. So they're like, we'll get to that later in the fall.

Jason Snell [00:06:27]:
And here we are and they've shipped it. But I think I was already super impressed with multitasking on 26 for iPad and the fact that they have done more. They added a bunch of stuff in point one, including bringing Slide over back. And now in point two, they've done more refinement. I don't know if there's more to come or not. But I feel like now it feels much more complete even than the very good point zero version that they shipped. So for me, that's the biggest one.

Andy Ihnatko [00:06:53]:
And I'm really, really glad that Apple's listening to feedback that I think it surprised them that they got so much feedback, quote unquote, about losing slide over. Yeah, that's when they found out that, okay, I mean, they didn't just simply pull this out of their, out of their ear. They feel as though they had enough metrics, enough data to support the fact that, yeah, there's some people who use it, but it's an underused feature and we don't really. Given that we're totally redoing how multitasking works in the iPad, this would be a good time to lose a feature that is clearly on its way out. But the fact that people, the people who do use it are just such big fans that they don't want to be without it. I'm still trying to figure out if I'm at that point, now that we're at 26.2, that I'm now going to have to read up fully on how multitasking and multi windowing works on iPad, because it's still doing some stuff that I'm not anticipating and still doing stuff where, wait, why is there like the leftmost little strip margin of a window sort of hanging out at the right side of my iPad when I switch over? And how do I get rid of that? It's like, I think that there's a collision between multi windowing and multiple workspaces that isn't really clicking for me. So at this point, I don't know if it's, wow, this is kind of poorly designed. And I kind of, it's a little bit clumsy because we have seen some clumsiness in this update.

Andy Ihnatko [00:08:13]:
But it could be that it's not a given that every good feature is something that could be instinctively learned without actually reading the documentation that Apple publishes with every major release. It's a pain point right now.

Jason Snell [00:08:25]:
My feeling, I think you're right. My feeling about Slide over and Split View is that the people working on these new features viewed that. Remember, that was the original multitasking. When they did a multitasking on the iPad, it was just slide over and split view. And then they added Stage Manager. And like, they kept putting more lipstick on that pig until they finally, literally, they threw that code away and made an entirely new system, which is what's in 26. I suspect the People who are working on this new system just thought of Slide over and Split View as compromises. Right.

Jason Snell [00:08:55]:
As like, oh, well, that's because we couldn't do real window multitasking. That's the only reason those things existed. But the fact is people like them, and I think they were really, I suspect they were taken aback by the fact that people were kind of aghast that Slide over wasn't there. Maybe they, you know, they just thought, oh, that's just an old compromise and now you've got Windows, you don't need it. But people really like that. And, and I mean, they said so in the beginning of the summer when that feature wasn't there. And so it takes a while to ship a feature. But I think that, that if they weren't already planning it, they got the message over the summer.

Jason Snell [00:09:27]:
It was very clear that there were a lot of people who just love Slide over. And so I'm glad that they got it back.

Leo Laporte [00:09:33]:
Yeah.

Andy Ihnatko [00:09:34]:
Just quickly, Apple has a special challenge here because I'm using multi windowing almost exclusively, actually probably exclusively on a 12.9 inch iPad Pro. I don't think that multi windowing necessarily scales really well to smaller sized iPads. And that's where you really, really appreciate Split View, where I don't need to have three or four or five windows altogether. I don't even necessarily need to have three windows together. I just need to be able to have two apps that I can basically dip into very, very freely. And on this small screen, it is a pain in the butt to have to manage like, oh no, that's overlapping in a way that I don't like. And so that's why Split View and Slide over were such interesting answers to that problem. Unfortunately, my iPad mini is no longer supported, so it's essentially an E reader that mostly uses the Kindle app and vlc.

Andy Ihnatko [00:10:31]:
I would like to see how well that performs on like a modern iPad mini because it seems as though I'm skeptical that multi windowing would be a good fit for a screen that's that small.

Jason Snell [00:10:42]:
I've talked to people who've done it and they say it's okay, but like it's not ideal because the screen is so small. It's small. And remember, it's also higher resolution, I think. So everything is sort of smaller on it, so there's more space. But oh, I wanted to mention another point too thing that is totally esoteric, but it's interesting. Apple has been boasting about the M5 being great for on device AI because the M5 chip added GPU acceleration. They already added like CPU acceleration and the neural engine is there, but they added GPU accelerators as well. Because a lot of m.

Jason Snell [00:11:14]:
A lot of AI tasks use the gpu, are written to use the gpu. And so they said they accelerated it. And what happened is there were a few apps that seemed accelerated. And my understanding is it's not because they were brought into Cupertino to accelerate their apps. And this is all on device like image generation and stuff that's happening on your device instead of using the cloud. And my understanding is those apps weren't specially written for the M5. They just happened to take an approach that worked with the new accelerators. And the M5 with point 2, Apple's whole extension system for machine learning, MLX, I think it's called, has now been revised.

Jason Snell [00:12:02]:
And you can get software that will build, that will generate things that are compatible with M5 and take advantage of it. And if you look at some tests, like Federico Fatici at Backstory did some tests on it, the speed claims that were kind of hard to verify when the M5 came out are verifiable now on the Mac and on the iPad. And that's. So that's. It's good to verify that, that, that speed claim because they made a speed claim where basically nothing actually could take advantage of it. So it was hard to verify it. We can now. It is, you know, legitimately way faster for GPU tasks.

Leo Laporte [00:12:39]:
I feel like a bad iPad user. I don't use any of those multitasking features.

Jason Snell [00:12:46]:
It's okay.

Leo Laporte [00:12:46]:
I mean, am I a bad person?

Jason Snell [00:12:48]:
No, actually, I think the best thing that they did in 26 for iPad is make multi window a mode. Because it used to be if you dragged wrong, you got in a multitasking mode and then you're like, what happened? Or a split view or slide over and you're like, what happened? And I think it caused a lot of support issues because even I, who has a keyboard, you know, a magic keyboard, and I use multi window mode on my iPad a bit, you know, most of the time I'm not in multi window mode. I really, I don't mind just turning it off most of the time. Unless I'm doing something that requires intensive looking at multiple apps, I don't bother. And I think that's fine for the default to be classic iPad, one window and then if you want more, you can flip a switch, not accidentally and get into it.

Leo Laporte [00:13:33]:
Yeah, okay.

Jason Snell [00:13:35]:
So you're okay.

Leo Laporte [00:13:36]:
Okay. Sometimes it does stuff by accident that I don't really understand or like, but other than that, I don't think. I think I just use it like I always use it. And I'm saying this so that people, the people at home, you lovely people at home don't feel guilty if you're just doing what I'm doing, which is swiping back and forth between full screen Windows, which seems fine.

Andy Ihnatko [00:13:57]:
I think there's always going to be some tension between two different communities of iPad users, people like myself and Jason, who use it as. Not necessarily we have MacBooks and desktops as well as iPads, but we do like to use our iPads in a very, very productivity oriented. Like, I don't need to bring two different devices. I can just bring this one with me and it'll do things just fine. And people who just want. I want immediate. I want a content consumption device that also can do really cool stuff. These are the people who are like, do not understand why people are spending over $1,000, maybe even 13, 14, $1,500 on an iPad Pro with a keyboard, when, gosh, I can't.

Andy Ihnatko [00:14:38]:
If he gave me $1,000 to spend on an iPad Pro, I could never, ever use it so much to even justify that sort of thing. So I think there's always going to be tension between those two kinds of users. And I think that this is the price that Apple is paying for my belief that Apple just missed the bus on multitouch on desktops like a while ago. It's way too late now to really do a multitouch version of MA in the same way that Windows can do it, in the same way that Android, the new versions of Android can do it. Because again, they really, really put that hard partition between the two. But if they hadn't done that, we wouldn't have this tension today.

Leo Laporte [00:15:16]:
The other thing, there are many things in 26.2, but you can now change liquid glass in a new location as well. The lock screen. I guess Apple's really recognizing liquid glass. Maybe not the best. Maybe with Alan Tye leaving.

Andy Ihnatko [00:15:34]:
Yeah, well, it's fine. Remember, we went through the exact same thing with iOS7, where iOS7 was almost a brutalist version of iOS. If it were a brick courtyard and a concrete building, it could not been more brutalist. And eventually they realized that, okay, this was as a hypothetical design task challenge inside our labs. This was a beautiful thing to make, but now people actually have to use it to, I don't know, make phone calls and text people with it and they're not liking it. So we are not going to simply say, well, too bad. This is the OS we're giving you. It's like, nope, we're listening and we can see where we can push a little bit harder and where we need to fall back.

Andy Ihnatko [00:16:13]:
They haven't fallen back completely on liquid glass. They just simply said people just want the ability to dial it back where they want to dial it back. So I think it's a very, very positive thing that Apple's doing. It's not a retreat.

Leo Laporte [00:16:23]:
Yeah, yeah. They're giving you the choice, which is fine. Yeah, choice is good. Lots of security updates, as we would expect from any update to iOS or Mac OS or TV, OS, everything. OS, watch OS, all the.

Jason Snell [00:16:39]:
It's nice. We can just say 26.2 now and we meet everything.

Leo Laporte [00:16:42]:
It's all the same. Let's see, there was a big webkit, big security. Yeah, Security they patched.

Jason Snell [00:16:49]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:16:50]:
Okay. Yeah, I see a JPEG bug, an app store bug.

Andy Ihnatko [00:16:54]:
It's a zero. It's actual zero day.

Leo Laporte [00:16:55]:
That's zero day.

Andy Ihnatko [00:16:57]:
Yeah.

Jason Snell [00:16:58]:
This is one of those things that don't, don't really. If you're running in 26 now, you probably should just go to 26 too, because there are some serious security. It sounds like they essentially, they shipped this, they were working on this os, they were going to ship it anyway, and then they had this issue with this WebKit security flaw, so they rolled it into the shipping to the 26.2 and shipped it. So it does include. It's not like there'll be a patch later. Like it's in there. So that's a, that's another reason to just update to 26 to and credit.

Leo Laporte [00:17:29]:
To Apple and to the white hat hackers who find these. And it's a really, it's, you know, good for Apple. They're actually starting to tell people where this came from. The red team at ByteDance, a guy running a company called Totally Not Malicious Software, Anonymous researcher, Trend Micro, Zero Day Initiative.

Jason Snell [00:17:50]:
Right. Got in there.

Leo Laporte [00:17:51]:
Right.

Jason Snell [00:17:51]:
It's, it's. Yeah, giving them credit is good. Giving them money is also good.

Leo Laporte [00:17:56]:
I think they do both. Right. They still have a bug bounty, although, you know, it's.

Jason Snell [00:18:01]:
It's debated. Right.

Andy Ihnatko [00:18:03]:
They need to keep that funded very well.

Leo Laporte [00:18:05]:
Yeah, they do, because people are talking.

Andy Ihnatko [00:18:07]:
About doing this just out of the. It costs money to find these bugs and their people want to be not only recognized for the work they're doing, but also compensated for all the time they put in.

Leo Laporte [00:18:16]:
Well, yeah, not only that, there are people out there, bad guys out there like Zerodium, who will give them millions for a really good zero day non click iPhone crack because they're gonna sell that to some nation state and so you've got. I mean admittedly they're gonna always pay more than Apple was willing to pay, but at least you gotta give them something so they can say, well, I'm.

Jason Snell [00:18:39]:
You know, well, and some people, right. I mean there are people out there who are gonna be malicious and all that. I think, I think most of these folks are not interested in selling to the highest bidder. They just wanna be able to support themselves and do this as their job. And they're essentially, if you're not gonna be on staff somewhere, you can be an independent freelance person and be anywhere. And those people are super important because they're smart and we want them to not have to make a bad choice because they need to feed their family by letting them do this. Rosnia Keller, who's on Mastodon and is a long time Mac developer, is credited multiple times, which is great to see. And the messages, it's a messages bug especially that was critical and backported back to iOS1,8732 because it was such a big deal.

Leo Laporte [00:19:32]:
They did say that's the other thing. In many cases you're going to want to go to 26.2 but if you are not yet on 26.

Jason Snell [00:19:39]:
Yeah. Update to 18.

Leo Laporte [00:19:40]:
You have patched older versions.

Andy Ihnatko [00:19:42]:
Yeah, that's the canary.

Leo Laporte [00:19:44]:
Keller is the totally not malicious software per se. Yeah, I love that name. Yeah. Messages are particularly problematic because that's how you get those zero click attacks. I don't know if this was a zero click, but the idea that you could send a message and even if I don't read it, it could hack your iPhone is terrifying. Yeah, I don't think this one was like that. But there are a lot of WebKit bugs. It just, there's a long list, longer it feels than usual, but I don't know.

Leo Laporte [00:20:16]:
And look at all the acknowledgments for all the fixes in all the companies. I think this is really great. Good on you Apple for giving them credit. I think Apple knows they have to do that. Yeah.

Andy Ihnatko [00:20:31]:
It's like.

Leo Laporte [00:20:32]:
Yeah, yeah.

Andy Ihnatko [00:20:34]:
And the money is also important too. It's like that. As it happens, I was watching Steve Martin's acceptance speech when he won the Mark Twain Award and he said the Mark Twain Award is the second oldest prize, guys. Rewarding greatness in American comedy. The first award is, of course, money. And the thing is, like, if you unfortunately, you show respect by saying, hey, here's a 500 gift card to the Outback Steakhouse. No, no. Here is a.

Andy Ihnatko [00:21:03]:
Not a life necessarily life change, but here's a substantial amount of money that says that we are willing to crack open the checkbook and thank you appropriately.

Leo Laporte [00:21:10]:
The immortal words of what's his name. Show me the money.

Jason Snell [00:21:15]:
That's from Jerry Maguire, Rod Tidwell. It's Cuba Goodie and Junior in that movie.

Leo Laporte [00:21:21]:
Show me the money.

Jason Snell [00:21:22]:
Show me the money. Yeah, it's. It's. Or as Mike Bontero says, and I'll clean it up. Fu. Pay me.

Leo Laporte [00:21:30]:
That's a good one too.

Andy Ihnatko [00:21:31]:
Which is also.

Jason Snell [00:21:32]:
Is that in Goodfellas? I don't know. Anyway.

Leo Laporte [00:21:35]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think it is good. Fellas. I feel like there's a.

Andy Ihnatko [00:21:38]:
There was an earthquake.

Jason Snell [00:21:39]:
And like, I can confirm that was indeed Goodfellas. I know. But then Mike M. Wrote a whole book about it, I think with a different title, because that would not be a great title. But it actually. It is a great title. But this is the point. Yeah.

Jason Snell [00:21:52]:
Compensate people for their work. And white hat hackers and also just programmers who find things like Rosa Nikkel are, I think just found it. Right. Like, what is going on here? And they investigated it and it turned into three CVEs. So like, that's. That's great. They should. They should.

Jason Snell [00:22:11]:
They should pay that person because that person saved their bacon. Yeah, right.

Leo Laporte [00:22:15]:
Yeah. It's the carrot and the stick. You don't really want to emphasize the threat that they might sell it to some bad guy. But that is out there, I must say. There's also on Apple tv, there's a new feature you might care about kids mode on the Apple TV app. None of us have young children.

Jason Snell [00:22:36]:
Not anymore.

Leo Laporte [00:22:36]:
I might do it for my mom. I don't know. It's also Apple Liquid glass for Apple tv. That's about time. You know, I want some transparency on my tv. Okay.

Jason Snell [00:22:52]:
Yeah. So you can create a profile that isn't linked to an Apple account and then you can also set up a profile that has just got all the parental controls turned on and TVOs. And I mean, that's a thing that you should do. But. Hey, Leo, I told my daughter that you're Salt Hank's dad, and she was suitably impressed.

Leo Laporte [00:23:13]:
I'm doing well with that.

Jason Snell [00:23:15]:
Are not young anymore.

Leo Laporte [00:23:16]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm doing really well with those. That age group.

Jason Snell [00:23:20]:
It's very funny. Because most of the stuff, I mean, she edits upgrade video, so she does see the computer stuff go by. But I was like, oh, let me drop his name and see if that gets a response. And she's like, no, really? Demographics.

Leo Laporte [00:23:35]:
It makes me so, so happy. He's in a Super bowl commercial, by the way. He's flying to la, I don't think. He says I'm just an extra. So I don't. I don't know if he'll.

Andy Ihnatko [00:23:43]:
Oh, yeah, he'll go better in that case.

Leo Laporte [00:23:46]:
Yeah. But yeah, just an extra has not.

Jason Snell [00:23:49]:
Been a Super Bowl.

Andy Ihnatko [00:23:50]:
I mean, let's put things in perspective. I didn't land on the moon. I was in the command module orbiting the moon while the other guys. So come on.

Leo Laporte [00:23:59]:
Thanks, Michael Collins. Thank you. Let's take a little break. That's the 26. 2 update. Is there anything I missed? Jason, you wrote a whole great article@6scholars.com with all the features, but is there anything significant that we should mention?

Jason Snell [00:24:12]:
No. It's a good thing if you're on 26. You should go to 26 too.

Leo Laporte [00:24:16]:
I did. I went through all the devices and.

Jason Snell [00:24:18]:
If you're an iPad user who misses or I actually have heard from people who are like, I'm not going to update to 26 on my iPad until they fix Slide Over. Now do it. It's your time.

Leo Laporte [00:24:30]:
Yeah, yeah, they fix Slide Over.

Andy Ihnatko [00:24:31]:
The only other thing before we move on. So 26.3 is out to developers. It does have a couple of interesting and significant.

Leo Laporte [00:24:39]:
Oh, yeah, let's talk about that.

Andy Ihnatko [00:24:40]:
Yeah, yeah. Chiefly for, like I said, EU compliance. That is not the sort of thing that we pull our hair out about. But like, oh, yeah, actually it would be nice if I could like buy a Samsung or a Garmin smartwatch and it could get notifications for the pebble phone. Yeah, pebble. Or pretty much literally anything other than an Apple watch. And so we're starting to. And the EU basically said.

Andy Ihnatko [00:25:03]:
And of course Apple's argument against the EU was like, oh, but that's some of the most private and personal things and we can't allow like, yeah, but what if the user actually wants that? And that's kind of the reason, reason why they spent $780 for this top of the line Garmin like fitness and workout watch. So essentially there's infrastructure for that. That's in there. There's also infrastructure.

Leo Laporte [00:25:22]:
Let's be fair, this was because the EU forced them to do it.

Jason Snell [00:25:25]:
It sounds like it's going to be Everywhere. And it's basically a Bluetooth setting that lets you take a paired Bluetooth Device. This is 26.3. So this is just the beta, not the thing that shipped. And you can turn for a Bluetooth device, you can turn on notification forwarding. And that is the idea is that you can then say, I would like my notifications pushed to this. Which is really good because yeah, as somebody who used to use a Pebble and I know a bunch of people who are really excited about the kind of new Pebbles and Eric from Pebble. Eric pebble wrote that blog post about how it was going to be bad on the Mac or on iPhone because of this.

Jason Snell [00:26:05]:
And it's like it's bad for iPhone users. Right. So it's good.

Andy Ihnatko [00:26:09]:
Interesting that at least in the state that it is right now, you can only click. You can only authorize one device at a time. So if you are basically there's going to be just one holy device of your choosing. And if you happen to have, if you happen to switch between, oh, for my ultra marathon training, I use a Garmin, but for daily wear I use Apple Watch. You're going to have to make a choice or you're going to have to keep. But again, this is in that category of why weren't they doing this all along? And it's where, yeah, you know what, Again, the world is not going to end if you keep. Give people the option of turning that on. It's kind of like basic nutrition for the constellation of devices that people own.

Leo Laporte [00:26:49]:
Okay, 26.3 coming soon. Not till next year. I guess they're all going on vacation. Oh, the watch has sleep score updates. Okay.

Jason Snell [00:27:04]:
Yeah.

Andy Ihnatko [00:27:04]:
And I don't think even we can credibly create a Vision Pro segment today, but it does that. They did add something interesting to Vision OS 26.2, where travel mode, they understand that. Well, sometimes people. Maybe we don't want people driving while they've got a Vision Pro on, but maybe there are people in the backseat and maybe there are people who are in an Uber or a bus. So they've enabled travel modes so that you actually use your Vision Pro while in a moving car.

Leo Laporte [00:27:32]:
Good.

Jason Snell [00:27:33]:
Yeah. Which you didn't used to be able to do. And the switch to iPhone and switch to Android stuff, which is. What is it? I think Google has enabled it in a build for their phones so far. So it's early days and it's also signs of it in 26. 3. The idea here is that Google and Apple announced that they are doing this And I think they're doing this everywhere, not just in the eu, but I think it's because of pressure and it's a great thing for users because they basically are going to work together and this is the first release of it, first sign of it, to build a standard system by which anybody on iOS can export their data to an Android phone and vice versa. Which not only is that great for consumers, but honestly, if that's your bulwark against people switching off of your platform, you have other problems.

Jason Snell [00:28:25]:
So I think it's great. Pro, consumer. Good for Apple, good for Google. Sorry it took this long, but I love it. I love that. That is, it's a little like something like Google takeout, which is like, like I just want to have it. Like it's good for consumers to feel like they're not trapped somewhere.

Leo Laporte [00:28:42]:
Yeah. All right, we're going to take a little break, come back with more, including the story of one of our club, twin members from down under who was trapped in the Apple ecosystem, but he's now been released. Maybe that's not the best way to look at it, but we'll talk about that in just a little bit. You're watching MacBreak Weekly. Oh, I didn't even mention. You might have noticed that Alex Lindsay's not here. He's off on assignment, working hard, doing something else. He'll be back next week, our last show of the year.

Leo Laporte [00:29:10]:
The Christmas week will be a best of episode and then we'll be back in January. So we will be here one more week. And is the good Lord willing and the cricks don't rise, Alex will join us for our last episode of the year next week. Meanwhile, it's great, it's Jason, Andy and me. What more do you need?

Jason Snell [00:29:30]:
What more do you need?

Leo Laporte [00:29:31]:
What more do you need? Our show today, brought to you by Framer. I'm sure you know the name. Framer is a great place to do your website, but if you're, they've got a new feature I think you're going to love. If you're still jumping between tools just to update your website, you know, maybe you've got Figma and some other things. Framer has decided this is no reason, no reason for this to be these import export things. Framer is now bringing together design, your CMS, your publishing and it's all on one canvas. No more handoffs, no hassles, everything you need to design and publish in one place. Framer already built the fastest way to publish beautiful production ready websites.

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Framer though. Even the free version gives you your entire workflow in one place. No figma imports, no messy HTML. It's faster, it's cleaner, it's more efficient and and it does now design much more than websites. You can create social assets, campaign visuals, icons, site resources, all within the tool, all without switching back and forth. Remember this name Framer. Framer stands above the others because it's more than a site builder. It's a true design tool that also just happens to publish professional production ready sites.

Leo Laporte [00:31:44]:
If you're ready to design, iterate and publish all in one tool, start creating for free at framer.com/design and use the code MacBreak and you can get a free month of Framer Pro. That's framer.com/design and use the promo code MacBreak framer.com/design promo code is MacBreak. Rules and restrictions may apply. Framer. Thank you Framer for supporting MacBreak Weekly. Well, in court, Apple got a little bit of a defeat. Tim Sweeney is jumping up and down. You may remember the scathing judgment handed down earlier this year by Yvonne Gonzalez, Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers saying that Apple had willfully, willfully violated her 2021 injunction to open the App Store payment system. Apple appealed, of course.

Leo Laporte [00:32:44]:
Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has come down with a ruling that Apple's initial attempts to replace the 30% vig with a 27% vig. There's a prohibitive effect quote. Had a prohibitive effect in violation of the injunction they held against Apple. That appeal failed. The appeals court said Apple hacked it in bad faith. And so now I guess it's done right.

Andy Ihnatko [00:33:15]:
Yeah, the only slight win for Apple is that the three member board basically said that. Yeah, we're agreeing with you, Judge. That Apple was not compliant with any of this, and they're kind of being jerks about it. The one thing that Apple kind of won was that the panel also said, yeah, but maybe take a look at commissions, because maybe it should be okay for Apple to charge some commission, something. Whereas just not 27%. Exactly. EPIC position, of course, which, of course they did not lose any time in posting a blog post. Was that.

Andy Ihnatko [00:33:46]:
No, no, no, no, no, no. You should get paid for what you. Apple should get paid for what they have to do to technically mechanically scan this content to make sure that it's not going to be harmful. But that's it. Nominal fee. That's it. They should not be profiting off of our work. And the truth will probably be someplace in between.

Jason Snell [00:34:05]:
Yeah, I mean, that's an extreme view. Right. Which is the idea that no one should ever make any profit margin on anything if they're in the middle is a little bit much. Right. Like just your. This is. Yeah, that's kind of ludicrous because, in.

Leo Laporte [00:34:18]:
Fact, what Tim Swinney wants to do is have his own epic web store in which he will be the middleman. Make money off of it.

Jason Snell [00:34:26]:
Yes, exactly.

Leo Laporte [00:34:26]:
He wants to make the money instead of Apple making the money. Exactly.

Jason Snell [00:34:29]:
But it is in the middle here, and I think this is a good result. But the problem is going to be that Apple. We kind of know how this is going to go. Right. Apple may respond by doing what it's done in other cases, which is, oh, yeah, we're going to do a new thing because that one is too much and it'll end up being, you know, what they did in. In the eu, I think it was like, it's complex. It's sort of like this. For this.

Jason Snell [00:34:54]:
This percent. And then this gets added on. And if you do this, it's. It's this other thing. But. But yeah, I think that in some ways, I think this is a victory for Apple in the sense that it's saying you can't ban all commissions. Right. Like that opens the door for Apple to set another commission percentage that's not 25%.

Jason Snell [00:35:17]:
And then. Well, I mean, maybe. Or maybe it's 20. Who knows? Who knows? Or it's. Or it's more complex than that already.

Leo Laporte [00:35:24]:
Right. For big guys, I think the smart thing for Apple to do is just say, well, we're going to make that 15 for everybody.

Jason Snell [00:35:29]:
Well, the little guys are 15. I think in app purchases for things that are 30 and a lot of games, that's where they make all their.

Leo Laporte [00:35:38]:
Money people don't like. They Fortnite for instance.

Jason Snell [00:35:40]:
It's a really funny argument because. Yes. Has Apple earned anything for that? That not really other than building the system and then they're just charging a toll at the same time it's also digital goods that have zero value. So other than the cost of Epic or anyone else creating those things, creating an unlock for a feature or a gem or whatever, it's, it's, it's a little rich to say that Apple is the only one exploiting people here because these things have no intrinsic value beyond the basics of it. But they end up being an enormous profit center for game developers especially. So, you know, I think, think, you know, nobody's going to defend Apple taking 30%. I wonder, I think what Andy and I are both going to be watching in this is how snotty does Apple get responding to this? Do they say fine, 28% or do they say okay, 10% and if you're this you get a 5% off and if you do this it's 10% more and whatever. Is it something that everybody will look at and go, especially a judge will look at and go that's reasonable and Epic won't agree but maybe that will still make it better for everybody.

Andy Ihnatko [00:36:45]:
Yeah, it was, it was, it was always a weird, in addition to just being snotty about it, which is something we all, we agree upon. It always was a weird argument because if you're having, if you imagine you're having a conversation with your 9 year old child in which you basically have to help them to understand the fallacy of the argument you would have to say so you're basically saying that the services that you give to people who sell through the App Store have zero value whatsoever Apple. Because it turns out that even if someone wants to sell through their own App Store, you're charging them the exact same amount. And that was always kind of weird to me. But also there are two ways that Apple can punish people for not using the App Store. One is by making them pay pretty much damn near as much money as they would spend if they were in the App Store proper. The other is to we will bury you in so much paperwork and bureaucracy that you will take, take one look at this 321 page PDF of no, not a PDF. We will make it a Microsoft Word file.

Andy Ihnatko [00:37:50]:
We're going to make it as hard for you as possible to parse all the filing requirements that we're going to demand from you. That you will get to page three and say I give up. I don't want this hassle. I just want to sell my app. So this is clearly an ongoing thing. I mean, yeah, Jason, we're wondering at one point, does Apple decide that, okay, we believe we have fought this as long as hard as we possibly can. We don't believe there's a potential for any greater wins than what we've already won so far. It's time to figure out a way to remake our App Store in a way that is going to be accepted by worldwide regulators, because all these countries and all these governments are not letting this go.

Andy Ihnatko [00:38:31]:
I don't think this is that moment. I think that they're gonna continue to argue. Again, the only win was that the judge was basically said, yeah, Apple should get some sort of a. Some sort of a profit off this. But it's. And so Apple gets to basically haggle about. I don't think they'll go to 27.2%, but they will say, we're going to see here is the largest amount that we think will not get us hurt by the court and laughed out.

Leo Laporte [00:38:58]:
And we're going to yell at us again?

Jason Snell [00:39:00]:
Yeah, I mean, remember, because we talked about this back then, this is that moment where Apple was like, we did fine. And Judge Rogers was like, no, you didn't. You lose everything now. No commission for you. And these judges are like, yeah, I know why you're mad, but you can't do that. You need to actually, like, let them set a commission. You can't. So, you know, but again, the Apple has to please Judge Rogers with what they do.

Leo Laporte [00:39:23]:
And it's still.

Jason Snell [00:39:24]:
I think it's her discretion.

Leo Laporte [00:39:26]:
Okay, so it's interesting because the headline really tells you something about the writer of the headline. For instance, Arts Technica said, in the Goliath versus Other Goliath section, Apple loses its appeal of a scathing contempt ruling in iOS payments case. But then MacRumors says Apple wins ability to charge fees on external payment links. It's the same ruling, just, you know, glass half full, glass half empty. Tim Sweeney was pretty scathing. He said, and I don't think he's wrong when he says, when people are afraid of Apple, he said. Said the fear of retaliation is what has led many iOS developers to pay 30% without complaint because Apple has, quote, infinite power to retaliate. End quote.

Leo Laporte [00:40:11]:
He calls this a totally illegal exercise of soft power, which to me may be saber rattling, but maybe an indicator that he wants to pursue this even farther.

Andy Ihnatko [00:40:21]:
Remember what kicked this all off? It wasn't that, gosh, we don't want to pay this and let's start litigating this. It was. Apple said, okay, okay, not only can you not have Fortnite in the App Store, we're going to pull your developer license so you can't develop anything for any of our platforms. At which point it was, it started.

Jason Snell [00:40:36]:
I mean technically it started when they shipped a hidden, hidden code in their app that turned on external purchases of in app purchase items in Fortnite. At which point Apple yanked that from the store because they, but they look, they were, they wanted this fight. Epic wanted this fight. Because I believe, not only does Tim Sweeney believe this on business grounds, but I think he also believes what Apple is doing is wrong and that he is the one person he thinks anyway who has the guts to stand up to them and willing to fight for. And he will. And here's the thing, he is, look, he's an extreme extremist, basically. He has an extreme position here. There are a lot of people who fight for rights who are extreme.

Jason Snell [00:41:17]:
Eff. Right. I love the eff. I don't agree with their positions on a lot of things because sometimes they are taking the most extreme position. Glad that they're fighting. And if the result is an improvement, that is fair. I think that that's good. Tim Sweeney will never be satisfied.

Jason Snell [00:41:34]:
Right. He will like Hamilton, never be satisfied. But if the judge is satisfied and it's Apple charging less when they used to not want anything at all, they just, you don't do it. And if you do do it, we want all the money still, then the consumers win. So like that's why you have the judge in the middle. And, and Tim Sweeney can, can, you know, he will have changed Apple's policies positively by doing this even if he's not satisfied at the end of the day.

Andy Ihnatko [00:42:04]:
Yeah. My position has always been that there's, there's absolutely there, there are cases in which the people who are trying to get Apple change their ways through the, through the courts are absolutely pursuing a legitimate claim. There are times where it is self serving and there are times where it's both. It doesn't necessarily negate each other. However, I'm always of the position where when you have companies that are this large and there are a lot of not just Apple here, the great thing about cases like this is that it forces these companies to say no. You don't just get to say we are doing this to preserve the integrity and the safety of our users. Okay, great. Then you should be easy enough for you to prove this, give us your proof, show us the documents that actually demonstrate this.

Andy Ihnatko [00:42:54]:
And no company with that kind of power should never have to say, show your paperwork, show your homework.

Jason Snell [00:43:00]:
Yeah, I mean the idea, I mean this is a classic Apple thing where they say, well, we're here to protect you. And the attitude is that if it's not inside Apple and done by Apple, it's dangerous. And this is why they've ended up having a policy scheme that, that, that's like links URLs are dangerous. They could kill this URL, could kill you, this giant credit card processor, right. Like, oh, you don't want to use Stripe. You don't know, maybe there's bad people back behind Stripe who are going to steal your credit card. And like that's the idea is they want users to believe that the big bad Internet is going to get them. And there are arguments there, but like they're not interested in the little deals, they just want it all.

Jason Snell [00:43:45]:
And there's no competition. Like, no competition.

Andy Ihnatko [00:43:47]:
Yeah, it's kind of sad on a level because you would like in an academic, in an abstract sense, you would like people and organizations like that to think, yes, we have some of the most satisfied customers. Yes, we have a user base that is huge and it's just growing every quarter. And the reason why that happens is because we try to earn their custom each and every time they use an Apple product or service. If part of the pillars of that growth is that we are gonna really put the hurt on anybody, whether it's a developer, a user, anybody who wants to leave our ecosystem or at least invite in a competing set of earbuds or a competing watch. We're just gonna try to keep people as Apple Watch users and iPhone users because we're make it really, really hard for them not to be that thing that's, that's not working from a point of pride. And so you hate to see that no matter who's promoting that sort of thing.

Leo Laporte [00:44:44]:
Well, and get ready because in two days in Japan, the app store for both the Android and iOS, they will have to start offering or allow third party app stores on the devices. Now I don't know how big a market for Apple or Android in Japan is, but I figure it's probably pretty important. And that's done, that's a done deal that starts in the 18th. So yeah, I think, I feel like it's dominoes, right. That this is just going to eventually be global.

Andy Ihnatko [00:45:20]:
Absolutely. And this is why you're seeing things like where Apple has where Apple can see a way forward towards okay, we can make it easier for people to switch from Android to iPhone and iPhone to Android. We can find a way to get people to put their notifications from the iPhone on a competing device. It's not that they are suddenly thrilled with the idea of making it easier for other people to again use competing products. But unlike 10, was it close to 10? Must have been close to 10 years ago when during the discovery process I think of this exact trial where it was why is Apple not embracing certain types of messaging for imessage? Because we don't want to make it easy for people to introduce Apple devices and this is not the same world as it was when Federighi participated in that conversation. This is a different world which, okay, we had it really nice for a while. It's a natural thing for us to try to be as selfish as possible because sometimes selfishness is not necessarily just a word. It's not necessarily a bad thing.

Andy Ihnatko [00:46:33]:
Self interest, let's say we're going to act in our own self interest. However, the window for us acting in our own self interest all the time without any repercussions is over. We have to figure out how we're going to live in this new climate and we're going to fight tooth and nail for some things, but other things, there's no point in fighting this because we can't flip the bird at 18 governments at the same time. We have to choose one or two.

Jason Snell [00:46:56]:
And the idea that they're going to have to come up with a scheme that works for them and that works for everybody that's different and they've resisted having to do that. But I'm going to cart out I wrote about this a couple of years ago. Apple already built a scheme that's open that still allows Apple to have a lot of control over privacy and security and provide its own app store. It's what they did on the Mac and they could do that on iOS and iPados and I think they would be just fine. I know. I'm not saying it would be easy. I'm saying Apple already came up with a system that allows the Mac to run anybody's software and verify developers and kill malware as it spreads while letting you install software from other locations. And I think in the end and they're going to lean.

Jason Snell [00:47:39]:
They're already doing it a little bit in the eu, they're going to lean on the choices they made to build that system, to revise the iOS system. And I think they can do it and I think it will be okay when they do it. And I think what we've seen in the eu, and if Alex were here, he would say this too is not a lot of people are using alternate app stores in the eu. But the idea is that if you could have a global audience and you have something that Apple doesn't want to exist, you could still sell it and that's, you could still give it away. Because right now, if your app, if Apple doesn't want your app to exist, you've. You've invested in the iOS app. It's a native app, it's not on any other platform. And Apple says no, you have no recourse.

Jason Snell [00:48:15]:
You cannot put that on that device anywhere other than, I guess the EU where they have alternative app stores. And it's just, that's not, that's not a way for devices to be. Apple will still control most of the app market and it will be fine, but there will be the ability for other developers to go their own way. It only seems right. It works on the Mac. It's worked for years on the Mac. That's what they're. I think that's where they're going to end up.

Andy Ihnatko [00:48:41]:
Yeah. And a lot of this is about Apple not necessarily being violently opposed to again, notifications on the on external devices or sharing WI FI network passwords to other devices. Sometimes it's like it's going to take time for us to do it the way that we as our corporate culture would want to do it. So it's not just something, okay, we'll add. We're going of vibe code, 100 lines of code and add it to the OS and great presto. Suddenly saved WI FI passwords can be pushed onto Android devices. Gruber a few weeks ago had a post about that. He had some sources that were explaining exactly what was going into notifications on other devices and sharing WI FI passwords.

Andy Ihnatko [00:49:20]:
And it really was here is how we want to do this in a way that in our culture is going to be safe and secure and that takes time. Again, people like me who get curmudgeonly about this would not be quite curmudgeonly if Apple were not so publicly virulent about this. If they did not hit the. Okay, time to hit Command Shift 8 Command Shift Option 8 which pastes in we are only interested in preserving the integrity and the security of node tell us that we're not necessarily opposed to it. But you don't understand how difficult that's going to be to do it in such a way that will protect the safety and the integrity and the security and privacy of our users. Again, remove that keyboard macro and I'll stop complaining about this sort of thing.

Leo Laporte [00:50:03]:
Thing. All right, let's take one more break. More to come. You're watching MacBreak Weekly. Andy Anako, Jason Snell. Alex has the week off. He'll be back next week. Somebody was asking and I'll repeat it.

Leo Laporte [00:50:16]:
Next week is December 23rd, the day the Christmas Eve Eve. And we are going to do a show Christmas Eve Eve Christmas Steve, as some people mention. Is that Festivus? When is Festivus? I don't want to miss that. I gotta, gotta make sure I get the airing of grievances in time. I did not figure that out.

Andy Ihnatko [00:50:34]:
I did not hearing grievances. But then again, I haven't checked my Twitter.

Leo Laporte [00:50:38]:
It may be there are some grievances next week and I hope Alex will be here for that, by the way.

Jason Snell [00:50:43]:
It is.

Leo Laporte [00:50:44]:
It is. That's what I thought. Yes. So Festivus next week for the rest of us. For the rest of us, we will celebrate and then the 30th we are gonna, everybody's gonna take that week off and so we'll have our best of show and then we shall, shall reconvene next months. So just as a kind of calendar thing, our show today, brought to you by our friends at Outsystems, the number one AI powered low code development platform. I think you need to know about Outsystems because they solve a really common problem in business. We've had it.

Leo Laporte [00:51:20]:
We faced it. The build versus by Conundrum Room. You could of course solve your problems. We wanted a sales system, right? So you could solve your problems by going out. And I mean, you can look for podcast sales systems. None of them quite fit. But you know, you could buy it and it's, you got it and it does something, or you could do what we decided to do at a great cost. And if it was probably a foolish move, design build your own.

Leo Laporte [00:51:48]:
That's buy versus build. So we built something. Actually, Jeff Needles, one of our employees did a very nice job, built it, then left and says, no, I'm not supporting it. We still use it, but it has a little, it has some bugs. You know, if two people try to work on the same document, it crashes, things like that. And then we have to call somebody to reset it. It's build versus buy. Neither one is exactly right.

Leo Laporte [00:52:16]:
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Leo Laporte [00:55:03]:
Like I said, if only we'd had out systems in our back in the day. Oh, have you called. Have you called the number on the screen? Implorebus. I just added curiosity.

Jason Snell [00:55:22]:
I haven't.

Leo Laporte [00:55:23]:
Have you?

Jason Snell [00:55:24]:
No, I haven't.

Leo Laporte [00:55:26]:
It is. It is. They have. There are two numbers actually, and I could call it. I don't know. Should I just. Maybe I'll just play it. I don't think Apple will take me down for that.

Leo Laporte [00:55:40]:
I would hope. Let me just play it and you can hear what happens when you dial.

Andy Ihnatko [00:55:50]:
Has always been very recent.

Leo Laporte [00:55:52]:
Yeah, It's a Washington, D.C. number. It's a real phone number. 2038-0820-2808-3981. Hello? Hello? Well, maybe not.

Andy Ihnatko [00:56:12]:
I don't know what happened.

Leo Laporte [00:56:15]:
I guess I should call it on the phone. How about that? Let me try it this way.

Andy Ihnatko [00:56:20]:
This must be very nostalgic for you during your radio dance, doing phone calls.

Jason Snell [00:56:24]:
Yeah.

Andy Ihnatko [00:56:25]:
Do you know the count or the amount?

Leo Laporte [00:56:26]:
In the old days, I would have had a way to do this without actually resorting to a telephone.

Jason Snell [00:56:31]:
A little dialing music, please, Paul.

Leo Laporte [00:56:33]:
Yeah.

Jason Snell [00:56:33]:
Thank you.

Leo Laporte [00:56:33]:
Let's see if we can put it on the speaker here. I miss that.

Andy Ihnatko [00:56:39]:
Then he tried to figure out, why is he playing this song? Because there's definitely a reason why he chose this song while he's calling it. Taylor.

Leo Laporte [00:56:45]:
Oh, gosh. This didn't work. This is so bad. I'm sorry. Bad radio, but. Oh, it's not radio, it's a podcast. There's nothing wrong on a pod.

Jason Snell [00:56:55]:
Yeah, we don't have a time slot. We could go on forever and we.

Leo Laporte [00:56:57]:
Do hang up on me. You know what? Maybe it's disconnected now. Never mind.

Jason Snell [00:57:02]:
Maybe that's a. Hello, Carol.

Leo Laporte [00:57:04]:
Hello, Carol. It did. It did. The. Hello, Carol. The number one ever of all time watched show on Apple tv. Congratulations.

Jason Snell [00:57:13]:
Yeah, I mean, it's good. They got another hit. They've got another buzz show. I don't think.

Leo Laporte [00:57:18]:
I'm getting a little bored. Can I tell you? Be honest, I'm a little bored with it.

Jason Snell [00:57:21]:
I'm riveted.

Leo Laporte [00:57:22]:
Are you completely riveted because you know something's going to happen eventually.

Jason Snell [00:57:26]:
Well, no, I mean, again, okay, I've heard this criticism and I just don't agree to it. People are like, come on, I want the plot to move forward. It's like, oh, you don't want to Gilligan.

Leo Laporte [00:57:36]:
I mean, he did a whole episode on a fly.

Jason Snell [00:57:38]:
First off, it's about the characters. Second, it's about Carol processing. I'm not gonna spoil it. But it's like about Carol processing. What could you do if you could do whatever you wanted and realizing that in the end, if it's just you doing it, it's not actually that fun for that long while. While the other character is.

Leo Laporte [00:57:57]:
She is starting to realize that. Which I like.

Jason Snell [00:57:59]:
Yes. And the other character is in a colossal man versus nature battle.

Leo Laporte [00:58:03]:
Holy cow.

Jason Snell [00:58:03]:
Out in the Darien Gap.

Leo Laporte [00:58:05]:
The Darien Gap is. No idea.

Jason Snell [00:58:07]:
I thought that was amazing and riveting. For those who don't know, Darien Gap is why you can't drive from the top of North America to the bottom of South America. Is that in between Panama and Colombia there is an impassable jungle and there's no road. Road. And they've tried and there's still no road because it's just, it's. It's ridiculous. It's like Martian.

Leo Laporte [00:58:26]:
And it's a 60 mile strip of jungle.

Jason Snell [00:58:29]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:58:29]:
That is mostly occupied by drug traffickers and migrants.

Jason Snell [00:58:34]:
Last year, half a million people went through the Darien Gap last year. They say I did.

Leo Laporte [00:58:40]:
I had. I did. I don't. I feel ignorant. I didn't know anything about it.

Jason Snell [00:58:43]:
And north and Central American governments actually don't to want, want to open the Darien Gap up because it will spread. There's foot and mouth disease in South America and it hasn't been in the livestock and it hasn't been in North America in 50, 70 years. Something like that. And they're concerned that if you open up that transport, it'll be very easy for the livestock to cross over.

Leo Laporte [00:59:04]:
And it's also the boundary. It's on the border between Colombia and Panama. And I wouldn't be surprised if those countries said, you know, we don't want.

Jason Snell [00:59:11]:
It's okay.

Leo Laporte [00:59:12]:
Your people going into.

Andy Ihnatko [00:59:15]:
Could be.

Leo Laporte [00:59:15]:
But I can go around. You can go by water. And we won't explain why there was a ferry.

Jason Snell [00:59:20]:
Although there isn't right now.

Leo Laporte [00:59:22]:
But yeah, you could even get a boat. But we don't explain why this person's doing it the way he's doing it. It's. You have to watch.

Jason Snell [00:59:28]:
He needs to be a man versus nature in a real sense there. I want to say, not too surprising given that it's a buzz show and people are talking about it and that it's doing well for Apple. Also, we could probably guess that Apple TV is. Has probably got. It's probably growing. Right. It's probably got more People overall subscribing than it ever has. I know they've done well on Amazon channels as well.

Jason Snell [00:59:50]:
I, I think that it's a growing service and so obviously a growing service. The, the raw number is going to be higher. Right. Their. Their ceiling is higher.

Leo Laporte [00:59:59]:
Right.

Jason Snell [00:59:59]:
Still, still, we're talking about severance, which had a lot of buzz, and Ted Lasso, which had a lot of buzz. And for this to surpass it is. I, I mean, Apple paid a lot of money for this show. Lots of different people were bidding on it.

Leo Laporte [01:00:12]:
Oh, really? I didn't know that was very expensive.

Jason Snell [01:00:14]:
Yeah, yeah. And they paid the most for it, but I think they're getting their money's worth.

Leo Laporte [01:00:19]:
Yeah.

Andy Ihnatko [01:00:19]:
And surprisingly, for the first few years of Apple TV productions, we would sometimes have like, news stories about how Apple is just meddling and nitpicking and they want in on every decision. Either that is not inoperative or they decided, well, this is the guy who did Better Call Saul and Breaking Bad. What if we just let him do his thing?

Leo Laporte [01:00:41]:
There was, I was surprised, a little bit of nudity, which I don't remember ever there being in an Apple TV show before. I mean, it was very mild.

Jason Snell [01:00:50]:
Yeah. They're not too worried about it. I think also the perception that it's like Eddie Q and Tim Cook are giving notes. I mean, it's Zack and Jamie, the guys they hired from Sony who've been running Apple TV since the beginning. Beginning. And those guys are pros. And those guys are at the top of the chain, really. And I think Eddie talks to them and that's it.

Jason Snell [01:01:10]:
Right. Like, so. So it really is quite remarkable for Apple actually to set up this entire other business that is not in their area and that they brought in outsiders to run and that it's been very successful. But I think it's been successful for that very reason that they brought in pros. They gave them a budget, they said, go make a great service and then they let them do do it. And they've made something that is basically, you know, they're striving for HBO level and they really have done a great job, I think.

Andy Ihnatko [01:01:36]:
Yeah. And also goes to show, like, when the company that owns you makes a huge amount of money on something that is not necessary, if they're not necessarily required to force you to wring every penny of profit you possibly can out of everything you do, that's a great place in which creative things can happen. And as long as people still want phones and specifically still want iPhones, I think that we'll still continue to get. Get things like severance on Apple tv and maybe it will not land on HBO and it will not land on these other services that are being bought and sold like so many trading cards.

Leo Laporte [01:02:09]:
I, in a year will have to replace my car. The lease runs up. And I know one thing, I will not be considering a Cadillac or a Chevy because they don't have CarPlay. GM says no CarPlay for you, but their position is softening. I don't know if this is enough for me. General Motors says we are going to allow native Apple music in our cars.

Jason Snell [01:02:37]:
What?

Leo Laporte [01:02:38]:
Huh? Yeah, I guess it'll be an app, right? An Apple music app. I don't want. I want CarPlay.

Jason Snell [01:02:44]:
Well, okay, so this is the thing. So Tesla and Rivian do this too. And the idea is they build a web framework and then they put Spotify and Apple Music in it and Apple podcasts in it and stuff like that. Right, right. And they say, see, this is it. But the fact is, if you use a different music service or a different podcast client, you're never going to. Or anything else. If you use Libby to do ebooks, like, they're not going to cover the App Store, they're going to cover two or three things that are easy for them to cover, and then they're going to walk away.

Jason Snell [01:03:13]:
Which is why it's silly. There was Ben Thompson just did an interview with the guy at Rivian and asked him about why Rivian doesn't do carplay. And that guy is so high on his own supply. His answer basically, well, in other cars you want CarPlay because the experience is so bad, but at Rivian, we're committed to doing such a great experience that you want to do CarPlay. And it's like, dude, one, you can't. And two, that's not it. The reason is all our data and apps are on our phone and we would like to use them, please. And then his other argument, the Rivian guy was, we think that CarPlay is a take over the screen experience, and we wouldn't want to do that because it hides all of our important things.

Jason Snell [01:03:55]:
It's like, there are plenty of cars that could put CarPlay in a window with your controls around it. And also he said Apple wouldn't like, you know, a window inside a window experience when they literally let you put an iPhone inside a Mac last year. So what are we even talking about? The guy again, to rephrase, again, high on his own supply. It's ridiculous.

Andy Ihnatko [01:04:17]:
Yeah, it's, it's. There There are two different sides to this, one of which was like, there's no reason not to have CarPlay. There's no reason not to have Android Auto. Okay, that's for all the reasons that Jason talked about. This is what we want. I just want my phone is inside my car and therefore I've got all my playlists, I've got all my settings, all the apps that I know are working correctly, and everything that I know and love. The others. There was a vaguely okay argument that I think he was making earlier about how, or it might have been another automaker about the widespread, the larger goals and ambitions of CarPlay to basically say, well, actually, here's a demonstration that Apple put up of how CarPlay can basically be every glass screen, the entire interface.

Andy Ihnatko [01:05:00]:
And they're saying, yeah, but.

Jason Snell [01:05:05]:
When you.

Andy Ihnatko [01:05:05]:
Turn on the air conditioning, when you turn on the air conditioning, is that something that should be handled by Apple or is that should be handled by the people who designed the air conditioning? But that is a totally different sort.

Jason Snell [01:05:15]:
Of thing than the reason we have a Chevy bolt.

Leo Laporte [01:05:18]:
I love the bolt.

Jason Snell [01:05:20]:
It's got CarPlay and CarPlay takes up most of the screen and then there's a border around it that shows you what's playing on the radio, what the temperature is, what your AC is set for, and you've got physical controls, but you can also go into the controls on the touchscreen and CarPlay goes away and you do whatever and then you go back to CarPlay. It's not unreasonable. I do think, See, I think it's an excuse. I think that the, the, the, the, especially the EV makers, but in general, carmakers are saying, well, when we're doing smart driving or battery, you know, smart maps that are guiding you to a charger and you need to know the current state of the battery on the car, we have decided, like, that's a better experience in our ui and maybe it is. Although there are car makers now who are using this new Apple Maps feature that actually lets you, lets the car tell Apple Maps how much battery they have, which is interesting, right? Like you could do that. But I'm, I'm receptive to the idea that, like, nobody, when you're in a car, when you're in a Rivian, you want to use Rivian's maps, probably because it's going to know where you can charge and it's going to know, you know, and it may navigate you there and it knows the status of the battery and all of those things. Okay, fair enough. But like, that argument Only goes so far because the argument against CarPlay is, is this absolutist strawman argument which like, oh, they're going to take over everything and then our software is not going to be there.

Jason Snell [01:06:40]:
And it's like that's not it. That's not what people want. People want to use their podcast app or their audiobook client. And, and, and, and also your, your implementation of Apple Music is not going to be as good. It's just not because you're not Apple, you're Apple API on whatever platform you're on, it's not going to be as good. So you know, it just, it's, it's so anti consumer and, and I was disappointed because I think Rivian's done a lot of really interesting things and the fact that he is still at the point where he thinks that they can out interface Apple and that they can beat the app store on your iPhone, it's just delusional.

Andy Ihnatko [01:07:16]:
Yeah, I think that there's something to be said. Again, it's part of the discussion. So I'll say it in their defense, this part of it, that when designers design a car, they want to design the entire car. They want to design the speed cluster, they want to design the buttons, the tactile buttons and the virtual buttons. And maybe they don't want to give up that. But the bigger thing that's so shady about this kind of absolutist policy is that no, they want all the data. They don't want to have to go through the privacy. They don't want people to have their behavior inside that car controlled by Apple privacy guidelines.

Andy Ihnatko [01:07:49]:
Okay. If they want to see like what are you listening to inside this car while you're going, they want to collect everything so they can categorize it, collect it, package it and resell it because that's another profit center for this vehicle. So yeah, it's shady as anything that they are sticking to this idea of. No, no, no, no, no, no. The people don't want Apple Play Apple CarPlay. People don't want Android Auto. They want our own bespoke solutions are exactly what are we. We know the Cadillac customer.

Jason Snell [01:08:18]:
It is the children who are wrong. Exactly.

Leo Laporte [01:08:22]:
Well, I am very happy with our bolt that has CarPlay, but there's no way, sorry GM, you should listen to your customers. I'm gonna buy another GM car or a Rivian or a Tesla. I had a Tesla and I didn't like it. I mean I didn't like that aspect of it. I did, I really wanted CarPlay and once you get CarPlay. Now the BMW I have has a BM, you know the normal, when you get in the car you don't see CarPlay, you have a little CarPlay button but you see all of their stuff. But I can go to the CarPlay button and this CarPlay takes over the screen. I can even sit there, I can use all of the CarPlay.

Leo Laporte [01:08:59]:
It's possible to do this intelligently and it's very disappointing.

Andy Ihnatko [01:09:04]:
We didn't have this problem when we just had a cassette deck and a simple cassette adapter.

Leo Laporte [01:09:09]:
That's probably where they're coming from, right?

Andy Ihnatko [01:09:12]:
They're just coming from a point of greed and delusion. Intersection of greed and delusion.

Leo Laporte [01:09:17]:
The intersection of greed and delusion. That's how Steve Jobs would have put it. Apple has bought two, count them, two new buildings in Cupertino pushing their local real estate spend past a billion dollars. They got the money in July they picked up a 365 million million dollar four building Matilda Campus and now another one built pair of buildings for 350 million and now a 166 million3 building Cupertino Gateway complex. They're all near the original campus, they're on Stevens Creek Boulevard, which those of us who've ever lived in San Jose know that street name very well. It's where the auto dealers are.

Jason Snell [01:10:02]:
Yeah, and that's basically where Apple is down the Cupertino end. I mean you talk about a company town also a bunch of these things are right by, they're right by Tantau, which means they're right across the freeway from Apple Park. And if you've ever been over there, it's surprising that there are any buildings left that aren't owned by Apple.

Leo Laporte [01:10:20]:
Yeah, no kidding.

Jason Snell [01:10:20]:
Also I don't know if these buildings, some of these buildings may have been rented by Apple and now are just being bought. I mean almost every space in Cupertino, if you've ever been over there, is Apple. Apple, like Apple has spilled out. For those who don't know, Apple park and Infinite Loop are not it. It's also every other office building between those two. Like everywhere you go there's more and more Apple. It's not just in those two main areas. They've got lots of different stuff going on in different places.

Jason Snell [01:10:51]:
And so like yeah, it's it. I don't know if it is the most company town of any town. I mean, I guess like the, the SpaceX starbase town that they incorporated at their launch facility in Texas might be, but like Cupertino. So much of Cupertino is Apple at this point. I'm surprised there were more office buildings for them to buy.

Leo Laporte [01:11:10]:
It's amazing, but it's a great location. Kudos for them for kind of staying where they were born and kind of taking it over, you know.

Jason Snell [01:11:19]:
Yeah, no, they're committed to that area. That's where they started and that's where they want to be.

Leo Laporte [01:11:24]:
And the fact that they're buying plenty of offices and other.

Jason Snell [01:11:26]:
Yeah, so these are literally. It's two. It's two office buildings on the, on the west side of Tantau where they already have like five buildings on the east side. And the, and the building behind them away from Stevens Creek is an Apple building. And then next to that is the shopping center with the restaurants and stuff, if you've ever been down there. So, like, it's literally. It would be shocking if they didn't, you know, buy those buildings because it's practically on campus already.

Andy Ihnatko [01:11:53]:
Yeah, a lot of the major ones. I read the article in Silicon Valley that it is. It is a subject.

Jason Snell [01:12:01]:
It's Valco 3 and 4. So these were already Apple office buildings. They're just buying the buildings.

Leo Laporte [01:12:05]:
Is it the old Valco Shopping Center?

Jason Snell [01:12:07]:
It's on Valco Parkway. They're still redeveloping the Valco Shopping center and they're going to. There's a huge plot of land across the street across Wolf Road that they're redeveloping, that some developer is redeveloping and they're going to knock down most of Falco. And yeah, that land is so valuable. Whether you put houses there with, whether you put shopping there or whether you build more buildings for Apple there, they will buy them. But yeah, I'm looking on Apple maps and they are labeled Valco Parkway 3 and 4. But why rent when you can buy?

Leo Laporte [01:12:41]:
If you're Apple, you got the money. There's probably tax breaks for buying. Do you think? I don't know that many people work at Apple. You do. Is it depressing if you get the job at Apple and you're not. Not in.

Jason Snell [01:12:55]:
There's. I think there's some status. Right. Like if you're in the park, you are. You are kind of the creme de la creme in that way.

Leo Laporte [01:13:01]:
Right.

Jason Snell [01:13:02]:
And. And now it's an interesting thing.

Leo Laporte [01:13:05]:
I feel terrible. Fire in one Valco Center.

Jason Snell [01:13:07]:
Yeah. Well, I don't know. So here's the thing. I think different groups are in different places. I think a lot of Eddie Q's group is now In Infinite Loop. So Infinite Loop is now sort of the second campus. Right. And there are a bunch of buildings around there.

Jason Snell [01:13:20]:
But I think, I think different groups are in different places. I think if you're in the, the region of Apple park, if you're in Tantau or even Valco and you're right there, you're probably feeling pretty good because you are a short hop from Apple Park. But I don't know, I mean, I don't know all the details of that. Maybe if you're on the other side of 2:80 you're not as, as good or something, but sometimes it's about what group you're in because like I said, I think that a lot of the, the, like the App Store stuff is happening over at Infinite Loop these days.

Leo Laporte [01:13:52]:
Yeah, yeah, you just have to live with that. Infinite Loop's the old.

Jason Snell [01:13:56]:
Yeah, the old HQ that is still there and they're still using it. And it's not like they. And this was when Apple park opened, people were like thinking, oh, all of Apple is going to move into Apple Park. And it's just not true. They have dozens of buildings in Cupertino and Santa Clara and Sunnyvale and like they're all over and they, you can't, cannot turn around in Cupertino without seeing an Apple sign on a building.

Leo Laporte [01:14:18]:
So we were talking about Japan, we're talking about the EU now the UK is pushing for nudity blocking software on your iPhone and your Android phone. They want technology companies to block explicit images on the phone and computers by default. Think of the children with adults having to verify their age to create an actual access such content. That's no more, no more selfies in the bathroom. What are you nuts?

Andy Ihnatko [01:14:49]:
This is a story from the Financial Times in which they have sources that say that the government wanted to push for this directly and they realized that, no, we're going to have to move slowly on this and get of course the inevitable sign in, sign on from everybody who's going to agree with this. So basically they are looking at ways that they can encourage Google and encourage Apple to do this sort of thing. Good luck to them. Because this is the sort of, this is exactly the sort of thing where it's like, nope, we fight, we fight, we fight. And we're putting on the table. We simply do not make, we do not make available in this country services that would require us to comply with this. Because this breaks everything. This basically.

Leo Laporte [01:15:27]:
And I just, I just want to tell the UK that here in the United States, the number one Holiday gift giver to children in need. Need are the strippers of America. So think of the. You think of the children, but think of the strippers who are thinking of the children. Okay, I just saw that stat. Okay, you may not believe me.

Andy Ihnatko [01:15:48]:
Citation needed.

Leo Laporte [01:15:50]:
I'll look it up for you.

Jason Snell [01:15:51]:
I feel like we just, we just had this conversation too. But again, it's like first off, it's. This is super nanny state. Like you're telling. You know, you're basically saying every adult has to opt into some sort of.

Leo Laporte [01:16:01]:
Tells you something locker. Britain has a safeguarding minister, the minister of safeguarding.

Jason Snell [01:16:09]:
But even, even if you go with that and say, you know what, I would also not like to be surprised with any nudity. And that's a great feature. I'm glad it's turned on by default instead of me being an adult and turning it on if I feel that way. The age verification thing, it is the government saying that some entity must verify you using documentation, at which point some entity has all of your documentation and personal information. And maybe it's Apple, maybe it's the government, maybe it's a third party that is unreliable and will disclose it. Do you want anybody. Should the conditions of me using my phone be providing a passport? Right.

Andy Ihnatko [01:16:52]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:16:53]:
And you allow, by the way, Page Six to have nudity. Why can't my iPhone. You know, we were born naked. It's okay, you know, calm down.

Andy Ihnatko [01:17:03]:
It's just impossible. It's also, it's also my least favorite type of government attempts to regulate, which is we don't know if this is even practical or feasible, but we're going to make a law that basically says technology will save it. You guys figure it out. And here are the penalties if you don't figure it out. To our liking. That's like, this is not. This is not even an argument to be made. This is.

Andy Ihnatko [01:17:23]:
This is. You have to immediately be suspicious of the reasons why they're asking for this and the. All the reasons that have nothing to do with child safety and csam. It really is about. If you allow that kind of screening on device. You're essentially saying that everything has to be. We want the power to compel a company to examine content before it's encrypted and is therefore out of control. It's like, no, no.

Leo Laporte [01:17:47]:
It bugs me that in order for me to visit the IRS or the Social Security website, the federal government asks me to provide ID to a third party. ID me. That bugs the hell out of me. But I don't have any Choice. Just what are we doing here? Yeah, the Home Office wants. This is. The British Home Office wants to see operating systems that prevent any nudity being displayed on screen unless the user has verified they are an adult through methods such as biometric checks or official id.

Jason Snell [01:18:22]:
So I'm watching a movie that has a little bit of nudity in it and the blocker pops up and Apple is watching the movie to see if their machine. I mean, it doesn't. Not only does it fall apart, but like, is that what we want? Is no. By mandatory. It's ridiculous. It is. No, that's what it is because it's. We're gonna watch everything you watch and approve it or disapprove it.

Jason Snell [01:18:47]:
And we need to know who you are. Are. And remember there was that story a couple weeks ago about how in India you have to provide ID to get a SIM card so they know based on what SIM is in use, where you are, because it's tied to your id. It's like, you know, this is all about putting more personal information in the hands of people who, in a lot of cases, can't be trusted. I would trust Apple to verify my age more than some other entities would. But like any third party that you give that to is increasing your chances of being tracked or having it leak and having your identity stolen. Like, it's just such a bad idea made by people who don't understand the ramifications of the thing that they're talking about. It reminded me of that classic.

Jason Snell [01:19:31]:
Was it the Washington Post where there was an op ed that was like, the wizards can come up with a magic golden key that fixes encryption. It's like, that's. No, you don't understand what you're asking for here.

Andy Ihnatko [01:19:44]:
Yeah, yeah, exactly. That's why I'm saying, like, you don't. This is not something that. This is not something that the companies do not want to do. It is something they don't want to do. But the reason why you're asking something that is not actually possible. And it doesn't matter if you say, well, we. Too bad, we've legislated it.

Andy Ihnatko [01:20:01]:
Go figure it out. It cannot be figured out. You are legislating perpetual movement. Motion. Okay? Unless there's a breakthrough in the understanding of encryption and security that nobody has thought of in the past past 70, 80 years, it's not going to happen.

Leo Laporte [01:20:18]:
Okay? Big story. And I did not know this at the time, but fella in Australia, and it was covered in Daring Fireball and Apple and Soda Insider. Michael Sy has Written about it. The Register's written about it. Paris is the name has and I think an Apple developer who has created some interesting Apple sites for developers. He says, I don't want to gender him. I think it's a he.

Jason Snell [01:20:53]:
Yeah. Paris Butfield Addison.

Leo Laporte [01:20:56]:
Okay. He says, I'm writing this as a desperate measure after. This is his blog post. After nearly 30 years, years as a loyal customer, authoring technical books on Apple's own programming languages, Objective C and Swift, spending tens upon tens of thousands of dollars on devices, apps, conferences and services, I think most of us would say that's us. I've been locked out of my personal and professional digital life with no explanation and no recourse. And how did it happen? He bought a gift card at a major Australian retailer. He doesn't say the name, but he says, think Walmart for those of you in the United States States. The code from the gift card could not be redeemed.

Leo Laporte [01:21:37]:
It was a $500 Apple gift card. He was going to use it to pay for his icloud storage plan. The code failed shortly after my account was locked. He's been on the horn with Apple support like crazy and they say, well, you can create a new account. Yeah, but that's not going to do it because all of his apps, all of his music, everything, and his devices.

Jason Snell [01:21:59]:
Presumably are locked to that Apple id. Right.

Andy Ihnatko [01:22:02]:
And that's part the of, that's part of his complaint that no, none of these actual devices are unusable because I'm logged out at all my accounts. It won't, it's, it's devastating. Like what this error has had and what frustrates the hell out of anybody who reads this is that you just recognize that. You recognize that. Oh, well, we're not going to tell you. What, why, what's wrong? No, no, no and no. We didn't approach you to say, hey, there's a problem. What can, can we get collect some information for you before we decide to absolutely torch your entire existence in the Apple ecosystem that you've built for the past 10 or 15 or 20 years?

Jason Snell [01:22:34]:
No.

Andy Ihnatko [01:22:35]:
And well, now that you've done it, will you explain why? No, we won't.

Leo Laporte [01:22:38]:
Please, I know people at Apple are listening. If you have any sway, please do something for Paris.

Jason Snell [01:22:46]:
Paris has been. So what's interesting here is for people who don't know, sometimes when a high profile person has a problem with Apple and they start yelling about it publicly, very frequently they are contacted by a mysterious group inside Apple called Executive Relations. Yeah, these are the same people who like, if you send a heartwarming message to Tim, they may get back to you with a, you know, something, a heartwarming response from Tim or something like that. But they are also the tactical team to suppress really bad stories by solving the problem. And it, they, they, they swoop in, they have swooped in, in this and so far Paris says no, you know, no response, no resolution.

Leo Laporte [01:23:35]:
He knew this. He asked for the executive team, which.

Jason Snell [01:23:38]:
Is amazing because the executive relations group, this is the group that fixes this stuff so that these things go away. And that's why I still believe that this will get resolved. If it doesn't get resolved, things are really, really bad. Because this is the case of some, somebody who has a receipt from the retailer, the card was legitimately purchased. It wasn't like a fake on ebay. It might have been a fake put up at the store. But again, to go from fraud detection to locking account, I get it. Apple locks accounts all the time for lots of reasons.

Jason Snell [01:24:11]:
I have a friend whose account gets locked all the time. He doesn't even know why. Just somebody is trying to log in and things are weird and they lock his account and he has to call Apple. The problem is what happens then because what Paris did is fell in a hole. Like this is, and this is I think the consequence of Apple growing so fast that a lot of their systems have just not grown commensurately to deal with issues like this. And like Apple has invested so much in tying all our devices to our Apple IDs that this is, this is a death sentence for your devices. Devices. You're going to lose all your photos, you're going to lose all your music, you're going to lose all your movies and TV shows that you bought.

Jason Snell [01:24:49]:
You may not be able to use your devices anymore. There has to be a process and it has to have some level of transparency. And the scary thing here is not that Paris is going through this, believe it or not, because the executive relations team has been in touch. The scary thing is if you're not a high profile person who wrote a bunch of O'Reilly books about Apple and has a blog and knows people, this could happen to you too, and there's no recourse.

Leo Laporte [01:25:16]:
Yeah, it's a cautionary tale for all of us. It's not just Apple, it's Google. Paul Thurat went through something similar with Google. Almost lost a whole bunch of stuff because Google canceled his account, including his YouTube account. It's true with Amazon, it's true with Microsoft. It's one of the reasons I went out after reading Paris's story and bought a ThinkPad which I'm gonna put Linux on. I wish I could buy a phone that wasn't owned by big tech. I moved all of my books off of Audible.

Leo Laporte [01:25:47]:
I moved all of my music off of Apple. This is a cautionary tale for all of us. Think about what would your life be like if you lost your account with one of these big tech companies. Remember, they're so big now, there's no, you know, I remember I had somebody call the radio show her Gmail account had been same thing summarily terminated. She said, so I found the Google office in Irvine and I went down and I knocked on the door. Nobody answered. There's nobody inside. She said, what do I do? I've heard these stories for years.

Leo Laporte [01:26:23]:
This brings it home. If you don't have a way of getting. This is why Google takeout is so important. You mentioned that earlier, Jason. If you don't have a way of getting your data out of there, get it out now while those accounts are live and start. I think we all need to start thinking about ways to not be so locked into these big tech companies. I think Linux is a very good choice. It's sad.

Leo Laporte [01:26:48]:
There is really no, you know, I looked at the fairphone. There really isn't a good choice. Yeah, on phones I'm going to put. I have a Pixel, my old Pixel 9. I'm going to put graphene OS on it. That is the closest you can get to a de googled version of Android and it's significant. I think we should all be aware of this and be prepared for this because this is not good.

Jason Snell [01:27:08]:
Yeah, prepare. You said prepared. I was going to say you sound a little like a prepper so that that works. But I would say, but I'm terrified.

Leo Laporte [01:27:14]:
This could happen to me.

Jason Snell [01:27:16]:
So for people who are in the Apple ecosystem, what I would say is if you've got icloud photos, make sure you've got a Mac somewhere though the hard drive big enough and you're syncing all files locally so that if something happens to your icloud photos, you have all the files. Photos, that's a number one. If you're renting or if you're buying movies and tv, consider that you kind of got a license for it and they could kill it at any moment. And if it's something that you really love, you know, maybe you can get it on, on Blu Ray or DVD or something instead that I think I Think protecting yourself from the worst of this is the thing that people who are invested in Apple platforms should do at the very least. And Photos is the big one, because Photos are irreplaceable, replaceable. Like there's a setting on Mac that says download all of them locally. And if your drive isn't big enough, get an external drive and put your Photos library on it. But do that, because that's the big one.

Jason Snell [01:28:05]:
To me, it would be terrible if you had to buy your apps again. Absolutely. And if you lost all those movie purchases that you made. Although, by the way, Movies Anywhere is a service that syncs your movie purchases between Apple and Amazon and elsewhere that you can do that might be a way to do some of this too. And your DVD purchases just right. Because for a lot of people, getting a Linux computer and a phone that isn't tied in is not realistic, even if it would maybe protect you. But you can take some steps so that all your eggs are not in your Apple id.

Andy Ihnatko [01:28:45]:
Yeah, we've forgotten the trifecta of backups that you're supposed to have three copies of everything that's important enough for you to keep, and one of them should be off site and another of them should be on a different form of media than the rest, otherwise it's not truly backed up. The thing is, cloud syncing works so well and it's saved your bacon so many times that you kind of forget that. Yeah, there's still one point of disappearance there. And so the thing is, you can get a terabyte SSD for not a whole lot. And for a lot of people, their libraries are actually, you can get for less than $100, enough storage probably to back up your entire cloud library. And I'm not saying it's an easy thing to do, and it's going to. You're going to anger the other people in your family who don't understand that why can I no longer stream at 4K, like over the past days? Yeah, that's because I'm basically moving, moving half a terabyte or three quarters of a terabyte off of the cloud and onto here. Because otherwise, again, it's just gone.

Andy Ihnatko [01:29:45]:
And the thing is, this actually ties into what we were talking about earlier about regulation that when you give a company like Google or company like Apple responsibility for policing against pirated content, pirated streamers, accounts that are being used for malicious things, you are basically telling them that our default position should be kill the suspected account immediately and make it incredibly hard for anybody to get it Back again, make someone actually have to sue us before we will restore this account because that is the safest way for us to be in compliance with this regulation. If we are tentative about it and if we why should we hire other people and spend a lot more money to really, really verify that this account is actually being used for piracy, for instance? Well, it's just a lot simpler and cheaper for us to simply zorch it and then whoever has that account is just going to have to deal with it. It's a huge, huge problem. I mean I have Dropbox, I have Icloud and I have Google Drive and I really have to set myself a twice a year reminder to say that make sure you pack a lunch, get all that off that thing and have a local copy of it because otherwise it's the difference between Paris problem, which is that 20 years worth of stuff is destroyed and getting it back again is going to rely on the good graces and intervention of PR and saying ah damn, that's annoying. It's a good thing I have that 10 terabyte hard drive that I spent $200 for that has a complete backup. But boy what a pain in the butt.

Jason Snell [01:31:19]:
Grr.

Andy Ihnatko [01:31:19]:
And then move on with your life.

Jason Snell [01:31:20]:
The black box is the thing that I think is the most disturbing and again it's Apple culture and it's also I think a vestige of an earlier time when Apple was not responsible for like it's over time the Apple ID has grown and grown and grown and grown in terms of connecting all of your data data and your devices together and the rest of the support system just hasn't really. And the black box nature of it is the other problem. So not only is support sometimes seems overwhelmed and underpowered to do anything, but there's no clarity about where you are in the process. At least developers who have their apps rejected know that they have an appeal process and it's internal, but there is an appeal to somebody else and that's a frustrating black box process. But this, it's consumers. Like I'm not saying that the EU needs to do a rights of consumers thing that has creates a whole weird Apple court structure or something for support issues. But Apple should be trying to get ahead of this. And if there is not an organizational will and there isn't somebody leading the charge here, there needs to be, there needs to be somebody who looks, looks at this and says this shows that our, our process is broken and our fraud detection is having adverse impacts that are just exposing how bad we are.

Jason Snell [01:32:45]:
We are how bad we are at taking care of customers like this where they have no idea what's going on. Because it's very hard to believe that any, that, that Paris is at fault. Right. Paris got a bad gift card almost certainly, but, but got it from a legitimate retailer. Like there needs to be a process to say we get it. Your, your track record is perfectly clean. We're sorry that this happened. We can't honor the gift card, but we'll turn your account back on because we know that this is a one off or whatever and if it keeps happening then it's a different story.

Jason Snell [01:33:20]:
But to do that you have to communicate. Apple doesn't ever want to communicate. They don't want to talk about their processes. They don't want anything out in the open. Because part their of culture from Steve Jobs especially is don't let anybody see anything that happens on the inside. Don't tell anybody anything unless you absolutely have to. And that attitude is kind of toxic. And if you're a company that prides yourself in good customer service, you can't have it.

Jason Snell [01:33:44]:
So I hope that the end result of this is not just the Paris gets his account back, but somebody at Apple says why did this happen? Don't let some executive, maybe even Tim, Tim Cook and says don't let this happen again.

Andy Ihnatko [01:33:58]:
Fix this because they need to fix calls to mind. A number of years ago, when Apple Music started up and the lamented not late but retired Jim Dalrymple had his entire music library killed by its first version of Apple Music. Because Apple Music said, oh well, I see a track whose name and title I write recognize, I'm going to replace it with this version that I have on our server. Not knowing that, no, this is a live version and a special thing. And Apple had of course had it's wor. It's bad when one of the most biggest audience, when one of the journalists with the biggest audience and strongest voices gets undone by a bad Apple service. And even then it took a while for Apple to essentially do what it had to do to get his data back. And you think about all the people who do not have that kind of reach and do not have that kind of kind of power where it's just like, no, I don't want you to send me a fourth email that says we know how much this might be frustrating.

Andy Ihnatko [01:34:57]:
Unfortunately we did review the case and decided that we're going to. No, you didn't review the case. You basically have a bot that says how long do we have to delay this response before it sounds as though a human had actually done it. And you just want to throw things, specifically every Apple product you've ever owned and. And replace it with something that does not make you absolutely filled with rage.

Jason Snell [01:35:19]:
And let me tell you, if the next step is a lawsuit, the first thing that's going to happen is the lawyers are going to say, what the hell is this? And somebody at Apple is going to go, jeez, fix it. Right? Like, you don't want it to go to a lawsuit. You don't want that. You want to be able to handle your customers fairly and have it be fine. You should never get to the point, and this is why executive relations is involved, is you should never get to the point where we're talking about this for you. 20 minutes and everybody else is posting about it because it makes Apple look really bad and calls into question everything we're talking about about the Apple ID and putting all your eggs in this basket. So I'm shocked that it hasn't already been handled. My guess is there's some real deep down tiger team fraud prevention because Apple gets defrauded all the time, right? There's a lot of fraud, phony hardware and phony gift cards and all this stuff.

Jason Snell [01:36:12]:
And I'm sure they have a whole system to deal with that and that Paris fell into it. The question is, if you built a system where people who don't deservedly fall into your trap are trapped there, there's a problem. You need to be able to get them out. You need to get the people out of the trap. And they seem to say, there's nothing we can do that is just so broken. So, you know, I hope the executive relations team. I have never heard of an example where the executive relations team came in and then said, welp, we can't help. But, you know, I don't know if Jim got his resolved.

Jason Snell [01:36:50]:
So, you know, maybe it turns out that the only thing more powerful than customer service is the group that bans accounts. I don't know.

Leo Laporte [01:36:57]:
Well, this is three days running now. Paris, I don't know if you're listening. I don't think he is, but.

Andy Ihnatko [01:37:07]:
Solidarity.

Leo Laporte [01:37:08]:
Yeah, solidarity.

Andy Ihnatko [01:37:10]:
We hope that the suffering that you go through. And thank goodness he lists all the things he's doing, including saying, no, I think we've gone beyond simply complaining to Apple. I'm actually filing grievances with the proper authorities here in Australia about how a tech company is abusing me and my data. And so let's see where that goes. I think he actually Mentions that a lot of his stuff is actually backed up elsewhere. I have to. I read it early this morning.

Leo Laporte [01:37:34]:
Use your hardware. You can't use your.

Andy Ihnatko [01:37:36]:
No, exactly. But saying it's like a lot of this is, yes, I want justice, but also I get the impression from this blog post that he wants to be a conduit for improving what is obviously a broken system. Good for them.

Leo Laporte [01:37:50]:
It's a shame for them. Really is a shame.

Jason Snell [01:37:52]:
Yeah. It shouldn't happen. I mean, that's the takeaway of this too is again, whoever is in charge of this part of Apple needs to say we need to make sure this never happens again. Right.

Andy Ihnatko [01:38:05]:
We don't expect Apple to never make mistakes, but when they make a big mistake, at least treat it seriously as opposed to okay again, option command nine. It's like, we know that this is mud. This is distressing. Unfortunately, we're as mad about this as you are.

Leo Laporte [01:38:20]:
No smile.

Jason Snell [01:38:21]:
It's like our hands are tied. You are Apple. Right? Your hands are not tied. This is exactly. That's a classic thing which is like, I'm sorry, the policy says I can't do it. It's like, who made the policy? You did. You represent Apple. You gotta fix this.

Jason Snell [01:38:33]:
You are all powerful inside Apple. There's nobody inside Apple who will refuse an order from Tim Cook who says fix this, so fix it.

Andy Ihnatko [01:38:42]:
If only they could blame Epic Games or Samsung for this. They're typical devils.

Jason Snell [01:38:48]:
Tim Sweeney's putting bad gift cards up in Australia just to watch the world burn.

Andy Ihnatko [01:38:54]:
We would to restore your accounts and data, but that doing so would violate the privacy and security that our customers rely on and therefore we have to take an ethical stand.

Jason Snell [01:39:02]:
Yeah, I'm sorry, that'll be a new way. New attack surface for high profile people is send them a. A bogus itunes gift card to break their Apple account.

Leo Laporte [01:39:13]:
Yeah, there you go. Yeah, I. Yeah, I mean I'm. Look, maybe not everybody can do this, but if you can get your stuff out of there and at least back it up. Yeah.

Andy Ihnatko [01:39:27]:
Remember, it's not backed up if the only backup is in one place on a cloud. In the cloud, on a computer you do not control. That's not a backup, it's a convenience feature.

Jason Snell [01:39:36]:
Get your photos on a drive in your house, period.

Andy Ihnatko [01:39:39]:
And there are actually a lot of even open source and free very well supported projects that are like here is how for two or three hundred dollars you could essentially get IPhotos Google Photos on your home network. Again, not the actual service, but every single thing that Google Photos and iPhoto does, and Apple Photos does. Essentially everything you do is going to be backed up immediately to a server that you own. And it can actually, after it's on your home NAS your home server, it can actually also be backed up to whatever cloud provider or multiple cloud providers that you ask for. Takes a little bit of effort, but they're very, very, very mature technologies and they cost next to nothing.

Leo Laporte [01:40:18]:
Except for the hardware I use, and I've mentioned it on the show before, an open source, a command line tool called the iCloud Photos Downloader, which I run on a Linux box, but you can put it on a nas, you can put it in a lot of different places and you can run it in the background, as in a cron job, or run it manually. And it will download. I'll show you how I'll run it right now. It will download. There's my. Oh, you can't really see it because it's.

Jason Snell [01:40:43]:
Oh, it's snowing.

Leo Laporte [01:40:44]:
It's snowing in terminal land.

Jason Snell [01:40:47]:
Festivus. Yeah, I love it.

Leo Laporte [01:40:48]:
It will download. So what it's doing is it's, oh, I have to authenticate. Well, I won't do that right now. You'd only do it once every month or so. But once you authenticate, then it will download. I have it set up to only download new photos, which is fantastic. Let me type this in. I'm going to boot loop with Microsoft, by the way, for Windows because my authenticators, I got new phones and none of my authenticator stuff works.

Andy Ihnatko [01:41:17]:
Oh God.

Leo Laporte [01:41:18]:
And Microsoft says, well, don't worry, we get you your account back in 30 days. Well, you know what? I don't need Windows that badly. Thanks, Microsoft. Anyway, I'm telling you, these guys are just making a mistake.

Jason Snell [01:41:32]:
I learned to live without Windows.

Leo Laporte [01:41:34]:
Don't mind if I do, don't mind if I do. And frankly, I might be learning to live without Apple.

Jason Snell [01:41:40]:
Good luck in your bunker.

Andy Ihnatko [01:41:43]:
I'm reliving Linux.

Leo Laporte [01:41:43]:
Linux is pretty dang good, I have to say. You know what? Linux is pretty dang good. I just wish there were a phone solution, but I don't know if I try this graphene. We'll see.

Jason Snell [01:41:53]:
I don't know if I've told you my wacky theory, but that moment when the Steam Deck stuff versus the Xbox stuff that Microsoft's trying to do, I had a moment where I, I thought, I wonder if we've actually reached the point where Linux is going to become more relevant than Windows for a lot of stuff. Because now that games Basically run on Linux. I wonder, and I'm not as worried about Apple because Apple is kind of playing a different game. But if Microsoft is sort of just the default, if you could get to the point where Linux could just be the default. It's not like lots of people are Microsoft customers because they love it, right? I don't know.

Andy Ihnatko [01:42:35]:
I installed the new POP OS a couple months ago and it's like, ooh, it's good. Really, really good. And the things that drive me up a freaking tree about Linux like are. No, there's an app store type experience. No, it's very fixed a lot of things. They're drivers for pretty much everything on like the couple of devices that I use. Again, there's still like a bit of a learning curve, but it's, it's not obnoxious as it used to. It used to be that using Linux as an actual day to day basis had to be a lifestyle choice.

Andy Ihnatko [01:43:08]:
Kind of like, no, no, no. I own a classic car. I want to own and run a classic car as my daily driver. Now it really does feel like, no, it's a legitimate alternative. It's a platform that you can choose to use and it runs like stink on a $35 ThinkPad that I bought at the MIT flea market like five years ago.

Leo Laporte [01:43:28]:
So. Yep, exactly. All right, we're gonna take a little break. More to come. You're watching MacBreak Weekly. Alex Lindsay has the week off. Andy Ihnatko is here, as is Jason Snell. Our show today brought to you by this.

Leo Laporte [01:43:41]:
I hope it's not too late. Have you done your holiday shopping yet? Maybe I can tell you about our sponsor, Aura. You know the name Aura, I think consistently, year after year picked as the best digital photo frames. But they've got a new photo frame that is, it's just not adding another screen to your life. It's just adding great photos to your life. Imagine if you could change the photos that are hanging on your wall every day. You know, all those photos that are in your, you know, computer. I have 60,000 something like that that you never see.

Leo Laporte [01:44:15]:
What if they could just show up on your screen on your wall as a picture, like a real photo? Well, this is the Aura in ink. It's Aura's all new cordless color E paper frame. And notice something, no cords. Meet Ink, Aura's first ever cordless color E paper frame. Featuring a sleek 0.6 inch profile and a softly lit 13.3 inch display. Ink feels like a print. It functions like a digital frame and perhaps Most importantly, lives completely untethered by cords. With a rechargeable battery that lasts up to three months on a single charge, unlimited storage and the ability to invite others to add photos via the Aura Frames app.

Leo Laporte [01:45:05]:
It's the cordless wall hanging frame you've been waiting for. And by the way, they just added a new feature. It's not in the ad because they added it last week. You can text photos to it, you can send photos via imessages. So what this is going to be, this is going to be the hot don't tell my mom her Christmas gift. All the family photos are going to be on here. And when there's new pictures of the grandkids opening presents, I will message them, I'll text them over to the frame and she'll see them that day. That is awesome.

Leo Laporte [01:45:38]:
Aura's put a lot of engineering into this. It's a breakthrough in e paper technology. Ink transforms millions of tiny ink capsules into your favorite photos. Renders them in vintage tones. They look like a photo on the wall. They really do. That's because partly because of the design innovation. It's a graphite inspired bezel, a paper textured mat.

Leo Laporte [01:45:58]:
The glossy glass in front, it looks like a piece of decor. It's not another screen in your living room and I didn't really want that. Unlimited free photos. You just download the Aura app and connect to wi fi. This is the gift to give family members, especially I think grandparents, anybody who or parents, anybody who appreciates innovative design and cutting edge technology. Actually kids, you know, if they're in college, be good to have something on the wall reminds them you, the people who are paying the bills still exist. Sleek, subtle and stunning ink blends the warmth of a printed photo with the versatility of an e paper frame. No chords, no fuss, just your memories beautifully displayed wherever you want them.

Leo Laporte [01:46:41]:
Head to auraframes.com/ink. To see for yourself. Support the show by mentioning us at checkout. That's auraframes.com/ink. Act now. They are offering a limited time holiday discount but that ends soon. It looks great with black and white photos by the way. A lot of my photos are black and white.

Leo Laporte [01:46:59]:
Looks fine with artwork as well. In fact, I have. I have to confess, I've put some AI generated images in here just because I think they're fun and I like to see them every once in a while. This is one that I did for our Dungeons and Dragons game of Sag Bottom. The cheerful the bard that I played. And look how, look how great that looks. It looks like a painting in the frame. Isn't that great? Auraframes.com Inc.

Leo Laporte [01:47:26]:
Highly recommended. Oh you can hang it on the wall. And by the way, it does portrait and landscape mode automatically. But they also have a. Again, the engineering is so cool. They have a little magnetic stand that just clicks in and it can go, you know, either portrait or landscape and it just clicks in so that you can take it out, put it in. Am I doing it right? There we go. And it doesn't fall out.

Leo Laporte [01:47:50]:
I think this is in every way. They've put some real thought into this. It's very nice. I'm going to put it right back where it was on my wall. Auraframes.com Inc. Did we bring the site down? Coinpig says I can't reach the site. Okay, well go there in a minute. I didn't mean to do that.

Leo Laporte [01:48:11]:
Sorry. A lot of people interested in this. I think. Let's see what else is going on. I guess we have a lot of rumors. I don't know. Are we ready to start talking about the next iPhone? It's pretty certain at this point it's going to be a folding phone, right? There's a lot of supply chain evidence.

Jason Snell [01:48:29]:
Along with the others.

Andy Ihnatko [01:48:30]:
Yeah, there are a couple of rumors. One, there's one.

Leo Laporte [01:48:32]:
The premium one.

Andy Ihnatko [01:48:33]:
Yeah, yeah there are a couple of rumors. One of them is that they're going for truly an all glass display that wraps around like all the corners and most of unlike many weeks. This is not like these are not German rumors. These are like supply chain, supply chain rumors. Another rumor is that with the foldable that no they were going to have to. They're not going to be able to do face ID so there's going to be a fingerprint sensor like in the power button or something like that.

Leo Laporte [01:49:04]:
I like that by the way. That reminds me of old Android phones right where this the curves. Was it a Samsung phone? Yeah, it was full.

Andy Ihnatko [01:49:12]:
Samsung did that. My. The Pixels used to do that. My Pixel 7 Pro does that still. I'm not. I'm not sure. I love it because you got to make the thing is like what do. What happens when you put it inside a case? Are you adding gestures that are now.

Andy Ihnatko [01:49:29]:
Yeah, it's also. You have to ask how now how difficult is this going to be to take apart so that you can can do a repair like four years down the line. Is this going to make things more fragile? After Apple's success with the iPhone air about saying no, I dare you to bend and break this with your hands and people not being able to bend and break it with their hands. I'm sure they've thought of that. But it's going to have to be one heck of a style statement to justify it as a consumer, not as a journalist, but as a consumer. It's gonna have to be one heck of a style statement. And I'm going to have to wait a couple of months to see before I would buy it, before to get reports from the first few hundred thousand people or a million people to see how it holds up again. I just don't think.

Andy Ihnatko [01:50:15]:
I wish that maybe it is a personality sort of thing. Like, I just want to have my phone inside a case. I don't want to have it like absolutely bare naked to the world. I want to have inside a case for any number of reasons. And so once you put it inside a case, a lot of these style decisions that were made kind of get negated because how many times did the design team at Apple like, cry because, oh my God, we designed this to be like the most beautiful object. How much thought did we put into this color of orange? And you immediately put it into, like this pink, sparkly iPhone case that you got for like $8 on AliExpress because you quote like it.

Leo Laporte [01:50:54]:
Is that a good little out of touch? Because they get free phones, Right? So if they drop their uncased phone, it's not the end of the world.

Andy Ihnatko [01:51:02]:
No, they do a lot of testing. They have a lot of.

Leo Laporte [01:51:05]:
Do they assume that people aren't using cases?

Jason Snell [01:51:07]:
No, I think, I mean, Apple makes and sells. Makes a lot of profit on cases, too. I do think they approach it as a design ideal and they know that some people don't use cases and they want to make it look as good as they can in that scenario. And then if you put a case on it that they want, you know, they sell cases that they think look good and that's fine. I did notice that especially with the newest iPhone models, you end up with a very large camera cutout that goes all the way across now. Right. And one of the advantages of that is that means that your color is that much more visible through a case in that sensor area. And I actually thought that was kind of clever.

Jason Snell [01:51:48]:
But because that allows it to shine through, like, do you have the orange one? Well, then you're going to have the orange accent up there. Do you have the blue one? Then you'll have the blue accent up there. And I think that that is Apple trying to get a little bit like, poke a little Bit of their design out of that case that you put on it, whatever it is. But you know, I mostly go caseless and I take the risk because I just prefer the feel but most people don't and that's part of it too. I'm intrigued by the folding phone only because I do love my iPad and the idea of having something that might be my phone and also an iPad mini intrigues me. But we'll have to see how they implement it and if they do something like split view for that or what they choose to do with that. And then yeah, lots of sources say, and Gurman says this, that the phone in the phone the following year is going to be a real, the pro phone will be a real kind of reinterpretation of the iPhone where they're going to try to make it, you know, as featureless and sleek and. But you know that platonic again they're always endlessly searching for the Johnny I.

Jason Snell [01:52:53]:
Platonic.

Andy Ihnatko [01:52:54]:
The cultural ideal inside Apple of less is less is which I think is.

Jason Snell [01:52:58]:
The goal, I think is a good approach to take as long as you don't let it wreck your usability. Right. Like I think that's always the balance there is that it is both those things. But, but I don't mind the guiding star of Apple being that the iPhone should be a mostly featureless, highly polished pebble and because I think it has driven them from the original iPhone to where they are now. And I think that's a good place. But yeah, they always have to keep in mind that if you do something that makes it look better and harder to use, you failed.

Leo Laporte [01:53:31]:
Yeah.

Andy Ihnatko [01:53:31]:
Also the other problem that Apple faces is that the iPhone, it's beautiful, it's well designed. It is also a fleet vehicle, meaning that it is they're the only manufacturers of iPhones which means that they want to make it as beautiful and well designed as possible. But it has to be a design that appeals to all of the 10 million people that are going to buy this. So they can't do something like the nothing phone which is delightful to see what they're doing. Like the idea of well, what if we had like an okay OLED display on the back that could either a just have fun little graphics when the thing is face down but also could be used for like timers. Could also be used for like selfie, a selfie preview. Like what if we just for no reason we made it look like a, like a gadget from Tron and just put light bars like zigzagging from the Back of it. What would that look like? And it looked for.

Andy Ihnatko [01:54:22]:
And the people for whom that looks like an amazing thing that I want to own. Congratulations. They can buy that. But Apple can't be as rapid radical. Is that because they have to make sure that whoever picks this up is going to understand it, want it, and not be confused by why they made the choices that they did.

Jason Snell [01:54:36]:
Yeah. And they ship in such volume that, you know, they have to make anything they ship. They're going to sell millions of. And so you can't just say, oh, this is a little weird one that a few like that isn't.

Andy Ihnatko [01:54:47]:
We decided to put a hand crank on the side of it.

Jason Snell [01:54:50]:
The scale is so enormous that they can't do that. But what they can do now that they're selling, selling. Like this year they came out with five different iPhones. Right. There are five different iPhones that are on the 20, 25 model year, the 16E and the 417S that came out this fall. The advantage of that is Apple can make phones at the high end, especially that push in weird directions and might be more expensive or might not appeal to everybody because they have other phones you can buy that do have more mainstream appeal. And it gives them a little freedom to do that where it's like, well, if the 18 Pro is too much or the 19 Pro or if they call it iPhone 20. Right.

Jason Snell [01:55:34]:
They will probably also be selling a 19 or whatever that is more like the iPhone you're familiar with. And they can do that now because they've got five. In addition to the older models that they sell. They have five brand new models. And. And that's a lot of models to choose from.

Leo Laporte [01:55:54]:
All right, one last break and then get ready because your picks of the week are coming up. You're watching MacBreak Weekly. Alex Lindsay has the week off. Andy Inoco is here. Do you celebrate on the 25th or are you going to do pierogi Christmas in January?

Andy Ihnatko [01:56:09]:
I do both at my household. It was great because we would have like the big, big, big family, extended family Christmas Christmas like on December 24th, 25th. And then we would also do Russian Orthodox Christmas in which be pierogi would be kibasi. Dad would go, would source mushrooms from an exotic store because he wanted to get exactly the kind of mushrooms and the honey and oh, how fun. It was like, imagine like a Christmas dinner that was just for your immediate family and not any pressure on it whatsoever, but something special. And mom would make her bread, which is the one. The one. The two Times a year she would make the bread and it's like, oh.

Leo Laporte [01:56:45]:
I've never asked you this. Were your parents first generation?

Andy Ihnatko [01:56:48]:
No, but they were both. Three of my grandparents were immigrants. Okay. And the fourth was a first generation American. Two from Czechoslovakia, two. One from Italy and one was the daughter of an Italian immigrant. So immigration is.

Leo Laporte [01:57:04]:
My grandma was an Italian immigrant. Yeah. And then on the other side died. Well, we sort of immigrants. We were descended from Hessian troops that were brought in to fight the patriots in the revolution.

Jason Snell [01:57:15]:
Oh, awesome. That's awesome. I'm watching the American Revolution Ken Burns and they talk about that. A bunch of them stayed afterward.

Andy Ihnatko [01:57:24]:
It's great. My father used to one tradition for a little Christmas that he didn't carry over where you tell the story about how my grandfather was like, just he would, that my dad would come home from school and like they couldn't use the bathtub because there was a lot. There was a huge live carp or something in there that Grant that my grandfather bought before the feast because of course, you know, this was like, must been like the forties or something. I was like, no, he doesn't have like, they don't, they don't have refrigerator refrigeration.

Leo Laporte [01:57:55]:
Yeah.

Andy Ihnatko [01:57:56]:
Like, I just always love the idea of like, oh, oh, I just need a seat. Oh, that's right. There's a big carp in the bathroom.

Leo Laporte [01:58:02]:
Must be Trimephal Christmas. And, and so have a wonderful holiday, Andy. I guess we'll see you next week. So. But I'm just a little early and Jason, are you going to be in town? Are you going to go out of town?

Jason Snell [01:58:17]:
Oh, yeah, no, we're staying here. The kids are coming in. We're a mixed household. So we've been doing Hanukkah and then Hanukkah is timed. So it's like a perfect lead into Christmas. We get to do both. A lot of fun and good to have the kids here.

Leo Laporte [01:58:31]:
Yeah, that's the, that's. You know, it's funny, it's very bittersweet when the kids leave to go to college, but then there is some joy to see them come back. You know, I'm gonna see my kids for Christmas too. I'm looking forward to that. Salt. Hank will be jet setting in briefly.

Andy Ihnatko [01:58:47]:
Looking, looking forward to watching the live stream.

Leo Laporte [01:58:51]:
Oh, I don't know about that. Yeah, he's. I'm gonna make him cook, though. He better darn well better make us no French dip sandwich for Christmas. That's all I'm asking. I tell you, there's one other thing I am asking and that is for your support in this holiday season. How about giving a geek in your life a Club TWiT membership? Do you ever think of that? This is a good time to do it. We have a 10% off certificate in the club right now for annual memberships for either you or as a gift.

Leo Laporte [01:59:19]:
But it does expire. I mean you got till December 25, so you've got a little, you know, a week and a few days to take advantage of this Twitter TV Club Twit. The club gets you a few benefits ad free versions of all the shows, which is nice. You also get access to our disco, the Club Twit Discord, where we talk about all kinds of things going on in the in the world as well as about the shows. And it's always snowing in the Club Twit Discord. By the way, just that's actually thanks to that program that you recommend, Jason Festivus Festivities or whatever it's called. We also have special programming that we do in the club. Only actually we've got some stuff coming up.

Leo Laporte [02:00:04]:
The AI user group. I think Micah's doing his crafting corner tomorrow. Yep, 6:00pm Pacific. I'm gonna do an interview. This is kind of off the wall, but I'm gonna do an interview on January 2nd with a comedian, New York comic Mark Malkoff, who is a big Johnny Carson fan. I am a big Johnny Carson fan is the thing. Tonight's show, he interviewed everybody. 400 interviews about Johnny and he's written a book called Love Johnny Carson, which coincidentally he wrote to ask me if he said, I know your audience is geeks, but do you think they'd be interested? And I said, I just bought your book and I'm listening to it and I love it.

Leo Laporte [02:00:38]:
And yes. So we're going to talk about Johnny Carson.

Andy Ihnatko [02:00:41]:
I know it's a little off the wall.

Leo Laporte [02:00:42]:
That's a club event though, so we get to do things.

Andy Ihnatko [02:00:45]:
I saw that. Remember, I learned about that book because it was on one of the tubes, a top 10 best comedy books of 2025 list.

Leo Laporte [02:00:51]:
Yeah.

Andy Ihnatko [02:00:51]:
So I look forward to that.

Leo Laporte [02:00:53]:
Thrilling. I can't wait to talk to him. We do our AI user group usually the first Friday of the month, so that'd be January 2nd as well. So we're going to do kind of back to back shows. We've got the photo show we do every month. We've got Stacey's Book Club soon. And that is a really good book. I've been enjoying reading that.

Leo Laporte [02:01:09]:
The Under. Under Hollow London, Underneath the Hollow London. Something like that. But anyway, anyway, the point is we do a lot of extra programming. We have a lot of fun and the real reason to join is it supports what we do here. Without you, we would not be able to do what we do. So if you like the shows, whether it's MacBreak Weekly or TWiT, Intelligent Machines, or Security Now, or Windows Weekly, or This Week in Spare, all the shows we do, support us. Would you join Club TWiT? twit.tv/clubtwit. Breaking news: January 30th for the book club.

Leo Laporte [02:01:40]:
January 30th. We set a date. All right, good. One other thing. Have we put the survey up yet? Is it up yet? I don't know. Survey, go to twit.tv/survey26. If it's not up yet, go in a week or so. Because we like to do this at the end of this end of the year.

Leo Laporte [02:01:56]:
It's another way you can support us. Just it takes a few minutes. Helps us get to know you a little bit better. It is up. Helps us to get you to know you a little bit better, but also helps us with advertisers because we don't know anything about you. We intentionally. We don't want to know anything about you. We don't want to collect information about you.

Leo Laporte [02:02:14]:
And RSS podcasts have no way of doing that. So we do this survey every year voluntarily. If you want to just tell us a little about yourself, we're not going to, of course, attach it to your, you know, in personal information. We only do it in aggregate. You know, 91% of our audience are it decision makers, that kind of thing. But it does help us a lot year end. We do this once a year. TWIT TV survey 26.

Leo Laporte [02:02:40]:
Yes. Survey was in the newsletter. Yes, there's a newsletter, Darren, you didn't know that? That's free. Twit TV newsletter. There's, you know, we do a lot of things. There's the Club twit forums at twit.community actually those are for everybody, not just club members, Twit community, the, the forums. There's also a mastodon instance @twitsocial. We do a lot of things.

Leo Laporte [02:03:03]:
We like keeping the family together in this holiday season. There's no better time to keep the family together. So thank you for being in the family. Thank you for listening and if you want, join the club. We'd love to have you. Now it's time for our picks of the week. I already gave you mine, which is that iCloud photo downloader Jason Snell. Do you have a pick of the week?

Jason Snell [02:03:23]:
I do. This is. It's kind of a weird one, but I was thinking, what have I been using lately or bought lately that I think might be interesting? And I bought a thing from a company called, I think it's Fosi or Fosse, I don't know, audio. It's called the BT20A. But what it is is it's a Bluetooth amplifier. So it's very small. It's a very small box with a little antenna on it. And that's good because a lot of these boxes that do this same thing don't have an antenna and their Bluetooth range is really bad.

Jason Snell [02:03:54]:
And this one has a little bit better Bluetooth range. Why would you buy this if you have.

Leo Laporte [02:03:58]:
Just describe your use case. Because.

Jason Snell [02:04:00]:
So the reason you buy. A friend of mine has this and he uses it out on his deck. He has a couple of speakers, like stereo speakers, that you have to have an amp to run. This is a teeny tiny box. You run speaker wire to the speakers and then you can pair to your phone and play music.

Leo Laporte [02:04:15]:
Music.

Jason Snell [02:04:15]:
And it just goes out over the speaker. So if you've got speakers that require an amp and you're like, I'm not going to buy another big receiver like what I've got for my 5.1 stereo or whatever, there's a little tiny compact amp that does Bluetooth. Now, how I'm using it. And you're going to love this, Leo. I wanted a system so that when you're reading an ad and I walk away to get some more water or get a snack or something that I can still hear, hear you. And so I bought this. I have a little Bluetooth transmitter in my office. And then on the other side of this wall, I have this amp that's paired to it, and it's attached to a speaker that is a rogue speaker in my ceiling that never got used.

Jason Snell [02:04:57]:
And so what happens is I press a button here, audio hijack starts streaming to a headphone jack on my Thunderbolt hub that's attached to the Bluetooth transfer transmitter. I take my headphones off, I walk out there and I can hear you reading the ad. And that means I know when I need to get back in my chair. And I do that for upgrade as well. When my Curly's reading the ads, I need this because for years I've been like, I have to personally time, like, how long do I think the ad is going to be in rush? And now I can actually hear the ads and get an idea that it's wrapping up and then. And make sure I'm back in time. So it's like a little. It's like a little studio monitor like you use it to have at the Eastside studio.

Jason Snell [02:05:36]:
When we would have somebody come in on Zoom, we play them over so that even if you didn't have headphones, you could hear them. I thought, I want that in my house for my podcast when I'm not hosting and I can take a break.

Leo Laporte [02:05:50]:
How's the latency?

Jason Snell [02:05:51]:
Well, so this is the thing. I have airplay speakers out there and I could have used airplay, but the airplay latency is terrible. The latency on Bluetooth is much less. So it's. It's under a second. It's like a quarter of a second, a half a second. It's really not very much. Whereas airplay latency is actually really bad.

Jason Snell [02:06:09]:
And that would be bad, right? Because then I'd think you weren't wrapping up and you've already wrapped up. Because I've got. I didn't want to do it that way. But a more common use case would be, again, if you've got a speaker or speakers that you're like, I can't use this because it's just. They're old. Because they were attached to my old stereo or whatever. These things are really cheap. They're on Amazon or they're Sonos speakers.

Leo Laporte [02:06:34]:
That only work as speakers. Because the Sonos Sons of guns.

Jason Snell [02:06:37]:
No, I mean, you need. This is classic speaker wire, right?

Leo Laporte [02:06:40]:
So you gotta have the little dual powered, aren't they? Yeah, yeah, so they're powered.

Jason Snell [02:06:44]:
So you need an amp. You need an amp for them.

Leo Laporte [02:06:46]:
And this is the amp.

Jason Snell [02:06:47]:
And a lot of people have those left over. And they're like. You're thinking of the amps that they've got that are these huge things that they used in their stereo. But back in the day. But the speakers are still good. The answer is buy a cheap Bluetooth amp, they actually put out a decent amount of power, 300 watts. And if you've got them, like, if you've got powered speakers outside or something, and you're like, what do I do with that? And. And once they're on Bluetooth, you can just use them from any device you want.

Jason Snell [02:07:09]:
And I thought that's a really cool idea. And like I said, a friend of mine has these out in his. On his deck, basically because he had a pair of speakers, outdoor speakers, that he wanted to power with this. And it gets them into the modern world. With Bluetooth. And now I can hear you in my living room.

Leo Laporte [02:07:24]:
Now you can go to the bathroom whenever I want.

Jason Snell [02:07:26]:
And I can go to the bathroom and then get more water. So I'll have to go to the bathroom later.

Andy Ihnatko [02:07:31]:
That's a.

Leo Laporte [02:07:32]:
That's a. That's a mighty big jug.

Jason Snell [02:07:34]:
You gotta go.

Leo Laporte [02:07:37]:
Andy Inako, my friend, your pick of the week.

Andy Ihnatko [02:07:41]:
Mine is a little bit of fun that I really, really enjoy. It's a screensaver. Now you've seen the, the classic shop sign where when a shopkeeper needs to jump out for about 20 minutes we'll hang this ubiquitous white and red and blue sign will return and then little plastic dial say here's what the time can return. So someone decided Yuchi Arichi of Tokyo decided to do this as a screensaver. So you can basically just set what time. Like if you're going to step away from your desk for lunch or for whatever, you can just basically set the time. You can optionally set a message. But the thing is that it is a 100% faithful looking version of that sign that will just be a screensaver on your screen showing again with the red plastic hands of the dial showing whoever's coming by your cubicle what time you will return.

Andy Ihnatko [02:08:34]:
And it's free. It's like the silliest but most joyful thing you could possibly have. And then you realize it. Whale I could actually use this. I no longer have to put a post it note on my screen anymore to tell people that I'm going to be back in 40 minutes after taking my dry cleaning.

Leo Laporte [02:08:48]:
Brilliant. Will return at 9pm thank you Andy and Ako. Have a wonderful holiday. We will see you. I am. And I will all of you on the 23rd.

Jason Snell [02:09:00]:
Yes.

Leo Laporte [02:09:00]:
I don't know what it is about 2025, but I'm playing Christmas music. I'm loving the decor. I'm eating cookies. I just enjoying it.

Andy Ihnatko [02:09:09]:
We need to retreat. And a space of joy that has been constant for, for some of us has been reliable and constant. The things that are. That are fortifying. Actually I, I actually did a marathon of my favorite Christmas specials including Charlie Brown Christmas but also the Dick Van Dyke Show Christmas Alan Brady Presents and and a couple other things. It's like, you know what this is. I'm going to retreat to a place that is very, very comforting.

Leo Laporte [02:09:37]:
It's been bad, bad news this week. We need a little bit of horrible weekend.

Jason Snell [02:09:42]:
Amen.

Leo Laporte [02:09:42]:
Yeah. You two. Jason Snell, so nice to see both of you. Will be back one more show before the End of the year, the December 23rd show. Let's hope Alex can make it. He's, you know, he's busy this time of year, but it would be nice.

Andy Ihnatko [02:09:57]:
To have the more making toys for.

Jason Snell [02:09:59]:
All the good mission themselves.

Leo Laporte [02:10:00]:
That's right.

Andy Ihnatko [02:10:03]:
As a live stream the this year.

Jason Snell [02:10:04]:
And yeah, I know that's. That's exactly it though. They're live streaming the sleigh and boy.

Andy Ihnatko [02:10:09]:
That'S a lot of setups. One hell of a gimbal on that sleigh to make sure he gets steady. But those of you who have vision pros are going to really enjoy those.

Jason Snell [02:10:16]:
Well, I mean, when you do 8k per eye at 120 frames, you really got something.

Andy Ihnatko [02:10:21]:
You can't have Santa getting motion sickness while wearing those goggles on the sleigh going at Mach 1.8.

Jason Snell [02:10:27]:
Yeah, well, unfortunately he can do that now because the travel mode let you do that, frankly.

Leo Laporte [02:10:32]:
On behalf of all the people who play the drinking game, thank you for seeing 8K screen. You're welcome. 28 frames per second. Because they are now satisfied. They were worried there'd be no opportunity to imbibe without Alex. Lindsay.

Jason Snell [02:10:44]:
Alex is always with us.

Leo Laporte [02:10:46]:
You've made up for it. Thank you, Jason Snell. Thanks to all of our wonderful listeners. We so good to see you in this holiday season. I hope you're finding some joy and family and love this season and if not, out there in here. Okay. We love you. We're glad you're here.

Leo Laporte [02:11:03]:
We do MacBreak Weekly every Tuesday, 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern, 18, sorry, 1900 UTC. You can watch us live if you want. If you're in the club, of course, we're in the discord. But you can also watch us on YouTube, Twitch, x.com, Facebook, LinkedIn and Kick after the fact. You can download copies of the show. There's audio and video at our website, twit.tv/mbw. You'll find a link there to the YouTube channel for MacBreak Weekly dedicated to the video. Great way to share clips with other people of things you see on the show if you want to do that.

Leo Laporte [02:11:35]:
And of course, the best way to get all of our shows is subscribe in your favorite podcast player. There's audio, there's video. There's both. If you subscribe, you'll get it automatically as soon as we're done. Thanks to John Ashley, who is our producer for today, who's editing the show. John, is it you?

Jason Snell [02:11:51]:
Always and forever shall be me.

Leo Laporte [02:11:54]:
Always and forever.

Jason Snell [02:11:55]:
John Ashley. Ashley.

Leo Laporte [02:11:57]:
That sounds like going to be a good song. Thank you, John. Ashley, appreciate your being here as well. We will see you all next time. Security. Now, coming up next, for those of you watching live. But now, I'm sad to say, for those of you who are at work, it's time to get back to work because break time is over. Bye bye!